MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kumarski | 2025-04-18 22:41:10+00:00
The energy required to extract, process and manufacture lithium batteries (70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves) Grid transmission losses (5-8% average, up to 15% in extreme conditions) Battery charging/discharging efficiency losses The dramatic efficiency reductions in adverse conditions (33% range loss in cold weather)

For aircraft and marine applications specifically (which was my focus), the energy density problem (60x worse than jet fuel) creates cascading inefficiencies as you need more battery weight, which requires more energy to move, which requires more batteries, and so on.

Electric cars have different economics than aircraft/boats and can make more sense in certain contexts. But my analysis was specifically about why lithium propulsion for aircraft and marine vessels faces fundamental economic and physics challenges that can't be solved with current technology.

The tires on an electric vehicle wear down about 20% faster because of the load bearing of the battery weight.
by ryanobjc | 2025-04-18 22:41:20+00:00
It's rather ironic since we know that women, poc, and more often face a lot of professional resistance, and therefore have to be better than average to succeed.

Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.

In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.
by windhaven | 2025-04-18 22:41:53+00:00
From the link: > mailed at public postal collection boxes (when possible to cram the object through the aperture) or at postal stations (if possible).

In the US, post offices generally have drop boxes outside for letters (since you normally just need a stamp), and a larger drop box for packages inside, since you can often get pre-paid labels for stuff like item returns.
by Izkata | 2025-04-18 22:42:01+00:00
> and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.

It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-18 22:42:26+00:00
I'm not sure this is terribly relevant given where the conversation has gone, but in your example, college admissions, race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.

I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).

Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-18 22:43:23+00:00
I would not recommend asking people on HN about this. You should seek out a competent mental health professional. These are serious issues, and you deserve competent help.

There are just as many people who give good advice as those that mislead you towards bad advice deceptively on HN. The latter group may actually hold dominance given what I've seen of the structural biases inherent in who gets heard overall.

Useful advice is often removed or downvoted to the point where you don't see it. This is true of all social media today post-AI.

I fully expect this post to be downvoted solely for pointing this fact out, in saying this.

You have a lot of life changes happening all at once. Your support structure is unstable as a result, and this puts extra work on you in cognitive load.

You don't mention how much time you spend on your business, family, etc, but I'd guess its more than half your time for the former most.

Did you take time off for bereavement? (mother, sister, child soon?) Have you done a bucket list?

Failing to take time needed for changes represses issues, and similar to burnout eventually you crack and succumb to the guilt and stress. Are you sure you aren't just burying your head in work trying to ignore reality?

You can only fix this by bringing the issues to the front of your attention and working through the issues, addressing them in turn. There won't be a magic bullet.

Right now, given what you've said it seems like you are trying to hide in your work. It will only get worse the longer you do this.

Repression has a complex relationship with psychosis, and that's important because eventually if you do nothing people crack.

I would suggest you bring someone on to help running the day-to-day of the business so you can take the appropriate time for these issues. Your business must be a bus factor greater than 1 so you don't have to worry about finances during these tough times.

Your lack of focus is most likely your unconscious mind telling you that you are running away from working on important issues you don't want to deal with.

You may not be able to control the circumstances, but you can control what you do about it.

The focus will return once you've worked through the personal issues. If you are unable or unaware of how to go about working on these things, you should seek competent professional help.

Be mindful though, there are many mental health professionals who are not great at their job or that competent. These people may run you in a circle.

If they aren't helping you within a few sessions and you are putting in the work, move on to a new one.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-18 22:44:27+00:00
"Small number" is doing a lot of work. Just as an example: https://heller.brandeis.edu/news/items/releases/2023/impact-...

Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-18 22:44:42+00:00
US police, in effect, are a lawless, violent, honorless, untouchable, mafia who protect and serve primarily a landed aristocracy. In some ultra-exclusive communities, city police are literally reduced to Dashers and grocery getters. Similar venues and communities in the States also pay for hybrid PMC/LE QRFs who roll with battle rattle more than body armor and long guns.
by tombert | 2025-04-18 22:44:49+00:00
I've been playing with Rust a lot in the last few weeks, and I have been pretty happy with the Rust plugins available for NeoVim. It gives me most of the features I would want from a "real" IDE, but of course it's still Vim, so all my configs and other plugins still work.

I'm convinced that the reason it's so good is because Lua is simply a better language than VimScript, making it easier to make plugins.
by svnt | 2025-04-18 22:44:53+00:00
He is for some reason comparing the levelized cost of energy. This is a metric used to analyze energy generating devices, not energy consuming devices.

His tweet says that if you wanted to buy electricity from an electric scooter and use it to run your house, it would cost the utility providing it $2 to $5/kWh, assuming that the sole function of the scooter is to provide its electricity to consumers directly.

LCOE goes up the further you get from the source, but his analysis is also based on outdated numbers and largely wrong.

That said, he isn’t totally wrong. Electric marine has a tough road ahead of itself due to the inefficiency of boats relative to cars. Boats can be calculated roughly as a car that is always going somewhat uphill.

Electric planes are a niche use case for the foreseeable future.
by muzani | 2025-04-18 22:45:14+00:00
Engineering is being good at using engines. Knowing all the systems that this engine is composed of, optimizing it, making it do what it's meant to do with minimal error, coming up with tests to verify that it does, facilitating all technical communication.

There's plenty of that work coming up. People don't like working with a completely different engine but it's inevitable; before this everyone was complaining about JS frameworks. Once the AI dust settles, it's back to spending 20 hours of the weekend learning the next framework.
by gschaible | 2025-04-18 22:45:30+00:00
Magnetotaxis in bacteria (and some protist) is passive. The organism will biomineralize a ferromagnetic mineral, such as magnetite or greigite, and in a magnetic field they will passively orientate. This is not active orientation, meaning that even when the organism is dead it will still orientate in the field.

Their movement in the magnetic field is however active. The theory behind the magnetotaxis is that it allows them to know what direction is up. In the northern hemisphere, the magnetic poles come in from above and go down. So to a bacterium, North is down.

Why care what direction North is? if you are sensitive to oxygen, which MMB are, and oxygen diffuses in from the atmosphere above, your magnetotaxis would tell you the direction to swim to get away from toxic levels of oxygen. Wild how evolution works!
by Alupis | 2025-04-18 22:45:44+00:00
Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working.

Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".

Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-18 22:46:54+00:00
Not sure what the proposal is exactly, that all there should be no international restrictions on commumications?

It feels like how a minor problem (in the sense that the app is poorly planned) is escalated into a device/os and then a country + international problem

If your goal were to fix this issue for other people on your situation, you would push for your insurance to disable geolocation instead of complaining about the existence of geolocation which is opening a can of worms you have no bearing in and don't understand.

Fix your garden before you fix the world.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-18 22:47:03+00:00
The definition I use for determinism is "same inputs and same order = same results", down to the compiler level. All modern compilers on all modern platforms that I've tested take steps to ensure that for everything except transcendental and special functions (where it'd be an unreasonable guarantee).

I'm somewhat less interested in correctness of the results, so long as they're consistent. rlibm and related are definitely neat, but I'm not optimistic they'll become mainstream.
by kumarski | 2025-04-18 22:47:06+00:00
At 10-15% conversion efficiency, you're burning 85-90% of your energy just making the damn fuel, requiring 6-7× more renewable infrastructure than direct electrification. Current production costs are $15-25/gallon (not the fairy tale $2-3/gallon of jet fuel), and the physics won't magically improve to hit their "3× oil prices by 2050" fantasy. To replace global aviation fuel would demand a staggering 32,000 TWh of new clean energy generation – that's roughly equivalent to building 900 nuclear plants just to make luxury jet fuel while the rest of the grid still burns coal.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-18 22:47:15+00:00
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.

People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.

Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?

Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
by neuroelectron | 2025-04-18 22:47:50+00:00
The way that monopolies dominate is by stagnating tech. IT tech. The driver of our economy. You're missing a decade plus of killed advancements through acquisition and extermination. The efficacy gains are theirs, we just get to larp as being better by using them. The idea that HTML5, JS standardization, web assembly etc. are important is ignoring how they are simply abstractions that maintain the status quo and add complexity that only serves builds their moat.

RSS is probably the best example. This is massively more efficient than any other thing you mentioned, which are only incrementally better. RSS saves orders of a magnitude more energy than is "saved" by modern JS which requires ever more powerful processors where older computers are simply incapable of browsing the modern web, but for some legacy websites which really highlight how "efficient" these techs you mentioned really are. The only thing they are efficient at is extracting money from users into Google's pockets and selling new iPhones.

Newer processors, massive low power RAM banks, specialized IP processors, cutting edge lithography, Webkit, Chromium, all these advancements google now claims as theirs with your logic.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-04-18 22:48:27+00:00
We know from the Snowden Leaks that they couldn't crack PGP at the time. There's been some talks about cracking "export grade" cryptography and how that is done. I'm pretty confident that the newer hardened crypto libraries are pretty secure and since even the NSA recommends signal encryption now because the infrastructure in the US has so many holes the Chinese are in the entire mobile internet infrastructure, that's a pretty strong lead that it's very hard if not impossible to crack signal, at least for the Chinese.

It's also very likely that even if they can attack crypto in ways we don't know about, they can at best reduce the required time it takes to crack a given key. Chosing extra long keys and changing them frequently should protect you from lots of attacks.
by abetusk | 2025-04-18 22:49:13+00:00
I can't find any reference to "open source" on the page. I see "free" in the title of the page but it's clear from context that this is meant as "gratis".

The "free and open source board game" in this posts title is misleading as "free" can be easily misinterpreted as "libre" (as in libre/freedom).

The title should probably be changed for this post.

EDIT: Nevermind, the 3d design files for the tiles are available under an MIT license [0] and the "where to get" page at does say "open source" (correctly) [1].

[0] https://thangs.com/designer/ZackFreedman/3d-model/Hextractio...

[1] https://www.playhextraction.com/where-to-get
by theshackleford | 2025-04-18 22:49:53+00:00
I come from a working class background, if that’s what you can call two parents who have spent most of their life on welfare of various kinds. I along with many of my white friends are now high six figure earners.

I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
by bentt | 2025-04-18 22:50:31+00:00
Let's not forget that in America, when you have a college or university, you have historically created a money funnel from the government/parents, through the students, to the city. There's an outsized incentive to cater to that opportunity and get the students accessing the business areas.

Also, American liberal culture tends to follow higher education, which not only means a desire for certain things, but also a love of rules to block "bad things". This often means preserving old cities.
by kumarski | 2025-04-18 22:51:02+00:00
Factor in complete system requirements—cooling, casings, and safety systems—that 270 Wh/kg battery delivers only 170-180 Wh/kg of usable energy.

Jet fuel still maintains an 18-19× energy density advantage (3.2 kWh/kg vs. 0.17 kWh/kg) at the system level, which explains the fundamental range limitations we're seeing in electric aircraft development.

For VTOL applications specifically, it demands 2.5-3× more energy per mile than conventional flight, electric air taxi prototypes remain limited to 60-80 mile ranges—impressive engineering, but not yet practical for replacing most aviation applications.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-18 22:51:20+00:00
> but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.

I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.

We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.
by remram | 2025-04-18 22:51:44+00:00
From their open letter:

> Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.

https://blog.23andme.com/articles/open-letter

So the buyer is bound by the same terms but they absolutely do get the data ("be part of the assets transferred" as per FreeTaxUSA's terms that we are discussing).

Do you have another reference in mind?
by johnea | 2025-04-18 22:51:54+00:00
I'm not so sure about this assessment.

But one thing I would agree with is that Li ion is not the ultimate battery chemistry.

Several others with greater density, increased cycle counts, and more readily available minerals are in development.

Of course there's BYD, which was a battery company before an EV maker:

https://engineerine.com/byd-blade-battery/

And a survey of upcoming chemistries and technologies:

https://thecalculatedchemist.com/blogs/news/the-future-of-en...

Just another indication of why we should have started emphasizing battery electric power, and the chemical research into possible solutions, 50 to 75 years ago when the problem of CO2 altering the atmosphere became scientifically indisputable.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-18 22:52:03+00:00
0. Is this retreading IRAM with more steps?

1. Did IRAM ever end up in anything remotely commercially-successful?

2. Is there any movement to eliminate or simplify memory controllers by throwing more RAM chiplets in manycore CPUs? The gradient vector in SOCs points to including a fixed amount of RAM anyhow.
by grep_name | 2025-04-18 22:52:17+00:00
> Playing an instrument is a complex skill that requires a lot of work and an expensive piece of equipment

Or it's something you just, you know, do? I listen to and play a lot of tunes from the Appalachians and you really do get the sense that just about everyone played something back in the day. They developed complex and extremely localized traditions that did not require formal music education to pass down. Some of them were musical geniuses, many were middling, just like with most things people do.

Even poor families would often have an heirloom fiddle around to learn to play on (sometimes even brought with them from Europe), and ownership of family possessions was much more communal. Many parlors or bars would have a banjo or parlor guitar around for whoever wanted to make some music while hanging around. Those without access or with limited woodworking skill also often made their own fretless banjos (which look different from what you might normally recognize as a banjo) out of wood and hide, or other simpler instruments like dulcimers. Not that there weren't also semi-skilled luthiers making non-concert-grade fiddles at more affordable prices. All this culture is well documented in the Foxfire manuals on Appalachian folk traditions, complete with schematics on how to make those things from different regions. Pretty far from 'made up'. Hell, a lot of American music traces its roots back to music made by actual slaves. It's hard to think of a group of people with less means and access to the things you've mentioned, and yet, music.

Music theory may have a nearly limitless ceiling for both complexity of understanding and expense of instruments, but your statement here completely ignores the entirety of global folk tradition. And it does seem like an accurate observation to me that participation in casual musicianship in everyday contexts has declined significantly in correlation with a lot of the trends in modern living.
by dreadsword | 2025-04-18 22:52:33+00:00
OpenAI has recently introduced its new o3 and o4-mini AI models that are integrated into ChatGPT. Reports indicate these models not only hallucinate more often than previous versions but also demonstrate an uncanny ability to determine photo locations. This duality of increased factual errors alongside unexpected geolocation proficiency has raised concerns among users and experts regarding model reliability and potential privacy implications. The coverage highlights both the technical achievements and challenges of incorporating these advanced AI capabilities.
by npc_anon | 2025-04-18 22:52:35+00:00
That's performative policy. Hungarian mothers of 3 weren't paying much or any taxes at all in the first place. Because on average they have a small or no income.

I think a better policy would be to reduce the tax burden of a couple with 3 children. This makes working quite lucrative whilst at the same time it creates the flexibility for the couple to distribute work how they see fit, whether this is a breadwinner model or more hybrid.

Pinning this to the mother doesn't work. The policy incentive is to work as much as possible whilst at the same time carrying the burden of 3 children. Not an attractive combination.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-18 22:52:36+00:00
What _doesn't_ change how you do your job ?

Does it make a difference if half a day in a month you're in pain ? Does it impact your human skills if you'll get shot by a cop if you're drunk in the middle of the night ? Will it make a difference if you go to golf with your boss or go to the same book club as your scrum master ?

You can argue whether any difference is worth it or not, but truth is we all have our opinions, we're probably right on some and wrong on other, and nobody knows exactly what actually matters. So we try to cover our bases.
by kumarski | 2025-04-18 22:52:37+00:00
<2.5% of US vehicles are electric.

I bought $AMR, $FCG, $UAN, and $POWL.

I bought $TSLA and sold almost at the top as well, but for different reasons than fundamentals. (Greenback boomerang CCP dollars etc...)

Chemistry doesn't lie and it imputes all of human behavior.
by CalculateQuick | 2025-04-18 22:52:38+00:00
I can do that.

Clarify some things for me:

“Offspring emissions” — is that just lifetime emissions of one child, or multiple generations (kids + grandkids)?

Should fertility rate be treated as a simple multiplier, or model population growth (e.g. TFR^n)?

Do you want attribution across generations (50%, 25%, etc.)?

Include discounting or just raw totals?

Outputs — just total cost, or also show emissions and breakdown?

Are values user-supplied, or should I include presets (e.g. emissions per person by region)?

Any other details?
by timschmidt | 2025-04-18 22:53:07+00:00
> but he thinks that translates into a god-like ability to do anything and that he's right about everything.

Like when this space youtuber suggested a change to his Mars rocket and he understood, accepted the validity of the idea, and decided to implement it on the spot? Er, I guess that's the opposite of what you said.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WY73exaVpyw