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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

I know HN comments have a knack for trying to min/max and optimize something posted, but honestly that's not the point here. He's proving that it's possible to harvest methane from ponds, enough to power a moped.

OF COURSE there's more efficient ways to get around, this isn't an attack on anyone's intellect or common sense and there's no need to react to getting nerdsniped by going "well ackchyually" and reinventing combustion engines and fuel from first principles.

It's fine to just go "that's cool" and move on with your life. The guy that made this knows it's not the most efficient use of his time.

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I agree with you, but I think part of the reason people have the reaction they do is that they start with the headline, which teases people into thinking this is something that is actually semi-viable, and then when they go in to read the article they find it is basically an art project, so there is this dissonance between expectations and reality.

I almost feel like we need a "Show HN an Art Project:"-like headline prefix.

Serious question, why would you use a throwaway account for a comment like this?

Maybe the name is just a joke?

user: hn_throwaway_99

created: February 20, 2017

karma: 28836

Really any account with less than 100k karma is practically a throwaway account.

whoa, even dang has only 25k. I'm not longer going to listen to him when he threatens bans.

Maybe HN stores karma as a 32-bit integer and dang had a buffer overflow and is simply wrapping back around to 25k now.

Compounded here by the headline starting with "Inventor".

Typically "inventor does X" reads as a proof of concept of something other people might someday want to do, too.

I suppose someone might figure a way to economically scale the methane captured here.

Of course the method this person used, agitating the bottom of the pond, could have an adverse impact of the ecosystem of the pond itself. Do they rely on trace quantities of methane in some way? Will the muddy & cloudy disturbed water make survival harder, maybe killing the biomass that was generating the methane? Who knows. Well, someone might know, but I guess my point is that agitating metastable systems can have outcomes that are hard to predict.

The downside would be that probably only a small fraction of people would read those. Which might be worth saving the annoyance of people having this reaction (and the random people convinced they are reading about anything but an art project).

People have built solar bikes, as in regular ebikes with 2-300w panels attached that power the motor. That's more impressive if you ask me. Other than that, lots of people (myself included) have run old, indirect injection diesels on used veg oil. That was years ago when it was financially very advantageous.

If you ask me, these are more impressive/interesting technical feats, but with real world applicability and usefulness.

That's what popped into my mind: the old waste fryer diesel fuel. A nice "gee whiz" science reporting that the MSM eats up, but not scalable in any way for any significant application.

Also not scalable because "waste" oil is, by & large, not usually wasted. Restaurants are often paid by collectors who repurpose it for a variety of applications, including biofuel. So the idea that massive quantities of fryer oil get wasted when it could be used is a myth.

"nerdsniped" is my new favorite word - thank you for this post haha

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