Hacker News: scheme271

New comment by scheme271 in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

scheme271 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:26:42 +0000

How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.

New comment by scheme271 in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

scheme271 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:41:49 +0000

Various intelligence agencies are willing to pay 2-3M for a working exploit for iphone or android. I think that they would be fine with paying 50M for a userbase that has a high population of devs, admins, etc. Being able to backdoor someone like this in the right organization down the line is probably worth 50M.

New comment by scheme271 in "False claims in a widely-cited paper"

scheme271 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:36:36 +0000

Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.

New comment by scheme271 in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

scheme271 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:50:00 +0000

A bunch of those big breakers require two people. One person in a flash suit and another with a 2m long pole around the first person. That way if an arc flash happens, the second person can yank the first person to safety without also getting hurt.

New comment by scheme271 in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas"

scheme271 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:26:09 +0000

The metal chopsticks are pretty much only get used in Korea. The shape and material of the chopsticks varies by country so you can make a good guess as to where someone is from based on which chopsticks they use.

New comment by scheme271 in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

scheme271 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:14:18 +0000

I think the deeper question is whose standards and why should we consider them the standard?

New comment by scheme271 in "A Tiny Camera Revealed a Hidden Passage in the Great Pyramid"

scheme271 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:15:04 +0000

It's pretty much just cosmic rays. I suppose you can sort of create them by using an accelerator to generate a beam of the appropriate particles that'll hit a target or decay and become a beam of muons outside the accelerator but that's not really all that practical. Incidentally, this is how neutrino beams are generated.

New comment by scheme271 in "//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner"

scheme271 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 03:42:48 +0000

There are directives and packages that affect correctness. E.g. the embed package allows you to initialize a variable using a directive. E.g. //go:embed foo.json followed by var jsonFile string initializes the jsonFile variable with the contents of the foo.json file. A compiler or tooling that doesn't support this results in broken code.

New comment by scheme271 in "Bumblebee queens breathe underwater to survive drowning"

scheme271 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 02:35:55 +0000

Decomposing and decaying organic material often generates heat (compost piles sometimes spontaneously catch on fire due to this). The bees may have survived due to that or maybe they were attracted to that in the first place.

New comment by scheme271 in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

scheme271 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:29:05 +0000

You could power down portions and that's what a lot of modern systems do but you need to incorporate that into the design at a fundamental level. The entire PC would have to be redesigned and you even need a whole new cpu and motherboard design in order to be able to power down enough things while still being able to do useful work.

So yeah, it's possible but you'd basically be redoing the entire system from scratch.

New comment by scheme271 in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

scheme271 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:56:58 +0000

The power draw looks like it's at least 4W with a max of maybe 45W. That's maybe 7 hr with a 10000 mAh battery assuming it's sleeping the entire time and not really doing anything. Not very practical for people used to a small phone lasting all day without a charge.

New comment by scheme271 in "Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source"

scheme271 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:39:35 +0000

Oh, I didn't realize that. I knew it was limited but not that limited. That's pretty misleading.

New comment by scheme271 in "Intent-Based Commits"

scheme271 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:25:26 +0000

I'll be charitable here but you need to go out of your way to introduce non-determinism. Bit reproducible builds and distros exist so it is possible to have an entire distro that can be reliably reproduced bit-by-bit on different systems and at different times.

New comment by scheme271 in "Intent-Based Commits"

scheme271 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:50:43 +0000

If you have a compiler the same source code and the same options, it should generate the same output everything provided you aren't using some compiler pragmas or something similar that embeds timestamps or random numbers or similar. If you give an LLM the same input, it can generate different outputs (controlled by the temperature setting).

New comment by scheme271 in "Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source"

scheme271 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:47:08 +0000

That's on the useful end but I don't think any QC has gone beyond being able to factor 14 or something in that neighborhood. Realistically we'd need a few thousand qubits to factor anything that's reasonable and current QCs have a dozen or so qubits that work.

New comment by scheme271 in "Intent-Based Commits"

scheme271 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:14:02 +0000

> Every commit is reproducible. The prompt is preserved with

> some extra attributes about which model and agent was used.

> You can re-run any commit against a fresh checkout to see

> what Claude generates from the same instruction.

I don't see how this is true. LLMs can generate different outputs even with the same model and inputs.

New comment by scheme271 in "Intent-Based Commits"

scheme271 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:12:33 +0000

LLMs are non-deterministic so I don't see how it's reproducible.

New comment by scheme271 in "FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs"

scheme271 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:41:16 +0000

There's a well known plateau effect with GLP-1s where the body adjusts to the changes in caloric intake and the medication itself so that weight loss levels off and stops after a period of time. It could be that but it's hard to tell with 2nd hand info.

New comment by scheme271 in "Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions"

scheme271 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:25:19 +0000

Doesn't power costs also affect shutdown periods? I know that CERN would shutdown in winter due to increased power costs and power demands around then. I suppose something similar may affect accelerators in the US.

New comment by scheme271 in "Remarkable Pro Colors"

scheme271 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:32:12 +0000

Yeah, that's a known problem The solution is to get one of those usb-c to qi adapters, keep it always plugged in, and use a qi charger to recharge. This minimizes insertion cycles and stress on the connector.