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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

from the article: "Imagine using the heat generated from your laptop to charge it as well? Or charging your car’s hybrid battery by using the heat off of the engine?"

Wish the author had rephrased these in view of The Law of Conservation of Energy. Don't want to give the impression of developing a perpetual motion machine.

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hey protomyth, author here. Haha, I see your point abt the conservation of energy. I assumed that everyone would know that law, so I didn't address it specifically. Obviously, the return energy would be less than the expended.

I guess to assume really does make an ass out of u and me.

It's not so much for the HN audience, but the next generation of article down the chain will use that paragraph as a basis for their headline. It is by far the catchiest and I don't think they will be explicit about conservation of energy with their readers.

Nice article though.

great point about the generation of articles down the chain. I will be more mindful of that in the future. thanks for reading

Well wait, they're not talking about using the car's momentum to power the car, just its heat. The heat is waste, this just makes it somewhat more efficient.

yes, more efficient - not a perpetual motion machine

Oh I see what you're saying, sorry. You mean that the writing would be ambiguous to those not as familiar with the concepts, they might take it to mean that all the energy would come from the heat.

yeah, as my down-voted comment mention, I figure the HN folks would get what the author meant (once again, good article), but it might give the false impression to someone less familiar with the concept. They might take the sentence as suppling all the energy, and someone picking up the article might use those sentences as a basis for a headline (catchy = headline grab).

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