Hacker News: thechao

New comment by thechao in "Ozempic-style drugs now in trials for heart failure, addiction and even aging"

thechao — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 04:12:34 +0000

Small peptide suppliers make them. You order by generic identifier & compound yourself. My identical twin & I are running an exponent: I'm on foundayo, he's on retatrutide. I'm down about 10 lbs. he's down 35.

New comment by thechao in "Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T"

thechao — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 19:07:04 +0000

Corporate calls for regulation usually translate to "regulatory capture to ensure the moat", in my books.

5400BT

thechao — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:28:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.terex.com/cbi/en/product/industrial-wood-chippers/5400bt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277361

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thechao in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

thechao — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:29:33 +0000

I've got one article near me. There's another group of articles that, I guess, are a bit further off? One of them reads like an ad for a creepy park. Luckily, the actual walking time is more like 24 hours. Yay rural Texas?

New comment by thechao in "The complement of true is true, except when it's false"

thechao — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:36:11 +0000

This reminds me of my favorite arcane C test: what value is TRUE and FALSE on X bullshit tool chain. My a favorite was 0=TRUE, 2=FALSE. I'd like to shake the hand of the joker who came up with that.

New comment by thechao in "Greenvolt begins building 600 MW/2.4 GWh BESS in Poland"

thechao — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:53:19 +0000

I dunno. I vacillated on that. It's something like 45–50 GWh nameplate currently installed, and ERCOT has 177 GW / 371 GWh of active planned battery projects in the interconnection queue. BESS are used for peaker-like capacity and load balancing, so GW is actually a pretty relevant number here.

New comment by thechao in "Greenvolt begins building 600 MW/2.4 GWh BESS in Poland"

thechao — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:30:55 +0000

I don't know about other states, but Texas has about 18GW of BESS, already (https://www.cleanview.co/power-projects/operating/battery-st...). We're planning another ~177GW (https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2026/04/16/ERCOT-Monthly-Op...).

New comment by thechao in "Tiny Brutalism"

thechao — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:28:13 +0000

Here's my theory about modern architectural design. Let's say you've got two students that have to do a final design: (a) chooses a rococo or neoVictorian (humanist design); and, (b) chooses a spare modern design. Both of them are required to draft facades, elevations, etc. The modern design is literally easier to draft — literally less time. That means any school of architecture that both rewards "good grades" and "project completion under pressure" will naturally select for students who like "modern" (brutalist?). Those students then become professors, and the whole system reinforces.

New comment by thechao in "US Treasuries Have Become Unappetizing for Foreign Central Banks and Governments"

thechao — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:47:49 +0000

Yeah. The headline is utterly divorced from the reality of the charts?

New comment by thechao in "Bend"

thechao — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:23:43 +0000

> curl -fsSL https://bend-lang.com/install.sh | sh

Hmmm... needs `sudo`.

New comment by thechao in "Everybody's Lost Their Minds"

thechao — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:15:44 +0000

Absolutely!

New comment by thechao in "Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)"

thechao — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:52:24 +0000

Only if the cost of monsanto seed + roundup is less than the cost of regular seed per expected harvested bushel? Otherwise, no one would use the monsanto seed + roundup?

New comment by thechao in "How big are factorials?"

thechao — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:38:47 +0000

My kids love taking about big numbers. TREE(3) is a family favorite. So, I was going over sequences with them, and I decided to go slow instead. My sequence was: 1 1 1 1 ... 1 ...

They accused me of using just "all 1s" (which is, naturally, cheating). Ai contraire!

The count of the number of digits in the decimal representation of the number of unique primes in the prime factorization of the natural numbers.

The best part is that even pretty young kids can compute this sequence; by the first "2" is at 2*3*5*7*11*13*17*19*23*29!

(Hopefully I got that right; the phone doesn't make it easy to type!)

New comment by thechao in "Apple's Dimensional Drawings"

thechao — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:31:17 +0000

I am!

New comment by thechao in "Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row"

thechao — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:10:06 +0000

That's because we measure weight in tonnage.

New comment by thechao in "Apple's Dimensional Drawings"

thechao — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:57:27 +0000

If the NTSB claims the car is safe on its interior in terms of certain kinds of crashes, you'd think that geometry & layout of the interior would be part of that claimed specification. That would prevent an A/B problem: the NTSB tests a car with 18" of padding, and the car manufacturer delivers a car with 18mm of padding. Or... whatever. Basically accountability & reproducibility.

New comment by thechao in "Apple's Dimensional Drawings"

thechao — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:38:08 +0000

I wish overhead (cut away to passenger layout) and side scale drawings of all cars existed. That way you could directly compare the vehicles. You'd think such information would be needed (in the U.S.) by the NTSB; and, thus, be freely available.

New comment by thechao in "Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video]"

thechao — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:20:51 +0000

I have friends at companies that used to do BS jobs. Then, AI came in and took over the BS, and now they're doing real, meaningful work. One friend was told her team (3) would be eliminated once AI took over. Now that the AI automated the teams' job, they do proper finance work, and they've expanded the team to 5 people. Turns out the limiting rate was a bottleneck in the paperwork that the AI eliminated, meaning they can do proper forecasting analysis more effectively. Each additional person increases the set of product markets they can effectively forecast for. With effective forecasts they can time the market better, and they've already saved the company significant money — way more than their salaries, combined.

New comment by thechao in "What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks"

thechao — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:33:31 +0000

> The big difference is that with a debit card, it's your money that is hit by fraud.

I kind of disagree. I think what's happened is the bank would prefer you to believe that. Imagine I kept my money at the bank, and deposited $10000 with the teller. Immediately afterward a robber follows in and steals that $10000 from the teller. Does the bank say "oh no Mr. TheChao! A robber stole your $10000!". I mean, no? The bank got robbed. Just because the bank's digital security is more tied one-to-one to dollars and its easier for a robber to steal from "my till" doesn't mean it was me who was robbed. It's the bank's job to stop that.

New comment by thechao in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

thechao — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:04:49 +0000

I hope I'm remembering this right: a mathematician claims to have a proof for the ABC conjecture, but can't conceive any other mathematician it's right — it's "too weird", so the proof is rejected?