Hacker News: MichaelNolan

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

MichaelNolan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:30:39 +0000

I just did an install to add solar and batteries to my shed to power lights and an AC. It was pretty easy. Hardest part was flattening the ground since I did a ground mount system. 5kw panels and 5kwh of batteries. $1000 for the panels, and $1,400 for the battery and inverter. $250 for the ground mount. Plus a bunch of miscellaneous expenses (tools, wires, permits, etc). It would be cheaper if I did it again since batteries and inverters seem to get cheaper every 6 months.

Check out https://m.youtube.com/c/WillProwse and https://diysolarforum.com/

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

MichaelNolan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:35:02 +0000

The best part of a quiz everyday is that in addition to the testing effect, you can easily fit in the spacing effect and interleaving effect. It’s a rock solid combo, that is well studied. We have pretty strong evidence that it works for all students in all domains.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident"

MichaelNolan — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:33:54 +0000

Apparently there is a way to solve this without brute forcing all the combinations. It has to do with looking at how many even an odd numbers there are, and taking into account the goal number is odd. And then thinking through the combinations [even-even=even, even-odd=odd,…]

Though this is obviously not something I would expect a 4th grader to solve.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Just Use Go"

MichaelNolan — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:05:07 +0000

Hmm, they misspelled Gleam.

In seriousness, Go is a good choice. Or at least it’s not a bad choice, I’d definitely pick go over many other languages. If go had a better type system, it would be damn near perfect.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:50:25 +0000

I’m trying to use my phone less and less. Ideally I’d like to even switch a dumb phone.

But tactics like this will make that nearly impossible if every website starts requiring a QR code scan on a authorized smartphone.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "AI Product Graveyard"

MichaelNolan — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:19:34 +0000

List is missing OpenAI’s Sora.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

MichaelNolan — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:33:25 +0000

> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI.

Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Zed 1.0"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:44:57 +0000

I tried zed sometime ago, and the limiting factor was devcontainer support. It looks like they’ve made some progress there https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers

New comment by MichaelNolan in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

MichaelNolan — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:17:37 +0000

I’ve never worked with SmallTalk professionally, so I could be mistaken. I know you can write/compile SmallTalk source code. But my understanding is that this wasn’t the way it’s intended to be used. I am under the impression that the live images were how the language designers intended it to be used. And that the live images are a better representation of the OOP/message passing paradigm.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

MichaelNolan — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:06:33 +0000

I’ve very slowly been trying to do the “99 problems” list in each of these languages groups. It’s been a fun experience seeing the differences. Though I think I would need a larger, less algorithmic, project to really see each group’s strengths. Especially for the OOP group.

One thing the article didn’t touch on was SmallTalk’s live visual environment. It’s not a normal source code / text language.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:03:47 +0000

> Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800

Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go"

MichaelNolan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:07:12 +0000

> But I keep wondering if they could integrate at a lower-level than the source code.

I’m sure they could, but targeting go source code has the benefit of giving early adopters an escape hatch. If it targeted LLVM directly, I would never consider using this at work since the risk of it being abandoned is too high. But since it targets go source, I would perhaps consider it for some low importance projects at work.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:13:39 +0000

How big of an install are you looking to do? I just did a ground mount install on my property. (4kw panels, 5kwh battery) If you are good with your hands, and can follow instructions then I would recommend you do the work your self. The actual installation of the panels and battery are close to plug n play. The cost of an electrician can easily double the project costs for small projects.

For the panels I did whatever was cheapest on signature solar. For batteries and inverter I did eco-worthy. (eBay for that, they run sales pretty often) in total is was $1000 for the panels (that included delivery) and around $1200 for the battery and inverter. If you have a truck then you might be able to find cheaper panels locally.

On YouTube check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse. He is a certified electrician and publishes part lists and plans that are easy to follow.

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:04:58 +0000

Kind of a weird headline. It makes it sound like this just happened. But it happened almost 2 years ago. Reading the article is also a bit confusing. I finally figured out they are only referring to utility scale solar and not total solar (utility plus behind the meter)

My overlay of the data: https://eia.languagelatte.com/

Raw data: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

MichaelNolan — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:55:08 +0000

> Waymo fatalities: 0

By some measures Waymo is actually at -1 fatalities. There has been one confirmed birth of a child in a Waymo. https://apnews.com/article/baby-born-waymo-san-francisco-6bd...

New comment by MichaelNolan in "White House defends sharing AI image showing arrested woman crying"

MichaelNolan — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:36:59 +0000

Direct link instead of live view - https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ce9yydgmzdvt?post=asset%3Aaec7...

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Uber Faces Growing Pressure over Sexual Assault Record"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:01:45 +0000

Uber does offer a similar setting in some markets. It took a while to roll out in the US because of legal uncertainties. So Uber waited until the feds gave them a promise that no action would be taken related to offering a “women only” or “women preferred” feature.

The mother of all demo apps

MichaelNolan — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:48:22 +0000

Article URL: https://codebase.show/projects/realworld

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46679590

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Htmx: High Power Tools for HTML"

MichaelNolan — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:38:00 +0000

If you’re using Alpine already, then is there a good reason to use HTMX over alpine Ajax? They both look quite similar to me, but I don’t do enough front end work to tell the difference.

https://alpine-ajax.js.org/comparisons/

New comment by MichaelNolan in "Was it a billion dollar mistake?"

MichaelNolan — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:48:12 +0000

> The real problem with Java in particular is you'd end up chaining calls ... and have no idea from the error or the logs what was broken from: a.b.c.d();

That’s been solved since Java 14. (5 years ago) Now the error will tell you exactly what was null.

And “soon” Java will have built in support for expressing nullability in the type system. Though with existing tools like NullAway it’s already (in my opinion) a solved problem.