Hacker News Reader

uvdivon California Nuclear Power Plant Decides to Close

and in total, there are FOURTEEN natural gas plants that generate more than 200 MW in the entirety of the United States operating today.

California alone has over 45,000 MW of natural gas capacity, including 46 plants over 200 MW. They add about 1,000 MW more every year (that state alone), and they're built very quickly and cheaply. Replacing nuclear plants with fossil fuels isn't remotely sensible, but it is easy.

http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_...

[.xlsx] http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/powerplants/Power_Plants.xlsx

uvdivon By the numbers: The NSA's super-secret spy program, PRISM

I understand it's the content, not "merely" metadata, that's being siphoned. That's what I got from the WaPo article.

uvdivon [dead]

I've flagged this submission. You are welcome! :)

uvdivon Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate

"The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers."

uvdivon By the numbers: The NSA's super-secret spy program, PRISM

248 percent: The increase in 2012 in the number of Skype communications intercepted via PRISM

Is Skype no longer end-to-end encrypted? I'm surprised to see it confirmed (?) that NSA is siphoning up Skype video. How does this MITM work technically?

uvdivon NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program

Exactly which data is exposed for each provider?

According to slide 2, all of it. You might be confusing this with yesterday's Verizon story, which was "only" metadata -- caller, sender, time, and duration. This one is "actual" data -- email content, chat text, audio/video of VoIP calls.

(From the article, there's also a parallel NSA program (BLARNEY) that collects metadata only. I don't know why there's two of them).

uvdivon U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls

Checks and balances are functioning perfectly. Congress voted for Patriot Act §215, President Bush signed it into law, President Obama and his congress reauthorized it, and the courts did not overturn it. The law has sat on the books, very publicly, for more than a decade, and has offered myriad opportunities for citizens to debate and challenge (an example: [1]). The broader issue of NSA dragnets is probably one of the top 20 political issues in the US, making regular headlines since 2005 (if you include foreign dragnets, 1995 [2] or earlier).

Checks and balances aren't broken. This is democracy in action.

[1] http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security-technology...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy

uvdivon U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls

Previous discussion (5 hours old, still active):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5829442

uvdivon The Sean Parker Wedding Is the Perfect Parable for Silicon Valley Excess

No such thing. IRS won't let you reclassify personal consumption as business losses just by creating an LLC for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_... ("hobby loss rule")

uvdivon The Sean Parker Wedding Is the Perfect Parable for Silicon Valley Excess

Hold on, he paid $2.5 million in fines over what those photos depict?

I think CCC is missing a 'Р'.

(edit): Here's a interesting profile of the guy leading this bureaucracy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/us/09sfcoastal.html?pagewa...

uvdivon High-school teen builds one-man submarine for $2,000

What physically matters is the pressure difference. 2atm:1atm and 1atm:0atm are the same -- they both exert 1.03 kg-force per square centimeter of wall.

If you're asking how does pressure change with depth, it's linear for water. The pressure is just the sum weight of the column of fluid above you. Since water is (basically) incompressible, the density is the same at any depth, so, the fluid weight is proportional to the column height. At ~10 meters, it's 1.03 kgf per cm^2 or 1 atmosphere (on top of one atmosphere of air above, for 2 atmospheres total).

It's the opposite for air. That's a compressible gas, so density increases with pressure, which makes pressure an exponential function of altitude. A packet of air is compressed by the air above it, which makes it denser (more mass/volume), so that the pressure below increases at a steeper rate.

uvdivon Texas won't allow Tesla to sell electric cars directly

State-sanctioned corruption.

If you're looking for the justifications, here's an explanation from a Cato article (pp. 3-6):

Why Restrictions on Online Auto Sales?

The franchise laws that inhibit the new business models for car sales from spreading online are defended as being important for protecting dealers and consumers from automobile manufacturers. Defenses of those laws, which became widespread in the 1950s, revolve around two arguments: first, that restrictive franchise laws are needed to protect consumers and, second, that such laws are needed to protect distributors from rapacious manufacturers[...]

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/bp58.pdf

uvdivon Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef

After eight years in captivity, she made a life-or-death escape from her guards after being sent to Vienna to promote Kim's latest film.

Could someone explain how Austria permitted slaves to be held within its borders? Is this some sort of diplomatic privilege? This would be 1986 [1].

edit: Or a parallel (?) situation, Cuban athletes "escaping" from government minders inside the USA (2002 [2]). What power do foreign government agents have in these situations?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Eun-hee

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuban_soccer_players_w...

uvdivon Skycraft: Minecraft clone in WebGL

Chrome users need their settings to "allow sites to disable mouse cursor". Just an observation: this wasn't obvious to me.

uvdivon OccupyGezi raises funds for full page ad

Parent is suggesting a 500% increase when AKP was ruling. I wanted to point out that this is a wordplay.

You're right on this point, it's only 143% in real terms (after inflation).

uvdivon OccupyGezi raises funds for full page ad

Following your first link, at €429/month Turkey has a higher minimum wage than wealthier European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, baltic nations).

OECD says the minimum wage is 71% of the median wage [1] and calls lowering it a priority [2].

The Economist also calls it "high" and recommends it be lowered. [3]

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=MIN2AVE

[2] http://www.oecd.org/turkey/47471935.pdf

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/18651739

uvdivon The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

Don't be Evil is still a real value of theirs, and we should be grateful. [...] and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective.

You realize that these two sentiments are inconsistent? If Google could be evil without anyone knowing it, then you have no way of knowing that they are not evil.

uvdivon Hyperloop

These ships burn the most horrible fuel known to mankind: bunker fuel. This stuff pollutes like nothing else. The pollution created by these ships nearly dwarfs that produced by all automobiles in the world combined.

If you source this statistic [1], you find it's contrived to compare one pollutant (sulfur) which auto fuels in particular contain extremely little of. Coal power emits two orders of magnitude more sulfur than gasoline/diesel [2], and is the largest SO2 source worldwide (not bunker fuel). It's very polluting, but far from the worst.

[1] http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/

[2] http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/data-and-maps/indicators...

It is a horribly inefficient mode of transport screaming for a land-based solution.

It's by far the most efficient method of transport. In what sense do you think it's not?

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

uvdivon Hyperloop

There was a large thread about this yesterday, speculating about what it is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796880

I think a "launch loop" is consistent with all of Musk's statements (and nothing else is):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5797212

uvdivon We Think We Know What Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is

I think that might be true of launch loops? The cable has incredible kinetic energy, but it is magnetically suspended in a vacuum tube, so its power loss could be low.

uvdivon The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian woolly mammoth

or he might be a complete fraud and not even be a passable biologist

He's genuinely one of the top researchers in the field (see: cloned dog).

uvdivon The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian woolly mammoth

The line before that is even more interesting:

Stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk's private bioengineering laboratory confirmed he is poised to make a bid to return the extinct Siberian mammoth to the planet.

Hwang Woo-suk is an extremely famous scientific fraud.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/asia/0,16641,20060109,00.htm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/asia/27clone.html

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2006/11/28-01.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk

SEOUL, South Korea — Hwang Woo-suk, a disgraced cloning expert from South Korea who had claimed major breakthroughs in stem-cell research, was convicted Monday of falsifying his papers and embezzling government research funds. A judge sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison term, saying Dr. Hwang had shown remorse and had not taken research money for personal use.

Dr. Hwang was once hailed as a national hero in the South. His school, Seoul National University, disowned him in 2005, saying that he had fabricated the papers he had published to global acclaim.

uvdivon If Tesla Would Stop Selling Cars, We’d All Save Some Money

The criticism is that they similarly oppose subsidies to oil competitors (such as electric cars). And more significantly, regulation or taxes on CO2.

uvdivon If Tesla Would Stop Selling Cars, We’d All Save Some Money

One needs look no further than Cato's full-throated endorsement of oil subsidies[2].

[2] clearly does not endorse subsidizing oil.

uvdivon If Tesla Would Stop Selling Cars, We’d All Save Some Money

Who do you think the Cato Institute is?

https://www.google.com/search?q=auto+bailout+site:cato.org

uvdivon The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down

To answer your question in the dead thread about the cold fusion scam: Ni-64 (n,g) Ni-65 (e-,) Cu-65 is physical, and Cu-65 has a greater binding energy than Ni-64:

http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=28&n=36

(look at Δ(MeV), the mass excess)

The binding energy per nucleon is lower, as the other guy points out, but that's the wrong metric because Cu-65 has one more nucleon. The free neutron coming in has zero binding energy.

uvdivon [dead]

There's no point in reading the paper, it has near-zero information value. All it contains is as an assertion by the authors that the electric resistance heater (nice photo attached) emits more heat than it draws from the electric outlet it was plugged into. That one assertion, embellished with tables of numbers showing the claimed temperatures of resistance heaters and computed thermal radiation and so forth.

uvdivon Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age

Lots of cities have a 1-4% millionaire density. By The Economist's definitions, Frankfurt is over 7%. NYC has 400,000 millionaires (5%).

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...

uvdivon Boeing 787 Dreamliner back in US skies

"From an electrical engineering standpoint, that makes no sense. Thermal runaway starts when too much power is being drawn from the batteries and they begin to overheat until exploding or melting, their promixity to each other may limit the damage of an overloaded or malfunctioning cell, however the core problem remains, why are 787 electronic systems overloading the batteries?"

"If one cell explodes or melts, you still essentially have a fire in progress. Protecting the other cells buys you time, but how much time do you have when there is fire on a plane?"

"Obviously its a design issue, probably very complex that Boeing simply doesnt have the time and money to investigate thoroughly."

"So this is a patch. Nothing I have read indicates an engineering approach was taken to prevent the previous result."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5740563

uvdivon Mercury Colonization

or the thermal gradients are perfect for running turbines

They're completely useless, actually: they're in insulating rock with no ability to conduct away heat. As soon you try to exploit a temperature gradient, you destroy it.