flor1s

Is day and night really the problem here? Because I thought demand usually peaks at certain times of the day (e.g. early in the evening in California: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...), and actually bottoms out during the night. You would mostly use an interconnected grid (and storage) to compensate for this.

Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).

I don't think this is true. My (Dutch) mom used to wash at night and in the weekend because of reduced tariffs. She is very energy conscious on general. Not everyone is oblivious to these things, especially less well off people.

I think it's more important to find a good text book about the language you want to learn programming in, rather than a book about OOP. OOP is implemented differently by each language, and some popular languages these days completely avoid OOP.

I don't think nuclear is much more resistant against forces of nature than solar/wind are... An INES level 7 accident in France could cause a similar outage in France's nuclear capacity (similar to Japan's nuclear lost decade). Or massive droughts could cause nationwide nuclear outages due to a lack of cooling water. Having a mix of nuclear/solar/wind with hydrogen as a "battery" in an EU super grid seems like a good way to mitigate the risks.

Right, luckily it's not enabled by default. Some other fields in which unbounded computation is common are IOT and robotics.

You keep calling it a "letter" but it is not just a "letter" in the sense that I can write a letter to you, it's a letter written by experts in the field to a top ranked scientific journal that has been editorially reviewed (by experts).

> If you cannot reliably judge the legitimacy of a pre-print in an area, then you aren't qualified to judge the legitimacy of any scientific comment in that area.

I agree, but now we are moving into the content and not just judging the book by its cover.

If you think a pre-print is a better source than an academic letter (published in a reputable scientific journal, which implies at least editorial review), then lets agree to disagree.

> a pre-print in the process of review.

So not reviewed yet.

My point is that both a preprint and a letter to the editors have not gone through a rigorous review. Preprints might be submitted for peer-review but that's no guarantee that it will be published in a reputable venue.

> Regions with an early interest in face masks had milder COVID-19 epidemics, according to a new letter-to-the-editor published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. (the source of the Science Daily article: https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1164/rccm.202004-1188...)

I don't see how this is much less scientific than the non-peer-reviewed paper you posted.

He says you can't "combine" percentages, not that you can't "compare" percentages, "you can't add and substract between them".

You mean that Fukushima never killed anyone during normal operations? Because people died during the evacuation, a worker died due to lung cancer attributed to the disaster (it's mentioned in the article), and we are not sure if there will be any further deaths due to radiation exposure.

Nuclear has its fair share of NIMBY-ism (especially regarding storage of waste), also benefits from "magic" energy storage technologies (so you can run them at higher efficiency) and is also reliant on breakthroughs (technological and regulatory) here and there to support many people's arguments why it's such great technology. If both solutions didn't have up and down-sides there wouldn't be such long discussions on HN about it.

Having all countries in the EU in the same boat when it comes to vaccines seems like a good thing to me. Now we have this spat between the EU and UK, but if every nation in the EU negotiated by themselves we might have a conflict between EU countries themselves... That's not to say the EU didn't screw up along the way.

This would solve one of the biggest problems I have with split keyboards; where do I put my mouse? At least I'm using a Logitech Ergo Trackball, which means that I can predictability move from the keyboard to the mouse, but there is no easy way of positioning a keyboard like the ErgoDox EZ while still comfortably using the mouse as well. I ended up switching to a smaller Razer BlackWidow Lite as it allows for a more comfortable keyboard-mouse workflow for me.

For buying ergonomic chairs on a budget, you should check out used office supply stores. You can often save hundreds of dollars for a good quality chair.

Vulcanus

Somewhat related applications in the robotics field were presented at this IROS 2020 workshop: https://sites.google.com/view/iros2020-geometric-methods/hom...

> They only work well at small percentage of generation when you have enough hydropower backup

What do you see as a small percentage? A country like The Netherlands is generating between 10% and 50% renewable energy without significant storage capacity (it's summer so a lot of that energy comes from solar, but in winter the yields from wind will be higher), and we are one of the worst countries in the EU when it comes to renewables. I thought the need for storage is mostly a problem if you want to reach a high percentage of generation using renewables. Anyway, energy storage also seems beneficial if you want to build a nuclear infrastructure, so it seems like a problem that has to be tackled regardless.

> They are cheapest because they are subsidised on one hand, and on the other hand, nuclear is penalized by lawsuits and regulartions and inspections

I don't think subsidies are really a problem. Weren't the nuclear power infrastructures of France and Ukraine mostly build using state subsidies? The amount of subsidies needed to build renewables is also decreasing. Some might argue subsidies aren't necessary anymore, but we still need massive infrastructure investments to create a smart grid, more interconnectors, etc. Also, nuclear energy might be regulated too much, but I'm not sure how much can be saved without hurting safety.

Considering Nature labelled it as a review article and still published it, it does seem like Nature is an applicable venue for publishing a paper like this.

The type of renewable matters though, it seems like retrofitting existing houses with solar panels is relatively more dangerous than building utility scale solar farms (no roof to fall off from, higher yield).

Is there a particular reason why solar and wind aren't competitive in Ukraine, while in general it seems like those technologies are some of the cheapest sources of energy available today?

Do you have a source for blades often being made of toxic material? The Bloomberg article a poster linked above makes it seem like it's completely safe to store the blades in landfill: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

Reading the Bloomberg article, it doesn't seem like the blades are a big problem.

> “Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.

I found it funny that the book "Robotics" (by Siciliano et al.) isn't in the category "Intelligent Technologies and Robotics". There's another book titled "Robotics" (by Mihelj et al.) in that category though.

Check out https://www.ros.org - it allows you to program in either C++ or Python (with some other languages being supported by the community)

I've seen it mostly in the Dutch news until now. The source is the Dutch CDC (RIVM) via Marion Koopmans (Professor of virology and head of the virology department at the Erasmus Medical Center).

Article in Dutch (translated title: Mild corona virus symptoms seem to lead to lower creation of antibodies)

https://nos.nl/artikel/2329846-milde-coronaklachten-lijken-m...

You might hate what you are doing in the short term but love what you will gain from doing that in the long term.

As someone who has a PhD in informatics, I would say it's only worth it if you (mostly) like doing what is required for getting the actual PhD (research, writing papers, giving presentations - often to an audience that is not really interested in what you have to say but still has to grade you).

Having the PhD is not that useful unless you want to be a professor / academic researcher. In my case I work for a Japanese governmental research institute, which hires both PhDs and "supporting staff". Supporting staff have less freedom and have temporary contracts. No-one really gets paid that well. In terms of work, I'm still coding a lot, but also need to read and write many papers, proposals, etc.

In The Netherlands we have a specific degree on the PhD level but focused on practical research, called PDEng (Professional Doctorate in Engineering).

I take it they will go deeper into the materials than they went in their previous course (http://www.ulaff.net), which also covered the topics to a limited extend.