HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Dylan16807

38,419 karma · joined February 4, 2010

submissionscomments
Dylan16807··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
I would say 250-260MB/s for a 16TB drive, and when 4TB drives were newer they were more like 160-180MB/s. That's about a 50% increase.

Doing the math, you're probably going from 5 to 8-9 platters, so 2.2-2.5 areal density, and a naive square root suggests it should be about 50% faster. So maybe track width is taking a fair share after all?

Though when I look at more sizes, it seems like 12TB drives were also hitting 260MB/s and speed has almost entirely stalled since, with 24TB being only a hair faster.

Dylan16807··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
I'm not surprised at all. Most of the benefits in capacity per platter have been offset by higher prices per platter.
Dylan16807··on Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use
Additives like what?

We're talking about water that's released in general use, right? I would expect a closed cooling loop to have some biocides but have almost none of that leave the system.

And one datacenter had a weird bacteria that one time.

Dylan16807··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
> That points to either mind-boggling incompetence or a deep and well-hidden conspiracy.

Why? I don't think military schools have a habit of invading nearby mansions and not much less was going to find him.

Dylan16807··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
Stamp value still matters in the US for normal letters because of the janky way extra weight is priced. In particular, the current price of a max-weight letter is two stamps plus 5 cents.
Dylan16807··on When did Google get so weird?
It doesn't input and output letters. It's like if it communicated with a version of sign language. It's using all the same words but it has an arbitrary signal or two for each one.

So it can't spell for garbage because the tokenizer hides the real spellings from the LLM.

Dylan16807··on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?
> you seem adamant that there's no chance

They just want some evidence. It should be pretty easy to measure, shouldn't it?

Dylan16807··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
I agree with how power is a bad way to measure batteries a lot of the time (though if you assume they last 4 hours you shouldn't be too far off).

But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)

Dylan16807··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
It's more efficient for the grid to be very unbalanced every once in a while, rather than building so much it never happens.

And it's not a sign of a broken community. Those batteries aren't making all that much money on a per-year basis. And the earlier batteries into the system are going to make the most money. The more batteries that get built the smaller the profits will be and the better the entire grid will be.

Dylan16807··on Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language
https://tomstu.art/programming-with-nothing

This is also a fun introduction to building up lambda calculus. And it gets up to fizzbuzz!

Dylan16807··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
> It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...

For the recent big outage in France, neither of those was the problem. Some big transformers overloaded and there wasn't enough redundancy.

> Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.

> But hey, it was cheaper, right?

> Oops...

I'm not sure what you mean by "oops". Those datacenters do have downtime but companies seem to be happy sticking with them anyway. It seems like it still saves money.

Dylan16807··on When did Google get so weird?
"nobody is disabling this optimization" shouldn't be surprising. It's a matter of knowing what letters are in words versus a 4x token efficiency boost. Nobody cares enough about spelling.

If it was top priority, every company that can't find a post training fix would go disable half their tokenizer code and it would be solved in the next model.

Dylan16807··on U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982
When did lame duck change definition? It was supposed to be just the month or two after the election. Not most of the term of someone that's facing a term limit.
Dylan16807··on OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns
The number of releases they've gone ahead with so far act as proof that they don't care all that much.
Dylan16807··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Are there any rules about labeling that can distinguish the old and new Honeycrisps?

Edit: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...

Based on this a big problem is overlong storage, which could be avoided with some effort into local purchasing.

Dylan16807··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Of course you don't replace everything old with new.

But when the specific varietal always sucked, that's a good reason to replace it.

Dylan16807··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Doing a job that can't be automated sounds like the exact opposite of "monetized by tech" to me.

And if "people be watching videos" was the wet dream of tech monetization, we wouldn't need to be worried about tech monetization.

Dylan16807··on When did Google get so weird?
Basic counting isn't really math.

And it can count fine. It doesn't know how to spell.

Dylan16807··on OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns
I could believe it could be a dangerous model, I guess.

I don't believe they really care about danger, or that they'd actually fully withhold release on anything significant.

And when I say "significant", is 6.1 Astra even meaningfully different from 6 Astra in capability? That release was less than a month ago.

Dylan16807··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
> The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.

> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.

When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.

I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.

Dylan16807··on OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns
> so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive?

How about we actually try to make it sound cool? They're not releasing the new car because the horsepower was too much, they need more time to get it under control.

I could easily see a car company doing that.

Dylan16807··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?
Dylan16807··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Rulings go on top of laws go on top of the constitution. And any level can be in violation of the levels below it. A law can be unconstitutional, and a ruling can be "not in accord with the law and/or the constitution".

> Maybe you and I just have different definitions of what is law.

Maybe. But I think my interpretation is the same as what kelnos meant.

In a more generic context we can call it all "law", but for specifically talking about a ruling not being in accord with the law, that's not the definition being used.

Dylan16807··on Windows 11½
My impression was that these days a printer is more likely to just work on Linux than on Windows. And without the bloatware.
Dylan16807··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Nobody is operating on assumptions. They're giving an opinion on a ruling that doesn't directly affect them.

Like, do I just quote this entire thing? "Their ruling is not final yet, per the article. I'm also free to disagree with the correctness and propriety of a judicial ruling and believe it was biased (of course, I do have to still abide by it, to the extent that it applies to me in any way). That it's binding doesn't mean it's right and that it is in accord with the law and/or the constitution."

A wrong ruling isn't in accord with the law. A wrong ruling is binding, at least temporarily, but it's a legal failure.

Dylan16807··on Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”
Timestamps aren't hard. It's almost everything else with time that's hard.
Dylan16807··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
If it was actually using XML as a markup language then that would be a reason to stick with it. But XML seems to be complicating things much more than it simplifies.

>> XML remains the best format for representing trees—deep hierarchies of nested data. JSON handles flatter structures well, but good messaging protocols are extensible: extensions can be embedded at different levels and composed together, like Lego bricks. That’s where XML shines.

Anything reasonable you'd be doing with messaging protocol is pretty flat.

Dylan16807··on When did Google get so weird?
It's not "some new kind of architecture comes along". It's been done before many many times and it's a very basic change, turning off a specific optimization. And it's a perfectly good style of LLM so "inherent flaw" isn't true either.
Dylan16807··on Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent
That's for when they're doing hacking tests that aren't supposed to be connected to the internet.
Dylan16807··on MongoDB CEO resigns "effective immediately" to join Meta, stock drops 20%
> However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?

I would argue that at most he's a signal about company value that people reacted to. Maybe the company lost 6 billion dollars in underlying value, but it wasn't from the CEO change itself.

Page 1 of 34Next →