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lorax

303 karma · joined March 12, 2009

I am <a href="https://EdwardJohnson.com/>Edward Johnson</a>.
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lorax··on Should more of us be moving to live near friends?
Japan has detailed zoning restrictions, including the shadow a building can cast on a neighbor's lot. Maybe there are fewer lawsuits because the law is clear so it is easy to know if you are following it. https://ranjatai.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/sunlight-on-japane...
lorax··on The 'Return to Office' Lies
When I was doing this, I went in a bit later and dropped the kids off and my spouse went in a bit earlier and picked them up. They were neither the first ones in nor the last ones out. My commute was worst case 20 minutes, that also helped. It worked fine (except when spouse was traveling), but WFH Is much easier.
lorax··on Toyota to buy clean power from a $1.1B solar farm in Texas
According to the article, it is matching 45% with renewable by 2026, not 2035. 2035 is the goal for net zero.
lorax··on DARPA is funding reef structures that will be colonized by corals and bivalves
They didn't forget, the ones left behind weren't flyable. F22s seem to require a lot of maintenance. https://www.twz.com/24442/we-finally-know-how-many-f-22s-wer...
lorax··on People fill old newspaper boxes with movies, call it 'Free Blockbuster'
Such as this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PirateBox
lorax··on My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
I think he meant in general drives aren't sealed, except the helium ones are sealed.
lorax··on EU data shows PHEVs emit 350% more CO2 than tested values
DC Fast charging prices are usually quite high (45-50 c/kwh and may well be near the cost of gas, but not all PHEV's support that. Level 2 charging is usually much cheaper (20-30 c/kwh) though slower. So if you can charge at one of those (such as at work) it also works out to be cheaper than gas.
lorax··on EU data shows PHEVs emit 350% more CO2 than tested values
I have a PHEV and charge overnight from a wall outlet. I wake up in the morning fully charged. Probably 99% of my trips are electric, but only 80% of my miles. The occasional long road trip really adds up. It is also hard (in the US) to charge on a trip. My car can't charge from a DC fast charger (it doesn't have the right connector), only from the level 2 AC chargers. From a L2 charger it only charges at 3.3 KW (most chargers support between 6.6-10 KW) which results in ~10 miles of range per hour. So if I take a half hour lunch break while driving, that's only 5 miles added.

If you can charge at home or work it's a great deal, but if you can't I can see how it would be hard to charge it enough to make it worthwhile.

lorax··on History Is Written by the Losers (2016)
In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state.

Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part.

Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.

lorax··on Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?
Ok, so that I didn't know. Here's from the Oster website: "When this feature is selected, the toaster will automatically defrost your food and then toast it in one easy step." So the temperature is lower for a little bit to thaw the food then higher to toast it.
lorax··on Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?
The bagel button makes only one side of the slot get hot (or at least makes one side hotter than the other). Your toaster probably has a bagel icon on the top showing you which way to put the bagel in (cut side towards the center in every toaster I have seen).

Source: I'm not married to toaster moguls but I do peer into operating toasters to see which wires turn red. Feel free to replicate my research and post your observations.

lorax··on Five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer
Oxfam carefully picked the dates they used to make the gain as large as possible. They used November 2023 compared to March 2020. What happened in March of 2020? The stock market dropped from 3380 (Feb 10) to 2304 (March 16). For the end date, if they had used Oct 30 instead of November, the S&P was at 4358. The Using the numbers I just gave, the gain would only be 29%, not 114%. That's a huge difference. (As you probably suspect, I also carefully picked the dates I used to minimize the gain.)
lorax··on UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
Your "very cheap" 1,000 year BD only has always 10 year warranty. I wouldn't want historical records stored on that.
lorax··on Why Isn't Landfill Mining More Popular?
The remains of dinosaur cities.
lorax··on ‘The best blueberry’: how a tiny North American fruit took over Australia (2022)
Given that the Ike hasn't been minted in 45 years, I think it is safe to say it is not that. The Sacky and Tony are exactly the same width, 26.5 mm. The Canadian dollar is also 26.5 mm (as are the Prezzies and the Innos, and why are we Infantilizing coins anyway). The Australian dollar is a touch smaller, 25 mm. So I think the answer to your question is "all of them", 1.5 mm is likely larger than the variation between blueberries.

Converting that to Library of Congresses or National Library of Austrailias is left as an exercise to the reader.

lorax··on Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file?
Only if you trust your dentist (or your proctologist, depending on which cheek you were referring to).
lorax··on Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file?
I don't think I would create a file like this. It is a lot of sensitive information that I wouldn't want on my computer, and, how would I be sure it was found if when needed?

I would take all of the the things you listed (and what others have listed) and put them in a safe or fire-resistant box then give a sealed envelope to whoever is going to be the executor of your estate with information about how to find and access the box.

lorax··on Can Pachinko be Skill-based? Taking a look at Hanemono
It also sounds like it was written by chatGPT. It doesn't sound like the rest of the article.
lorax··on Ford's answer to EV supply chain hell: Cheaper batteries
I have heard of proof of concept camping trailers that not only have batteries but also motors in the wheels so the can provide extra power when you drive (restoring the range you loose when towing) and also regen braking. Not low tech, but would be really useful https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133124_towing-with-an-...
lorax··on Nonexistent Test Item
Bummer, it's out of stock.
lorax··on Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
You can already do this with the Internet Archive, just create a web page, submit it to the wayback machine, then publish the resulting archive link. Like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20210302145655/https://news.ycom...
lorax··on Proposal for an Internet Service: The Eternal Home Page (1996)
There are a few services like this today, some are fairly simple like memorial web pages or find-a-grave where you can add photos about the people named on the tombstones.

Expanding beyond that (and I think more useful) are eternal digital archives such as https://www.permanent.org/ which is a non-profit that charges you per gigabyte for perpetual storage. They store copies of your data with multiple providers (AWS and Backblaze right now) and promise to transcode formats as technologies change. you can make the archives public (letting you have the "eternal home page") or private so only certain people can view or update it. The money you pay goes into an endowment and the earnings from the endowment pay the storage costs.

lorax··on How to Stop Endless Discussions
I really wish comments were disabled on this article, that would really fit with the headline
lorax··on Ask HN: Has anyone noticed Amazon Prime become much slower?
Some sort of virus or something I think.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/coronavirus-amazon-says-item...

Amazon warned it’s experiencing Prime delivery days and running out of stock of popular household items amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Also here's a related blog post by Amazon https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazons-actions-to...

lorax··on Loop, a new zero-waste platform that may change how we shop
I'm not sure that you should separate the "avoid waste" and "conserve energy", they seem intertwined to me. Recycling in the supermarket is part of their plan, but I don't know how much it matters (there are UPS trucks going through my neighborhood every day, the amount of extra energy required to stop at my house versus me driving to the supermarket seems like a wash).

My packaging consumption consists of a lot more than what I stated, I based my comments on the partners they listed and the examples they gave (on the terracycle website), they are going to have to move in to products that get used up every week or two, not ones that get used up a few times a year to actually have an impact.

Side note: the parent company, Terracycle seems like it is more about giving you the feeling of saving the environment instead of actually having a positive impact. Current promotion: recycle little-bites (a brand of muffins) packages by packaging them up and mailing them in, the cost (resources and energy) of doing that is far above any value the get from recycling a few ounces of packaging.

lorax··on Loop, a new zero-waste platform that may change how we shop
I'd like to know what the breakeven point is. How many times does the package have to be used before it becomes less resource intensive than single-use packaging, and how long will it take. I use honey (an example on the terracycle website) but I probably go through a bottle a year. If the breakeven is 10 uses, that would be 10 years worth of honey consumption. Even for shampoo, toothpaste, and laundry detergent I don't go through very many containers a year (but I buy big containers).

It seems like it will take years of re-use to make it less resource intensive, what's the chance a bottle will get lost, broken, or forgotten about during that time (or loop will go out of business).

lorax··on How much Americans make in wages
> 48% of wager earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage

I'm surprised. I expected that 50% of wage earners would make less or equal to the median wage. If for no other reason than the definition of median.

lorax··on If You’re Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won’t Be Yours
This seems like they developed their conclusion then went searching for data to back it up. For example they only "considered only separations that result in at least six months of unemployment or at least a 50 percent drop in earnings from pre-separation levels." So anyone who found a new job before resigning their position isn't counted, anyone who switched jobs to one with more flexible hours but took less than a 50% pay cut isn't counted. They also didn't compare this number for people both over and under 50 to see if age had any relevance at all.
lorax··on IOTA: CFB's Response to Neha Narula's Blogpost
That is a pretty poor response, the IOTA team doesn't seem to know how cryptoanalysis works. Theoretical attacks usually are found first, then specialized attacks like the chosen message one shown here, then more general ones. Cryptoanalysis takes time, and it is best to fix your system when you still have time and not wait until a full, generic, attack is known.

The first rule of hash functions is "Don't write your own hash function" writing cryptographically secure hash functions is hard, and even expert researchers get it wrong as often as they get it right. Better to use one that has been analysed already than coming up with your own.

lorax··on The race to the finish for self-driving cars
The article seems incomplete since there is no mention of Waymo (even if it just says "unknown date"
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