rgmerk

The rate of success of side projects seems unrealistically high. Yeah, I know, it's the YC dream, but even acquisitions where the founders walk away with a few million dollars are rare enough, right?

You can make decent code with AI assistance. You can churn out 37kLOC per day.

However, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that you can do both.

Yes, there have been hot days across northern Europe before; however, the frequency of very hot weather has increased substantially.

It may not have gotten the headlines of this year’s heatwave, but we were in Switzerland and Germany for a month last July. For three of those four weeks, it was stinking hot. The maximum temperatures weren’t so bad, but the nights were oppressive, and there was no letup. If that’s going to be the norm most summers, it absolutely justifies investing in air conditioning.

Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer

Cite your sources.

There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership.

And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts of northern Europe with weird hangups about air conditioning.

But as best I can tell this claim is false; the biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States is that the climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.

That sounds like an absolute nightmare to get approvals for.

The evening peak is well on its way to being a solved problem in Australia.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...

And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:

https://www.aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/renewables-li...

If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.

You pay for it.

There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.

Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.

Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.

If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.

It put the chart title directly on top of Australia.

Which just about sums up my experience with using LLMs to code, really (though not with these state-of-the-art models, admittedly) - it's amazing what they can do, but left to their own devices they'll make boneheaded decisions.

You could do this, but on all present evidence you won’t get anything that anyone would volunteer to watch.

Agreed. There was already too much human generated slop in academia.

And I’m not talking about good faith research that didn’t pan out, I mean research that is completely useless for any other purpose other than convincing a casual observer that the authors are doing research.

Good.

If it’s not worth your time to check the output of your LLM carefully, it’s not worth my time to read it.

I can assure you having observed the process of clothes shopping for the women in my life, that as far as they are concerned, clothes do not just “fit them”.

Alcatraz or whale watching? Sure.

But Pier 39? I’d rather poke my eyeballs out with a stick. I can eat shitty fast food at home, thanks.

Good luck, but there’s a reason why subsistence farmers move to city slums as soon as they can.

Maybe I’m missing something, but there’s also the idea that you don’t need to be perfectly secure, you just need to be secure enough that it’s not worth the effort to break in.

In the case of crooks (rather than spooks) that often means your security has to be as good as your peers, because crooks will spend their time going with the best gain/effort ratio.

Dart/Wong for America ‘28 - Give America Back Its Groove.

Can you link to it? I'm curious.

In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.

But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.

I did have the same thought, had a quick look (I'm not a polymarket user) and couldn't find a market relating to this project.

Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.

Their hoped-for completion date is "2031". Anyone want to hazard a guess about what their actual completion date for this plant will be?

Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster...

However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.

Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).

Pretty sure the answer is no, most of the time.

As I understand it (and even if I’m broadly right I’m greatly simplifying) there’s an auction system and if demand is X kilowatts, they line up all the bids to supply in cost order and draw a line at X kilowatts. All successful bidders receive the price bid by the highest successful bidder.

There are rare times in this kind of market where the price does go very high (though not to $1000 per kwh), and those brief periods push average prices up substantially.

In markets where batteries are going gangbusters, they are squashing many of these peaks and thus reducing average prices paid by consumers (though not as much as you’d hope because the majority of retail electricity costs are distribution rather than generation).

Worth keeping in mind that nobody freezes to death in FNQ if the power goes out.

Grow up in a place where roads have gravel on the shoulders and are made using coarse-chip seal and you’ll get them regularly.

Hmmm. If, rather than flying close to sea level, you flew at high altitude (above commercial airliners), and kept it relatively small, I suspect that you could do this and no one would notice unless you told them.

Though at high altitudes the winds are such that it would be less of an airship and more of a steerable balloon.

I would assume that these days you can simulate that increasingly accurately before you need a full-scale prototype.

They could also use active noise cancellation, which is already used in some turboprops like the Q400.

Numerous critics pointed out that the only application where cryptocurrencies had any real advantages over conventional finance was crime.

The critics were right, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in which Silicon Valley was a not insubstantial part were wrong.

As such, and combined with the ills of social media, Silicon Valley has blow’ any public trust it may have had in the past.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re not a researcher in the area ignore any media reports of a study that include the words “in mice”.

Also, there’s a tendency on HN for commenters (mostly software engineers) to think that they are smarter than the scientists who work on this stuff day in, day out. Let me tell you, you, random HN reader are not smarter than random biomedical scientists.