deftnerd

Civilian uses? Perhaps not, but Iran has always wanted to have a respected navy. Compact nuclear reactors like the type used in submarines with nuclear reactors for their power production require 90%+ enriched uranium. That's one very plausible use of HEU that isn't just "they want to build a bomb".

I am a big fan of The History Guy (https://youtube.com/@TheHistoryGuyChannel)

He's very affable, good voice and cadence, and it's enjoyable even in an audio-only format. He's also very prolific, producing three episodes a week with several years in his back catalog.

Many of The HN clients that I use have their own bookmark system that doesn't actually trigger the bookmark feature on the website. It makes bookmarking a totally local client feature.

Does your client support site based bookmarking?

This seems disingenuous to me, but my personal experience with Coinbase colors my opinion.

I had my Coinbase accounts canceled more than 5 years ago. Despite my merchant account with them processing over 1MM USD a year in BTC, they refused to tell me why they terminated my merchant and personal account.

At the time, I was buying physical giftcards in bulk from official wholesale distributors for 90c on the dollar, scanning and OCR'ing the redemption codes, and was selling those for the BTC equivalent of $1.05 on the dollar.

At the time, some of those merchants had their own plans for digital giftcard distribution and said they didn't want to be associated with cryptocurrencies. I ignored their pressure because I was staying true to the law in regards to various resale doctrines.

I suspect some of the larger merchants pressured their financial partners to represent them and put pressure on Coinbase.

I didn't mind writing my own bespoke payment processing system to replace them, but the loss of an easy USD <-> BTC gateway did make life quite a bit harder. Since my move to NY, it's been even more difficult because there are few companies that are allowed to operate here.

I live in Ithaca, and Cornell is about to start drilling a test borehole in the coming year. Once the borehole is completed and some tests made, they'll drill a pair of production boreholes about 10,000ft deep.

The goal is to pump water down one, and extract it from the other borehole and then use a heat exchanger to pull the anticipated 160F to 180F temperature to provide heat to the entirety of the campus.

It's similar to the University's Lake Source Cooling system, which they use the naturally cold water temperature of the local Cayuga lake. At the 250' depth they draw the water in, it's a constant 39F year-round. The cooling system is used to provide chilled water to all the buildings, and a few thousand homes, removing the need for standard air conditioners.

The Lake Source Cooling system has saved the university 20 million Kwh a year, an 85% reduction in power usage, since it was made in 2000. It's hoped that the Earth Source Heat project will have the same kind of impact on the energy necessary for heating.

There are a lot of unknowns. Nobody has drilled a borehole so deep in this area before because there hasn't been a reason to do it before.

[1] https://earthsourceheat.cornell.edu [2] https://fcs.cornell.edu/departments/energy-sustainability/ut... [3] https://fcs.cornell.edu/departments/energy-sustainability/ut...

It looks like a group at the University of Exeter is working on that exact plan.

"SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities."

"SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market."

[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/807198

Well, there also incidents about 5 years of people making vape juice with Diacetyl, a food additive that gives a creamy buttery taste. Turned out that while it was food safe, bringing it to the temperature necessary for vaping did bad things to it and it also caused "popcorn lung"

You do make a good point. It makes me think of the occasional video of a registered nurse standing in front of a City Council saying things like vaccines cause Autism, or the COVID-19 vaccine has tracking chips in it.

Seeing that makes me think that they should lose their license, which goes against the feeling I feel in this engineers case.

That makes me worry that I'm making my decision based on if I think what they're saying is correct or not, not if they should have the right to say it.

I didn't know that was a Kodi feature. It's actually enough for me to consider migrating away from my Plex setup, or at least running them in parallel.

I disagree. The truck going through the crowd model requires a sacrificial group member. In our country, the lack of terrorist group members makes their individual value higher. that makes an attack that has a higher capex cost more appealing, such as sacrificial drones.

A swarm of two dozen drones costing less than $50k could foul all of a passenger airplane's engines within a few thousand feet of takeoff. The evidence would be pretty junked up and there is no easy way to trace it back to the controller while it's happening. No sacrificial terrorist cell member needed.

One of the other issues that your comment shines a light on is that police often book someone under multiple charges. A safe one that the person is likely to be able to be convicted on, and multiple charges that probably don't apply to the situation.

This is common because it gives prosecutors the power to "offer" to drop the higher charges in exchange for accepting a plea bargain to the lower, and likely more appropriate, charges.

The result of this is that booking information, with the photos, from a drunken bar fight might show the person was charged with assault with a deadly weapon when the final charge will end up being something like disorderly conduct.

I remember reading about a year ago how thieves have been seen using BLE scanner apps walking through parking garages looking for computers and phones to steal. Even in "sleep state" many of them are discoverable through bluetooth.

From what I understand, ransomware insurance is already a thing. With the policy you get someone who negotiates the price and pays the ransom directly to the ransomware gang, which bypasses some laws against paying ransomware directly.

In theory, this helps with lower prices, negotiated support policies with the ransomware criminals to ensure the decryption process goes well, and they keep cryptocurrency available so the policy holding company doesn't have to scramble to get millions of dollars in crypto in a day or two.

Similar to kidnapping negotiators, ransomware negotiators often have the experience to produce a better outcome

It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale.

You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...

But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.

After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.

That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]

Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.

This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

It's a feature on some money counters, which seem like something banks might use at the end of the day to check the balances in the drawers.

This looks very promising. I use several self-hosted solutions to handle several of the things this provides.

The one thing that will keep me using Monica instead of this is the ability to access my contact info and their birthdays using CardDav and CalDav. CalDav for the Calendar would also be very useful.

Cloudflare lets you create custom error pages [1]. I would recommend making one for any geo-restricted pages. The benefit is that you can emulate your site theme and have an opportunity to explain the reasoning for the geographic restrictions.

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172706-C...

I find it interesting that there were spikes of readings at certain times of day and night. Coupled with the information that the apartments have a VoC barrier, my intuition is that there is a timer somewhere that turns on a fan to clear out the VoC capture space created by the barrier and exhaust the contaminated air to the outside.

If the VoC that's bothering her is heavier than air, it could be being blown upwards from the ground level and then settling back over the building and falling back down and finding its way back into her apartment somehow, like through the range hood, dryer exhaust, plumbing stacks, open windows, or just cracks due to poor craftsmanship.

If she was still at the site, I would recommend looking for what appears to be an exhaust vent of some kind that might be tied to the VOC barrier system and putting a sensor there and seeing if the readings correlate to the timeline of unusual readings in her home

Nuclear power is expensive and complicated, but not inherently so. A lot of the causes of the problem is political decisions and bureaucratic processes.

There are many designs for nuclear reactors that are simpler, safer, and more suitable for smaller communities, but various government nuclear regulation agencies around the world have such a high bar for entry that those designs will never be put into practice.

In the US, if you want to operate a nuclear reactor, the design has to be vetted first. To vet the reactor, you have to convince the agency to let you build a full-scale test reactor and convince them that the design is likely safe before building the test reactor. If anything about the test reactor makes them uncomfortable, the design will be denied and the reactor won't be allowed to operate and cannot work as a template for future reactors.

This creates a very difficult and expensive bar for entry into the market. For a large reactor, a company would have to invest billions of dollars for a decade before they could even begin to hope to operate to pay back the loans, and even then there is no guarantee that they'll be allowed to operate the reactor to sell the electricity.

That is, unless they use one of the existing pre-approved reactor concepts that were designed in the 70's and have known flaws (albeit, with known ways to reduce the risks of those flaws)

Nuclear radiation might be damaging, but it's not really a big deal as long as the design prevents accidents and there are safeguards to prevent the uncontrolled release of radiation.

You are incorrect about the availability of uranium. There is a LOT of uranium available for use, and we could run entirely on it for thousands, or tens-of-thousands of years. Many mines are shut down simply because there is far more supply than demand.

Solar is an excellent source of energy, with long life spans of the equipment but it's only functional for anywhere from 6 to 16 hours a day, depending on your latitude and the weather. The ideal places for solar farms are often far from the highest concentrations of consumers.

Wind is also great, but it wears out fast because of the moving parts and friction, even the friction of the air moving across the blades wears them down. It's not uncommon for lifespans to just last a decade.

Both wind and solar suffer from risk because manufacturing predominately takes place over seas and trade wars, or real war, could interrupt supply. For solar, that's not as big of a deal for existing infrastructure, but for wind it could cause problems.

Our grid, in the US, is pretty interconnected. There are improvements that can be made, but it's pretty redundant in general.

The ideal solution would be small but safer nuclear reactors, no bigger than an office building, that can supply power to 50k or 100k homes. Place them within 20 miles of urban centers.

The problem is that it takes a lot of political will to build a nuclear power plant because everyone is afraid of that. Bigger plants are often desired because plant owners need to invest the decade and tens of millions of dollars getting not just approval from the NRC, but approval from the people and government within 20 miles of the plant.

Smaller and safer plants might be cheaper to build, but there is no savings when it comes to that approval and acceptance process.

I think it might just be a way for staff at embassies to make some money on the side. Embassy employees are allowed to import vehicles without paying import duties or taxes.

Buying a car every month or two and reselling it to auto dealers could provide a reasonable profit.

A few years ago, tariffs accounted for 25% of a cars price for SUV's and Light-Duty Trucks from the EU. I'm not sure if it's changed since the new administration has started.

https://www.state.gov/about-us-diplomatic-importation-progra...

Because controversial campaigns are usually not welcome on other platforms. Niche platforms that court those kinds of controversial campaigns exist, but they struggle to stay alive with the public always trying to get their host or payment processor to stop doing business with them.

I get that you're trying to say that Ransomware is a kind of evolutionary pressure to force IT ecosystems to adapt and improve, but that's far from saying it should be legal.

It's like trying to justify armed robbery as a method of convincing people to take self defense lessons, or burglary as a method to get people to upgrade their windows to lexan.

The middle ground, which is always a bit in flux, does already exist. It's known as Bug/Security bounties, similar to what HackerOne tries to make above-board.

I had a business idea last year that would take advantage of a similar concept.

Basically, it would be like GoFundMe, but users could also pay money to defund a campaign if they so desired.

For example, if there was a campaign that people thought was distasteful, they could pay $10 to take $5 from the campaign and allocate the previously funded $5 and $5 from the defund fee to the antithesis of the campaign (selected by a site administrator).

The remaining $5 of the defund fee would go to site operations, allowing the defunding payments to pay for costs rather than taking costs out of campaigns themselves.

This would allow sites to respond to pressure from the public about controversial campaigns with less threat of being deplatformed by their ISP, host, or payment processor.

Numbers are just examples, a lot of changes on the pricing and fee balancing would have to be determined, but the concept intrigued me.

They have scripts to import from Asana, Notion, and Trello https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/tree/main/import

One possible use case of solar panels on a car in bright and hot environments would be running the air blower to continually replace the interior air with the exterior air in order to maintain a reasonable temperature. It's not uncommon in the south for temperatures to exceed 140f inside of the car.

Are there industry options or methods of wiring to allow for a UPS room separate from the actual rooms the racks are stored in?

It's almost tradition to have a rack with UPS's in the bottom and then the rest of the space filled with servers or drive arrays.

We wouldn't ever think of putting a tiny backup generator in the bottom of every rack, so why do we put a battery storage system there? Also, with the advances in battery chemistry technology that improve reliability and density, it's only a matter of time until Lithium chemistry batteries are available and that also increases the risk of fire.

Is there any reason not to move backup power to another room, or even to a separate structure like how they put backup generators on a pad outside of the building?

[1] this episode of the Caspian Report (an excellent Youtube channel on international affairs) discusses how Israel and Turkey are trying to establish stronger diplomatic ties in order to directly connect their maritime EEZ's and block Cyprus from the Mediterranean.

It would give the both access to undersea hydrocarbon deposits, and Israel was going to support route changes of pipelines to pass more through Turkey.

I suspect this project and goal is somehow intertwined, but I'm not versed enough with international relations to see the big picture.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvOMSTElVHk

Heat Pump technology is pretty awesome and more efficient, when your circumstances and weather patterns support it. Since they move heat from one place to another, they have to work harder as the difference between the temperatures increase.

The ideal solution is a ground-source heat pump, where a closed loop is buried underground to take advantage of the very stable and reasonable subsurface ground temperature.

If you can afford to put in a geothermal ground loop and use a heat pump, you can have a very stable heating and cooling solution that is energy efficient and works well in a super-insulated passive home.

Considering the tight integration of the OS and the hardware, I would offer the comparison that it's more like a CPU not allowing any code that's not signed by Intel to run. Or, more aptly, only allowing one specific OS to run on their CPU and that OS has a restrictive policy on application usage.

Sure, you could go with AMD but does having other choices excuse a company? It certainly violates the spirit of anti-trust laws. Apple makes and controls 46% of all the mobile devices in the US. The nearest competitor is Samsung, who makes 25%.

If Apple allowed other OS's to operate on their phone, then they could say "If you don't like our integrated app store policies and policy of not allowing other app stores, use a different OS". But until they do that, the OS and the hardware have to be seen as one thing.

Only if you believe that the warnings went out because of the "alarm over the devices' sophistication" and not "alarm over the idea this could happen" or even "alarm over a misidentification of a legitimate component and now we're too embarrassed to issue a retraction to those 10 CEOs"