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pokeymcsnatch

177 karma · joined May 8, 2015

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pokeymcsnatch··on Driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes
Work/worked for a place that was doing this. There's a couple problems:

* More battery weight means less cargo weight

* Trailers are dumb; the standard hookup (in NA) is lights and air. I hear CAN is common in EU though.

* Trailers are cheap and almost disposable.

The trucking industry is very slow moving, and probably 20 years behind passenger cars. So changing any of this stuff, even though none of it sounds particularly major, is at least 15 years out to start. Then you're left with the hundreds of thousands of "legacy" trailers that need to be retired or retrofit. The tractor to trailer ratio out there is like 1:10.

One interesting use case for this though is refrigerated (refer) trailers. They're often diesel-electric so they can plug in to shore power. Add a battery to this and maybe you can dump the diesel motor. Again though, weight is an issue... diesel is an order of magnitude more energy dense than the best batteries we have.

pokeymcsnatch··on Two new PebbleOS watches
Just a guess, but Nordic pushes a proprietary bluetooth stack. You don't have to use it, but it's the fastest way to get up and running.

edit: not sure they use the proprietary stack... at the very least, it looks like they're in the process of switching to a free BT stack

pokeymcsnatch··on The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
Voltage spikes from line inductance, voltage drop-outs from line resistance. Basically you have little reservoirs of charge scattered all around the board (current flow isn't instantaneous in a real circuit).

It helps to always think of current draw in a compete loop, out the "top" of the capacitor, through your IC, and back into the ground side (this isn't necessarily what's happening physically). Shorter loop means less inductance, shorter traces less resistance.

pokeymcsnatch··on Jaywalking legalized in New York City
No law is going to physically protect you from a 2 ton hunk of steel.
pokeymcsnatch··on Signatures of gravitational atoms from black hole mergers
> I thought it is pretty well accepted there isn't a "gravaton" like there are photons.

Different branch of physics that we can't quite mesh with GR yet. A graviton is the quantized "piece" of gravity, like phonon is for sound/mechanical waves, or photons for EM. It exists as much as a photon or any other "messenger particles" exists, in that it's a useful mathematical model. It's not something we have isolated/observed with equipment though.

pokeymcsnatch··on Using a 1965 Dutch rotary phone via VoIP
Coupling capacitor, not decoupling, right? You want the AC signal and want to block DC.
pokeymcsnatch··on This USB flash drive can only store 8KB of data, but will last you 200 years
Just need 3 switches and an indicator light
pokeymcsnatch··on Australian man says border force made him hand over phone passcode
They present it in a way where it seems like you have to comply- "OK, now look into this camera and hold still".

If you don't read the signs (and from what I saw, no one does...), you may not understand that it's optional. The dishonesty is on purpose of course.

pokeymcsnatch··on Ask HN: Why does everyone need to be an "Engineer" these days?
Meh you don't need a PE to be an engineer. That's stretching the gatekeeping too far. PE is valuable for a lot of things, but not necessary for a lot of actual engineering work. Is a trained and working electrical engineer not an engineer because a PE isn't necessary to design and build sensors, loggers, etc?

PE essentially just means you can legally sign off on safety critical designs. Engineering is the application of math and physics to solve a problem.

Anecdotally, the handful of PEs I know are the pencil-pusher types. They're engineers on paper, but a critical skill for engineering is actually building stuff.

pokeymcsnatch··on I made a new backplane for my consumer NAS
I extend the pads out from underneath the chip. Then it's easily hand-solderable if needed.
pokeymcsnatch··on States, including CA and NY, sign heat pump memorandum
> TL;DR - Your deep cycle battery approach may not prove to actually be worthwhile, consider working out the car-as-generator hookup plan in advance.

Ha yep, learned that the first time and was ready to go with an extension cord the second time I needed this setup. First time, I had a stash of 3 batteries but I didn't realize how much power the blower motor would draw, so I was charging on the car and swapping out batteries as needed. Did that the first day then rigged up cords for day 2. Halfway through day 3 we got power back.

pokeymcsnatch··on States, including CA and NY, sign heat pump memorandum
My strategy is a deep cycle car battery and harbor freight inverter to run the blower motor. You get a long enough extension cord and you can use your car as an emergency generator.
pokeymcsnatch··on Do Elephants Have Souls?
The illness doesn't but the virus might.
pokeymcsnatch··on Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
I'll bite I guess. I use Calibre pretty regularly. I think a general way to put it is that it's not for "casuals". To understand a lot of the functionality outside of the basic inventory management stuff, you have to be a little bit of an enthusiast. For some examples: You have to know about different ereaders and their formats and how they differ, the differences between metadata sources, and dozens and dozens of configuration options if you're trying to convert a book to work well on your device.

Also, there's definitely something "off" when it comes to using it intuitively. I have to devote a lot of brain power to searching for functionality AND trying to comprehend exactly how those pieces of functionality are going to affect my library data.

Maybe it's too powerful of a tool up front or something. It could benefit from a "basic view" maybe?

None of these are complaints from me, I'm a happy user. I'll just echo some other commenters in wishing for a more robust network interface (whether that's just an API, or a more hashed out front end). I'd like to easily share my library with people or just other devices while on-the-go, and Calibre has all the device formatting functionality built-in.

pokeymcsnatch··on Diesel-Electric Conversion Kits for Old Pickups
Truck manufacturers measure fuel efficiencies to the tenths and compete on that. At highway speeds, ICE engines win over a pure electric system, so throwing in another conversion step hurts. For city routes, pure electric is better than diesel-electric.

So in general, the disadvantages of a diesel-electric system outweigh any advantages when you take a look at how trucks operate.

New trucks have "automatic" transmissions (not torque converters- they're more like automatically shifting standard transmissions), so no manual shifting required.

Somewhat related, but refrigerated trailers ("refers") often use a diesel-electric system because it's easy to plug in to shore power and cut the diesel engine.

pokeymcsnatch··on The Geopolitics of Godzilla
Soldier is on losing side of war, was unable to go through with morally objectionable orders, comes home to find everyone they ever knew died in bombing campaigns, and over time has to learn how to deal with the psychological and physical toll the war left on them.

But of course that's an absurd premise because Nazis and apparently the Japanese are not humans and therefore can't have human-like stories or something I guess.

Shit and you're not even the same person who commented above that all Japanese movies should essentially be 2 hours of Japanese actors apologizing for war atrocities their country committed 80 years ago.

pokeymcsnatch··on The importance of cash in a technological society
People don't like accepting them because 1. It feels like a huge denomination, and with that comes fear of mishandling and counterfeits, and 2. You have to then make change... and you only have so much of that

And then on the customer's side, you're just back to carrying a bunch of 20's and 10's

pokeymcsnatch··on WiFi can read through walls
Ethics is (often?) required in engineering curriculum, but it's mostly along the lines of "don't lie about work you didn't do then charge for it". There's nothing that touches on only using your powers for good. Like building 'autonomous' cars then letting them loose in public before they're proven, or building out algorithms designed to get people addicted to rage bait, or building in planned obsolesce, or building a device that uses WiFi to map out a private domicile without the occupant's knowledge.

Engineering ethics courses all boil down to "don't lie about stuff", not "think about the potential consequences of what you're building".

pokeymcsnatch··on Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity
> We don't even own a tractor because it's not economically viable to take on the upfront or maintenance costs of modern tractors.

This is a little bit ridiculous. A tractor is an invaluable tool and there's tons of them out there that are as old as 60-70 years and still running great. You don't need a brand new GPS-guided john deere with a dealership maintainence plan to work a small ranch; $5-10k will get you something that is old, but easily maintained and will last forever.

pokeymcsnatch··on Mister Rogers had a point – routinely greeting six neighbors maximizes wellbeing
Similar line of thought, I never really met any neighbors but I know all of the right places to pee around the neighborhood.
pokeymcsnatch··on Infrastructure audit completed by Radically Open Security
I do this, mostly for the static IP that isn't linked directly to me and my approximate location, with mullvad exit only for 'sensitive' stuff. The degree of separation is nice even if the breadcrumbs are there. Best if the VPS allows crypto or cash payments.
pokeymcsnatch··on Perhaps it’s time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality
I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.
pokeymcsnatch··on Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users
It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.
pokeymcsnatch··on Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer
Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same modifiability as firefox.

Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

pokeymcsnatch··on Never trust a programmer who says they know C++
Yarp, I do the same. It's rudimentary but works fine and the code is clean enough if you pick a couple conventions (starting "private" variables with an underscore for example) and stick with them.
pokeymcsnatch··on Never trust a programmer who says they know C++
structs?
pokeymcsnatch··on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I don't know the specifics of shingle deterioration, but just having them physically shielded from light and precipitation has got to drastically improve their lifespan. That's a good point about only part of the roof being protected though.
pokeymcsnatch··on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
Afaik shingle roofs (common in US) need replacing every 10-20 years.
pokeymcsnatch··on If PHP Were British (2011)
Hm. As an American, there's several gearboxes on my car but only one of them is the transmission.
pokeymcsnatch··on Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals
The practical tradeoff for not using the actual currency blockchain is instant settling time and 0 cost for transactions. If every transaction was on the chain, they may take hours or longer to settle (not unlike trading shares on a "real" stock exchange), and there'd be a fee for each one.

As for why they don't keep them on an internal blockchain, there's really no advantage in doing this vs a proper setup with a database. The part that makes crypto work isn't necessarily the blockchain, it's the public record part.

Blockchain and crypto go together because the blockchain acts as a public ledger between parties who don't (or don't need to) trust each other. On an exchange, there's no trust issues- you and the person you're trading with have both agreed to trust the exchange and their records.

Edit: I'm not super up-to-date on the crypto world, but I'm reasonably sure that there are on-chain/decentralized exchanges. I also think that there's been a lot of development towards making pseudo-on-chain exchanges through projects like the Lightning network in regards to BTC.

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