Hacker News Reader

sienon Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars

Yes.

Sorry, should have said they have a 35% share of new car sales, up from 4% just a few years ago.

sienon Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars

The transformation in Australia has been remarkable. Chinese electric vehicles are now everywhere.

In Australia Chinese cars had 4% of the market in 2020. They now have 35% and Chinese cars have the greatest share of any country.

https://www.anz.com/institutional/insights/articles/2026/07/...

Just as an aside, Australia is odd in that it has positive trade balance with China because Australia sells so much iron ore and coal there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

sienon Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.

Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.

sienon Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

The Economist is so good in this respect.

A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.

Writing like that respects people's time.

Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.

The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.

sienon Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age

In Australia the fully electric BYD Atto 1 starts at $AUD 20K. That's 12.5K Euros. It's not a bad car.

In Australia Chinese cars had 4% of the market in 2020. They now have 35% and Chinese cars have the greatest share of any country.

https://www.anz.com/institutional/insights/articles/2026/07/...

sienon Sales of sub-€25,000 electric car models set to rise sevenfold

https://www.bydauto.be/en/

The BYD Dolphin Surf is 20K Euros in Belguim. This is the same care as the Atto 1.

Presumably it's European duties designed to drive up the price of cheap Chinese electric vehicles that is the difference.

Apparently the EU has tariffs of up to 36% on Chinese electric vehicles.

sienon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

SA is at 168 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/yearly

France is at 32 gC02eq/kWh for 2025.

So France's emission intensity is 1/5 that of SA.

SA has a population of 1.9 M. France is at 69.1 M. SA is physically larger than metropolitan France ( 983 km^2 vs 549 for France). It is very sunny. It is rich and solar has been subsidised for ages.

It is really ideal for solar.

But the emissions are still much higher than France.

Australia is ideal for solar in general and the government has been giving money to millionaires all over the country to put it on their roofs.

But most of Australia, with the exception of Tasmania that uses hydro, has fairly high emissions.

Australia's emissions have also been effectively flat for the past half decade :

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/mea...

This is despite increasing solar.

sienon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

What about Sweden?

South Sweden, with most of Sweden's population is at 20 gC02eq/kWh and at 36% nuclear

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/SE-SE3/yearly

Also Ontario?

Finland?

sienon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

It's not.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Orano and Urenco are European and have massive enrichment capability.

Canada, Australia and Namibia have massive Uranium reserves.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

sienon Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits

I don't think you're one of the happy few.

You're more like one of the happy many.

Amazon has sold an estimated 70 million Kindle readers.

Ebook sales are at least 20% of book sales.

I read 60+ books a year. Almost all on my Kindle. My partner and my sister are similar. I know of one person who has bought a Kindle and not used it much.

Australians alone are reading 1.6 billion pages a month on Kindles.

https://www.techguide.com.au/news/gadgets-news/australians-d...

sienon How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?

Yep.

Muddling through with markets, democracy and welfare.

Global life expectancy was 34 in 1913. Today it's 70.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Global GDP was less than 1Trn until about 1800. In 1950 it was 11.7Trn . Today it's 157 Trn. In a life time it's gone up by more than 10 fold.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...

People are living longer, richer lives all over the world.

The world's largest country grew at 7.8% last year.

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/why-indias-strong-gdp-gr...

Things are getting better. Look at the data, work at what you do and ignore the doom sayers.

sienon The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

Yep. They alternate decades with the 'Airships are returning for cargo' groups.

sienon Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure

Andor was really good and only finished in 2025.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor was also highly enjoyable.

The big films have been sad except for Rogue One.

But there is some Star Wars stuff that is out there and is really good.

sienon Douglas Adams and the exterminated Doctor Who adventure

The wikipedia entry is well worth a read for anyone interested in this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)

The tie in between Shada and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency is worth noting.

sienon Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

I'm old enough to remember when it was celebrated that 'big data' was being used to rally voters.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obama...

This was in 2012.

These tools were used around the place. They have an influence. They don't decide who wins and what big issues are.

sienon Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

People outside Germany are just sad about it. German electricity production was at

339 gC02eq/kwH

for the past year. That's ten times the level of France.

sienon The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]

Freight modal share by country is interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

Latvia, Rusia, Estonia and Switzerland have a higher modal share of freight than the US.

But the US is higher than the countries many people think about when they think about Europe in Germany, Italy, France, the UK and others. Which is really significant. US freight rail is also super efficient and cost competitive.

US freight rail is definitely unappreciated.

sienon Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

Good on Google.

Finland has low emissions from electricity :

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly

71 gC02eq/kwH

France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.

sienon The August 17 outage

Ironically wouldn't someone who solves real problems at scale actually be a 'keyboard warrior'?

sienon My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

US views on AI are interesting. There is actually some nuance in the answers people give :

"50% say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021. 10% are more excited than concerned. 38% say they’re equally excited and concerned."

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

sienon The Essential Question: “What should I read next?”

For people who are interested in modern literature reading the Booker Prize winners from 1969 forward and skipping any book that you find dull after 100 pages or whatever is well worth it.

Then people can stop as they get to the latest things that are driven by identity politics when they choose.

sienon How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

One thing you can do with the LLMs is ask them to make up quick quizzes for you one a subject.

That can help a bit.

sienon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

I'm not an American but FIFA certainly care about the US and Mexico.

The US is a vast market. It's played a lot in the US as well. The MLS also not a tiny league. Football is also huge in Mexico.

Hugo Sanchez was truly a legend. Among many.

sienon It's a shame what's happened to radio

Community radio is still alive and well in Australia too.

RRR and PBS in Melbourne are still excellent and seem to still be a fairly big deal if bumper stickers are anything to go by.

sienon How to read more books

A Kindle really helps me. I don't do anything else other than read with it.

As does Goodreads and reviewing, for myself, every book I read.

Logging out of social media on phones is a good idea.

sienon In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

OK.

It does have a real time spell checker. But it doesn't seem to have the squiggly line. The screen blinks at you when you type a word it can't find.

I've just run Prowrite 2 and 3.1.1 via FS-UAE.

So my memory is wrong about that feature have a red squiggly line.

It did have realtime checking. Also Prowrite was WYSIWYG. The realtime checking is neat, but it's actually a bit annoying with the blink. The red squiggly line is a better way to show that there is an unrecognised word.

Thanks for getting me to check.

sienon In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

The 'check continuously' is the thing.

I'm going to run it and have a look in a bit and get back to you.

It looks like 1st Word on the Atari ST also have a continuous spell checker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Word

From the link for 1st Word :

"Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.[12] The spell checker included the relatively rare, for the time, option to check on-the-fly. It also added document statistics display, including the number of characters, pages, etc"

Honestly I'd guess it's one of those things that possibly originated at Xerox Parc and then got added to consumer products from the 1980s onwards.

Personally, I remember it because I remember seeing Word 6 and thinking 'at last they have caught up to Prowrite'.

sienon In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Prowrite on the Amiga had a real time spell checker before Word did.

Possibly there were other programs that did as well prior to that.

But Prowrite did it and had a red squiggly line under incorrect words.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue123/P215_1_REVIE...

sienon The Abundance Illusion

If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% .

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

sienon Usborne 1980s Computer Books

The average house in the UK now has 1.3 laptops.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/09/online-al...

A windows laptop from today is vastly easier to code on that a C64 or whatever. Most houses would have an internet connection as well so they can get to all sorts of things.

A Raspberry Pi is probably something richer kids get to play with.

Have you had a look at Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Primary School kids today in Australia often get a Chromebook and have some tutoring in Scratch. Again, it gets you the ideas of coding in a way that more kids will get.

You mention the lack of alternatives that got you and other kids into coding. That's probably a thing. There is so much more entertainment available today that most kids probably don't get bored like kids did in the past and sat down and learnt to code. It has to be more intentional.

When I was a kid my mum was a teacher and brought home a computer over the school holidays which had no games. I taught myself databases and spreadsheets because there was a good tutorial on that.

There is also probably something in that until, say, the 2010s computers were not quite ubiquitous enough that they were a constant part of kids lives. Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s there was something almost magical about the devices. A kid today who grows up in a household with smartphones, tablets, laptops and multiple smart TVs probably won't get the same thrill about moving an object around a screen as someone did 30+ years ago.