phkx

And then, yes: If you can make more money by not using your big resistor than actually using it, then economically you would be better off not using it. If you can make money by not using it, then someone is willing to pay you because they get value out of it or they can avert some damage. If you threatened to use your capacitor without obvious use other than destabilizing the grid, that might just look a little too much like blackmail...

If you believe in markets, then someone coming up with the means to improve grid stability (here: by overall less consumption) should somehow be able to turn it into a profit. The issue here seems to be, that American Efficient didn't actually give any guarantees that they could reduce consumption. So it rather looks like whoever admitted them to the auction didn't do their due diligence. The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud or when the identical thing gets sold more than once (actually, energy savings could probably be sold once for grid stability and once for reduced emissions - I'd say they're disjoint to first order, but might be connected indirectly).

That being said, there should be limits to markets.The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud, when a party/faction has a disproportionate amount of power or when there are externalized costs that are not accounted for in the pricing.

Comment · 6 months ago

You softened your statement with 'not always' to which I would add, that different people might be looking for different levels of 'understanding' ;)

Comment · 6 months ago

Jake VanderPlas also has an article on Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram [1] which I can recommend if you want to get into the details (it also includes a treatment of fourier-pairs + convolution to explain the 'artifacts' in DFT). There's a module for it in scipy, so it should be rather straightforward to try your analysis using timestamps for x and an array of ones for y. That algorithm is essentially a least-squares fit with sinusoids at pre-selected frequencies.

I've tried to use Lomb-Scargle to reduce the number of sampling points in magnetic resonance experiments, but had another dimension to take into account (similar to doing the analysis for each network port separately in your case). I got some spikes on some of the 'ports' which I couldn't reason about or reproduce when I did the same with periodic sampling and FFT. But the individual periodograms looked reasonable, if I remember correctly. Maybe we have a more regular user of LS around, who can point out common pitfalls. Otherwise you could generate some data from known frequencies to see what kind of artifacts you get.

You could maybe also take a look at the auto-correlation of the packet timestamps to see whether you can extract timescales on which patterns arise.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/aab766

Comment · 10 months ago

It appears that the ruling regarding the rapes was not so straight forward [1], certainly not something that you can use as a one-line argument. There are also other articles describing what presumably happened there in 2020.

Regarding the case of 'Maja R.', here's a summary [2] (e.g. she didn't show up for the first two hearings [3] - that would certainly raise the anger of the righteous if somebody not in their favor did that).

I'm in doubt whether this one case is sufficient to prove the downward spiral that some people claim to perceive (it was also brought up in context of migration here on HN recently, and from the sources which I could find I‘m not sure it fully qualifies there either).

[1]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/details-aus-dem-prozess-darum-ka... [2]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/57113 [3]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/ehrloses-vergewaltigerschwein-20...

Comment · 10 months ago

I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;) The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post. On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter. I‘d just like to see better on HN.

Comment · 10 months ago

Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.

Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.

[1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...

Comment · 10 months ago

Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.

Comment · 11 months ago

I use the mobile page on desktop. Less clutter is always welcome.

Comment · 11 months ago

Now I’m thinking that I have missed the point of the article. I didn’t read it as an introduction to vector spaces, but rather that the introduction served as to give an intuition how functions may be viewed as vectors (going back to the article, it’s even in the section heading). I found the next parts well written and to the point, leading along the steps to show that indeed the requirements for a Hilbert space are met by L^2 (even though those requirements are only spelled out in the end). I’m not actively working with mathematics any more, but I didn’t notice any major corner cutting. It’s not text book rigorous but lays out the idea in an easy to follow way. I took something away from it - or not, depending on whether I missed some inconsistency.

Comment · 1 year ago

Do these donations also support the operation of nodes? If not, how to support the network (other than running a node myself)?