Hacker News: tlb

New comment by tlb in "Starship V3"

tlb — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:31:54 +0000

Yes, for example taking off or landing a rocket on the surface blasts particles of sand out sideways at 1000s of m/s. The particles can fly in the thin atmosphere for kilometers and sandblast everything. Our intuitions about how far and fast tiny things can fly are only true in an atmosphere of similar density.

New comment by tlb in "Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation Without Heuristics"

tlb — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:39:45 +0000

But in fact no modern processor/OS executes this either. Pages are marked as executable or not, and static data is loaded as non-executable pages.

New comment by tlb in "Knitting bullshit"

tlb — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:29:23 +0000

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay.

It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

New comment by tlb in "Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge"

tlb — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:59:34 +0000

Yes, the entire field of software engineering ran aground on not being able to test how well people can write software.

But I'm more optimistic about testing programming models. You can run repeated tests, and compare median performance. You can run long tests, like hundreds of hours, while getting more than a few humans to complete half-day tests is a huge project. And you can do ablation testing, where you remove some feature of the environment or tools and see how much it helps/hurts.

New comment by tlb in "The USB Situation"

tlb — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:54:13 +0000

Field termination is necessary when the connectors are too large to pull through a conduit. But if they were USB-C sized, you could just pull fully assembled cables.

New comment by tlb in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

tlb — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:59:31 +0000

You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.

New comment by tlb in "Ask HN: Why am I unable to post Show HN?"

tlb — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:11:50 +0000

If you have something interesting you made yourself, and not some vibe-coded AI slop project, email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com and they can enable your account.

New comment by tlb in "OpenAI's response to the Axios developer tool compromise"

tlb — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:53:33 +0000

Of course, when everyone sets min-release-age=7, supply chain attacks won't get noticed until 7 days later. So you should set min-release-age=14 and be safe forever.

New comment by tlb in "I am building a cloud"

tlb — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:48:08 +0000

I understand the appeal from AWS's perspective. Customer A pays for a 32 vCPU VM, which they run on 32-core hardware. Then they can also squeeze in customer B's 1 vCPU instance running a blog, and no one notices. Free money!

But I don't want to be either of those customers. It means the whole system has an extra layer of abstraction, so they can juggle VMs around. It's why you need slow EBS instead of just getting a flash drive in the same case as the CPU, with 0.01x the latency.

New comment by tlb in "I am building a cloud"

tlb — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:25:41 +0000

I think clouds pay a huge abstraction penalty to allow tiny VMs. I guess it helps with onboarding and $10 personal VPNs. But I have never needed a fraction of a computer. I want to rent some number of full computers of various sizes, consisting of CPU, memory, and flash disk. Hetzner is closer than AWS, and I think/hope that’s what Crawshaw is aiming for.

New comment by tlb in "MuJoCo – Advanced Physics Simulation"

tlb — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:17:17 +0000

MuJoCo is great. I have it running in the browser for robotics simulation. See for example https://visibot.com/sheet/examples/humanoid_walking.v

New comment by tlb in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

tlb — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:14:08 +0000

Cool, but why is the most rounded-off part in the center? My wrists cover the edge at 5-25% and 75-95% when typing. When mousing, my right hand fleshy pad covers the edge at 65-80%.

New comment by tlb in "SpaceX files to go public"

tlb — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:33:02 +0000

You’re free to invest that way if you want. You might one day wake up and wonder why your Blockbuster Video shares did so badly. But Netflix seemed way overpriced.

Investing in future prospects encourages companies to plan for the future, rather than extract what they can from the present. The stock price is a big motivation for execs, so they can only invest in R&D if the market understands why it makes sense to spend money now in expectation of future profits.

New comment by tlb in "We Have Learned Nothing"

tlb — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:56:20 +0000

Yes, and indeed more startups are addressing more markets every year. The total number of attempts and successes are both up, keeping the success rate fairly constant.

New comment by tlb in "We Have Learned Nothing"

tlb — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:20:15 +0000

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

New comment by tlb in "It Took Me 30 Years to Solve This VFX Problem – Green Screen Problem [video]"

tlb — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:55:58 +0000

I think the total light output of each bulb in the pair is the same at all points in time, but the orange-blue gradient is reversed. So when one is orange at one end, the bulb beside it is blue at that end.

IIRC, the end that's negative looks orange, because the electrons emitted from the filament haven't gotten up to speed yet and can't ionize the mercury atoms at that end to the highest states.

If you didn't do this, you'd see 60 Hz strobing when you looked at one end.

New comment by tlb in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

tlb — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:56:36 +0000

You and I look with dismay at the high prices, but remember that a million hospital administrators are high-fiving themselves. So ideas like "just cut waste" are opposed by a large group with a lot more skin in the game.

New comment by tlb in "Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators"

tlb — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:10:42 +0000

Heat goes up with the square of current, so putting 10x the current to get 10x the force means 100x the heat.

Still, I think this idea is under-explored. There are probably applications for robots that move really fast, but only for a second before having to cool down.

New comment by tlb in "Y Combinator Investments in Europe"

tlb — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:42:39 +0000

You can get a more accurate list at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026&ba...

New comment by tlb in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

tlb — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:39:39 +0000

One scenario: there's a short circuit somewhere, say rats chewing through insulation. This can cause a very high current through the short. A non-inverter 4500 watt 120 volt generator might have 0.2 ohms coil resistance, so the short circuit current can hit 170 volts / 0.2 ohm = 850 amps. When the shorted branch's circuit breaker trips, the inductance in the generating windings wants to keep that 850 amps flowing for at least a few microseconds, and it gets distributed across everything else that's still connected. Depending on what else is connected (hopefully including some surge protectors) the peak voltage can get into many kilovolts.

The circuit is something like this:

  voltage source -- parasitic inductor --+- circuit breaker -- short
                                         |
                                         +- circuit breaker -- your PC