ericd

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241.
by ericd 5mo ago
I think the commenters with new accounts and comment on only political topics and not technical ones on Hacker News are a bit suspect. Not saying that there aren't a lot of disaffected youths out there, there totally are, and I'
242.
by ericd 5mo ago
For commoners in Feudal Japan, it would’ve been unpolished/brown rice, refining rice was labor intensive/expensive. When accessibility of white rice spread due to automation making it much cheaper, in the 1800s, it caused a huge e
243.
by ericd 5mo ago
I think it’s probably mostly what your sibling comment said, it’s very cheap to sow division and discord now. I get what you’re saying, and there definitely are people who are angry about the US slipping, and standards of living reverting t
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by ericd 5mo ago
Why is it that new accounts these days always seem to come out swinging about politics, class warfare, etc?
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by ericd 5mo ago
Not quite, I'm rooting for the solar/battery microgrids down here, one of the startups I've invested in is working on those, but you don't really even need batteries for panels in a dawn-dusk sun synchronous orbit, which
246.
by ericd 5mo ago
All of that has been repeatedly addressed in anything that discusses it, if you care to try to understand. It has ~nothing to do with available space, the US grid can’t handle the current rate of expansion. It’s bad enough that apparently S
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by ericd 5mo ago
Good point re cartels. But I still don’t think there’s a shadowy group trying to make owning things impossible for normal people as an explicit goal.
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by ericd 5mo ago
Steam gets me and many others to spend a lot more than 50% more on games than we would otherwise. I’m pretty confident that they push a lot more money to creators than they’d getting otherwise, even leaving aside the old publishing revenue
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by ericd 5mo ago
Are things too expensive now, or was that miraculously cheap because of a glut of supply relative to demand at the time? I think my first SSD was something like $600 for 160 gigs, one of those intel drives that came with a speed demon stick
250.
by ericd 5mo ago
Sounds like you've got a single stage/speed heat pump, the good ones nowadays are variable speed, with pretty significant turndown ratios, so oversizing is less of an issue. I've been idly hacking on this site for comparing h
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by ericd 5mo ago
Good point, though you generally don’t really have to handle coolant for mini splits, they come precharged. You mainly have to add more if you have a longer lineset. I’ve heard the online EPA course/test for coolant cert is pretty easy
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by ericd 5mo ago
As a PSA, mini splits are pretty easy to self-install, and it can save you a bundle, even when buying all the equipment new. Lots of youtube videos on how to do it, though I'd add that most of them show using a manifold with analog gau
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by ericd 5mo ago
Why would it be easier to install/maintain? It's basically the same machine.
254.
by ericd 5mo ago
Dug into the ground, we usually call a "ground source heat pump", or less accurately, "geothermal". The normal split systems are "air source heat pumps". AC is a heat pump without a reversing valve.
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by ericd 5mo ago
Well, there are heatpumps made to slot into a window frame (ex: https://www.mideacomfort.us/packaged.html ). The ones I'm familiar with are made for double hung windows, which are more common in the US, though. But mig
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by ericd 5mo ago
Yeah, you’re the best kind of customer. And I’ve found that fixing those issues tends to make those customers into evangelists.
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by ericd 5mo ago
Go watch one of JoeBen's interviews. His original inspiration for the company was making something that could make where he grew up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains more accessible. His stated long term vision is vertiports
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by ericd 5mo ago
Heh it doesn't have to be literally on one's own lawn, it could just be a little helipad per community. And my understanding is that the vast majority of private helipads don't have air traffic control - your hospital's
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by ericd 5mo ago
Just talking about what they've talked about as goals in interviews. And I'm surprised you're willing to make definitive statements about my lawn, we have a large enough area with none of those obstructions you're talkin
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by ericd 5mo ago
This isn’t meant to slot into the role of other planes, though, it’s meant for rideshare. It can take off and land on my suburban lawn. There’s a lot to figure out before we can get to that point, so they’re just displace helicopters for th
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by ericd 5mo ago
I think many people reflexively assume that this in the same cost tier as a private jet. I wonder if it could eventually get to somewhere on the order of uber per mile, since a mile takes much less pilot time, and the maintenance requiremen
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by ericd 5mo ago
That’s something like $2k/resident to build, and then ongoing maintenance. Seems high for something that most will never use.
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by ericd 5mo ago
Joby plans to expand way beyond airport access, it’s meant to be basically flying rideshare. The key enabler is they designed it to be quiet enough to not annoy everyone around like a helicopter, so that it would be reasonable to have this
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by ericd 5mo ago
There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes.
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by ericd 5mo ago
Well, in this case, we don’t need to argue about theory. The Joby has a tested range of 150 miles. They also tested it with hydrogen fuel cells and got >500.
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by ericd 5mo ago
And did our thinking about the importance of being good at arithmetic change in response? I think so. We also used to be much better remembering things, when we relied on oral histories, our memory skills have degraded quite a bit. And ther
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by ericd 5mo ago
Seriously, these are an autodidact's dream. I've been having an absolute blast learning about stuff from government structures and the different approaches to fusion power to what types of electrical conduit are used for what appl
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by ericd 5mo ago
I only run claude code inside a docker container that only mounts the directory it's called in, and I make damn sure I don't run it in a way to mount a directory that has any creds in it other than dev infra. Do not mount a home d
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by ericd 5mo ago
Yes, it needs to be sandboxed very carefully. It should have no way to access anything outside of the directories you mount in the sandbox.
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by ericd 6mo ago
If you all think NAC is great, wait till you try liposomal glutathione (glutathione is one of the things NAC is a precursor for, one of the general take-out-the-trash compounds for your cells). Of all the supplements I’ve tried, it has prob

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