Hacker News: scraptor

New comment by scraptor in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

scraptor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:26:19 +0000

So what's your excuse for why New York has equally bad internet?

New comment by scraptor in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

scraptor — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 02:04:03 +0000

The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.

New comment by scraptor in "Worlds largest electric ship launched by Tasmanian boatbuilder"

scraptor — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:07:44 +0000

More efficient to spend the same amount of money on shoreside panels with lower installation costs.

New comment by scraptor in "Toyota unintended acceleration and the big bowl of "spaghetti" code (2013)"

scraptor — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:16:45 +0000

Servers with ECC generally report zero recoverable memory errors until the chip starts failing, at which point there are increasingly many. Therefore the average server experiences zero cosmic ray related memory errors during its lifetime, despite having many times more memory than 256MB.

New comment by scraptor in "Wave of (Open Street Map) Vandalism in South Korea"

scraptor — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:38:47 +0000

So how are the special interest groups keeping their enemies out?

New comment by scraptor in "BYD Pulls Ahead of Tesla in UK, Closes Sales Gap in Germany"

scraptor — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 02:04:02 +0000

The government will keep changing the rules until VW wins. Using tariffs, price floors, subsidies, whatever it takes.

New comment by scraptor in "72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study"

scraptor — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:15:10 +0000

This only applies to steam keys sold off site, which is why the original comment specified non-steam keys.

New comment by scraptor in "Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”"

scraptor — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 05:12:39 +0000

Interesting to see the definition of moat change from keeping other companies out to keeping your customers in.

New comment by scraptor in "Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success"

scraptor — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:29:51 +0000

I don't hate journald because it's not plaintext, I hate it because it's worse than plaintext. Somehow journald manages to provide a database which is 40x slower to query than running grep on a compressed text file. I'm all in favour of storing logs in an indexed structured format but journald ain't it.

New comment by scraptor in "Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI"

scraptor — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:15:31 +0000

sqlite resolves lock contention between processes with exponential backoff. When the WAL reaches 4MB it stops all writes while it gets compacted into the database. Once the compaction is over all the waiting processes probably have retry intervals in the hundred millisecond range, and as they exit they are immediately replaced with new processes with shorter initial retry intervals. I don't know enough queuing theory to state this nicely or prove it, but I imagine the tail latency for the existing processes goes up quickly as the throughput of new processes approaches the limit of the database.

New comment by scraptor in "Puerto Rico's Solar Microgrids Beat Blackout"

scraptor — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:14:52 +0000

Subsidies is too technocratic, trump style is to just order utilities to keep the plants operational at negative profit https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/06/climate/michigan-coal-pla...

New comment by scraptor in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

scraptor — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 22:35:25 +0000

But enough about trump, let's talk about iran

New comment by scraptor in "Another Crack in the Chain of Trust: Uncovering (Yet Another) Secure Boot Bypass"

scraptor — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:38:12 +0000

When's the last time you made a motherboard purchase decision on the basis of firmware quality? Or rather, when's the last time a corporate purchasing manager got fired for buying motherboards with low quality firmware?

New comment by scraptor in "What is HDR, anyway?"

scraptor — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:25:44 +0000

The client side toggle might be new since 2024 but the volume normalisation has been a thing for a long time.

New comment by scraptor in "US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired"

scraptor — Mon, 12 May 2025 19:49:30 +0000

I certainly don't see much value in AI generated papers myself, I just object to the claim that the mere act of reading a large number of existing papers before writing yours is inherently plagiarism.

New comment by scraptor in "US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired"

scraptor — Mon, 12 May 2025 13:15:10 +0000

Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

New comment by scraptor in "Hyperspace"

scraptor — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 08:50:28 +0000

The linux tools can't get it wrong, the kernel checks that the files submitted for deduplication are actually identical.

New comment by scraptor in "Do you want to be making this much money when you're 50? (2012)"

scraptor — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 21:10:05 +0000

Relevant to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138190

Do you want to be making this much money when you're 50? (2012)

scraptor — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 21:10:05 +0000

Article URL: https://yosefk.com/blog/do-you-really-want-to-be-making-this-much-money-when-youre-50.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143250

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by scraptor in "Are SSDs more reliable than hard drives? (2021)"

scraptor — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:09:29 +0000

That's the promise. In practice your SSD might kill itself due to a bug in the firmware and drop off the bus without warning long before the flash is worn out.