Hydrogen made using rust | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen made using rust

popularmechanics.co.za

70 pointsrustoo36 comments

This is not about a rewrite of libhydrogen in Rust.

funnily enough that's what I was expecting to read about.

Thanks for clearing that up, I found the title ambiguous

But is arguably a bigger deal haha

I never particularly liked the (recent?) tendency of software projects to pick names that conflict with established things. This is just one good example of that. I prefer new words like grep or bash, or descriptive names like nushell. I doubt there's a shortage of short words like grep or bash if one doesn't want to make them acronyms like grep and bash are. Xfce doesn't meany anything at this point and sounds good to me.

As a fluid dynamicist, I might expect TensorFlow to have something to do with fluid dynamics given that I use tensors and flows, but nope...

I would like to see software projects generate a UUID for themselves, and include that UUID in any document that includes the project name. I'd also like to see third parties that write about the project to include the UUID along with the name.

Then when we want to search for things related to the project we can use its UUID instead of the name. In most cases I'd expect that to return relevant results with only a small number of unrelated hits.

Searching on a random UUID is interesting. I generated a version 4 UUID, cc8ece66-ded9-45f0-ad45-579bb97251bf, and searched for it in Google. It gets one hit, to a page on the "Death Road to Canada" wika at fandom.com [1]. Google specifically says that the page is missing cc8ece66-ded9-45f0-ad45-579bb97251bf, so I have no idea why it offers it.

Duck Duck Go gives a bunch of hits related to cryptocurrency and bittorrent stuff, many in Russian, plus some other Russian sites, and a few other odd things.

Bing says that there are no results.

For a couple other random UUIDs (6bf402ec-4428-418c-9bfc-f54257fa8b2f and 93c7e4a2-bdc2-4cd0-8afd-2351f7b9dd4d), results were similar. For those Bing and Google both had no results, and Duck Duck Go had results similar to those for cc8ece66-ded9-45f0-ad45-579bb97251bf.

[1] https://deathroadtocanada.fandom.com/wiki/H*NK

Interesting idea. For a bit I thought your comment was in response to another post I made recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22495175

My earlier comment was about webpages, not projects, though I think having a project-specific UUID would have major advantages as you point out.

> Google specifically says that the page is missing cc8ece66-ded9-45f0-ad45-579bb97251bf, so I have no idea why it offers it.

Looks like Google is matching only "ded9". I recall that Google treats dashes as word separators and underscores not as word separators. This might make a UUID not a good choice because you only want to display exact matches.

https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-handle-underscores-...

As someone that approves of rewriting C in Rust rather than being sick of the publicity.... still a funny joke.

Extracting pure hydrogen never seemed like a problem to me. It’s always been safely leveraging it as a power source.

Hydrocarbons are extremely stable comparatively.

Fuel cell catalyst material has been cost prohibitive.

Interesting research but I don’t understand the commercial value.

You can always make Methane from Hydrogen.

But cost effectively? Even with free H2, seems the CH4 is expensive to produce.

> Fuel cell catalyst material has been cost prohibitive.

Maybe, maybe not. Lots of people have been working on low cost fuel cells:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/04/pani-20110421.html

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2016/01/20160115-udel.html

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191216-suryanto.h...

Toyota thinks they can build fuel cell cars cheaper than battery electrics:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...

> Interesting research but I don’t understand the commercial value.

They are more uses for hydrogen than just fueling vehicles. For example, you can use hydrogen in steel production:

https://www.en-former.com/en/hydrogen-revolution-steel-produ...

> That came when in 2003 Hirose’s boss Mitsuhisa Kato told him that “it’s time to join the enemy” and switch from hybrid to working on hydrogen.

Hahahaha

The technical term for this is "water splitting" and there are about 20000 papers published on the topic per year. So at least the ones providing money to academia are convinced that it is a problem worth solving. FWIW, the professor I knew working in this field and also owning a startup in the field recently switched from a hydrogen powered car to battery power. However as others noted, hydrogen is great to be converted to liquid fuel, because you won't be flying transatlantic on battery power any time soon.

> Extracting pure never seemed like a problem to me

But then it's just energy carrier. You must use other sources of energy to produce it.

The process described produces hydrogen directly from the sun.

With renewables, carrying the energy is the biggest problem we have. Producing enough is entirely feasiblr with current technology.

It is. But one "easy" way of transporting it is throwing it into the electrical grid.

I don't think we'll have hydrogen cars necessarily, but if you can produce H2 easily, you can generate electricity with it.

Liquified hydrogen is the best possible fuel for aircraft, newly practical since advances in aerogel production that make well-insulated tanks practical.

It will unfortunately need new airframes, because even liquified it needs a fair bit more room than diesel. But once those are going, nobody will be able to compete with them. The hydrogen can be produced right at the airport from solar electric at minimum spot prices.

With this development, some of it can be produced without the round trip through electrics.

> With renewables, carrying the energy is the biggest problem we have.

Storing energy is the biggest problem we have. (Hydrogen can help with that.)

Not sure where you’re getting this:

> directly from the sun

As that’s not what the article describes. FTA: “ efficiently producing 25 times more hydrogen fuel by using a specific type of rust and light source.

Scientists achieved this new technique by using light from a mercury/xenon lamp”

So no - it’s not “the sun”, and it undoubtedly requires more electricity to run the lamp than can be harvested from the hydrogen produced.

Maybe with mirrors, you might be able to do something like boiling water and getting hydrogen, getting two energy sources from water?

Well yeah, what are you going to do in the lab: run a light pipe up to the roof and split off a portion into a power meter to normalize results by season+time+weather, or run a constant power lamp to control illumination power?

Well, that's what the research is for, to determine if it can be done with cheaper materials? You don't have to consume it in a fuel cell, it can be burned directly, and it's an input to some industrial chemical processes. It can also be added to the existing natural gas system in small quantities without modification, like the use of ethanol in petrol.

(The real problem is that fracked gas is so cheap)

The general subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

Wondering if this has any implications for mars exploration. Given that there's a lot of iron (rust?) up there and copious amounts of H2 are required to make CH4

This is a very confusing title for this site. I thought someone had reimplemented the drum machine hydrogen in rust

Can't wait until someone does it in Go :-D

You can imagine my disappointment when I showed up wanting to make a quip about physicists not expecting it, when it turned out to be not about software.

How does it compare with the C version?

First thing I asked myself was "What framework is Hydrogen?" and I briefly guessed it was the next trendy GUI toolkit.

I first guessed it was the chemical, then remembered I was on HN, and did a double take also thinking it was a Rust rewrite of some fancy library, or something.

I was (pleasantly?) surprised at the outcome, I guess...

That was also my assumption before clicking the link

Async await! Haven't you heard?!

I'm sure I will eventually

As a member of the rust evangelism strike force, I was thoroughly confused.

The username of the person posting it (rustoo) seems appropriate too, but that might just be coincidental!

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