HN user

JohnL4

79 karma

Cranky middle-aged white male programmer in North Carolina. My proudest achievement from the ancient days is making an IBM 029 keypunch machine automatically punch sequence numbers into my cards as I punched them. I know more than you think I do and I know less than you think I do.

Posts0
Comments138
View on HN
No posts found.
Ask HN: Who would you recommend following on Mastodon? 4 years ago

My technique so far has been to join interesting-looking instances and read the local stream. People who say smart things I follow. At some point I'll coalesce my follows into one account, I guess. I think continuing to do that, along with following boosted toot authors if they look smart/interesting, will eventually generate a good list of follows.

0ThreadHN
Top navy admiral wants rust-free ships 4 years ago

$100 > $80.

Meta: (1) Oh, that's cool, using Wolfram to look up inflation data! I'll try to remember that.

(2) "Trying to gently... I'd suggest..." strikes me the same as "With the greatest respect..." Maybe just post the link next time.

0ThreadHN
Write plain text files 4 years ago

I have long thought writing law is a LOT like writing code. When you actually look at modern laws, they're basically legal patch files.

0ThreadHN
Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage 5 years ago

"Looked the temp gradients up, after 50ft, temp of the earth is 50F, and raises one degree F every 60ft." (So, at 300 feet, 54 degrees; at 500, 57.5 degrees.)

(http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum/read.php?14,46717,4671...)

"...but other parts of the mine was very cold you made sure you had plenty to ware it depended where you worked"

(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Keith-Scott...)

"Underground mines maintain a constant temperature, around 55 degrees Fahrenheit."

(https://www.quora.com/Are-coal-mines-cold/answer/Tom-Inghram)

«The temperature on average is in the 50s, but you still sweat an enormous amount when you start laboring.“ - Alan Bates, working in the coal mines of Letcher County, Kentucky.»

(https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-working-in-a-coal-mine/a...)

Yes, a 4000m gold mine is hot. I doubt that's where they're storing their compressed air.

0ThreadHN
Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage 5 years ago

I'm guessing not. Earth's heat is way lower down. Think of a cave: always cold. I think what's going on is they're taking the heat out and storing it more efficiently than just dumping it down the ground, where (1) it would leak away, representing energy loss, and (2) as it leaks away, the air would lose pressure. (It would leak away b/c it's harder to insulate an entire mine, basically.) So, they pull it out ahead of time and put it back in when they decompress the air (which I think would add pressure back in due to heating a gas and maybe reduce problems caused by super-chilling other plant hardware? Anyway, seems fitting to add back what you took out if you're shooting for a closed system.)

0ThreadHN
Org Mode 9.5 5 years ago

Been using it for years and years, and I started same as you, with some basic outlining. Now it's my primary work organizer/brainstorming/documenting tool (I generate html from it for other folks to read, although I'll occasionally drop plain text somewhere).

0ThreadHN
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020) 5 years ago

I have a blog, which is

(a) Basically just a bunch of glorified retweets, but (b) Free of the moronic 280-character limit, and (c) Immune to Twitter's moronic "jail" algorithm (all I have to do is delete the IFTTT tweet, not my "blog post")

And I think that's fine. And, yes, I do have opinions on the moronicity of Twitter, how did you know?

0ThreadHN