Hacker News: ttshaw1

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:31:44 +0000

Also interested

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:52:06 +0000

I think the relevant issue is you could conceivably have a house with two outlets with opposite phases. Bussing them together in the PSU will then create a short

New comment by ttshaw1 in "DeepSeek v4"

ttshaw1 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:22:24 +0000

You're so soft

New comment by ttshaw1 in "New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect"

ttshaw1 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 23:30:03 +0000

>When the electromagnetic wave hits a substance, it splits into separate electric and magnetic waves

Not in any sense I'm familiar with

New comment by ttshaw1 in "My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi"

ttshaw1 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:22:41 +0000

You're right, I didn't read thoroughly enough.

>Everything joined up via a 2-pin and 5-pin connector on the PCB. From there, it was a straightforward matter of measuring voltages and continuity to work out what connected to what: the 2-pin connector was offering 24V DC. The 5-pin connector was what went off to the motor itself. Two of its pins were passing through the 24V DC and ground directly. Two more pins were connected to the potentiometer. The fifth pin was not connected.

New comment by ttshaw1 in "My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi"

ttshaw1 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:33:06 +0000

I don't like the notion of doing speed control by putting a digipot in series with a motor. It worked because the fan happened to be low enough power but it doesn't seem like the author gave thought to the power handling capability of the digipot. If the fan happened to be beefier he's letting the smoke out with this design.

Plus, this is more complicated than just doing PWM.

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?"

ttshaw1 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:38:22 +0000

I don't get what the point of the article is. Is the takeaway that I should lower the channel width in my home? How many WAPs would I need to be running for that to matter? I'd argue it's more important to get everyone to turn down TX power in cases where your neighbors in an apartment building are conflicting. And that's never going to happen, so just conform to the legal limit and your SNR should be fine. Anything that needs to be high performance shouldn't be on wifi anyway.

If you want to spend a really long time optimizing your wifi, this is the resource: https://www.wiisfi.com/

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Cormac McCarthy's personal library"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:12:09 +0000

That's Blood Meridian

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Show HN: I Got Tired of Calculator Sites, So I Built My Own"

ttshaw1 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 21:40:28 +0000

Try qalculate. It's great with units and I think will work for base conversions, though I haven't tried that

New comment by ttshaw1 in "3D-printed device splits white noise into an acoustic rainbow without power"

ttshaw1 — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:38:47 +0000

>Unlike nature, which utilizes passive structures to shape sound, most artificial sound control systems require active devices or resonance-based systems.

What's wrong with resonance-based systems? I have to wonder if their side lobes and frequency range would be better if they used resonance

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Quantum Computation Lecture Notes (2022)"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:30:28 +0000

We're already at NISQ

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall"

ttshaw1 — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 22:42:42 +0000

Of course Ukraine conscripts, they're in a war for their survival. They aren't drafting anyone under 25, by the way, so it's not as dire as you seem to think. And Russia's beating people and throwing them in pits if they won't sign contracts to go to Ukraine, so it's not all roses over there.

It's not at all unreasonable to think that Ukraine can continue ceding ground and shredding Ladas full of mobiks until Putin kicks the bucket, or the Russian economy collapses. A healthy economy doesn't have a 20% key interest rate for 8 months straight, you know. We've already seen one large-scale mutiny in the Russian armed forces, too, so who knows what else might happen?

You haven't proposed any sort of alternative to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. What's your idea, cut them off and say "good luck?" How does that benefit anyone besides Russia and the minority of Ukrainians who don't want to fight?

edit: if you're thinking that I care about the financial cost of arming Ukraine, I don't. This is the best money we've ever spent and the only time I've respected our MIC, and I wish we were sending more weapons and more financial support. Every time Ukraine spends $100,000 of aid destroying a piece of Russian armor, that's saving us god knows how much in money spent on deterrence.

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall"

ttshaw1 — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:58:11 +0000

Why, because Russia can grind out a village a week? Ukraine is inflicting disproportionate losses and is supplied to the hilt by Europe, while Russia's moving closer every day to a Potemkin economy.

New comment by ttshaw1 in "What you need to know about EMP weapons"

ttshaw1 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 22:04:41 +0000

You shouldn't need to prevent gaps entirely. You only need to make sure there are no holes larger than roughly the wavelength of the radiation you're trying to block. Which, for 2.4GHz wifi, is about 125mm. I think what you saw is that a single layer of foil isn't enough skin depths thick to block radiation sufficiently at that frequency.

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Trump's 'Golden Dome' plan has a major obstacle: Physics"

ttshaw1 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:30:22 +0000

It takes well-calibrated electronics detonating conventional explosives with precise timing to set off a nuclear warhead. The warhead maybe would fizzle but wouldn't detonate because you intercepted. And anyway, it's much better to have it detonate anywhere besides where it was targetted

New comment by ttshaw1 in "I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 29 May 2025 17:16:24 +0000

What school system? Sounds like a great setup

New comment by ttshaw1 in "The cat that wouldn't die"

ttshaw1 — Thu, 01 May 2025 20:05:05 +0000

Well, yeah, it's a thought experiment. But if we had some sort of ideal box then yes, the cat would actually in a superposition

New comment by ttshaw1 in "Palantir's Justification for Building ICE's Master Database"

ttshaw1 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 16:56:03 +0000

Sold my stock the other day. Solid gains and I have no qualms about owning defense stocks, but their behavior here is over the line

New comment by ttshaw1 in "The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution"

ttshaw1 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:33:28 +0000

Not so. See the battle of Kircholm from 1605 as a particularly successful example. Anyway, the discussion is about whether new technology (naval drones) could make old weapons (warships) and tactics obsolete. I thought you were saying that cavalry charges never happened and so never became obsolete. I'm glad that's not the case. But you yourself are saying that technology rendered cavalry charges obsolete. There are countless other examples; no one could argue in good faith that the once-dominant bronze chariot still has any role on a battlefield.

I just realized you're not the guy who said "it doesn’t mean the old ones are obsolete", so probably moot

New comment by ttshaw1 in "The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution"

ttshaw1 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:14:51 +0000

Cavalry charges absolutely were used to break lines of infantry. It just became obsolete earlier than you think.