Hacker News Reader

coryrcon Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries

And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?

coryrcon Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

    BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE

coryrcon Show HN: TinyAIArena watch AI agents battle it out

Code link didn't work for me.

On mobile, I don't have enough room to scroll the background so I got stuck in a long text box.

coryrcon Does Georgism work? Five years later

I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.

coryrcon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

You're closer to right. I was remembering oil+coal=80%. Coal is 60% today and oil is 20%.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

coryrcon California is chasing wealth that has feet

It's not reset of you inherit, or a bunch of other bullshit exemptions.

We live in a gerontacracy. Every advantage and tax break and handout is given to the elderly and the ladder has fully been pulled up for the new generations.

coryrcon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

That's 50% of electricity, but not 50% of energy. Coal still provides ~80% of energy IIRC (roughly 10% is carbon-free and growing faster than the US). China burns so, so much coal, while much of the world has shifted to natural gas, which has much less carbon per energy.

coryrcon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

That only makes sense if you're burning hydrocarbons to heat your homes; about 1/3 of total energy use is space heating. Shifting to heat pumps and more wind before wasting money on solar panels at high latitudes is better ROI on energy independence and carbon reduction.

coryrcon George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts

> Some of the scenes between Anakin and Padme are just downright painful.

The worse part of that is seeing clips from between takes: they actually have chemistry! They were actually directed to be unrealistic and unbelievable.

> It really made me question whether the OT were as a good as they were because of him or in spite of him.

Harrison Ford is why Han Solo says "I know" in response to Leia's "I love you". Contrasts directly with Anakin/Padme. "in spite of him" is at least a big chunk of it.

coryrcon Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

There was[0] Dabo, an attempt at a modern Visual Foxpro in Python https://dabo.leafe.com/

0: sort-of "is" rather than "was": https://blog.leafe.com/creativity-and-ai-models/

coryrcon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

What's the lifetime of a "cheap shade"? And the cost to renew it over the same lifetime? And the cost of paying for other land?

... likely less than the ~$13/W this cost to install, but that included NRE for three different styles of panel mounting. Standardizing would cut costs significantly.

coryrcon I said no and Apple said yes

This is actually a great point. I've taken some esoteric issue with my Debian Linux install and gotten exactly the needed fix. Especially when the error is extremely misleading ("/dev/root: Can't open blockdev" was that I forgot to install the actual kernel image itself...) Distros could ship open-weight LLMs that sure, might take a minute to come up with the answer, but they could be preset with the privileges to actually execute the solution.

However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?

coryrcon Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%

Shit, who cares how much it costs when it doesn't go useful places?

coryrcon Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business

Being a plumber pays acceptably, not well. Being a plumbing business owner can pay well, but would have less catchet than a doctor making the same amount, sure, but it's also far less common.

coryrcon Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business

There'd be pride if it paid similarly to a doctor.

coryrcon Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls

No, I exaggerated slightly; but we're past the wettest season now AFAIK.

coryrcon Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%

If I did the math right, Seattle-area Federal Way Link Extension costs $185k per yard, getting 81 yards for $15M.

God we're terrible at building things.

coryrcon Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls

It's 98% humidity for months, you need to worry about the whole house!

coryrcon Keep Our Servers Running

More, if it causes the organization to change course and avoid being sued into oblivion.

coryrcon Netherlands pulls gold out of the US for fears of 'geopolitical unrest'

It certainly can't be leading to more government services. We get less every year. There might be more spending, but there's fewer results. We can't build trains, our police don't stop crime, healthcare covers less and costs more every year.

coryrcon Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

Instead of getting a local locksmith, it's a "lead gen" service which charges the locksmith $100 or something to get your info. They're placed on the map, but aren't actually there.

The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.

coryrcon Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat

All I can say is, I'm sorry Cassandra.

Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.

Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...

coryrcon Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.

coryrcon Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

Hanford was nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.

coryrcon Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.

Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.

coryrcon Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'

Botfly. Don't cut, they dig deeper.

The proper solution is a thick layer of petroleum jelly over your skin. The larva has to come up to breathe eventually (~hours). Use tweezers and grab it. Gross, but perfectly safe.

coryrcon Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft

You could design in an electric autonomous-returning JATO-like system to allow for extended distance flights.

Oh, even better, you're always going to have enough propeller power to take off. Extremely high power-density batteries on a glider which detaches at cruising altitude and flies back to the airport? Oh, you fly even higher than normal before detaching to transfer even more energy into PE?

Hmm, shouldn't electric be able to fly even higher? But they're short range, so probably not worth it ... yet.

coryrcon Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft

That's not that much higher energy density and, IIRC, low power density, so not powerful enough to be useful in an emergency.

coryrcon Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft

The jet planes are flying much higher and are loaded; I'm assuming this one was empty. That would account for the power discrepancy.

Finally, I think you might be still high on the power cost. $.10/kwh is retail cost in the PNW, they might be, um, bullshitting a little and have purchased power at a very good rate at a particular time just so they could say $5. They didn't say every flight would be $5. So energy could have been 3x more than you estimated.