Hacker News Reader

VintageCoolon Could we dredge the Netherlands without fossil fuels? (2018)

I think that's because we've made it politically difficult to build transmission. In the United States, you have to get approval from every jurisdiction and landowner along the route, so valuable transmission lines are politically impossible to build. (See: SOO Green, Grain Belt Express, BECI, other planned lines).

Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.

VintageCoolon Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri

The Grain Belt Express has been in limbo for 15 years now, despite backing from Invenergy. It has recently taken hits from President Trump, Senator Hawley, and Missouri's AG.

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind...

VintageCoolon Just Put It on a Map

The tax on fuel has not been able to keep up with expenditures for the Highway Trust Fund for two decades; now a third of the money comes from the General Fund.

https://t4america.org/2025/05/22/the-highway-trust-fund-isnt...

That said, suburbs with high median household income are probably still putting a lot of money into the General Fund by income taxes.

VintageCoolon Just Put It on a Map

It says in the linked article that they only have support for 9 cities so far, and they list them as:

Spokane, WA

Syracuse, NY

South Bend, IN

Bellingham, WA

Morgantown, WV

Cincinnati, OH

St Paul, MN

Rochester, NY

New York City, NY

It also says that they are working on improving the data pipeline so that they can reduce the amount of time it takes to add new cities to their dataset and visualization.

VintageCoolon Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)

Nooo... we have a bunch of metrics and logs reporting systems at my company. Some of them are in UTC, some of them display my local time, some of them display China Time, and I'm trying to collaborate with colleagues in London and Australia who get data displayed in their local times as well. When I'm working to address an incident and combing through multiple systems to try to correlate events, it's a pain in the ass having to constantly double-check which time zone this data is in.

VintageCoolon The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

Zephyr Teachout wrote an early article critiquing Abundance, the book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. She appeared on Ezra's podcast and (IMHO) did not appear to have thought very deeply about the problem of housing affordability; instead defaulting to "monopoly in housing construction" as the problem. Stoller and Musharbash are re-iterating the position that had been staked out by Zephyr Teachout in March.

> Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/23/an-abundance-of-amb...

Much of the criticism of Abundance from prominent pundits on The Left (including Teachout and Nathan Robinson) has been along the lines of "the actual problem is corporate monopoly" rather than zoning. (Or maybe: "zoning is an easy problem to fix and a distraction from the real problem of corporate monopoly".)

VintageCoolon M8.7 earthquake in Western Pacific, tsunami warning issued

I remember in 2015 watching this great tsunami video at a harbor. It was about 11 minutes long.

At the start, there's just a white line at the horizon. Then the fishing boats in the harbor start rocking and jangling. Then water starts pouring over some walkways and sea walls.

Eventually the cameraman backs away and starts climbing a concrete tower; water starts to flood over the area where they had been standing. I think they climb a couple stories and are safe up there.

I haven't been able to find the video in years, but I remember being fascinated by it and I'd love to watch it again.

Edit: I never expected to find that video again, but here it is. A little more terrifying than I remember.

https://youtu.be/PvJs2iWQuFs

VintageCoolon Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

If China is manufacturing solar panels for us, that doesn't give them control of our energy supply.

It's not like being dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply oil. If China cuts us off from new solar panels, the solar panels we already have continue to provide electricity. It would only slow the rate of deployment, which we're already doing to ourselves by imposing a tariff on solar panel imports.

VintageCoolon It took my savings and 14 years but I’m about to beat arthritis

And Pfizer is an investor in his company.

VintageCoolon Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

https://indyweek.com/news/opinions/op-ed-the-purpose-of-zoni...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...

Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.

VintageCoolon Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

The energy efficiency initiatives of the 1970s significantly reduced the energy cost of economic activity. (Ironically, this helped kill nuclear, by undercutting the expected increase in demand that utilities built all those nuclear power plants to meet.)

The ongoing clean energy transition could bring us cheaper energy and divorce grid energy usage from greenhouse gas emissions.

I feel like the future is looking bright.

VintageCoolon How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert

Okay, sure, if you look at geologic timescales then eventually Africa will move and the region of northern Africa will cease to be desert.

Within a human timescale, I think "never" is an acceptable term.

Atmospheric circulation means that the latitude of the Sahara is blasted with cool dry air from the upper atmosphere. Humans planting trees might slow the spread of the desert, but will not vanquish it.

To disrupt the effects of atmospheric circulation (ie Hadley cells) creating deserts at those latitudes, you'd need mountain ranges and oceans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell

VintageCoolon Plastic bag bans work

The goal is to eliminate trash in the environment. Thin plastic bags get discarded carelessly, then catch in the wind and get strewn around a wide area.

Plastic bag bans have been sufficiently successful that people have forgotten this was a problem.

VintageCoolon A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

The cost of solar dropped by 90% between 2010 and 2020, and the cost of panels fell by 14% last year. Batteries were just straight up not a thing until 2019: California's grid-scale battery storage capacity has been doubling every year since then.

Putting together the solar panels, the battery, the desalination plant, and the brine plant, he's proposing a $42 billion dollar project that has only been economically feasible for a year or two now. I'm not surprised that it hasn't been built yet.

VintageCoolon Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

Based on the past 30 years, I think the safe assumption is that there will not be much nuclear built in the US+Europe in the next 15 years.

VintageCoolon Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

If China stops selling us solar panels, the ones we already have will keep producing power and we'll be just fine.

I feel like you're making an analogy here to 1973 when Saudi Arabia cut off the supply of oil or 2022 when Russia cut off the supply of fossil gas, but the analogy doesn't work.

VintageCoolon Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air

Quite right old chap! Surely no reasonable consumer would interpret terms like "Autopilot" or "Full Self Driving" to mean that the car autonomously drives itself!

VintageCoolon Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

I love to bike around the city and listen to the frogs in the Stormwater Ponds.

VintageCoolon 40% of US electricity is now emissions-free

It has become popular to refer to it as "fossil gas".

VintageCoolon The curse of the goitre in Switzerland

The article referenced mentions of goitre in Switzerland from Victor Hugo in 1839, Mark Twain in 1880, a medical survey in 1883, and Roman authors like Vitrivius and Pliny the Elder. It also mentioned that the iodine idea had been going around for a hundred years before the activities of the heroes of our story.

Iodine had not been seen as a successful cure before because excess iodine causes a horrible condition. The key difference here was that Hunziker proposed regular use in minute quantities, and then Bayard tested the hypothesis with careful measurements and convincing evidence.

VintageCoolon Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34

There is no excuse to be using MyISAM instead of InnoDB in 2023. It was a scarcely forgivable mistake in 2013.

The read performance advantages of MyISAM are solved better by using SSDs instead of HDDs.

MyISAM will cost you dearly when performing actions like "trying to create a new replica of an existing database".

VintageCoolon To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

24/7 companionship, with owners that don't leave all day for work...

VintageCoolon Lithium “shortage” bubble implodes again

Construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass began in June, and it is expected to start producing lithium by 2026.

There is a (super nutty) environmentalist group and some Native Americans protesting and trying to delay the mine, but it looks like they have so far been unsuccessful at convincing judges, and blockers have been getting cleared out.

I consider myself an environmentalist, so I'm a bit sensitive about descriptions like "nutty environmentalist", but... the group protesting the Thacker Pass mine is weird and I think largely repudiated by other environmentalists. I mean, they're trying to stop the transition to clean energy. These guys advocate for total deindustrialization, return to a pre-agriculture way of life, only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support, and they're... deeply anti-trans?

VintageCoolon US transition to clean energy is happening faster than you think, reporter says

The Texas grid has been buckling because of extreme weather events and rapidly increasing load. Texas broke electricity demand records 11 times last summer [2022] and 9 times this summer.

The rapid deployment of renewables and grid-scale batteries is saving the Texas grid from brownouts and blackouts.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-power-use-hits-record...

Grid-scale batteries have also been saving California from blackouts. Back in 2020, the California grid wasn't able to handle the peak demand of 46.8 GW during a heat wave and resulted in blackouts. But in 2022, thanks to the rapid deployment of several GW of additional batteries, California weathered a peak of 51.4 GW without issue.

https://www.icf.com/insights/energy/battery-energy-storage-b...

VintageCoolon Most Americans comfortable with solar panels, turbines in their communities

There is a wind farm by the highway east of Seattle. I enjoy looking at them when I drive through that area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Horse_Wind_Farm

VintageCoolon Zinc-air batteries as an alternative to lithium-ion: study

A cobalt mine recently opened in Idaho, but apparently is idle because cobalt from Nigeria is priced too low for the Idaho mine to be competitive.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/biden-is-scrambling-for-mine...

VintageCoolon Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

Donate to aspiring Democrats running for state legislatures in blues states with red State Legislatures or split governments.

> Back in 2019, [David Roberts] wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on.

> The 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota.

> Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emis...

VintageCoolon FCC fines robocaller a record $300M after blocking billions of their scam calls

Those calls threaten their Mandarin-speaking target that US Immigration services are going to kick them out of the country. But the scammers (who might be dressed up as immigration lawyers) will take care of the problem in exchange for a bunch of money.

VintageCoolon Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

I have been upset with the NY Times for years because of their uncritical addiction to access journalism.

* They held into the Abu Ghraib story for a year to avoid influencing the 2004 election.

* They dismissed and discredited the story about DNS lookups between email servers at Trump Tower, Spectrum Health (DeVos / Erik Prince), and Alfa Bank (Russia) in 2016.

* They uncritically repeated the Barr memo about the Mueller report. That one I couldn't believe -- there had been weeks of reporting about how Bill Barr had been hired/appointed to suppress the Mueller investigation. Then Bill Barr publishes a memo a few days before the report saying that it's no big deal, and the NY Times is publishing mea culpas about how they had done wrong by reporting on Trump/Russia connections exposed by the Mueller investigation??

Instead, it seemed like the New York Times liked getting scoops from their sources high up in government, and they didn't want to preserve those sources by not upsetting them.

VintageCoolon Was Richard III a Bad King?

The article really really wants to put a positive spin on Richard III, but in Dictator's Handbook terms he clearly failed at building an effective coalition to rule England. The people whose opinions counted in 1485 mostly did not want Richard III to be king.

> That many allies of his brother, Edward IV, supported Henry Tudor speaks to Richard’s inability to command widespread loyalty. Richard’s rule failed because too few people supported him

The established figures who had supported his brother rebelled against Richard.

> Richard’s subjects and foreign observers were stunned by his brazen betrayal, his swift execution of Lord Hastings, and the disappearance of his young nephews, all of which undermined efforts to stabilise the kingdom in the two years that followed. Further resentment and anxiety festered when Richard misjudged regional politics and redistributed southern property among his northern affinity.

Richard was redistributing southern property to northerners because he couldn't find southerners that would support him.

On the plus side, Richard III ended the War of the Roses by convincing all the Yorkist supporters (who had supported his brother) that they had to cast their lot with the last Lancastrian candidate (Henry Tudor) in order to get rid of Richard.