Hacker News: nebopolis

New comment by nebopolis in "Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant"

nebopolis — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:48:34 +0000

There's a single mine (Giant Mine) in Canada that is contaminated with 200k+ tons of arsenic trioxide - which will literally remain poisonous forever since the poison is a stable element not an organic compound. The current plan is to try to keep it frozen because the dust is odorless, tasteless, water soluble, and located just outside of Yellowknife. That's the weight of more than half the amount of nuclear waste ever produced on the planet, in one relatively unremarkable industrial site.

Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is. We could probably store all the nuclear waste in the world in a geologic repository on the canadian shield somewhere for the cost of actually cleaning up that one old gold mine to make it non toxic.

New comment by nebopolis in "Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant"

nebopolis — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:40:10 +0000

the thing that makes nuclear waste scary (the radiation) is also something extremely helpful for public health. You can wave a cheap, widely available scanner over your milk and immediately know if it is contaminated with radioactive iodine. Anyone can do it in their own home if they are concerned. It takes extremely expensive lab equipment to detect PFAS in the same milk, even at concentrations associated with major health impact. How do you know if that dust is contaminated with arsenic trioxide? It definitely isn't as easy as if it has radioactive cobalt.

I can be confident none of the food I ate today had nuclear waste in meaningful quantities, and it is verifiable non-destructively. If something is detected, it will have a characteristic signature that should be traceable within days back to the exact time and place where it was released. Can anyone say the same thing about the thousands of other industrial waste products with similar dose-dependent impacts on human health?

New comment by nebopolis in "Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?"

nebopolis — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 08:07:21 +0000

I've been in pretty bad shape off and on for the past five years now. Never to the point of psychosis, but to the point of hospitalization for chest pains caused by panic attacks, persistent hemipelegic migraine, essential tremors, gastrointestinal issues, rapid fluctuations of weight - my whole body was shutting down and giving up. It started with a really traumatic work assignment in 2018 that I'd describe as pushing on a string - the harder I worked on it the more resources got pulled from the project such that my efforts had zero positive impact. I basically worked myself off the cliff trying to chase down an impossible target. It only took 6 months to reach the point of complete breakdown. I was working on slowly recovering from that when the pandemic hit, and that kind of just shattered the final bit of strength I had. Since then it has been a long and halting process of recovery, and I don't think I'll ever be quite as capable as I was before my episode. I've definitely noticed that things which came effortlessly before are still a struggle even now. Very slowly I have started to be more able to go beyond the bare minimum of purely reactive survival. This is the longest time I've been "lucid" since 2018, but it still feels extremely fragile and tenuous.

Medications helped a bit, lifestyle changes helped a bit, therapy wasn't super helpful for me (but I know that it can be very helpful for some people, I don't want to discourage anyone from giving it a shot). Eventually just enough time and distance have started to allow healing. The hardest thing for me is that I have essentially lost a half decade of my life. My memory of the past several years is extremely patchy, my career progression has been zilch, I've lost track of friends and missed out on relationships. I feel like I'm still in my 20s but I am in my mid 30s now. In a lot of ways I regard who I was over those years as kind of a totally different person, like I was in and out of a coma and I've just started to wake up over the past several months. I'm grateful for whatever part of me held my life together through those years, but they're a kind of stranger to me. Whole years of my life I can maybe remember where I was for a handful of holidays, and that only because there are pictures of me and that helps track down the threads of memory that remain.

New comment by nebopolis in "3M to end 'forever chemicals' output"

nebopolis — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 17:45:53 +0000

There exist industrial reaction vessels etc which are made of stainless steel with a bonded liner made of glass. That seems like the ideal "forever" food container material to me - chemically nonreactive and easy to clean, but lightweight and resilient to impact. The glass layer would be lost in recycling, but it shouldn't impede recycling the metal too badly as it'd just be a tiny bit more slag in the crucible.

New comment by nebopolis in "Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site"

nebopolis — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 16:02:31 +0000

Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling.

From the Three Gorges Dam

> China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir

New comment by nebopolis in "Balloon framing is worse-is-better (2021)"

nebopolis — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 22:29:05 +0000

Wood has advantages. For one, insulation is easier. A lot of the current best practices for insulating a brick building are basically to build a different kind of building, insulate it, and then add a cosmetic brick facade. But in a Mediterranean climate insulation is less of a concern and some thermal mass to even out the evening vs daytime temperature is enough. Sturdy is a matter of what you're trying to achieve - for example wood is superior in earthquake zones. But the real deciding factor is the cost of materials and labor - in much of Europe wood is more expensive and craftspeople are more familiar with other techniques. The converse is true for much of the USA. Wood is also just as long lived - hundreds of years if well maintained and kept dry (at least in regions where termites aren't endemic). The biggest problem with short lived American residential construction isn't the wood but instead the use of engineered materials and fixtures with finite lifespans. For example laminate flooring and older plastic water piping which is expected to last only a few decades before needing to be gutted and rebuilt.

New comment by nebopolis in "Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries"

nebopolis — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 06:55:22 +0000

Water usage is heavily region dependent - grass fed beef from a region which does not depend on well irrigation essentially has net zero water usage. The cows eat grass and drink water, which they then piss out watering the grass. This is for sure a problem in an arid region dependent on aquifers to raise livestock, but for instance the midwest has plentiful rain (sometimes far too much in fact) and "water usage" isn't a meaningful limitation. Often times the water usage numbers quoted include all the rain that fell to grow the silage that the cows eat, which still ends up in the same aquifers and rivers eventually whether it passes through a cow or not. There are concerns if there is a poorly managed high point source concentration of manure which causes nutrient runoff into waterways, but that's a far different conversation.

Methane is a better example, but ironically factory farming has the answer there. Collecting manure in a waste pool and turning it into biogas turns it from a negative to a net positive.

New comment by nebopolis in "Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor"

nebopolis — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 06:16:38 +0000

Being sodium cooled, both a steam explosion and hydrogen gas generation via water is ac minimized. Lots of safety advantages to a coolant that is still liquid at operating core temperature with no added pressure. But of course liquid sodium does come with some other caveats that are of concern. Making it a sealed unit with minimum moving parts helps with some of those potential problems for sure. As does keeping the total thermal capacity relatively low, below the threshold where secondary fission products need active cooling to prevent meltdown even after the reactor is shutdown.

New comment by nebopolis in "Hacking the S-100 Bus"

nebopolis — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 05:40:16 +0000

One of my favorite programming ballads is Frank Hayes S-100: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow78cUDdTOg

To tell the truth the source of all our troubles seems to be

A committee on computers of the I of triple E

They settled on a standard spec 696 by name

Now everything is standardized but nothing works the same

New comment by nebopolis in "Graphene may have found its killer app"

nebopolis — Fri, 20 May 2022 04:58:04 +0000

Poured concrete actually is a passive remover! The issue is the process of baking carbonate rocks at high temperatures to form the cement. This not only takes a lot of energy, but it inherently drives off CO2 from the rock. Over the decades as concrete slowly gets stronger and stronger it absorbs back a small but substantial fraction of the CO2 it emitted.

The way to make this better is to be able to have mixes with lower fractions of cement for a similar level of strength - hence using graphene in this case.

New comment by nebopolis in "Rust on Espressif chips"

nebopolis — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 16:33:14 +0000

I would argue that Fortran _is_ "über mainstream" - if you look at computing as a whole. It may not be used extensively for CRUD applications, but it is part of the bedrock of basically all computing. And there are some niches where it is the main/only language.

Rust will likely end up in a similar place - enormously useful in its niche, foundational for infrastructure outside, and with enough uptake and stability to make a career out of. I don't think anyone expects it to eclipse popular dynamic languages for web development, but it might make inroads on C and C++ in areas where active development is still needed.

New comment by nebopolis in "Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab"

nebopolis — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 16:39:39 +0000

The thing you are missing is that in addition to fusion power research (which is valuable and NIF has made major contributions to) there is also fusion weapons research. Inertal confinement is (kinda) close to the conditions inside a fusion bomb, and NIF also has a mandate to research those conditions. For that kind of research, a single pulse of fusion ignition is exactly the kind of data they need. Since we have a nuclear weapon test ban, and computer simulations need some kind of ground truth to be calibrated against, achieving fusion ignition in a lab is valuable to NIF for that reason alone.

New comment by nebopolis in "France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes"

nebopolis — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:19:17 +0000

Prions are essentially already denatured/unfolded. They are a more stable state of a normal protein that has biological function, and they interact with the "correctly" folded proteins to cause them to denature into additional prions. Often denaturing a prion means actually breaking apart the protein into fragments or amino acids, because it is already at the most stable/denatured state. This is also why they are so persistent in nature and so hard to remove from surfaces. Apparently gas plasma sterilization is a promising possibility. (this seems like an ok overview of the challenges: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21271212/). Current procedures include things like autoclaving in 121C sodium hydroxide for 30 minutes. Definitely not something that fully cooking will inactivate.

Eating the alkali metals: Salts taste test

nebopolis — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:26:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJh9yTIBY48

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435129

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by nebopolis in "ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper"

nebopolis — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:50:38 +0000

The original RM (and all signs point towards the RM2 being the same) had direct root ssh access via a virtual network device on the USB port. This could be used to SCP backup the notebooks, add custom executables, etc. I understand why they don't list it in their marketing materials - it isn't intended as a polished experience and is more of a "hacker" option. The CTO of Remarkable is a KDE dev though, so there are a lot of subtle niceties you wouldn't expect like a full toolchain and bootloader available on their github.

New comment by nebopolis in "Rust 1.45.1"

nebopolis — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:45 +0000

This version includes a fix for a rare but potentially impactful compiler bug affecting the correctness of const propagation.

Rust 1.45.1

nebopolis — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 23:57:35 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/07/30/Rust-1.45.1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004172

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by nebopolis in "Firefox/Normandy/PreferenceRollout"

nebopolis — Sat, 04 May 2019 12:28:36 +0000

Is it an unacceptably bad idea to allow auto updates as well? Anything potentially problematic here could also be done with a code change, but at least this contains a flag to opt-out.

Smyte is joining Twitter

nebopolis — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 15:29:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.smyte.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17366034

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nebopolis in "A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab"

nebopolis — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 16:32:06 +0000

There is a checkbox for "titlebar" in the customize view that will let you bring back the titlebar if you have your tabs hidden.