Hacker News: throwawayben

New comment by throwawayben in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

throwawayben — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:56:58 +0000

send an unending chain of them and you solve the transmission problem _and_ they don't have to slow down as you'll always have another on the way past whatever you're targeting

New comment by throwawayben in "Midjourney Medical"

throwawayben — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:26:28 +0000

couldn't it be different when scanning becomes very cheap and quick and it's the delta over n scans that gives signal?

New comment by throwawayben in "The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain"

throwawayben — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:43:45 +0000

Could you explain more? It appears economically self evident to me that it would improve the situation but I'm not in the industry and there's probably much I don't understand.

I would say that improving transmission seems like a much better solution but again I think zonal pricing can help there as it could then be more easily sold to the public as being able to import the cheaper (say) Scottish energy to your local zone, whereas at the moment there's no apparent direct cost associated with blocking pylon projects forever.

New comment by throwawayben in "The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain"

throwawayben — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:25:42 +0000

it is insane to me that they rejected moving to zonal pricing. zonal pricing would give incentive to move power demand closer to production, create costs to nimby-ism, and give the benefits of lower costs to those who live closer. but it might make energy cost more down here in the south east and (in particular) London while benefiting the North and Scotland so we can't have that

New comment by throwawayben in "Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D"

throwawayben — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:22:59 +0000

0 based is much simpler for any mathematical calculation done with the indexes. only reasons I can think where you need to handle it is when getting the last index from the length of the array or when interacting with the user. With 1-based you'll need to subtract or add 1 all over the place when doing almost anything

New comment by throwawayben in "FLX1s phone is launched"

throwawayben — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 12:50:55 +0000

I will always have a case that has a cut-out for the camera so it still lays flat and it's otherwise thinner (or the case is thicker and thus more protective) than it would be if the camera didn't stick out slightly

New comment by throwawayben in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

throwawayben — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:53:20 +0000

yeah I had a deep fake Kier Starmer tell me about some investment opportunity with guaranteed returns.

New comment by throwawayben in "William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)"

throwawayben — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:53:59 +0000

the best author-read audiobook I've listened to recently has been Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky[0]. He did a really good job and I would never have guessed it was the author himself. As you say, it's a very different and difficult job.

[0] https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0CMXTZZN2

New comment by throwawayben in "William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)"

throwawayben — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:44:53 +0000

it's 2 hours

New comment by throwawayben in "Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says"

throwawayben — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:42:11 +0000

I had a joint account with an ex who now lives abroad and I no longer have contact with.

I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present.

Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot.

Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the account for several years allowed it to happen (though the humans never told me after x years of inactivity I'd be able to close it)

New comment by throwawayben in "Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds"

throwawayben — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:46:30 +0000

"if you multiply by 1 it's always the same so that's pointless - I should remove that"

New comment by throwawayben in "Preliminary report into Air India crash released"

throwawayben — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:10:28 +0000

Dual failure of the locking mechanism is extremely unlikely. These are not switches that are regularly used so a muscle memory issue also seems very unlikely (but is still the most likely non-suicide scenario)

New comment by throwawayben in "Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell"

throwawayben — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:33:57 +0000

I played this a few years ago.

Despite being born in the UK to a British father my character wasn't previously British due to parents being unmarried and being born after 1983 but before the 2006 rules update.

I'm not totally sure when but I think some time in the 2010s the 2006 update became retroactive so my character was allowed to play. Didn't have to do too many side quests - the main one was retrieving father's birth certificate.

My character also had to attend the endgame ceremony and swear allegiance to the queen, which seemed odd for someone born in the country and lived here all his life

New comment by throwawayben in "Problems with the heap"

throwawayben — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:59:57 +0000

pretty sure it's just a hash of some text they can reveal later, to prove that they had something at this point in time. not referring to any release or commit

New comment by throwawayben in "Solitaire"

throwawayben — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:27:15 +0000

Very nice but I keep losing my progress on a game with swipe gestures on android accidentally triggering back functionality when I pull a card from right to left, even with installed PWA version

New comment by throwawayben in "The Palletrone is a robotic hovercart for moving stuff anywhere"

throwawayben — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 07:18:08 +0000

I'll stick with my hoverbarrow, don't need all this AI stuff. https://youtu.be/OmJ-8JMw_l4

New comment by throwawayben in "Gentry Lee's So You Want to Be a Systems Engineer? [video]"

throwawayben — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:59:53 +0000

it took me a moment to remember where I knew that name from. I only knew of him from his science fiction, co-authoring the Rama sequels with Arthur C Clarke

Make sunsets – cooling the Earth through stratospheric SO2 injection

throwawayben — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 13:44:26 +0000

Article URL: https://makesunsets.com/pages/faq

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40617507

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by throwawayben in "Mexico City could run out of water in a month unless it rains"

throwawayben — Tue, 28 May 2024 00:21:42 +0000

I always thought that desalination of sea water was too energy expensive to be worth it but apparently it's only about 3 kWh/m^3, meaning for an average water consumption of 150l/day you're looking at under 0.5kWh per person per day - about 5c (us) at Mexico's electricity prices.

Obviously it's not something that can be implemented in the next month in Mexico, but the long term outlook for water supply in a future hotter world is not as dire as I thought.

The UAE gets the majority of its water already through desalination: https://u.ae/en/information-and-services/environment-and-ene...

New comment by throwawayben in "Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports"

throwawayben — Wed, 15 May 2024 22:52:24 +0000

I remember convincing my dad to get a 3dfx voodoo2 because I really wanted to run UltraHLE. That was a seriously impressive emulator