<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: namibj</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=namibj</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:19:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=namibj" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Germany had two sizable heatwaves this summer, of which one was so intense that for the first time in about "ever" ACs tripled/quadrupled in price (note this includes those on online stores where the shipping times would allow for trucking them in from all across central Europe)... I'm not referring to installation labor/technicians even. But like window units and similar ones that don't rely on HVAC technicians to take out the box and turn on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:36:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612713</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612713</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612713</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good thing we've been working on beating photosynthesis efficiency of turning sunlight into carbohydrates (e.g., sugar) by using special electrolysis cells to synthesize plant-accessible carbon-nutrients (one kinda-successful (in beating natural leaves with PV based sunlight electricity and their electrochemistry)) attempt focused on generating a nutrient solution rich in acetate from CO2 feed (and electricity); that's one of the energy carrier molecules that existing plant biology can efficiently utilize.<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.09.011" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.09.011</a><p>And note that by exploiting winter time solar yield and the grow houses with such technology not using sunlight directly and thus allowing easy and efficient thermal insulation, production could run year-round just with the amount of grow houses "online" varying with the average solar yield. Also gives convenient off-times (if they rotate which building runs through the winter) for maintenance.<p>And eating less meat or at least feeding the meat animals efficiently produced (but not as "tasty/varied/textured") plant/algae(/possibly-microbiological with bacteria or yeast) feed instead of things like Alfalfa that are very resource intensive to farm, would also help a lot with these issues.<p>Probably we should get back to doing grain bunkers as strategic reserves, though, lasting long enough to realize the problem, slaughter 80% of livestock, and plant low-failure-risk human suitable food crops on farmland that previously had feed crops for those no longer living 80% and land that had things like corn dedicated for ethanol that's then added to gasoline.
Ideally ofc. we'd not need to cull as much life stock and could instead just slightly reduce new breeding and switch those corn fields to human food.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:30:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612623</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612623</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612623</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Earphones are forgoing the outer parts of your ears and skull.<p>Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.<p>Like, literally.<p>It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:17:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483063</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483063</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483063</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP.
Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:24:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408265</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408265</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408265</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah you can run stuff through DECT I'm not sure what handheld suitable gateway you'd use and strap to the holster of the associated scanner, but otherwise...<p>That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.<p>I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.<p>The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.<p>You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.<p>Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:20:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408237</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408237</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49408237</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Have you considered "no password set"?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:25:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393372</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Make a 6-Tesla-class high-temperature superconducting dipole magnet at 4.2 K"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Liquid hydrogen cooled superconductors (20K) would be good especially if we manage to use some materials that don't suffer hydrogen embrittlement processed/machined economically enough to really play out the cost benefits of not relying on the rare noble gas.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:02:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384738</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384738</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384738</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air" they could use exhaust gas recirculation with pure (other than the exhaust gas diluting it so the flame doesn't melt the turbine blades) oxygen which would as a side-effect allow them to condense out water to obtain nearly pure CO2 exhaust.
Liquid oxygen is around 100$/ton and you need 3.21 tons of it to burn one ton of methane. If you use kerosene instead you're at about 2.58 tons of oxygen per ton of fuel.<p>Note that the absence of nitrogen otherwise plentiful in combustion air eliminates NOX formation.<p>What they do for the oxygen production is they condense air and then distill it; IIRC it's mainly done for steel production where they use it to burn off carbon dissolved in molten iron. It's side product liquid nitrogen and argon are primarily produced from this but are mostly considered side-products of the "oxygen refining".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:03:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351847</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351847</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351847</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ohhh, nice; happy to have a chat on the subject; suggest a messaging option to discuss further if you're interested. Check out keybase on my profile for some listed contact options; you can also use the padlock symbol in the menubar there to PGP encrypt a message to me and share that through any suitable channel that can handle that ascii.<p>Edit: I've captured and extracted-to-textured-mesh Mirker Bahnhof before it got covered by the scaffolding; if you're going to do another recording I'd highly recommend you include an IMU recording and ideally (though much less critically) a GNSS raw measurements recording that includes carrier phase. I've got a recorder for the latter that exposes a simple USB-serial port that should work great unless the GTW15 windows are EMI-shielding (but iirc they aren't).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:25:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347085</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347085</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347085</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Shouldn't be; at least if you count the termination setting trials that already were a thing with DDR4 as "DRAM training".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:48:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299439</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Differential Heuristics"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd like to point out that according to a tech blog or similar from years back, Google Maps public transit routing supposedly employs the zone-boundary hierarchy to do similar preprocessing, exploiting that at least in networks like e.g. Germany, there's a hierarchy level roughly corresponding to what is perceptually "same city" where the number of border crossings between the zones has a local minimum (splitting a zone and merging two adjacent zones would both increase the border crossing count of the resulting zone relative to the local minima one).<p>They then do all-pairs precomputing between the border nodes and connections within the zone; then use this to cheaply handle the long-distance travel, while only needing to do full non-precomputable pathing locally within the start and the end zone (and ofc jumping across the contractions on the way between the border of the start zone and the border of the destination zone).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:39:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297942</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297942</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297942</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sadly it's not too counterintuitive; remember the old "how many r's are in the word strawberry"?<p>Also different tokens for the same named entity/concept if they almost entirely exclusively occur in non-overlapping contexts, and are themselves rare/uncommon in the first place, will result in behavior that's similar to the speech/phrasing/vocabulary registers humans exhibit, where the aspects of the named entity/concept get largely compartmentalized.<p>The most severe case along these lines were the old BERT models that ran over straight UTF-8 bytes (plus a handful special tokens).<p>But for the modern post-GPT2 LLMs such radical simplicity seems to mostly not be considered suitable.
Note that CJK (the big one in particular, so Chinese semantic and Japanese Kanji) encodes each one into multiple UTF-8 bytes giving some automatic scaling for semantically dense languages; similar effects also apply to e.g. APL code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:04:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296686</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296686</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296686</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A second angle on the counterfactual savings would be Luna telling them not to pursue a potential session with the expected/extrapolated (from which sessions they did ignore Luna on, e.g. just to keep efficiency statistics current) sunk costs at time of getting shut down used to derive the quoted number.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:52:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296609</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296609</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296609</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Pretty sure a court order to return say a "PlayStation Dev kit" a game studio employee had when he got fired during covid remote work mandates, if it's just against the employee personally, would not obligate me to let you in or carry it out to you if that employee left it on the middle shelf of my couch table having told me he'll be back after, say, taking unpaid and non-granted-despite-requested time off for his "common law wife if that was a thing in the state they're in, but legally just unrelated consenting adults (that haven't yet moved in together)" 's funeral and rounding it up to one whole week to grieve at their memorable places, after having crashed at my place (bringing his work with him, thus the dev kit on my table-shelf) as I live much closer to the hospital his "wife" was in for the past 3 weeks and he expressed some psychological worries about spending almost all of his time alone while the love of his life is dying....<p>In fact, I'd expect you to need a seizure-warrant/distinctly-named-but-to-the-layperson-identical-court-order for my place as, among other things, I don't think I am in a position to legally have standing to challenge an order that's not mentioning me, and lack of me being an active flight risk would probably preclude you from arguing exigent circumstances to secure the dev kit without a judge ordering me to let you.<p>TL;DR: "complying" with a court order that's filed against a 3rd party is, IMO/AFAIK, a voluntary act, specifically because the party not mentioned in the court order AFAIK has no legal standing to challenge that very order of in court.
_Precisely_ because they're not legally mandated to comply, at least not beyond perhaps taking a precautionary legal hold on the referenced information to not get accused of aiding in destruction of data in case the court-ordered party directs the non-mentioned party to delete through the regular customer relationship channels (API? Whatever else?).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:47:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296573</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296573</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296573</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah; I haven't read TFA but IMO especially if Iron Mountain is aiding the procurement of said court order through giving some (potentially redacted as required for privacy purposes) "sample" court documents that could be readily used as reference so the lawyer on the Nine PBS side (filing with the court to get a judge to order Iron Mountain to release that data to Nine PBS) doesn't need to waste their time repeating all the drafting from scratch for what I'm assuming would be a (from the legal perspective) straight-forward request (that nonetheless has to specifically account for the particular legal data possession/ownership/access-rights situation under which the data in question is stored at Iron Mountain), especially as relevant for the situation at hand allowing Nine PBS to put a temporary data retention legal hold on these 50TB giving them a fair deadline (not merely "legally 'reasonable'") either on charity (understanding the gravity of the "this Nine PBS data is a public good (at a cursory glance)"/"information wants to be free") or offering general reasonable list price of what they bill for retaining 50TB stored under the storage model at play for "just one more month" (or whatever fair deadline) paid by Nine PBS.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:17:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296363</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296363</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296363</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Early detection, while things can be cheaper to mitigate?<p>Fixing hole in tooth is far cheaper than replacing a full tooth, for example.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:41:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262663</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262663</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262663</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just a regular grid?<p>That's countable you just go in a spiral.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:46:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227288</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Salty.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:43:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156481</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Don't need global shutter just use a bit more math and IMU data with frequency in excess of the frame rate.<p>Make it work with the recording capabilities of a good modern phone and handle the compute in non-real-time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:16:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155404</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155404</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155404</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by namibj in "Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's also the potential of co-locating non-evaporative cooling with CO2-scrubbing using a strong KOH solution in the big cooling towers and regenerating the hydroxide with calcium hydroxide (regular process done in kraft process paper mills, though they use NaOH with slightly favoured properties over KOH).
KOH is very hygroscopic; it does not have to be humid for a barely-still-liquid solution to actually dehumidify in the process.<p>Or, if that's too much effort for them, use e.g. LiBr or other such atmospherically-stable salt that can maintain humdity equilibrium with dry ambient air.<p>The reason for even involving a water-based solution at all is because you can spray it or at least run it over dense corrugation (sheets alternating orientation, but overall with the channels roughly pointed upwards) "packed beds" with free contact between the coolant and the air, instead of having to maintain a barrier layer between the two (typical car/computer radiators, but also AC coils), which notably saves you from even a potential for a there-required barrier layer to leak and from having to clean such a barrier layer.
If you make the corrugations large enough and have some simple mesh filters in the intake path that you just roughly shake/rinse/blow/brush off every once in a while, you can prevent particles larger than a rice grain from getting to the coolant in the first place and wash/rinse all the sand grain and smaller dust particles down into the coolant sump where their densities are far better matched (than air vs. dust) and volume flow is much easier to handle/filter.<p>The big part of these is still that they don't require active fan ventilation to cool radiators, which would be a substantial increase in critical electrical power needed after a SCRAM to keep the core from melting down; vs. the passive evaporative cooling towers and the KOH/LiBr non-humidifying variant I mentioned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:43:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127746</link><dc:creator>namibj</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127746</guid></item></channel></rss>