zizee

The recent launch of the Quest Pro was clearly focussing on use cases other than games, and the pro's resolution and pancake lenses appear to be now reached "good enough" to work with/read text in.

I'm assuming you understand that my statements have a implicit "from an economic pov" when I argue about the practicality of pumped hydro storage, and you're arguing that it is economical to do pumped hydro on a small scale.

My understanding is that it only becomes competitive with other options at a very large scale. A 10 m deep football sized reservoir, at an altitude of 1km above the generator would have approx 13Mwh of energy storage at 100% efficiency (if my math is correct). Battery prices are around $140 per kWh, so a 13 Mwh battery installation is going to be in the vicinity of 2 million dollars.

I would love to see some costs involved in building two man made ten meter deep football field size dams, a large 1km length (it will be quite a lot longer due to it running on a slope) with all the required engineering to run it down a steep incline. The add to that the and generating equipment, and pumps.

Once you've done that, we could compare the operating costs of the two options.

On the depth thing, I really only meant to mean you need lots and lots of water. You could have a shallow basis, and take over a huge area of land, or or smaller amount of land if you have deeper water. Deeper also allows for less evaporation, less land area.

Perhaps your and my definitions of favourable geography are different. You need a water source, due to evaporation, you need a big resovoir at elevation, and another lower. If you don't want to build it all yourself you need valleys that you can close off at one end. You need ground that is not permeable, so the water you have stays where you want it.

Perhaps I am misreading you, but you seem a bit agitated with your in fact writing style. We're all friends here. I am not anti pumped storage. Far from it. If you can make it work economically, it's a great solution. It will definitely be part of the mix. But there's reasons it's not being rolled out everywhere, and a lot of this is due to cost and unfavorable geography.

Pumped hydro needs to be truely massive scale, both in the amount of water (read: lots of depth AND surface area), and the height differential between the two reservoirs. To make it cost feasible we really need very favourable natural geography. Building such structures ourselves would be astronomically expensive.

Perhaps. But this stuff does raise the minimum amount it takes to build, which in turn makes developers less likely to invest in building affordable housing.

> You do know that the hospital doesn't get paid for organs donated, right? I have no idea what incentives you think they have to kill you.

Believe it or not, money is not the only motivator of people. Wanting to help someone you have a stronger relationship with (because one patient can communicate, the other cannot) could be incentive enough for some people. And doctors are, in the end, just people.

I am not suggesting that most doctors would do this, or even a sizable percentage, but it would be reassuring that measures would be in place to ensure what the GP is talking about cannot happen. I suspect everyone realises this, and there are actually systems in place to protect organ donors against harvesting whilst still alive.

Edit: this comment suggests the GP's fears are not so far fetched https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300503 EEP!

> BMW and Toyota have hydrogen cars.

How many have shipped? How many gas stations are pumping hydrogen?

> most people can't charge them

And yet there are millions of them on the road, with numbers always increasing.

The strength of EVs, and why they will win over hydrogen is that they can be adopted regardless of what the majority are doing, incremental instead of big bang. There is a sizable market of people who can charge EVs. This number is only going to grow as more and more apartments/carpark are being fitted with chargers (which people have already said are not a necessity). It's not a small task, but it can be done gradually, unlike hydrogen. Unless you get some massive coordinated effort between multiple car companies and gas stations to roll out hydrogen refil stations across an entire country in preparation for hoped for sales, people just won't buy them. EV naysayers love to talk about range anxiety for EVs. Imagine the range anxiety if you had a hydrogen vehicle today.

> Why is hydrogen dead?

Car manufacturers are all releasing EVs. How many are really mass producing hydrogen vehicles?

It's a scale and chicken/egg (or two sides market) problem.

Gas stations won't convert until there is a decent number of hydrogen cars on the road (in the area the station is in), and people won't buy hydrogen vehicles if there are no stations to refill at. Manufacturers won't be able to scale production to make the investment worthwhile. EVs do not suffer from this problem as there are many people already in a position to easily charge at home (yes, I know it is not everyone, but it's a large enough market to be self sufficient).

For scale, I'll posit that there isn't room for three different types of power systems. Car companies won't want to invest in hydrogen because it's clear that there will be a significant percentage of people wanting EVs. The market for hydrogen cars will always be shrinking, because EV adoption will always be growing.

Gas station business models are finely tuned, with most of their revenue from convenience goods, petrol sales are just the mechanism to get people into the store to impulse buy. EVs will play havoc with this model. Less people will go to the stations as they will charge at home, causing a feedback loop of stations closing, and ICE vehicles becoming less convenient. It will also result in less money to invest in things like hydrogen tanks and pumps.

The number of EVs is only going to continue to grow, the window for hydrogen gets smaller and smaller (and I think already closed).

> Then there is the vandalism issue and mantaince problems involved.

Not really sure what this means. Presumably you are not talking about the EVs themselves as they require a lot less maintenance than ICE vehicles.

> Only if you are rich dose EVs make sense. But on a mass scale they make close to zero sense.

EVs continue to get cheaper and cheaper. Eventually it just won't make buy new ICE vehicles, even if you have to spend thousands to put in charging infrastructure.

Perhaps it will be only the "rich" who can adopt EVs at the start, but when the majority of new cars are EV, eventually the pool of 2nd hand ICE vehicles will become mostly EVs as well. It's inevitable.

As another top level comment stated, in a lot of circumstances you can make do with charging an EV from a normal outlet.

The post was mostly about the challenges with regulations/codes. For the most part it was a plea for governments to smooth over the jankiness they introduce to the whole process. Hardly an insurmountable challenge.

Hydrogen is dead. Upgrading the existing electrical network gradually over time (EV adoption will be gradual) is going to be significantly easier than building a distribution network from (almost) scratch as would be required for hydrogen. To think the reverse is bonkers.

Sounds good, but just don't be surprised if this results in more expensive rents, and less affordable housing being built.

> I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal).

Surely it's a combination of nurture AND nature. It's likely some people are just born smarter than others, much like people are born with the "right stuff" to go further in athletic pursuits. Just like athletic training would play a part in the end result combined with natural athletic potential. It seems crazy to me that people would think that every brain starts as a blank slate, with the same potential, with the end result being purely due to education.

I know that people are worried that even admitting it is a possibility immediately invites ideas of eugenics/racism, but surely we can entertain this idea without the discussion devolving into us goosestepping into oblivion.

From your links:

> When it comes to greenhouse gasses alone, the contribution of rocket launches is rather negligible, accounting for only 1% of aviation's carbon footprint — which in itself only amounts to 2.4% of annual global carbon emissions, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Apart from the fact they overinflated the impact to 1% (there is no way it is close to 1%) there is a reason they chose the adjective "negligible" to describe the impact.

> Eventually, the circulation of the atmosphere dissipates those greenhouse gases and brings the concentrations back to "standard" levels. It is, however, unknown how long the concentrations remain elevated and what their impact on the temperature of the mesosphere could be.

Reality is that these scientists did a simulation, got some results that can be made to sound alarming, but just don't know if these is any inpact. I'm all for studying this more to see if there is a real issue. My gut says it's not going to be a problem until we have at least a couplr of orders of magnitude increase in launches, but it's worth looking at it further.

And I'm not sure why you included the graph of objects in orbit? This looks exciting, but it really is just that companies are now launching clusters of smaller satellites. The good news is that these tend to deorbit in under ten years. Unlike practices of old, this new style of satellite will not result in long lasting space junk.

Finally, what is the point of including a graph of airline flights over time? What bearing does it have on rocket launches?

Naive eh? What "nasty things" do you think are released into "every layer of atmosphere"?

Since we're specifically talking about SpaceX and Starlink, let's talk about Falcon and StarShip rockets. Let's look at the "long list of very nasty things".

Falcon 9 is expecting to launch a record number of flights this year, recent reports suggesting 52. Falcon 9 burns RP1 (a refined kerosene, very similar to jet fuel), a hydrocarbon that mostly produces CO2 when burnt, but also Carbon monoxide, and plain old carbon. The Falcon 9 has about 200k litres of fuel when fully loaded. It sounds like a lot, but for perspective a fully loaded Airbus A380 has a fuel capacity of 380k litres. So, they output of a record breaking year will be the equivalent of around 25 long distance flights of a large passenger aircraft. I'm not going to find out how many long distance large plan flights are happening, but many estimates are over 100k a day. So a record breaking year outputs a fraction of a percentage that airline flights do each hour. And the "nasty" stuff is mostly CO2, CO, and C.

Starship will burn Methane, and will burn even cleaner than Falcon 9. It will also be fully reusable, resulting in less waste again. On the downside, methane is a potent greenhouse gas, so any unburt fuel would be not great. That said, rockets are designed to make the most efficient of fuel, and any unburt fuel is not going to be released in normal operation.

> I'm no rocket engineer

Colour me shocked!

As for going through "every layer" of the atmosphere, I wouldn't get too worried about that. A lot of a rocket's fuel is burnt at lower altitudes (the same level at which passenger and military Jets operate) and the various zone mix readily, and are really so massive that you would have trouble measuring the impact of hundreds to thousands of flights of Starship per year.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13082/calculate-fa...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/what-is-the-environmental... https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/what-is-the-environmental...

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32002/what-percent...

> And all of that adds to maybe 100k customers.

Those 100k customers are not like the others. Commercial, government, and military customers will pay FAR more per connection than an everyday customer.

You make it sound like they are being extremely misleading, and yet the page you linked to has this text in bold:

> Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of Services are not guaranteed. Actual speeds will likely be lower than the maximum speeds during times of high usage. Starlink may temporarily reduce speeds if our network is congested.

On the "big enough market" question, passenger aircraft, and commercial shipping, and US military make for a compelling business case in of themselves. Each of these use cases have customers that will pay over the odds for a reliable connection to remote areas.

This is not what the grandparent meant, and also not what anyone sane means when discussing establishing off world colonies. They are talking about an insurance policy if we happen to get hit by an asteroid, or world war III breaks out, or a devastating pandemic, or any number of other civilization (or life) ending events.

No one wants the bad thing to happen, but instead they are saying "wouldn't it be smart to have redundancy". They're also not saying "ignore trying to save the environment because we have mars". It is very likely any effort to make mars into a habitable planet would dwarf fixing problems here on earth.

They're also not suggesting spending a significant amount of our resources on Mars, to the detriment of life here on earth.

Others have pointed out things wrong with that doomsday predicting Twitter thread. I wanted to add a couple of things

* Rocket launches are a rounding error on co2 emissions when compared to passenger aircraft

* the worries about Kessler syndrome whilst simultaneously worrying about tonnes of aluminum and rare earth minerals (gasp) due to the short orbital lifetime of the satellites are contradictory.

* Presumably astronomers are more worried about light pollution rather than ecological concerns

On a side note, what is it about people hyping up rare earth materials? The twitter thread tries to make them sound scary. Others try to make them sound harder to find than gold.

This does not break down how much money is spent on development of Firefox. I don't have references, but there has been many a discussion about Firefox development being only a small fraction of the whole, and the majority being spent on questionable endeavors (or perhaps I am thinking of Wikipedia?)

> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.

> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas

Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and failing to identify significant market niches.

I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant portion of the worlds population has never experienced a blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.

If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies. That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as your product utility increases to service broader markets.

I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.

For all it's evils, single use plastic prevents a lot of food spoilage, and could be considered good for the environment on a certain axis.

(yes I am aware that it's very existence changes how people behave, probably enabling wasteful behaviour)

Classic HN. Can you really not conceive any benefits? Is your imagination so limited that it does not extend to seeing that other people have different use cases to you? Yes there are clearly drawbacks, but there are obvious benefits.

For me, with three children that take sandwiches to school for lunch, it's all about convenience. I don't need one more minor complication getting them ready each day.

Some well meaning advice: being able to put yourself in other people's position, seeing from their perspective is an invaluable life skill. It is extremely useful in personal and professional settings, and it is very worthwhile to develop.

> then removed at the behest of a hereditary monarch thousands of miles away. That sounds like abuse

You forgot to mention the part where Australia immediately held an election. The poor victimised Labour party, who you would have us believe was wrongly removed, lost the vote by a landslide.

If the people wanted Whitlam's government, and thought it was a grave injustice, they would have voted them back in. They were clearly unpopular given the election results. The end result was decided by the people, not the Queen/Governor General/Liberals.

For some reason your making the assumption EVs and related infrastructure are not improving all the time. ICE cars are not improving very much, where EVs are getting cheaper each year. Eventually there will be cheaper options, and a 2nd hand market. Eventually there will be heavy duty trucks. Eventually there will be options with generous seating capacity.

Yes there are some people that love the roar of a v7, some people think the choice is political. But the vast majority don't give a shit. It will come down to function and economics. Eventually EVs will beat out ICEs in more an more usecases per $ spent, and then many of the people holding out for ideological reasons will switch because they're friends and family are all driving them.

There will eventually be a tipping point where gas stations start shutting down because of EV becoming a significant part of the market, which I think will start a feedback loop. Gas stations that survive on slim margins will be uneconomical with 20% EV adoption, will either shut down or raise prices. This will make it worse to own an ICE for more people, that will switch to EVs. Then more stations are out under pressure, rinse and repeat.

> Sometimes it feels like there is a group of EV elites out there that are predicting the complete demise of ICEs while conveniently downplaying the problem of charging access.

I see the opposite. Every single discussion of EVs, people come out of the woodwork with all the edgecases/usecaes where current EVs don't fare so favourably to ICEs.

Guess what! EVs don't have to be perfect in every scenario to be better for a growing number of people. The cars and infrastructure continue to improve, and the number of edgecase are slowly falling like dominos.

Range not suitable for people that are regularly driving 1000km commutes? Lots of people have driving habits where a > 200km trip is a rarity. And available range keeps increasing as the tech improves.

Battery charging not so great in places with subzero temperatures have the year? Lots of people live in warmer climates. No doubt, someone is looking at improved battery chemistries or thermal regulation to help here.

Can't charge at home because you live in a studio apartment with no off street parking? There a lot of people that own their own homes, or have apartments with off-street parking. Meanwhile more charging stations are being installed at shopping centres, businesses, in reserved on street parking.

Why do people think EVs have to serve every single person perfectly before we'll see adoption? Why do they think the cars and infrastructure is going to remain static going forward? This transition is going to happen over a 10-20 year period as EVs improve, and old ICE cars are retired. It's not all happening next year.

Personally, I will buy one as soon as I have determined they make the most sense for me, just like everyone will. For some, that will be now, for others it will be five years from now, for some it will be 20 years from now.

Maps originated in Australia, originally developed by an Australian company Where 2 Technologies employing two Danish brothers in Sydney.

> Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.[9] In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc.[10] where it transformed into the web application Google Maps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions

Like Crowded House and pavlova, Australians will claim anything good originating in New Zealand as our own :-p

> What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian?

There are plenty of wellknown tech/software companies originating in Australia. Xero, Freelancer, Canva, REA Group, MYOB, Airtasker, BigCommerce, Afterpay...

Many foreign software companies have development teams in Aus as well. Google, Zendesk, Square, Squarespace spring to mind.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/the-top-50-tech-c...

Yes, I think I was missing your point.

I think that your thrust was that smaller average household sizes means more dwellings are required. This is a good point.

Shrinking average household sizes could be explained by the shrinking size of the average family, or it could be explained by shifting expectations, by people wanting more.

If you take a population where all single people are willing to live in share houses, your average size of your household goes up. If all the single people expect to live in their own apartment because they want their own space, own bathroom/kitchen, then this would drive down the average household size.

I would expect both of these dynamics to be at play here. Average family sizes are decreasing in most developed countries. People's expectations have also risen with regards to housing.

I wonder what effect each has on the demand for housing in Portugal?

BTW: Your personal example is possibly a good example of shifting expectations in society, whether you recognise it or not. Every sibling moved into a place by themselves? Did no one move into a sharehouse? I probably do not live in the same country as you, but it used to be in my country that when you first move out of home it is not the norm to live by yourself. What's the norm these days?