Hacker News: plankers

New comment by plankers in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

plankers — Sun, 25 May 2025 21:06:45 +0000

modeling the heat transfer modes in Enceladus' icy shell that rests above its liquid water ocean. previous modeling has assumed that all heat transfer is conductive, but using dynamical simulations i've shown that under certain conditions convection can occur at in the shell. specifically, these conditions are having a thick enough ice shell, the right amount of porous fluffy ice deposited from the plumes at Enceladus' south pole which jet water into space through fissures in the crust, and the right thermal conductivity of this porous layer.

now i'm starting on adjusting the model to include the liquid water ocean underneath the shell and observe the effect of changing viscosity gradients in the equilibration of the ocean and ice shell, as well as adding in compositional impurities (chloride brines) and tidal heating effects.

New comment by plankers in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

plankers — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 19:03:36 +0000

Trotting this out again because somehow it hasn't completely saturated the internet yet:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

--Upton Sinclair

New comment by plankers in "It's not a crime if we do it with an app"

plankers — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 01:58:03 +0000

The U.S. before antitrust laws existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Steel_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Pacific_Railroad

New comment by plankers in "I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year"

plankers — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 08:46:20 +0000

i procrastinated on my bachelor's thesis for ~5 years. the school ended up changing the graduation requirements before i finished it.

never underestimate the power of stubbornness.

New comment by plankers in "Ask HN: Developer abused “sign in with GitHub”?"

plankers — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:37:51 +0000

maybe, just maybe, having friction in logging into web services is a good thing.

i, for one, am not a fan of the tendency for every web service to require an account in the first place. making it easier for people to log in to these unnecessary accounts is helpful in discouraging this practice, as it will decrease utilization of services which require such superfluous accounts.

New comment by plankers in "Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software"

plankers — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 16:15:26 +0000

On public roads with other people who haven't consented to testing anything, no less.

New comment by plankers in "Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software"

plankers — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 16:00:53 +0000

So I guess this means Volvos will be... crashing... less?

Swift Financial-Messaging System Pilots Blockchain Project

plankers — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 03:14:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/swift-messenger-for-the-financial-world-to-pilot-blockchain

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832922

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by plankers in "What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)"

plankers — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 03:03:09 +0000

sounds like the devs over at SAP need to unionize if they want to stop pushing user-unfriendly software

New comment by plankers in "White House Is Mulling a Ban on Bitcoin Mining"

plankers — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 11:47:18 +0000

enforcement would probably happen at the level of the power utility. large mining operations have agreements with utilities to buy power at wholesale prices, the utilities know what the power is being used for

the real beneficiaries of this would be small miners (small business owners?) who either use their own locally generated power or the residential grid. oh, and all the people who don't mine in the US

New comment by plankers in "Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs"

plankers — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 07:09:52 +0000

coincidentally, i'm sure the rent freeze has had a positive effect on your ability to pay your bills without stress

New comment by plankers in "Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs"

plankers — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 07:05:03 +0000

a proper marxist critique of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" hypothesis:

Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

from the conclusion:

>This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.

New comment by plankers in "Ask HN: Why doesn’t Apple allow torrent clients on the app store?"

plankers — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 16:48:35 +0000

pretty sure it's just HN being HN

New comment by plankers in "The dictatorship of the articulate"

plankers — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 05:34:21 +0000

right, it's the fault of regulators that every major industry has come do be dominated by a small handful of conglomerates that survive by mimicking each other and consuming every smaller challenger that might one day, through the power of innovation, grow and compete with the existing monoliths.

oh wait, that's the opposite of regulation that caused that. my bad.

New comment by plankers in "What would a “good” WebMD look like?"

plankers — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 23:32:45 +0000

it would be run by a publicly-funded consortium of doctors, social scientists, and public health experts with no mandate to earn a profit, for one.

New comment by plankers in "The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor"

plankers — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 20:50:58 +0000

Good. The only way we're going to get these selfish Americans to sacrifice anything is if we force them.

New comment by plankers in "The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor"

plankers — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 20:36:52 +0000

agriculture provides me with food to eat. lawns do not. i would rather have food to eat than useless patches of grass.

New comment by plankers in "They're trying to get me kidnapped and tortured, but Twitter doesn't care"

plankers — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 20:26:06 +0000

twitter is interested in making money. there's far more money to be made pandering to governments than in pandering to dissidents. the content moderation policies are just extra steps in justifying that stance.

New comment by plankers in "Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I"

plankers — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 10:48:35 +0000

Interesting that I haven't seen any discussion of the housing monopolies that were castigated in that study, given how vigorous discussion was on that topic when that study was posted here.

The study largely blames HUD and builders unions for squeezing manufactured home builders out of the market with zoning laws, government programs which favored stick-built housing, and further regulations which make buying and owning a manufactured home undesirable. This discussion of course only applies to the US.

New comment by plankers in "Nobody wants to teach anymore"

plankers — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:02:22 +0000

Pay teachers more and more people will teach. On a website so dedicated to discussion of free market principles, the amount of rationalization people put themselves through to avoid this simple conclusion is both funny and tragic.