Randall's license text is really chill; normally to give attribution to an image from Commons there would be more to do, but currently the article does hotlink to the page on Xkcd.com, and that is clearly "stated in the LICENSE file".
> Then for another 3 day hike where I used it to boil water for two persons it took so long that other people were done eating where we started.
There's quite a spread between the heating output of alcohol stoves. # Of holes, alu vs. Ti vs. brass, filler materials (if any). Some have simmer rings, some don't. Outside temps matter too.
The trick is to use it a # of times before you go out camping / backpacking. So that you're familiar with its behavior.
Disclaimer: cooking daily on a deluxe model (Origo 3000). Safest method to cook on a boat.
Propane/butane burners are easier to regulate, but these gasses have the nasty habit of sticking to the floor. So a leak could cause a deadly explosion (which happens semi-regularly).
That Origo: I could flip the whole thing over while burning & it wouldn't start a fire. Can't remove the burner from the stove while it's on due to a safety catch.
Also have a Trangia stashed somewhere (just the burner not pots/holder). Also used many times.
Both Swedish design & highly recommended. Cheap/ubiquitous fuel is a big plus too. Sadly the Origo isn't made anymore afaik.
Most of the stoves used for backpacking have the same basic design. I have two: an Esbit and a Toaks, the latter is lighter (it's titanium) but both have the same design as a small Trangia or the one in the article.
It takes 7-10mn to boil the water I need for food + a coffee, while using my gas burner it takes 2-3mn.
One issue I forgot to mention is that it's almost impossible to get the remaining fuel in the burner back into the container.
Ceramic capacitors can have similar issues: apply voltage, part warps a tiny bit. @ the right frequencies some (mechanical) resonance effects might come into play. Yay! But I have a hard time imagining this to be a real-world problem.
> Most basic digital logic, processors, and power parts shouldn’t have meaningful issues with light.
Depends... if you have an input that isn't driven externally (tri-state or nc), and there's just a weak pull-up or -down on the pin, you could have issues. An unexpected reset here, a bitflip there...
Also there's high-impedance ADC inputs on some parts. Wouldn't take much to send readings waayy out of spec.
Note that affected signal might be inside the IC (not going to an IO pin). More likely to be driven though (low-impedance).
Hehe.. remembered an optimum wavelength ~255nm (and indeed - Wikipedia says 253.7nm. Close enough :).
> sunlight would erase a chip in weeks
Been there, done that. When I wasn't in a hurry, I'd stick some EPROMs in a foam & put 'em under a window. Usually took a bit under 3 weeks. But no point trying in the midst of winter; probably works but could take months.
Loved those windowed ceramic packages. Especially microcontroller parts like (iirc) 87C52. Lovely patterns to have a look at with magnifier.
When I was a kid I used to spend hours exploring the surface of windowed ICs with my field microscope. I have a weird association of microchip architecture and the depictions of the surface of the “Death Star” in Star Wars. I think I used to imagine I was flying over the surface of the chip lol. I was slightly saddened by the electron microscopy of smaller node sizes as time went on, the features became more globby and a little less beautiful.
But this really should have been a web standard, loooong ago. User sets a couple of settings once, browser & webserver send a few packets back & forth, done. No need for users in that loop on every single website (not to mention traffic for downloading scripts to show dialog boxes, list of vendors or whatever).
The whole cookie thing (as we have it now) is one big waste of resources & user's time.
Isn't that essentially what "Do Not Track" was? Then Microsoft defaulted that setting to "on", which advertisers summarily used as an excuse to just ignore the whole thing.
No particular post. I like HN's grab-bag aspect, there's something for everyone. Peeking your interest about things you hadn't heard of before, or get a new angle on something.
Beats all the "Trump did X, popstar married gf" crap out there.
> Beats all the "Trump did X, popstar married gf" crap out there.
No doubt, HN is one of the best resources for tech and tech adjacent topics. It has all sorts of people ranging from the experts to beginners. Also, tech is one of the easiest thing to provide proof or refute (Ofcourse subjective debates lik vim vs emacs, formatting, best practices exists for fun). So, the quality of discussions on those topics are high.
When HN posts deviate and gets into murky discussions like (geo)politics it gets ugly too. The title may not be "Trump did X" but the content on those related issues is not too far from that on other forums.
I don't think HN crowd and discussions are immune to the crap found on other forums, it's just the theme and majority of topics that reach front page are resistant and have less scope for ugly discussions.
That said, I'm not discounting the effort put in by everyone and the mods to keep the discussion clean but in the end we are all people and (hopefully) not AI bots and that shows sometimes.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
Uncool.