HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

fsh

4,834 karma · joined February 23, 2019

submissionscomments
fsh··on The MacBook Neo
On the contrary, displays are commodity components. So much so that motivated enthusiasts have managed to swap better panels into their ThinkPads for a long time. Manufacturers don't prioritize display quality in cheap devices because it doesn't show up on the spec sheet and most customers don't care that much.
fsh··on The MacBook Neo
Which notoriously favors anything made by Apple.
fsh··on Medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are fiction
The article is about case reports, not about empirical studies. Putting a fake case report on GitHub wouldn't make it any less fake.
fsh··on Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video]
Any interaction between light and matter can be modeled as absorption and re-emission (stimulated or spontaneous) of photons. In this picture, there is not much difference between a photon traveling through the sun or through a piece of glass, and the analog makes physical sense. Since photons are massless elementary particles, they are indistinguishable and their number is not conserved. The notion of "the same photon" is questionable in any case.
fsh··on U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs
From the article:

> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.

fsh··on Rydberg atoms detect clear signals from a handheld radio
The abstract is not very clearly written. The 3.5 mV/cm is the maximum detectable field strength before the system starts to saturate. I would be interested how the sensitivity compares to conventional (cryogenic) semiconductor detectors.
fsh··on The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
Considering the state of japanese IT, there is probably a person typing each reservation from the website into a 1980s mainframe.
fsh··on The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be purchased by residents of Japan.
fsh··on Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
Hydrogen is not great for airplanes since the extremely low density makes the tanks too large. The best solution would be synthetic hydrocarbons (synthesized using hydrogen) which can outperform fossil jet fuel.
fsh··on Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.
fsh··on Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.
fsh··on GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
The Bohr radius is the result of a simple classical physics calculation (a common exercise for undergraduates in their first year). It depends only on the electron mass and the fine structure constant which is the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. In the SI system, the speed of light has a fixed value which defines the unit of length.
fsh··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
Yes, LLMs have become extremely good at coding (not software engineer though). But try using them for anything original that cannot be adapted from GitHub and Stack Overflow. I haven't seen much improvement at all at such tasks.
fsh··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
IQ tests only work if the participants haven't trained for them. If they do similar tests a few times in a row, scores increase a lot. Current LLMs are hyper-optimized for the particular types of puzzles contained in popular "benchmarks".
fsh··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
Companies are optimizing for all the big benchmarks. This is why there is so little correlation between benchmark performance and real world performance now.
fsh··on Q&A: New UK onshore wind and solar is '50% cheaper' than new gas
That is exactly what I wrote. Gas plants being at 1% implies that there is no cheaper source with available capacity. Why should anyone sell electricity for less then?
fsh··on Q&A: New UK onshore wind and solar is '50% cheaper' than new gas
This is highly misleadling. Nobody is setting the price, it is determined by an open market. This naturally drives it towards the price of the cheapest energy source with available capacity (often natural gas). It would be irrational to sell electricity for cheaper than this. If more batteries get deployed, the price will more often get set by battery storage instead.
fsh··on Luce: First Electric Ferrari
A lot more people drive around sports cars than ride around sports horses.
fsh··on EV-1 for Lease (1996)
The EV-1 was launched with lead-acid batteries and later upgraded to NiMH. It would still not be possible to make a practial BEV with these battery chemistries. The breakthrough came through the microelectronics industry producing billions of cheap devices with lithium ion batteries in them.
fsh··on Bugs Apple loves
I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.
fsh··on United States Completes WHO Withdrawal
These church-owned entities in Germany are almost 100% government fincanced [1], while abusing a loophole in the German constitution to discriminate their employees for religious reasons. For example, the Catholic ones are notorious for firing employees that get divorced. This system is an absolute disgrace, but the churches are still too powerful in German society and have so far been able to block any attempt at fixing the constitution.

[1] https://www.malteser-international.org/en/about-us/how-we-wo...

fsh··on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT
Find me a consumer IPv6 router sold in the last ~10 years without a restrictive firewall enabled by default. I have never seen one.
fsh··on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT
If your router had only NAT and someone (i.e. your ISP) sends it a package addressed to somewhere inside your internal IP range, it will happily forward it. A firewall would block it.
fsh··on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT
If you really don't have a stateful v4 firewall, your ISP can happily connect to all of your devices.
fsh··on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT
NAT implementations get broken all the time (NAT slipstreaming attacks). If a manufacturer is incompetent enough not to have a firewall on by default, they are probably also shipping a vulnerable NAT.
fsh··on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT
You seem to have misunderstood how IPv6 works. In a home setup, all the traffic still goes through a single router which typically has a restrictive firewall enabled by default.
fsh··on East Germany balloon escape
Since West Germany considered East Germany to be occupied territory, East Germans had automatic citizenship in the west. This made it uniquely easy to emigrate into the much wealthier country.
fsh··on Danish Armed Forces expand their presence and continue exercises in Greenland
Zero. Denmark belongs to the EU and NATO, and Greenland has always had a significant NATO military presence to deter any possible threat.
fsh··on Meta announces nuclear energy projects
The nuclear share dropping is a very clear signal about a lack of investment. Shows that nuclear energy is no longer cost competitive, even in a "low regulation" environment.
fsh··on Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)
The app is great, but unfortunately it only works in Switzerland. The same company also developed a german version (DWD WarnWetter, works for all of Europe), and recently a worldwide one (Fluid Meteo).
← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →