Hacker News Reader

jccooperon How to scale nuclear power

US energy mix is 60% fossil, 18% nuclear, and 1% biomass, which are all basically steam turbine. The remaining 20% is "renewables", about half wind. World mix is similar.

Is 80% "nearly all"? Dunno, that's semantic. But it's a pretty high percentage.

jccooperon Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

One of the benefits of Hollywood is rental and studio stock. Many of these sets are one-off or occasional, and the furniture would return after the shoot.

jccooperon Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

An explicit renewal regime with some reasonable fee would allow most works to pass into the public domain, and avoid objections from owners of still-valuable properties. (I like the concept of renewal fees escalating each period, a kind of dutch auction against the public domain, but I'd accept even a fairly trivial flat fee as the price of avoiding ever-longer universal copyright.)

jccooperon Rule for Beneficial Ownership Reporting (2022)

I've never heard about it, and will probably forget in three months. So will a million other people.

jccooperon Tidal energy is not renewable

This is mostly based on the assumption of a 2% growth rate in overall energy consumption, with tidal power as an ever-growing 1% of that. The effect of covering 1% of our current energy usage would be minimal. And, likely, the ability to exploit tidal power will plateau at some (fairly small) amount, due to geographic constraints.

jccooperon Enhancement of mosquito trapping efficiency using pulse width modulated LEDs

A Bifen spray every month or so will work pretty well. I don't love it conceptually, because it's not super mosquito-specific, but it works.

jccooperon Sargablock: Bricks from Seaweed

The seaweed is removed anyway; resorts and beach authorities remove it because it makes for an unpleasant beach.

jccooperon Tijuana's illegal sewer hookups linked to cross-border pollution

It's code in SF to send stormwater to the regular sewer.

jccooperon Tijuana's illegal sewer hookups linked to cross-border pollution

Many older areas have no separate storm sewer system; rain goes into the regular sewers and significant rain will overload the treatment systems and lead to "bypass". Lots of these in the NE.

jccooperon North American English Dialects

Dialect can include pronunciation, vocabulary, word choice, grammar, semantics, and other ways of speaking where accent refers only to ways of pronunciation. Academics almost always go with "dialect" for "different ways of speaking" unless they're specifically meaning only pronunciation. And sometimes not even then.

The differences covered here do seem to be mostly accent (though some might consider sound changes to be more than accent), but calling it dialect allows for broader consideration if warranted.

jccooperon Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?

More than just painting. It's no coincidence that characters in Lord of the Rings are styled like Peter Jackson.

jccooperon SpaceX is stretching the lifetime of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters

It's not, but SpaceX is very aggressive on cost control (it probably costs them less than $3M ea bird right now, which is amazing for space stuff, and the cost/capacity is only going to get better) and more importantly there's a lot of headroom for growth in the subscriber base.

jccooperon Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

All sorts of services seem to think that mandatory accounts drive "engagement". No doubt it works on certain metrics. Long term... we'll see. I know I still don't have a Pinterest account.

jccooperon Starlink v2 reached the brightness reduction target recommended by astronomers

Starlink brightness concerns are mostly for around dawn and dusk. During the night, since they're pretty low, they're mostly in complete shadow. However, the darkness design is for operational altitude and attitude; during orbit raising, they are in an unusual mode.

jccooperon Reddit goes down fully as thousands of subreddits protest API changes

...and the timeline. Apollo could've maybe adjusted with a 12-18mo warning/phase-in. The 30-day no-compromise plan that happened instead makes it impossible to do anything but shut down.

jccooperon At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

What I did was email business@raspberrypi.com, as suggested at https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain...

jccooperon Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?

Here's a bit closer look at the mechanics: https://www.plasseramerican.com/en/machines-systems/ballast-...

jccooperon Average Age of Cars on U.S. Roads Hits 12.5 Years, a Record High

Mazda dealer down the street will sell you a mid-range Mazda 3 for $25k. And those are quite good cars. A Kia Soul can easily be had for $22k, or a Rio for $20k or less. They're not quite as nice, but they'll work.

jccooperon The History of Fire Escapes (2018)

> Btw, there's no retrofitting of existing buildings. Most of the laws only apply to new buildings and existing buildings get better as they're renovated. So buildings in NYC comply to the safety standard of whenever they were renovated last.

But that's the thing that's notable about fire escapes: they were a required retrofit. Building code changes are almost never retroactive, but in response to fires "have two paths of egress" was added, and because it was so important it was made retroactive. It being very difficult to add a stairway to an existing building, external stairways were allowed.

jccooperon How the ISS will end its life in orbit

It's only kinda modular. The core modules would be rather difficult to separate, and replacing them would probably cost as much or more than a new station. And many of them are Russian, which is a problem for a whole host of reasons.

jccooperon Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

I feel like the increase in suburbanization due to self-driving cars is probably pretty small over person-driven cars. Given the low building density that human-driven cars create (read: parking lots) there's some hope that a large change in car parking behavior would lead to lots of infill development.

jccooperon Boring Company Will Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network

NFPA requirements for road tunnels is an emergency exit every 1000ft/300m. Cross-passages to another tunnel are acceptable, including a parallel travel tunnel if there's automatic traffic control. They may also be stairs or ramps. Secondary tunnels are not common; typically they are for long and/or deep tunnels.

Dunno if the Vegas system would qualify as a road tunnel (thus NFPA 502) or some sort of transit tunnel, which might be a different thing. (I've not seen such exits provided in subway tunnels; emergency procedure seems to be "walk back to the station".)

But in a short shallow system like in Vegas, they could have periodic cross-passages or stairs to the surface. Dunno if they do; never been in it.

jccooperon SpaceX's Starship didn't immediately respond to a self-destruct command

Here's a video of the flight, where you can see the charges activate and venting start at about 15:12, the linked time: https://youtu.be/NCYSVmSPM7E?t=663

You can decide how long that is before and after, though I'll note that it may be complicated to determine what's not nominal: Starship has an unconventional staging maneuver that's basically a spin.

I'll also note that "they" didn't send anything; the FTS is autonomous, and will trigger on violation of its conditions, which is probably (1) departure of the instantaneous impact point (where the rocket will hit if all thrust stops now) from a safe ground corridor or (2) indications of disintegration of the vehicle. "The vehicle is doing something weird" is not a condition for flight termination.

jccooperon SpaceX's Starship didn't immediately respond to a self-destruct command

The "rocket shell" is the "fuel tank". They blew a big hole in the side of thing, which usually is sufficient to destroy any rocket in seconds. Turns out this one it took a while for the damage to cause complete failure.

jccooperon SpaceX's Starship didn't immediately respond to a self-destruct command

It "responded" immediately to the "command" (an onboard automatic trigger) and the explosive charges ruptured the tanks instantly. However, the explosive charges which ruptured the tanks didn't cause the vehicle to disintegrate immediately, as it was stronger than anticipated and at a high altitude with lower wind force. (No one has flown a rocket of this construction and size before.) The flight was, however, pretty well terminated at that point (the FT in FTS).

They will be adding more explosives for the future to ensure structural failure.

jccooperon Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

They have a certain number of near-polar orbit satellites. There's not yet the same level of coverage as inside 57 degrees, but they do have ground stations and offer coverage, though it seems to be of the "just barely" sort. The polar orbits are rapidly filling in, however, so it should get better before too long.

jccooperon Droit de Suite

https://www.religionenlibertad.com/blog/57334/angelus-jeanfr...

It's kinda there, if you look closely. Quite noisy, though.

jccooperon As I am currently in a war zone, I don't have many options for cabling

Ventilation and/or lighting.

jccooperon UK airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners

Pre Check skips shoes and most of the other nonsense.

jccooperon Bell System Vehicle Graphics Manual (1973)

I don't think it ever appears on the nameplate or badges, but it's in common use as a synonym, even by the company.