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3ple_alpha

47 karma · joined January 6, 2025

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3ple_alpha··on Much of the World Facing 'Water Bankruptcy,' U.N. Report Warns
There are some partial solutions that are fairly simple in concept, for example those related to farming. Some of the crops grown in regions where water is less than abundant are unnecessarily water-intensive, leading to a possible strategy that can be summarised as "grow something else". In practice this means regulating farming with emphasis on water management, I often feel that many places could use more regulation in this area.

Simple concept does not mean simple execution, once you start regulating things it's easy to get it wrong, but the ideas are there and are not exactly novel.

3ple_alpha··on Claude Shannon's randomness-guessing machine
Did you stop after 14 iterations? Because the game is, in fact, infinite.
3ple_alpha··on EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal
Removing tariffs on beef specifically is a serious mistake, there's no need to incentivise any more production of that.

Other agricultural imports, like soy and coffee beans, are a huge boon to the EU on the other hand. If this results in cheaper coffee, everyone in my country, for one, will be ecstatic.

3ple_alpha··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Vans work just fine on mountain roads. And driving off road is simply not a thing for like 99% of drivers.

Reality is, people buy these things thinking they would drive them off road, and never actually do it.

It's possible to make an off-road van, by the way. It's just that real demand is so vanishingly small that you don't really see them.

3ple_alpha··on Ask HN: Unemployed almost a year after graduating MIT – a rant
Don't let this situation define who you are, there is more to life than one particular career path (or even payed work in general, to be honest). Just because things haven't worked out the way you wanted at this time, does not make you "a failure" by any means, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Others have (and will) given specific career advice, meanwhile I'd like to emphasise this: you absolutely can, and should, do hobbies, preferably including such that involve physical activity cause that's good for your health. Doomscrolling is not a good one. You have every right to have free time and to enjoy it, everyone does.

3ple_alpha··on Sinclair C5
Execution could have been a bit better but ultimately it's really hard to make electric vehicles with 1980s battery technology. Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.

Electric moped was right idea but some 30 years ahead of its time.

3ple_alpha··on Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
Android seems to be a bit better in that regard: not in the sense that applications are smaller (though I think they are, slightly), but rather that you can easily unpack or decompile most of them and see what's inside.

There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.

3ple_alpha··on Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending
MS auth service as such does support TOTP (though even then it won't stop bugging you about the authenticator) but then it probably depends on how those resources are configured. Never been on admin side of it so don't know if it's on by default.
3ple_alpha··on Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died
Even my local Swedish newspaper paid him respects. It may feel a bit better knowing that somewhere half way across the world, people knew him and considered him a celebrity.
3ple_alpha··on Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO
There's a bit more to it since you do need to do last bit of configuration (pull up the nose) just as you hit the target speed. But yeah, automatic take-off is quite a bit easier than automatic rejection of take-off.
3ple_alpha··on Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)
It is not true that reliability requires old-style engine design, it's more a question of cost. Modern jet airliners (their engines but also really everything about them) have a ton of complexity, including a myriad of electrical control systems, yet they are no less reliable.

It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.

3ple_alpha··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?

I don't, I ride electric. It's not just leisure rides, too, noise is just as important for daily commute.

3ple_alpha··on Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight
Too bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that regard.
3ple_alpha··on We are destroying software
You can also reproduce it within a week without hosted cloud services. What matters is that you don't have to develop custom software and instead spend that week writing config files and orchestration scripts, be it cloud stuff, docker containers or whatever.
3ple_alpha··on Life on a Closed Timelike Curve
So they assume four-dimensional space-time of a certain shape, similar to how a two-dimensional sheet could be curved taking various shape. Then they calculate how would physical objects behave in space-time of that shape.

Can such shapes exist anywhere in our universe, realistically or even just theoretically? For all we know, perhaps not.

3ple_alpha··on Norway on track to be first to go all-electric
I can name several that can cover significant part of local demand with solar power. Or perhaps they'd have energy storage to fully cover it by now had they invested into that.
3ple_alpha··on Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior PM?
Depends if the project started with you or was ongoing. If it is the latter, defer to pre-existing coworkers to an extent at first.
3ple_alpha··on Lead and cadmium found in muscle-building protein powders, report says
For chronic exposure, yes. You don't want it to be in your food all the time. But accidentally eating a tiny bit once would be safe.
3ple_alpha··on Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006)
No they're not. If you're using an array with length over a billion in Java, your code stinks already before you start using binary search.
3ple_alpha··on NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker
I've driven electric motorbike for 7 years and it's absolutely great for everyday commute. Lighter ones tend to have removable batteries so they work even when you don't have a garage with electric outlet. Some heavier ones you can even take on an occasional long trip, though that's not super convenient – it's commuting (combined with joy of riding) that makes them useful.

One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.

3ple_alpha··on A minimax chess engine in regular expressions
It does seem to play worse than it should, by game went: 1. d4 d5 2. c4 dxc4 3. e4 Qxd4 4. Qxd4 5. Bc4 6. Nf3 7. O-O 8. Rd1 9. Qd8#
3ple_alpha··on Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?
If one divides weight of the airplane by the number of wheels it has, one would find one wheel carries around 10 times more weight than that of a truck. You even get a slightly better deal on landing when you don't have as much fuel.

That's a lot of weight but nothing crazy, so on a dry runway wheel brakes alone are more than enough to stop normally. They would also wear out a lot, overheat and occasionally ignite if used like that, so that's what thrust reversers are for.