Hacker News: paulhart

New comment by paulhart in "I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270"

paulhart — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:31:43 +0000

I have one for work; I was excited to receive it, I’ve never been more disappointed with a laptop bearing the ThinkPad brand. Lots of intermittent issues with graphics, BT audio, and performance.

New comment by paulhart in "The true story behind the Toronto mystery tunnel (2015)"

paulhart — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:45:24 +0000

The follow-up article is lovely too: https://macleans.ca/news/canada/passing-the-headlamp-the-tor...

And this one later in 2015 that speaks to his use of the fundraiser money: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/york-u-s-mystery-tunnel...

New comment by paulhart in "Eat Real Food"

paulhart — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:00:54 +0000

So the data is skewed by burgers georg who eats 3,000 Big Macs each day?

New comment by paulhart in "Clicks Communicator"

paulhart — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 01:48:23 +0000

I'm more interested in the Comet - https://mecha.so/comet - as a thing to support in pre-order. They will be launching their Kickstarter soon, and the founder is very active and transparent on their Discord.

New comment by paulhart in "The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)"

paulhart — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 13:35:21 +0000

Is there a repository for that? I’d like to dissuade certain species from my porch but not others…

New comment by paulhart in "Introduction to GrapheneOS"

paulhart — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:53:07 +0000

That's a Chromebook, no?

New comment by paulhart in "Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses"

paulhart — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:51:53 +0000

lol I just ordered a pair - many available on eBay at this listing (same as I bought from): https://ebay.us/m/t2i9YF

New comment by paulhart in "About Containers and VMs"

paulhart — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:44:19 +0000

According to their Github page, they _are_ linuxcontainers (in a way), and Incus is Apache licensed:

Incus, which is named after the Cumulonimbus incus or anvil cloud started as a community fork of Canonical's LXD following Canonical's takeover of the LXD project from the Linux Containers community.

The project was then adopted by the Linux Containers community, taking back the spot left empty by LXD's departure.

Incus is a true open source community project, free of any CLA and remains released under the Apache 2.0 license. It's maintained by the same team of developers that first created LXD.

LXD users wishing to migrate to Incus can easily do so through a migration tool called lxd-to-incus.

https://github.com/lxc/incus

New comment by paulhart in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

paulhart — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 01:29:05 +0000

Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.

New comment by paulhart in "Launch HN: Hyprnote (YC S25) – An open-source AI meeting notetaker"

paulhart — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:27:46 +0000

Yeah, IBM employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company, own opinions etc. The odds this is approved for employee use are essentially zero.

New comment by paulhart in "Home Battery versus Generator"

paulhart — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:51:46 +0000

I didn't see anything about load shifting in the article - are there any sites that help calculate the ROI on a battery system that is used to power the house during the day and recharges overnight?

For example, here in Ontario Canada, we have the option of an "Ultra Low Overnight" rate where the energy price is 2.8c/kWh between 11pm and 7am, while the tiered rates start at 9.3c/kWh; given the 6.5c/kWh delta, how many days' worth of use would be needed in order to pay off a given battery system? How would adding a solar system affect that calculation?

Rate references: https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...

New comment by paulhart in "OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor"

paulhart — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:33:07 +0000

"You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen"

New comment by paulhart in "Amsterdam Compiler Kit for Cray X-MP"

paulhart — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 23:49:01 +0000

30+ years ago I did a week’s “work experience” at the UK offices of Cray Research in Bracknell (and, shockingly, nobody had ever approached them before to do this).

I spent a couple of days with the software support team and was given an account on a UNICOS-running X-MP (hostname was either “forest” or “wind” - I specifically remember the second because the motd said “if you have problems with wind, please contact [redacted]” and that made my 16yo brain chuckle). Anyway, my benchmarking program was to calculate all the factorials up to 100!, and then repeat the process a lot. Fibbonacci, as given in the README, seems like more fun ;)

New comment by paulhart in "Which power plant does my electricity come from?"

paulhart — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:42:16 +0000

You make an excellent point - so much so that it already exists today at the wholesale level in many markets. What you're describing is Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) - a reasonable introduction is here: https://www.enverus.com/blog/an-intro-to-locational-marginal...

In the wholesale market the biggest consideration is transmission capacity - if I can generate 100MW of electricity at $15/MW but the transmission line between me and the demand can only carry 20MW, and another generator can generate 100MW for $30/MW with excess transmission capacity to the demand, the price at the demand will lean heavily towards the $30/MW price.

The same model could be applied to local grids as a way to "manage" residential solar installations for example; overcapacity is penalized through pricing signals (but if you throw in batteries so you can shift the release of electricity...).

New comment by paulhart in "New Nano-Tech to Control the Brain Using Magnetic Fields"

paulhart — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 16:53:20 +0000

I was a research subject for a TMS study a few years ago (I made myself eligible by way of a bicycle accident). Having your thumb twitch because the researcher “shot” magnetic fields at my brain was an amusing experience; she said some people completely freak out at it.

New comment by paulhart in "Unit is a general purpose visual programming system"

paulhart — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 01:21:15 +0000

https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit/

New comment by paulhart in "Map of Pontypandy in Fireman Sam"

paulhart — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:56:19 +0000

That story is an original from Rev. W. Audry (my grandmother bought a lot of those books for me as a child, I specifically remember that story and Gordon being imprisoned until he accepted his lot in "life").

It wasn't just okay in the 80s / early 90s, it comes from waaaay before then.

New comment by paulhart in "A startup's "tablet" gears up to take on Apple's iPad"

paulhart — Sun, 19 May 2024 13:51:16 +0000

So it’s an e-ink tablet running Android with front lighting but without access to the Play store? I’m not clear what’s so revolutionary about that.

New comment by paulhart in "Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner"

paulhart — Sat, 18 May 2024 21:37:59 +0000

I just use my electric drill with a paint mixer attachment, like https://www.homedepot.ca/product/a-richard-paint-mixer-16in-... and I've only had one spray incident, when I forgot to hold on to the jar while running the drill. It was epic!

New comment by paulhart in "Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video]"

paulhart — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:09:36 +0000

More likely it’ll be utility companies that want to do remote and autonomous inspection of the transmission network. It’s already a big business, but if you can run the drone the entire length of the line without relocating the base as frequently, or have no base at all and transmit data over 5G? Big wins.