Hacker News: zzbn00

New comment by zzbn00 in "The biggest heat pumps"

zzbn00 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:59:29 +0000

Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

New comment by zzbn00 in "The biggest heat pumps"

zzbn00 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:49:38 +0000

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

New comment by zzbn00 in "Koralm Railway"

zzbn00 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:53:53 +0000

Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)

New comment by zzbn00 in "Koralm Railway"

zzbn00 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:22:58 +0000

Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.

New comment by zzbn00 in "What Killed Perl?"

zzbn00 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:12:46 +0000

Moved out of TCL and into Python in 2001. Perl was big at the time. But Python had REPL and numeric/numarray which swung it in my case.

(Worked out well I suppose? Almost 1/4 century and still using Python)

Air gapped / Data Diode backing up arrangement

zzbn00 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:47:45 +0000

Article URL: https://bnikolic.co.uk/blog/linux/2025/11/13/backupdiode.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921042

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by zzbn00 in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

zzbn00 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 08:59:51 +0000

Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this:

Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings to make structured programs out of Unix processes. To compare them to a text file is like writing that a program needs no variables because it can read all the values it needs from an input data file when it needs them.

Environment variables are precisely to be used in situation where sub-processes need to be passed information in a way that is not necessarily affecting subsequent calls to that subprocess from another section of a program. Sometime the subprocesses are sequences of nested shells, and sometimes other more complex programs, but the same idea applies.

New comment by zzbn00 in "The product of the railways is the timetable"

zzbn00 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:54:40 +0000

No need to go as far as Africa. Basic landline telephones spread into poorer/more rural parts of Europe only in 1980s and 1990s. Until then it was either taking the bus to see people in person, or sending a letter....

E.g. quick search revealed this pamphlet from 1988 Spain, showing that ~30% of households did not at time yet have a telephone: https://www.telefonica.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/202...

New comment by zzbn00 in "The product of the railways is the timetable"

zzbn00 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:38:47 +0000

Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.

New comment by zzbn00 in "Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation"

zzbn00 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:06:25 +0000

Exactly this. But you don't really want to bundle straight away -- think about the exact problem you have and then solve exactly that problem. After you've sorted a few problems like this think if a bundled platform is useful.

New comment by zzbn00 in "What Problems to Solve – By Richard Feynman"

zzbn00 — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 20:33:15 +0000

“studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” -> Ended up being a very important (and largerly solvable!) problem in ground-based astronomy

New comment by zzbn00 in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

zzbn00 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 19:19:56 +0000

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.

Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!

New comment by zzbn00 in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

zzbn00 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:33:58 +0000

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA.

Which/why did they remove the book?

New comment by zzbn00 in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

zzbn00 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:12:27 +0000

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

New comment by zzbn00 in "21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X"

zzbn00 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:55:51 +0000

Its great for when people need to be in the loop, looking at the data, maybe loading in Excel etc. (I use it myself...). But not enough humans around for 21 GB/s

New comment by zzbn00 in "21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X"

zzbn00 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:54:26 +0000

Yes, but if you have decades of data, what turns on having to wait for a minute or 10 minutes to convert it?

New comment by zzbn00 in "21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X"

zzbn00 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:53:48 +0000

I think these would add only small amount of information (and in a DB would be modelled as joins). Only adds lots of data if done very inefficiently.

New comment by zzbn00 in "21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X"

zzbn00 — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:36:19 +0000

Humans generate decisions / text information at rates of ~bytes per second at most. There is barely enough humans around to generate 21GB/s of information even if all they did was make financial decisions!

So 21 GB/s would be solely algos talking to algos... Given all the investment in the algos, surely they don't need to be exchanging CSV around?

New comment by zzbn00 in "I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors"

zzbn00 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:36:32 +0000

There is also https://tiddlywiki.com/ that you can save anywhere

New comment by zzbn00 in "How Silica Gel Took Over the World"

zzbn00 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:31:07 +0000

Maybe that would be enough. But the belt-and-braces approach of superglue with silica gel bags in a closed jar, in a fridge, seems to work well and has meant the superglue is still usable when I end up needing it....