<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: msandford</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=msandford</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:50:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=msandford" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What iron mountain does know is which drives are owned by oss. What they don't know is which drives owned by oss have the station's data on them. Hopefully nothing is comingled and drives are dedicated to a customer. Seemingly only oss knows and they went bankrupt so who knows what shape the records are in.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:50:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344309</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344309</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344309</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "People are worried about America's solvency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would be nice to see change in debt numbers vs change in deficit numbers. I think only Clinton ran a surplus in the last 30 years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:34:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329840</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329840</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329840</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes it's true we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. But good also has to be good enough to solve the problem without creating more problems faster than it solves them.<p>It's fine to propose a solution but if people aren't convinced just throwing an aphorism grenade at them isn't productive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:42:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310995</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310995</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310995</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Think about gasoline consumption in an economy. If gas is $1/gal in today's dollars you can make many trips, they're almost free. At $3/gal people do some prudent economizing. At $10/gal people stop driving and take the bus, carpool, etc.<p>Making the price go up 10x won't cut consumption by 90% though, maybe only 50%. Trades still need to get to the job, food still has to get delivered to stores and some people who make huge salaries will still drive to work.<p>During the pandemic fuel demand didn't go down by 50% and yet the price dropped dramatically. Sure office workers stayed home but that's not 80% of the jobs. Think about how much the gas price dropped vs how much traffic was still on the streets. It almost certainly wasn't a linear relationship.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:45:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303694</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "CFTC declares market emergency, orders Kalshi to continue to operate in New York"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're a market maker?  It's the whole job. They're Federally regulated to do precisely that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:03:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266607</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266607</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266607</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I'm poor I'm still indirectly exposed through the stock market. Employers stock goes down I get fired. Employer has better robotics because of AI?  I get fired. Datacenter wants to get built where land is cheap?  I get evicted.<p>Just because I'm too poor to own stocks doesn't mean stock prices don't affect me. That's indirect exposure not direct exposure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:11:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162148</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How do I get zero direct and indirect stock market exposure, no electricity price impact, no RAM or GPU price impact, etc?<p>I'd love to live in a world where AI firms bidding these things up doesn't affect me but I'm really struggling to understand how they aren't impacting the market.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:04:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162082</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162082</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162082</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Baseload Is a Myth (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article concedes that there is an actual base load that's real (so not a myth) but then talks about another sort of related thing and says that's dumb.<p>Okay, but that isn't really base load. That's the other thing. Base load is real. It's statistics.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099843</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099843</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099843</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nobody is safe from a nation-state "attack" they'll just go threaten your providers to give up your data. Passwords written on paper are probably safer than a centralized password manager for almost every circumstance other than a government coming after you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:19:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008213</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008213</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008213</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I recognize the "esp32 perched on top of a circuit board" from the picture.  I've got a couple of those at my house right now, I'm on the second version of one board and the third of another.  I think I'm going down a very similar road for a different product.  Would you be willing to some paid advising?  I'm an EE so I don't need hand-holding on the actual boards or programming, really just looking for more information on everything else around the edges.  Either way, thanks for the article.  It was nice to get some validation of my development process.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:15:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967968</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967968</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967968</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "The Victorian War on Rabies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe you didn't read that it was the history of how Britain eradicated rabies?<p>For most of history until the rabies vaccine if you got bit by a dog there was a 5% chance it killed you unless you amputated the affected limb.<p>These are very high stakes for a dog bite.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:42:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875121</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875121</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875121</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>1. They do a really bad job because you can't get fired<p>2. My package is delivered late yet again<p>3. I don't bother calling because the other 8 times I did I wasted an hour, nobody did anything (because nobody can get fired) and I didn't get any money back<p>4. Look how great we're doing!  Complaints are down<p>5. Give us more funding because we're doing such a good job<p>This is just as likely of a spiral if we keep it publicly owned. It's also not good. How do you get good outcomes with.no accountability?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 03:21:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782371</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782371</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782371</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My problem rate with Fedex or UPS is maybe 0.1% of packages. I can't remember the last time I had a delivery issue.<p>Just this week I had a package that was supposed to be delivered by Monday that lost tracking and didn't show up until Wednesday.<p>It might be "basically fine and good enough" but it's definitely not "amazing and completely beyond reproach" at least in my opinion.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:25:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781836</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781836</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781836</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise "]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.<p>Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection?  You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.<p>For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:26:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760401</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760401</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760401</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "In praise of memcached"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Huh that's interesting!  I found celery to mostly match my expectations. I used it in a couple of django apps. My only real foot gun was around having to set an EAGER setting for local development or tasks never got executed.<p>How did you find your expectations and celery's actual semantics to be different?  I'm trying to document well and it seems like I might have some implicit assumptions that I could make explicit, but I don't know what they are since they're already in my head and matching celery it seems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:33:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643997</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Canyon HUD helmet for road riding"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This really seems like a solution in search of a problem. Maybe it would be useful for pro tour riders, but I would guess it'll be banned as not in the spirit of cycle racing. Recumbents would really change the game in the pro tour for speed but the UCI doesn't allow them for the same reason.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:01:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636130</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636130</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636130</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "LLMs do not merely reflect the bias of their training, they police it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The idea that's been floating around in my head for the last few years is something like "it's being trained by the data produced by people, it's going to have many human flaws as a result"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:25:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48629235</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48629235</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48629235</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Norway greenlights first full-scale ship tunnel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I always thought it had to do with which way the vessel leaned while turning. Boats will lean into the turn, ships out. I guess that really only tells you if that's a displacement hull or planing hull, though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:53:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600540</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600540</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600540</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Electric motors with no rare earths"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And even that's not the hard part of a black start. The plant control is relatively easy. What's hard is grid coordination.<p>All generation and consumption have to be almost perfectly balanced every second of every day. And the power company doesn't have good addressability of load. Worse when you restore power to an area all their stuff turns on in parallel giving an inrush that could be 3x or more the steady state.<p>A black start is a very drawn out process of bringing generation and load online in a balanced way and with wait times between load increases for stabilization.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:53:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516351</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516351</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by msandford in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The energy density on super capacitors is pretty bad. If you imagine full power 200kW braking for 5 seconds that's 1 mega joule and at a best case 8 watt hours per liter you're going to need 35 liters minimum. Really you probably need to double that so you can float up and down and never fully saturate the capacitor as power inflow is going to drop as you get closer and closer to fully charged.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:40:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476148</link><dc:creator>msandford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476148</guid></item></channel></rss>