Hacker News: mulanroo

New comment by mulanroo in "Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds"

mulanroo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:40:27 +0000

The reason this keeps getting reinvented is that the physics only half works. Sound disrupts the flame's boundary layer and separates it from the fuel, but it removes almost no heat. The fuel stays above its ignition temperature, so anything hot nearby relights it the second the speaker stops. DARPA demoed this in 2012 and it stalled there. Impressive on a small liquid fuel fire in a lab, very hard to scale to anything you'd actually want to put out.

New comment by mulanroo in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

mulanroo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:34:12 +0000

One thing I didn't know before reading this: an unusually large effect size can itself be a red flag. You don't have to understand all the statistics to at least notice when a result looks almost too good to be true.

New comment by mulanroo in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

mulanroo — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:41:57 +0000

Thank you! I’ll check it out. Ten minutes is a lot less intimidating than I’d built it up to be in my head.

New comment by mulanroo in "Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices"

mulanroo — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:36:49 +0000

Motorcycles are everywhere in the Philippines, and there are far more now because of delivery riders. They make sense here: they get through traffic and park anywhere. The tradeoff is the roads, which can be rough, and riders squeezing through whatever gap they can find. Accidents are common. I don't ride myself, but it's obvious why so many people do.

New comment by mulanroo in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

mulanroo — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:30:46 +0000

I've never cooked a steak. Not once. It feels like one of those foods where getting it wrong means you've just ruined an expensive piece of meat, so I've always let a restaurant take the risk. This post makes me think I've probably been overthinking it.