Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

jdstillwater.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 331 posts

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#281

Post by pocketsand »

msteffen wrote: post #250
refulgentis wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs. I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and do…

Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pretty surprised. Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been planted by the time I was there, including the culture of blameless postmortems. There was this idea that any problem—any outage or whatever —reflected not stupidity on the part of th…

For what it’s worth, in most cases, an organization that overly focuses on process is superior to one with a naive individualism that throws employees under the bus by default.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#282

Post by thataintright1 »

rtpg wrote: post #206
raicem wrote: post #60

> These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, but they are strident in doing so because they are repeating what everybody knows. They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted. This is an important takeaway for me, maybe even more than “electirc devices are washable”. World is filled with conventional wisdom th…

Of course I've seen the opposite all the time. People who find issues with the conventional reasoning, and then apply their own _extremely faulty reasoning_ to reach their own conclusion! Someone having incorrect reasoning doesn't mean they are wrong, just that they do not know (in the sense of knowing something for the right reasons) Case in point: OP decided to wash the toaster in the dishwasher. Their story about…

Spot on. This “teacher” is doing a piss-poor job of challenging “conventional wisdom” that saves lives. What are students learning from him cavalierly running a hairdryer underwater and marching into electrified water?

Yes, electricians often have plenty of experience with getting shocked. But all it takes is one dumb mistake and you quickly die a horrible death, with muscles locked up unable to self-rescue in a location where immediate bystanders will risk their own lives to rescue.

What kind of dumbass proudly tells about wading into electrified flooding in front of colleagues when there wasn’t even any urgent reason to do so? What would it have cost to simply wait and cut the power first, calling the power company if necessary if a breaker box could not be safely reached for some reason (unlikely)?

And many/most circuits outside code-compliant kitchens and baths aren’t GFCI, and GFCI doesn’t protect against all electrocutions (you can be electrocuted in a short without a ground fault). Now consider electrical fires from getting sloppy with damaged wiring and electrical devices, which are a leading cause of deaths from fire.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#283

Post by krisoft »

LoganDark wrote: post #179
krisoft wrote: post #143

It is because people use heuristics to navigate their lives. Instead of doing complicated engineering reasoning all the time to ensure their safety they learn simple “rules of thumb”. These rules are incorrect in as much as they have both false positives (something which the rule prohibits, but is safe) and false negatives (something which the rule lets you do, but is not safe). I’m a hobby jeweler and I use an ordin…

I suppose what you're doing is insulating the metal and also obscuring the reflective surface, right? Or does it not reflect microwaves? Curious.

The way I understand it. (and here I'm just telling you what I have heard from other people) is that the brick we use has two layers. So going from the outside to the inside the structure is: layer1, layer2, graphite crucible, metal to be melted.

Layer1 is thermally insulating. Keeps the heat in the brick. It is still 300ish celsius at the end of the melt, and it increases further as the whole structure "cools".

Layer2 "captures" the microwave radiation and is the thing the microwave oven heats. All that energy is captured inside the brick and layer1 doesn't let it out so it heats up very quickly.

And then layer2 heats up the crucible via mainly heat conduction (so the interface has to be neat between them) and only to a lesser extent via heat radiation.

The main dangers of the operation is the same as with any other process which results in tens of grams of molten metal. Those would be not new to anyone who casts metal. (But entirely outside of the experience of someone who never worked with molten metal before.) Everyone with normal household experience would know that molten metal is hot, what might surprise someone without specific training or very good intuitive grasp of physics is that if it contacts water the water immediately turns into steam and that will make the molten metal fly everywhere. [1] So that would be the first unexpected turn of events. Hopefully you have a bucket of sand ready to put out the resulting fire, because water is not your friend in this situation.

It is also important as you pack the crucible to not form a "bridge" between the walls with the metal. Because before the metal melts it expands. And if you pack the to-be-melted metal too tight it will crack the graphite crucible. Which would ruin the brick.

Then the other surprise is that the layer1 keeps heating up even after you have removed the brick from the microwave. (because layer2 is very hot, and that heat is slowly dissipating through layer1) And if you use the brick too much without letting it cool down between melts it might crack, or it might crack the glass plate of the microwave.

1: this is how that looks on a much bigger scale https://youtu.be/oWSHEC1N770?si=lc1ZKXxQ9kOsuhz0

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#284

Post by krisoft »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #211
nomel wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the social friction from getting all of this right/wrong really damages inquisitive minds. The visceral negative response you get from, "Wait, I don't think that's right, it's more complicated than that", helps prevent speaking up the next time, unless you have an inherently disagreeable personality (which I cherish working with). I see it all the time with kids. They'll see some fundamental truth that takes…

> That said, I wouldn't melt metal in an expensive microwave. The metal has poor absorption relative to the magnetron antenna itself, so both will heat. I wouldn't be surprised if the antenna is also glowing a bit (at least early on)! You don't make the metal absorb the microwaves. Either your crucible or the inner lining of your insulator will be designed to do the absorbing.

> the inner lining of your insulator will be designed to do the absorbing.

That is exactly the case with our setup.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#285

Post by _xnmw »

Ooh, I love these points of Conventional Faith presenting itself as Reason. I would argue that most true Knowledge is actually knowing what is not true, yet commonly believed. Actually, if used wisely, you can execute arbitrages on financial markets for profit, aside from other social benefits, at the cost of appearing insane in the beginning. Peter Thiel says that almost every successful person has "secrets", i.e. things that they know about the world that fly in the face of Conventional Faith and that they therefore exploit to their advantage until it's a fait accompli. Personally, I have quite a few, which if I posted here, would get me downvoted like mad, even on HackerNews, but here are some of my LESS controversial ones:

* Cloud services like AWS actually take more time, resources, and headache to maintain than baremetal servers, whether at the scale of a few backoffice users or millions of consumers. Related: the vast majority (95%+) of apps could run on a single baremetal server and be more reliable than whatever cloud shit you use.

* Most SPAs are garbage. Unless you are building something like Figma, write backend code only, don't use a frontend framework like React, and when reactivity is needed, tie it to the backend with something like Livewire. Actually even Figma uses WASM.

* Using a framework like Laravel that makes the business logic easy is far more important than choice of a language based on its technical characteristics.

* People who are outwardly racist are often the easiest to work with, as a minority. And vice-versa, people who outwardly appear anti-racist are often masking a deeply inbred superiority complex and patronizing attitude (hello Democrats), and are the most difficult to work with unless you submit to their authority. Allowing open racism actually makes it easier for a minority to live, and I say that as a minority.

Oh I could go on but I'll stop here.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#286

Post by bregma »

nkrisc wrote: post #195
alwa wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not play such games? If it works, it works; if it fails, it only costs $20 to replace at your local Walmart!

Because failure modes of toasters may include fire.

A toaster is normally filled with dessicated carbohydrate particles, which are an explosive fire risk.

I would think going through dishwasher would significantly reduce the fire risk.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#287

Post by nkrisc »

bregma wrote: post #286
nkrisc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because failure modes of toasters may include fire.

A toaster is normally filled with dessicated carbohydrate particles, which are an explosive fire risk. I would think going through dishwasher would significantly reduce the fire risk.

And once you start using it again they begin replenishing.

Except now the toaster may or may not be compromised in some way. There’s no amount of benefit here worth even a minuscule risk of a house fire.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#288

Post by yourusername »

kragen wrote: post #118
mikedelfino wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that electric showerheads provide instant heat. My comparison was based on the electric showerhead I have at home, which can't heat very much due to electrical limitations. It's definitely not the case of every installation. On the other hand, the hot water I experience when showering at the gym or in fancy hotels is extremely, extremely hot and much more comfortable on a cold day. I also see some wealth…

oh, yeah, i don't think an electric showerhead in my house would work very well at all; some dumbfuck wired it with 15-gauge wire (1.4mm diameter, safe for up to about 10 amps) and at 240 volts you need more like 40 amps to provide a comfortable shower, depending on water flow rate the entire house is on a single anemic 25-amp circuit breaker. at a low-flow 6 liters per minute (100g/s) heating from 15° to 40° (Δ temp…

>on the other hand, if you're building an apartment building in brazil or a hotel in costa rica, there's nothing stopping you from including an 80-amp circuit in every bathroom for the electric shower.

Do these countries not have any limit on the current in a circuit? Over here we're not allowed more than 16A in residential use and that's over 2.5 mm^2 wires. What kind of conductors do they use in Brasil for 80A circuits?

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#289

Post by trinix912 »

nashashmi wrote: post #46

I used to ask electrical engineers who design building utilities if they ever touched a live wire with voltage running. If not, "how do you know it is really dangerous? How do you know it will electrocute you?" They don't. EVER. Want to talk to me again if they don't have to. #ConventionalIgnorance For reference, I touched 10k volts with microcurrents. It hurts! I touched 240 volts wire and felt the vibrations run up…

I've seen 400V industrial equipment shock people and not kill them and I know someone from my hometown whose grandfather died of an electrocution on a 230V outlet.

We have the ability to learn from others' mistakes, that's one of the main reasons we've gone so far as species. Not every child needs to get serious burns to learn that fire is hot and can be dangerous.

Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

#290

Post by Gormo »

niccl wrote: post #203
valtism wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also just have a spoon in the microwave too, right? I think It's only from things like crinkles in aluminium foil and the prongs of a fork that produce sparks and arcing inside.

CDs are fun in a microwave, arcing and spitting like fury for a while. So not just crinkly things

CDs are extremely crinkly at a microscopic level. They're effectively thin sheets of foil that use embossed pits to encode data.
Post reply on HN