Hacker News Reader

jlaporteon Engineers develop a process to make formate fuel from CO2

The headline number of 96% (in the original new release) is very misleading. What matters is not the fraction of gaseous carbon that ends up in the fuel (the yield), it's the energetic efficiency of the process. ie: Nobody will spend 100 Joules of energy to store, say, 1 Joule of energy. The paper says their process has low energy efficiency (low enough they don't seem to want to say the number)[1]:

> ...rather than relying on the CO2(gas) feedstock, bipolar membrane (BPM) electrolyzers with aqueous bicarbonate HCO3−(aq) input were demonstrated (Figure S2b). In principle, the energy-intensive CO2 regeneration process could be circumvented. In practice, however, the BPM induces a large overpotential, causing *low energy efficiency*, and it still suffers from CO2 escape, low FE, low yield, and low operation lifetime. [** emphasis added]

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...

jlaporteon Headsets Delayed into 2024

MS Office has been available for iOS for just over a decade (June 2013).[1] So it will be on Vision Pro at launch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Mobile_versio...

jlaporteon HashiCorp CEO called their community building for Terraform “Malicious” [video]

Wow, I assumed he must have misspoke. But he actually said this twice and really underlined it the second time, saying "it's very malicious is the right word".

What a terrible way to communicate about your company strategy, regardless of the audience.

jlaporteon Talk-to-ChatGPT

There are a lot of admirable things about the EU, and this is by no means intended as EU bashing.

But could there be a more on the nose example of why the EU lags in tech innovation and entrepreneurship? An solo maker builds a cool little tool as a personal project, open sources it on github, and is immediately attacked for the effort by cosplay compliance regulators. It defies parody.

The commenters also have a cartoon understanding of the GDPR - the author of the Chrome extension is neither a data controller nor a data processor.

I'd ask the commenters that jump on a project like this to introspect a bit and try to understand why their first impulse on seeing someone's effort like this is to try to take it down.

jlaporteon Deepest infrared image of universe

> This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

12.5 hours total exposure for the JWST image, "weeks" for the HST image

jlaporteon Ford dealers able to add no-resale provision to 22MY F150 Lighting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

jlaporteon A Closer Look: How I Created a 248MP Photo of the Sun

The photographer's (Simon Tang's) full-size images are available here:

* https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M0EpmTs6iU97J05846UA...

And his Instagram:

* https://www.instagram.com/simon2940/

jlaporteon Samsung Foundry: New $17B Fab in the USA by Late 2023

They exist, but Intel doesn't do contract manufacturing and GlobalFoundries is behind the other major contract manufacturers (TSMC and Samsung) by many process node generations.

jlaporteon Show HN: RadarWidgets iOS – GitHub Dependabot Vulns and Actions Workflow Widgets

Hey HN

Radar Widgets for Github helps developers and team leads watch their code for GitHub security vulnerability alerts and Actions Workflow status events, with beautiful widgets on right on their iOS home screen.

I built this to scratch my own itch - my team uses Github Dependabot alerts and Github actions workflows prolifically. But I found a need for both aggregated views across multiple repos, and a clean passive mini-dashboard like view on my mobile. Plus I'm personally hooked on the new widget system in iOS 14 .

For today's app launch, here's a pack of promo credits (10 available) for HN folks who want to try it out:

https://tokn.co/c/JBJc8mkX

Would love to hear what you think!

-J

jlaporteon GFXBench: Apple M1

The M1 GPU is 2.6 TFLOPS, M1 Neural engine is 11 TFLOPs - in a 10 watt power envelope. The RTX 3090 draws 350 watts.

jlaporteon SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

Yes. From the same Dish Network 10-K:

"Subscriber Acquisition and Retention Costs

We incur significant upfront costs to acquire subscribers, including advertising, independent third-party retailer incentives, payments made to third-parties, equipment subsidies, installation services, and/or new customer promotions."

jlaporteon SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

SpaceX/Starlink have done effectively no marketing spend to get those leads into their funnel. Subscriber acquisition costs (SAC) for home broadband and TV are very high, and due to churn doesn't necessarily even translate into net subscriber adds. Those numbers are good by any measure.

One representative example, Subscriber acquisition costs for Dish network: "DISH TV SAC was $822 during the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $759 during the same period in 2018, an increase of $63 or 8.3%." [1]

"We lost approximately 511,000 net DISH TV subscribers during the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the loss of approximately 1.125 million net DISH TV subscribers during the same period in 2018. This decrease in net DISH TV subscriber losses primarily resulted from a lower DISH TV churn rate and higher gross new DISH TV subscriber activations." [1]

[1] https://www.marketscreener.com/DISH-NETWORK-CORPORATION-4870...

jlaporteon Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?

You may be interested in intercooler.js (http://intercoolerjs.org/). It allows you to perform a host of AJAX + DOM manipulation flows using only HTML attributes.

intercooler also supports something similar to the server pushed DOM diff flow you envision:

Server Sent Events BETA (http://intercoolerjs.org/docs.html#sse)

"Server Sent Events are an HTML5 technology allowing for a server to push content to an HTML client. They are simpler than WebSockets but are unidirectional, allowing a server to send push content to a browser only." http://intercoolerjs.org/docs.html#sse

jlaporteon In Canada 50Mbps internet now considered a basic service

Canada's population is highly urbanized and concentrated in cities near our southern border. More urbanized than Switzerland (GP comment). Not an explanation for our uncompetitive mobile and broadband data markets.

Canada urban population: 81.8% of total population (2015)

Switzerland urban population: 73.9% of total population (2015)

[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

jlaporteon The Okinawa missiles of October 1962

As many times as the world has come close to nuclear war and mutually assured destruction since the end of WW2, it's actually one of the most reassuring things about humanity that people refused orders to fire missiles every time

If you accept the account in the linked story, this episode itself is a counterexample:

"...the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles..."

jlaporteon Ask HN: Entering into a part-time contract role, what should I know

If you are certain that your billings for the year from all clients will be less than $30k, then you don't need to register for or collect GST. But if there's any chance you will exceed this amount you should register.

This questionnaire is helpful: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/gst-tps/rgstrng/rgstr...

Your next question should be to decide whether to operate as a sole proprietor or to incorporate. Sole proprietor: you will file all your earnings on your personal taxes as usual. If you incorporate you'll have some responsibilities to create and maintain the corporation. You'll likely want to follow the sole proprietor path for a part time gig.

If you do decide to register for GST (or to incorporate) I'd suggest finding an accountant to help you with the setup of your GST account with CRA and to explain the schedule for remittance. It's actually not hard at all but helpful to understand from the start.

jlaporteon RSTTA: A Rosetta Stone for WebDev Tools

Agreed, just a start but with 3 popular language ecosystems.

Thought I could get away with 3 because the actual Rosetta Stone only had 3: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Ancient Greek. :-)

Possible next additions: Clojure, Haskell, etc.