Hacker News Reader

zizeeon Green hydrogen is the centerpiece of Australia’s clean-economy growth plan

Whenever I read about "green hydrogen" I'm always suspicious that's it's a bait and switch by the fossil fuel industry. Say green hydrogen enough times, people will start thinking all hydrogen is green. Meanwhile industry just keeps making most hydrogen from fossil fuels.

zizeeon Waymo expands its rider-only territories

Is it possible that he was talking about a different cost than that of vehicle parts? Even at a million dollars a piece, I'd imagine google would be happy to spend a hundred million or two to get dozens/hundreds of higher visible vehicles out in aive environment.

Perhaps the expense he was talking about is that it would be super expensive to create a factory to be able to increase the volume whilst the vehicles are still rather custom built.

I will say that I have very little knowledge about anything here, just that Google has already spent billions on this effort and it would seem strange that they are shying away from spending a few hundred thousand per vehicle.

zizeeon Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws

I know it is contrary to HN guidelines to discuss comment votes, but this is weirdly my most downvoted comment of all time. In almost 13 years of commentating I have never had a comment receive -4 points before.

zizeeon Firefox 2022’s top features

I love Firefox, especially on Android so that I can use UBO. I am amazed that it doesn't have a larger install base!

That out of the way, does anyone have info on where Mozilla spends it's money? Is it still mostly on non-firefox vanity projects, and execs?

zizeeon US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

Are you suggesting it's all an elaborate scheme?

I know it is popular/easy to hate on the man right now, but this is a really strange take.

Given that Musk has been talking about mars since at least 2001, many years before he had the resources he has now, and almost went bankrupt funding spacex's first orbital rocket, it's hard to believe he's pretending.

People seem happy to believe all negative things they hear about him, but discount anything that doesn't gel with this negative image. It's like how the same people who put all missteps of Tesla/SpaceX at Elons feet, will also discount any of the successes and say he has nothing to do with them.

zizeeon US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

I'm no expert, but I think you have it backwards. My understanding is NIF raison d'etre is weapons research, with a power generation being a secondary concern. It got funded because of weapons research regardless of whether it was relevant to fusion power generation.

It may surprise people, but the DOE is the government body that is responsible for nuclear weapons research in the US.

zizeeon Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws

And the review process will cost €1 per line of code.

zizeeon Tell HN: Your Android carrier can remotely turn settings on

I was talking to someone who was charged with a fairly minor crime, and they said the first advice their very expensive/experienced lawyer gave them is to no longer trust their phone is not recording them, as the local police (australian) use this ability quite freely.

zizeeon Orion has splashed down off the coast of Baja, California

> Its the only way I can think of that space cargo becomes economical

Depends what you mean by economical, but a totally, rapidly reusable craft that takes mass to orbit would massively reduce the cost of getting mass to orbit. Not as inexpensive as a space elevator, but more achievable in the near term.

zizeeon U.S. battery storage capacity to increase significantly

How much labour is involved in the upkeep/operation vs a battery bank?

I think that there are pros and cons of each, we'll end up with a mix of lots of different solutions.

zizeeon U.S. battery storage capacity to increase significantly

Context for your context: Bath County resevoir is descrbed as "largest battery in the world", and cost the equivilent of 4 billion dollars (in 2021 $), occupies 265 acres of land, and has a capacity of around 14,000,000 m3 of water.

I'm curious to see how the costs compare. My understanding is pumped hydro storage gets cheaper at scale. If my math is correct, 24GWH of storage at $4 billion dollars^ is $167 per kilowatt hour. What do these batteries cost to install at scale at the moment? What are they predicted to cost in the next 5, or 10 years?

^ does the 4 billion include the cost of land? Probably not important, even at an "expensive" 200k an acre, that's only 50ish million extra in costs.

zizeeon The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks

UK is not the only country to drive on the left of the road, including Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic

zizeeon MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot

A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes

- Mark Twain

zizeeon Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of dollars

Typically exports are used to gather USD. It sounds like Ghana has gold. Presumably people want their gold? They could sell the gold for USD, then use that to purchase the oil.

But using the gold for currency does sound like it could be more efficient, cutting out the middleman.

Note: normally countries maitain a float of foreign reserves for this, and I'm guessing this stash of economic lubrication has run a business dry for Ghana and they don't have the luxury of rebuilding their reserves, and hoping to use gold as a more immediate solution.

zizeeon Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of dollars

You think that the USA has never employed it's three letter agencies to protect its interests?

zizeeon 'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads

Haha, I just posted the same comment. It's always entertaining to see one doing a snatch and grab from a public bbq, and then watch them leg it with a whole sausage in their beak...

zizeeon 'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads

> There are few Australian animals more reviled than the white ibis.

I just want to say that as a Queenslander who has had Ibises run off with whole steaks brazingly zoinked straight off a sizzling bbq, I think reviled is a bit hyperbolic. I have think people mostly have a grudging respect for these bbq bandits

zizeeon Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

Thank you. Yes, I think that there is still some ways to go with making these cost efficient vs other tech. I have heard people mention similar issues that you are rightly calling out. I believe the hope is the viability of these designs relies on cost reductions that would come from mass production/ economies of scale. I don't know how realistic that is, but it does tend to happen when things get produced in greater quantities, smart people find many optimisations to reduce cost.

zizeeon Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

What is a terrorist reactor? And prompt critical?

zizeeon Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

Sorry, I'm not quite following you. Could you please ELIA5? (No snark intended)

zizeeon Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

I won't speculate on how much fear one can incite. Anything with the word nuclear in it could most lilely be enough to srir up feelings of panic. Hell, D&D was enough at one stage. So you're probably right.

But I will say that if you spread this fuel over a large area with a bomb, it will ve orders of magnitude easoer to clean up, and result in far less long te issues. It wont leach into groundwater. If you swallowed/inhaled it, whilst it wpuldnt be gpod, it wont be absorbed ibto your tissue. Same with lifestock/crops. The cleanup problem goes from almost impossible, to pretty involved.

Again, I'm no expert, so take whatever with a grain of radioactive salt :-)

zizeeon Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

Someone wrote in another thread:

> It uses TRISO fuel, which are fissionable materials enclosed in a carbon and ceramic shell that's extremely tough and can handle far higher temperatures than are present in a reactor without melting.

Each grain of fuel is about the size of a poppy seed, with the majority of the seed being the ceramic shell. It's not a dense fuel. This stops issues of radioactive material leaching into groundwater, and also makes it quite difficult to use the fuel for nefarious purposes (like a dirty bomb). Someone would need to separate the fuel from the shell, not a trivial thing to do. All this to say that it's not super attractive for terrorist types.

Also, remember that whilst they talk about using them in remote areas, it's mostly about being "remote to other infrastructure", not "remote from all people". These things will be installed in small regional towns / mine sites etc. Places where a town sized number of people will be. So it's not like it will be hours away from any first responder.

Finally, these can be secured pretty well physically. They won't be easy to move, or cut into, or siphon out the material, at least not in a smash-and-grab type scenario.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-robu...

edit: I wouldn't say they are risk free, just not as big a risk as it first sounds locating a nuclear reactor out in the middle of nowhere :-)

edit2: I'm by no means an expert, but I really liked this video on the topic on the benefits of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). I really love the concept, especially their mass produced, regularly rotated/retired nature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYnqJ4VnRM8

zizeeon Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel

1500 miles a year is a huge caveat to your earlier prouncement. Of course if you drive rarely^, an existing ICE vehicle could result in less emissions than building an entirely new EV.

^Average annual KMs driven by Europeans is 12k, Americans average 15k Miles a year.

https://short-fact.com/how-many-miles-does-the-average-europ...

zizeeon FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

Yeah, I guess I wasn't super clear. I meant seizure of certain things is fair game i.e. Obviously problematic stuff. I didn't mean to suggest that means all things are fair game to be seized.

Looking at Wikipedia's definition of civil asset I see my "in head definition is slightly wrong:

> Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture, is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing. While civil procedure, as opposed to criminal procedure, generally involves a dispute between two private citizens, civil forfeiture involves a dispute between law enforcement and property such as a pile of cash or a house or a boat, such that the thing is suspected of being involved in a crime...

So my use of clearly illegal assets being seized means it wouldn't actually be civil asset forfeiture. Mea culpa!

zizeeon FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

> I'd love to hear a steelmanned argument in favor of it, maybe I'm missing something obvious?

If it were a big shipment of plutonium laced heroin, it seems fair game.

I think the biggest issue with civil asset forfeiture is the conflict of interest where police departments are keeping/using the seized assets. From the outside it looks a lot like the government acting like a gang.

The other big problem is it seems like it is up to the owner to prove the assets "innocence", rather than police proving the assets were the result of illegal activity.

If assets are seized, they need to go to a third party that can store them safely, return the assets to their owners. If found "guilty", the assets should go to some victims of crime fund, or destroyed.

zizeeon Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

> You can pretend an entire city spending 7 days locked in their house

You do understand that people were not actually locked in their houses in NZ? There were reports of people literally being locked in to their apartments in China, but don't confuse "lock down" with "locked in" when it comes to NZ.

In practice lock downs (at least in Aus) were stopping people going into offices or non-essential places of business, or congregating in parks or other places. Whilst definitely an imposition on people, it wasn't equivalent to what was described as happening in China.

Of course they stopped it eventually because the costs were unsustainable, and it was never intended to be a permanent solution.

The whole point was to go hard at the start, get the population vaccinated, then open back up.

I haven't checked recent numbers, but last time I did, the number of deaths in NZ/AU per capita were far lower than in the US. Which you might not consider worthwhile, but we might have different value systems.

zizeeon The Quest for a Fusion Drive

There is value in creating designs that are feasible if some technological breakthroughs is made. If we manage to make fusion work, then someone can then capitalise on the existing designs. It's also a great motivator for people to work on those hard problems that could enable many fantastic possibilities. It's also just fun to let your imagination not be constrained by what is possible today, but what might be possible in the future.

zizeeon Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

> They didn't abandon zero-COVID for another 5 months (Oct 21) when they finally admitted the data showed it didn't work.

This doesn't sound right to me. I live in Australia, and we adopted a very similar policy. Lock down migration until a large percentage of the population was vaccinated. When the vaccine was rolled out, the restrictions eased. It wasn't because "the data showed it didn't work".

And fwiw "lockdown" for the most part meant restrictions on international travel. Most residents got to lead very regular lives for theozt part.

zizeeon Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

This one? Looks interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steenbras_Power_Station

The capacity of the smaller of the two dams is 3,560 megalitres. I think a 1km X 350m X 10m deep is this capacity. So "small" is fairly subjective term, but you are right that it is not gargantuan. It is still not going to be easy to place such a setup just anywhere, but I'm willing to admit my statements may have been a little too much.

I would be interested in how much it cost to build and run to obtain the 180mwh capacity. A similarly size gridscale battery would cost in the vicinity of 40-60 million USD (using the $140 per kWh cost, numbers are is hard to find for the supporting equipment and installation costs).

There is probably an inflection point where pumped storage becomes more economical than batteries. With land and labour costs so different from lace to place what makes sense in certain areas, is probably not economical in others.

https://www.morningbrew.com/series/battery-tech-for-evs-and-...

zizeeon Playstation VR2

I also never had to connect my (rift) headset to a Facebook account, but wasn't there a period when new quests needed to be connected to Facebook accounts?