hnmullany

If you want the ACTUAL mathematics of geothermal energy - a good place to start is the open source GEOPHIRES model which is available on github and has a UI

https://github.com/NREL/GEOPHIRES-v2

https://www.nlr.gov/research/software/geophires-v2-0-geother...

Because it's now headed by an ex-lobbyist for the chemical industry

No that was above my pay grade. They met with the engineering leads directly.

For 4.51, it was $100k per cert slot. We were just trying to cover the cost of the engineering team.

I was the product manager with responsibility for root certificates in the Netscape 4.51 browser. It's crazy to see someone factor it 25 years later.

Just to reply to some people in the comments. Yes, we knew export grade encryption was weak - that was the point - that the NSA could decrypt it - and the govt. required us to do it anyway.

FWIW - we had the goal of expanding the list of root authorities in the 4.5x release - and this might have been the first release to monetize the root slots because Netscape was under severe pressure to generate revenue.

(Also - Verisign hated that we were expanding competition and tried to convince us to implement a program that would re-restrict the list to a set of "responsible" companies aka Verisign and one or two others. We declined.)

I was a private equity analyst in the 90's and we owned Berol - one of the classic American pencil companies. Their classic wood pencils were made the exact same way - batch oriented and quite labor intensive.

Their next gen process was a fully automated continuous process co-extruder that extruded a core of hot graphite surrounded by a cellulose/wood mixture. That continuous string of graphite/wood composite was pulled down a two hundred foot line where it was cooled, sealed, painted twice, varnished, cut, capped with erasers and boxed. The whole line could be operated with two people.

I worked in private equity as an analyst in the 90's - we looked at an ambulance service that was up for sale - the underlying operating margins (before you load on debt) were pretty reasonable, although I don't remember the details.

I worked in private equity in the 90's and looked at one of the big regional ambulance service companies that was up for auction. The underlying operating margins were fairly reasonable - the private equity owned companies only have issues because of their debt load.

I think the strength of the "vouch" is understood to be much weaker in Silicon Valley - it's more like - I've talked to this guy for 30mins to an hour and I can vouch that he (or she) is not a waste of time for you to talk to them for a similar amount of time. It's not a vouch that they're the next Steve Jobs or you have diligenced their background.

On every tech that would have made HTML5 an effective application platform (databases, advanced AV, animation) - Apple has been 5-10 years behind Google and Firefox, and in many cases simply vetoed or wouldn't implement.

Flash didn't disappear when internet technologies got better. Flash disappeared because Apple refused to distribute it on iPhone - partly because Adobe couldn't effectively shrink it down to early generation iPhone technical capabilities - but partly because they didn't want a competitor to the iOS SDK.

Then Apple effectively vetoed - explicitly and through lack of investment) futher improvement in audiovisual web platform technologies (e.g. the custom shaders that Adobe wanted to make part of the nextgen filter spec) during the critical period where developers were making their platform choice for mobile.

Apple has been no friend to the further evolution of the web.

You might want to look up the value of those "fat pensions" - a lot of them are substantially less than US Social Security.

e.g. in Ireland, the state contributory pension (aka what you paid egregious social security taxes for) maxes out at about $18,000 per year. The equivalent pension from US Social Security is about $45,000.

I don't see any on data on nutrition in that reference.

Organic grown food tends to be higher in anti-oxidants and secondary metabolites, possibly because the plant immune system is activated more frequently due to better microbial biodiversity. From what I remember at least - it doesn't maintain any advantage in macronutrient density (carbs/nitrogen etc.)

Organic grown food is more nutritious and I'm glad we have a significant percentage of farms who have gone organic, but the yield gap is very well documented. Organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly and unpredictably and can't match artificial nitrogen for plant uptake.

E.g. a 25% average yield penalty in this meta-analysis:

Alvarez, R. (2022) ‘Comparing Productivity of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: A Quantitative Review’, Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, 68(14), pp. 1947–1958. doi: 10.1080/03650340.2021.1946040.

I studied the productivity benefits of adding beneficial fungi as part of my master's thesis. On average they provide a yield benefit, but it's not ubiquitous and they're far more likely to work in arid and semi-arid soils that have poor microbial diversity in their baseline. They don't tend to be as effective in temperate soils - partly because they have to compete with existing soil microbes.

I think he peaked in the aughts - his latest stuff is ho-hum.

I came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almost all the star growth from the previous year, resulting in a 20% YoY record. The company eventually got acquihired.

Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.

Just a note that 46,000 is a 2050 target - which covers current demand AND all the growth in electricity and heat demand over the next 25 years.

Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.

But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.

Heroku got a lot of attention and funding within Salesforce at least for the first few years - they grew from about $1M in ARR when they got acquired, and I think they peaked at around $200M (second hand - so I don't know if part of that was funny-money revenue allocated from Enterprise agreements.)

Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison.

Nuclear capacity: +2GW in 2025 (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...)

Solar capacity: ¬300GW capacity

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202512/26/cont...

The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.

The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.

Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.

That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.

2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.

Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.

Coal generation production in China did decline in 2025 vs 2024 - but that was the first year for it to happen.

It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.

I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.

I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.

What are the bets that the NSA has been encouraging Microsoft to keep shipping this?

Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.

I did a meta-analysis for my masters thesis and I was convinced that 2 of the 39 papers in my dataset had fraudulent data.