Hacker News: sliverstorm

New comment by sliverstorm in "The Kindest Way to Kill a Lobster"

sliverstorm — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 23:35:21 +0000

Another gas bubbling through the water "knocks" the dissolved gasses out of the water. So the oxygen bubbles up out of the water, along with the argon.

New comment by sliverstorm in "Spectre and the end of langsec"

sliverstorm — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 18:21:58 +0000

I believe you can make a process noncacheable today, and maybe even disable branch prediction. This would totally shut down Spectre and Meltdown. You can disable SMT, and there's a whole host of other things you can do to isolate your "secure" process on an existing chip. Nobody has done these things because they like performance.

For most of what most people do on their computers most of the time, performance is fine without speculative execution or branch prediction

I think you underestimate the importance of branch prediction.

New comment by sliverstorm in "In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff"

sliverstorm — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 17:24:54 +0000

All good points, and certainly if you went entirely off-grid, avoiding a water tap fee is big savings. Though, 110 gallons isn't going to get you very far if you're totally off-grid.

New comment by sliverstorm in "In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 21:08:04 +0000

Where does the article suggest the water is wasted? It seems to focus on the savings in terms of reduced demand on the municipal water plant- rainwater doesn't need to be treated- and in terms of changed behavior:

once they got that rainwater harvesting system, the way they’re irrigating is completely different, and they’re paying a lot more attention to how they irrigate. It really changes behavior. Definitely people are more careful with how they use that rainwater than how they were using the potable water to irrigate beforehand.

New comment by sliverstorm in "In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 20:00:50 +0000

It used to be illegal to do anything except direct the rainwater, e.g. direct a downspout into your flower garden. You are now allowed 2 55-gallon rain barrels.

The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels.

At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.

New comment by sliverstorm in "North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:48:12 +0000

The reason it's so fascinating though, is that because it is a many-variable optimization problem where 1) many of the variables conflict and 2) we haven't actually agreed on the desired optimum. In the end it still very much has a "you know it when you see it" quality, and nobody has come up with math that definitively says "yes this is" or "no this isn't".

Actually, it's maybe a little like spam filtering.

New comment by sliverstorm in "North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:41:32 +0000

Geography still matters because your interests are entwined with where you live, at least so long as you continue to venture out the front door.

New comment by sliverstorm in "World without antibiotics"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:24:56 +0000

Reminds me of water rights. During droughts, huge campaigns against residential water use in California- meanwhile industrial agriculture consumes 80%+ of the water used in the state, and has no incentive to cut back.

New comment by sliverstorm in "Suburbs That Haven't Recovered from the Recession"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:19:22 +0000

The only one who can keep up the house is owner, but as you can see in this case they'll just choose to pocket the rent.

I don't think it's just a profit thing. If you're a small time landlord, it's probably incredibly expensive to retain a gardener/landscaper for such a tiny job. On the other hand, unless you live down the street it's awfully difficult to mow the grass every week, shovel the sidewalk after snow, water the plants, and so forth.

A small time landlord has no economies of scale for professional services, but doesn't make enough money to quit their day job either. (which would give them time to do all this themselves)

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 01:52:36 +0000

Naturally, a lone country road designed for speed is fine. It's when you've got a high speed road with lots of on-street parking and pedestrians right next to traffic, even house fronts, where you've got a major clash of functionalities and a safety problem.

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 01:39:29 +0000

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous

Certainly! Falling from great height isn't dangerous either, you know.

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:25:44 +0000

I think the big picture goal of reducing speeds is much more than putting up a different sign. There's a whole movement out there pushing for denser development, reduced car-driven-development, and streets that are truly lower speed, not simply highways rebranded with different signs.

Segregating types & speeds of traffic is still good though, especially dedicated trails for pedestrian and/or bike traffic.

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:16:35 +0000

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react.

There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

New comment by sliverstorm in "NOAA kicks off 2018 with massive supercomputer upgrade"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 20:16:08 +0000

Has there been a rash of failures? Not a meteorologist, but I usually hear that ECMWF & GFS have generally been trading blows, and have different strengths.

New comment by sliverstorm in "A letter about Google AMP"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 20:05:23 +0000

Has no one yet tried forking AMP and simply removing all the Google? Call it OpAMP. You might not get into the carousel right off the bat, but if you get the ball rolling you'd have actual leverage instead of writing open letters on the internet.

New comment by sliverstorm in "A letter about Google AMP"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 19:58:15 +0000

That's why it so perfectly illustrates the problem. The detractors are correct, a website can be made fast without AMP. But that isn't the problem AMP solves.

To draw a crude analogy- I don't have a problem with alcohol, I don't drink in excess and that's all there is to it. So clearly, there's no reason for AA or any other detox program to exist.

New comment by sliverstorm in "A letter about Google AMP"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 19:13:39 +0000

Post-AMP, it's easy to see why it never got solved before. Many, many detractors commenting along the lines of:

I was perfectly able to make my personal website fast; there is no problem, no one needs AMP.

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 16:33:49 +0000

To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point

Maybe nothing grand, but it's pretty hard to stomach movies that don't go anywhere at all. I come away wondering, what is the point? Why are you telling me this story?

There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live

That's still 'something happened' and/or 'the movie went somewhere', and is acceptable.

New comment by sliverstorm in "The day I accidentally killed a little boy"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 16:30:36 +0000

The US is certainly too big for some things. But it's definitely not a good argument when we're talking about urban & suburban street design. How big the US is or isn't, means nothing when we're talking about how best to lay out a 5 mile by 5 mile plot of land for a town.

New comment by sliverstorm in "Beginner's guide to longevity research"

sliverstorm — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 03:57:00 +0000

Ok, so really it's just about targeting a leaner body composition, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you.