Hacker News: pulvinar

New comment by pulvinar in "Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first"

pulvinar — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:17:23 +0000

The chart defaults to ending at 2025. Move the right timeline marker all the way to the right (today).

New comment by pulvinar in "TV Pickup"

pulvinar — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:23:43 +0000

Jump down to the Cause section. Millions of high-powered electric kettles being switched on during a popular show's break.

New comment by pulvinar in "Ask HN: Is there a Moore's Law equivalent for compute/energy use?"

pulvinar — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:46:20 +0000

You're probably looking for Koomey's Law, though it has also slowed down.

New comment by pulvinar in "Where can I find or get in contact with farmers specifically in the US?"

pulvinar — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:37:52 +0000

If you're looking for farmers who aren't averse to tech, there are a number with YouTube channels. They're also the sort who love to talk to people. That may skew their opinions from the norm, of course.

New comment by pulvinar in "Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research"

pulvinar — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:02:16 +0000

The trick for trees is capillaries, which change the equation. The 10 meter limit only applies to larger columns. With capillaries there's a high negative tension that allows evaporation from leaves to pull the xylem sap up 100 meters or more.

There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop it.

New comment by pulvinar in "Why the Slate Truck Only Costs $25K"

pulvinar — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:56:10 +0000

Not flat between the wheel wells (42.9"), but on top of them. There's a photo (don't know if it's real though).

https://www.slateforums.com/forum/threads/slate-truck-dimens...

New comment by pulvinar in "Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs"

pulvinar — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:39:15 +0000

"Ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans" and "we will not show ads in accounts where the user tells us or we predict that they are under 18"

Could be that based on your prompts it had just decided you were an adult, and started throwing ads at you.

New comment by pulvinar in "Ask HN: Favourite Assembly Instructions?"

pulvinar — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:03:54 +0000

rlwimi was a nice one, especially for emulators.

And it also had eieio, Enforce In-Order Execution of I/O.

New comment by pulvinar in "The Soul of an Old Machine"

pulvinar — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:26:38 +0000

It's unrelated to the book, other than the title.

New comment by pulvinar in "Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone"

pulvinar — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:16:13 +0000

The goal here is neutral buoyancy when in gravity so that it behaves as though there were no gravity. Put a bag of water in water and it floats like the rest of the water, gravity or no.

New comment by pulvinar in "I don't know Apple's endgame for the Fn/Globe key–or if Apple does"

pulvinar — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:37:06 +0000

In System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, add the shortcut: app Safari, name "Quit Safari", command-option-Q. This will leave command-Q doing nothing, yet still allow you to quit. Repeat for other apps.

New comment by pulvinar in "19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack"

pulvinar — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:10:04 +0000

That outfit was typical of clowns in 1890, and often used in the opera Pagliacci about a clown.

[0] <http://1890swriters.blogspot.com/2015/10/victorian-clowns-an...>

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagliacci>

New comment by pulvinar in "Xweather Live – Interactive global vector weather map"

pulvinar — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:28:52 +0000

If it’s showing surface winds, it goes up. On windy.com there’s an altitude slider that lets you choose which wind level you’re looking at. Haven’t found that yet here.

New comment by pulvinar in "No Skill. No Taste"

pulvinar — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:10:27 +0000

I'd like to see the internet return to those who aren't putting it out there for money, so AI companies (and anyone else) hoovering it up wouldn't bother them. Sharing should be the point.

Would also result in fewer sites with ads -- yay!

New comment by pulvinar in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

pulvinar — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:29:43 +0000

GPT5.2 does catch it and warns to not trust anything else in the post, saying no competent person would confuse these units.

I wonder if even the simplest LLM would make this particular mistake.

New comment by pulvinar in "Ask HN: Why does Facebook.com activate the microphone?"

pulvinar — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:47:32 +0000

That's odd. ChatGPT (5.1) tells me Safari does not open an audio capture session for 'capability negotiation' that would show the mic icon.

I assume you have Safari > Settings > Websites > Microphone > facebook.com set to the default "Ask", or to "Deny"? Also check any installed extensions.

New comment by pulvinar in "Do the thinking models think?"

pulvinar — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:54:26 +0000

ChatGPT 5.1-Thinking, after having this pointed out: Short answer: no, your version isn’t the classic one, and my previous answer treated it as if it were. That was me pattern-matching too fast.

New comment by pulvinar in "How to Spot a Counterfeit Lithium-Ion Battery"

pulvinar — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:34:25 +0000

"One test, called a destructive physical analysis, involved dismantling small cylindrical batteries. This immediately revealed differences in quality."

New comment by pulvinar in "Rust edges toward CPython and older platforms won't like it"

pulvinar — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:54:06 +0000

Title I see: "CPython may go Rusty, but older platforms risk getting iced out"

New comment by pulvinar in "The Perplexing Appeal of the Telepathy Tapes"

pulvinar — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:16:51 +0000

There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.