Hacker News: tomatotomato37

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space"

tomatotomato37 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:06:20 +0000

I'm curious what the thermal management system on this looks like. On one hand, vacuum being in essence a perfect insulator works in favor of keeping the silicon hot for the very long time it takes to pull a boule while requiring very little energy. On the other hand, you have to make sure the control electronics don't also heat up to 1000C. I'm also curious how you keep the molten silion separate from the crystal without gravity keeping it in the crucible. I bet a lot of interesting engineering going on here.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "White House gives Maduro ultimatum as U.S. moves toward land operations"

tomatotomato37 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 22:26:59 +0000

Those upsides could have also been accomplished by pointing the CIA at Venezuela to do the same thing they've been doing across South America for the past fifty years.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

tomatotomato37 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 02:44:30 +0000

The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

tomatotomato37 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 02:32:42 +0000

Nah, they are pretty similar in difficulty for interception - the first US ASAT program used essentially the same Nike Zeus missiles used for ABM duty during the late 50s

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year"

tomatotomato37 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 22:26:17 +0000

Worst part about it was all the people fretting on about ridiculous threats like the chatbot turning into skynet sucked the oxygen out of the room for the more realistic corporate threats

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "China bans one-pedal driving in default modes by 2027"

tomatotomato37 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:57:47 +0000

Most ICE vehicles with automatic transmissions (aka 90% of them) either explicitly open the clutch or do torque converter things when off throttle, the result being that the vehicle starts freewheeling. Air resistance and friction and what not means the vehicle will eventually stop, but in a modern car at highway speeds that stopping distance can still be multiple miles; and that's before you bring hills into the equation.

My point being for most people expected behavior is for a car to only slow down during active braking and maintain momentum otherwise, and trying to change that otherwise would bring more danger than it's worth.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door"

tomatotomato37 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 19:10:53 +0000

I find it hard to believe continuous consumption of potable municipal water is cheaper than running chillers or exchangers cooled by a river/ocean, especially considering powerplants and the like have been doing the latter for decades

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Israel launches strikes against Iran, Defense Minister says"

tomatotomato37 — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:28:23 +0000

Arguably if India had the intel and military means/technology to quash Pakistan's nuclear program without a full-on invasion at the time they would have. I'm sure several other countries would have too, but the ability just wasn't there during the 70s

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "BYD's Five-Minute Charging Puts China in the Lead for EVs"

tomatotomato37 — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:15:01 +0000

5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "I'm Wirecutter's water-quality expert. I don't filter my water"

tomatotomato37 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 22:45:20 +0000

I use "Third Wave Water" but there are other brands out there

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "I'm Wirecutter's water-quality expert. I don't filter my water"

tomatotomato37 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 22:38:30 +0000

Yes, water quality matters a lot in coffee enthusiast land. They actually make little mineral packets that you add to a gallon of distilled water to get a "perfect" brewing water - I know since I actually use them for my espresso machine to fight scale buildup from my +10 grain tap water.

Note this excessiveness is really needed for espresso though; a regular Brita jug handles more tolerant methods of brewing perfectly well (and to be honest most people murder coffee enough that the water is the least of their concerns)

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Doctors Were Preparing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up."

tomatotomato37 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:19:36 +0000

I've heard in some lighter procedures (think bone setting or dental work) just an amnesic drug is given as apparently not biologically encoding/remembering a traumatic event seems to produce just as good an outlook as blocking the tramua through unconsciousness/painkillers

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google"

tomatotomato37 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:09:11 +0000

I always assumed "bring your whole self to work" was just a nice way to lead into "you don't need work/life balance because your work is your life"

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”"

tomatotomato37 — Mon, 19 May 2025 10:16:37 +0000

  "[Photography] is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds -- and one that can be practiced by any imbecile."

I like this quote.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "What Is HDR, Anyway?"

tomatotomato37 — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:02:46 +0000

If anyone was hoping for a more technical explanation, I find these pages do a good job explaining the inner workings behind the format

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth....

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac...

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start""

tomatotomato37 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:54:09 +0000

Unfortunately that pretty much just leaves solar panels, as wind/hydro/concentrated solar/geothermal all rely on a spinning mass moving at a mostly consistent speed, though at least hydro can black start itself relatively easily

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Europe's Nuclear Trilemma:Difficult and Dangerous Options for Post-US Deterrence"

tomatotomato37 — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:18:29 +0000

That only works if you have US/Russia level nuclear infrastructure. Second-tier nuclear states are still vulnerable to the two superpowers just by sheer number advantage, be it warheads, delivery systems, or just the land area to hide things like VLF arrays

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Frank Lloyd Wright's mile high skyscraper proposal (2021)"

tomatotomato37 — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 04:11:20 +0000

Wow, some of the complexes in those pictures look a lot like the cities I create when I'm playing Workers & Resources; if I didn't know any better I would have thought they were taken in the former Soviet bloc. I wonder how they managed to make it work where the West didn't.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers?"

tomatotomato37 — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:40:39 +0000

I also want to add in the context of human sprinters & F1 drivers, their reaction time is measured via leg actuation, which for a creature evolved to be an object-throwing endurance hunter is going to have worse neural & muscular latency than, say, your forearm. That is why using your finger to trigger a response in a conventional computer time tester can get such high speeds, cause we're essentially evolved for it.

New comment by tomatotomato37 in "Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that"

tomatotomato37 — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 03:36:30 +0000

...actually wait, you unintentionally brought up an interesting point, how exactly did Netflix get data on how people are consuming their media in the privacy of their own home. That's not something you'd get good data off a simple survey