Viewing profile — barathr

Tom Murphy shows in his excellent book on energy that over-tilting your solar panels by 15 degrees is a good idea (Table 13.2): https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#section.13…

People have also been building ingenious systems for growing fruit for a long time: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-...

We've found that this decoupling (multi-party) approach is a good way to improve privacy in a bunch of networking contexts -- here's a paper we wrote a few years ago with colleague…

This is really clever and elegant. Thanks for building it.

Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH

This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two…

I highly recommend Klinenberg's Palaces for the People, which he named after Carnegie's phrase for libraries. Here's an interview he did on 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisibl…

Any chance that Threlte makes it easy to do view-independent rendering / ray tracing? Basically if you have many surfaces in your scene and you want to not just visualize the scene…

Amazing how prescient her talk is on so many levels -- things that in 1982 there were likely few folks really thinking about deeply and holistically.

What we're hoping for (and is the theme of the piece) is that we are and can and should be both and more -- taxable citizens, members of illegible communities, and many more things…

It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are inv…

We started writing this essay about 3 years ago (and first read Seeing Like a State about 15 years ago -- it's a book that should be read and re-read many times). It takes time to …

I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.

Yeah, desalination is perfectly aligned with solar energy availability both on a daily and annual cycle: More water needs during the day, more sun during the day. More water needs …

GEM isn't worth growing -- it's not that good of a fruit. Hass does just fine even in high heat. Just plant the tree in a spot that gets some afternoon shade.

Easy to water a backyard tree with a laundry to landscape greywater setup.

They usually flower in Spring, whenever that is for you. It's cultivar and temperature dependent. Some varieties like Carmen will even flower multiple times a year (though Carmen i…

Yeah, that can be a separate issue with any fruit tree. There are a bunch of options, but it depends on how much effort you want to put in. (Though all the options are worth it com…

I've grown and grafted Avocado trees in both Northern and Southern California. Hass, Reed, and many other good types will fruit well in Redwood City and virtually all of the Bay Ar…

Most folks who live in California can grow more avocados than they can possibly eat. If you don't have a tree, you should get one. I would highly recommend against any of the varie…

This strikes me as similar to Cargo Cult Science. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult