Hacker News: a115ltd

New comment by a115ltd in "Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids"

a115ltd — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:06:14 +0000

Nice. On Octopus Agile in GB the price already tracks the mix (roughly 2.2x day-ahead wholesale), so the carbon-aware tariff exists in the wild.

What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.

New comment by a115ltd in "Backtrack-Free Cursive"

a115ltd — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:48:58 +0000

It's the accepted view of scholars and the accepted EU stance.

New comment by a115ltd in "Backtrack-Free Cursive"

a115ltd — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:38:50 +0000

This is unrelated to the main thesis of the article, but worth pointing out as too many people equate the Cyrillic script with Russian language.

The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.

And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.

New comment by a115ltd in "To Restore an Island Paradise, Add Fungi"

a115ltd — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:40:42 +0000

To an extent, yes. I'd say the difference is government systems. A single organism, or something like the human body, has more evolved, more sophisticated government mechanisms. The body is mostly a cooperative civilisation of cells. Of course, there's still natural competition among them, in many shapes and forms. The cells are held together in a coherent, agile, resilient organism by governance systems strong enough to keep internal Darwinism from becoming civil war.

New comment by a115ltd in "Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks"

a115ltd — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 23:11:02 +0000

This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary: language is far from arbitrary labels for things.

New comment by a115ltd in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

a115ltd — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:21:31 +0000

The exact point I'm making is that this is NOT the case! US has super strong financial control over most of the world in a way which is NOT connected to the strength of the US currency.

New comment by a115ltd in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

a115ltd — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:26:31 +0000

Is the US dollar losing its dominance? The answer is both A) yes and B) it doesn't matter.

Yes, US dollar is losing a bit of power and influence. This is likely to continue.

Making inferences about the US global dominance based on this fact is misguided. US global dominance is as strong as ever and, if anything, getting stronger. US has very successfully managed to move the game a level above currency, to direct governance via financial, legal, political and military means. It has made any meaningful competitors either entirely irrelevant (e.g. Russia), pretty well aligned (e.g. India) or pretty well contained (e.g. China) It's blue skies ahead.

The Global Gas Market

a115ltd — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:42:05 +0000

Article URL: https://a115.co.uk/global-gas-market/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666986

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Physical Foundations of Energy Commodities

a115ltd — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:17:13 +0000

Article URL: https://a115.co.uk/physical-foundations-energy-commodities/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659210

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by a115ltd in "Deloitte hit by cyber-attack revealing clients’ emails"

a115ltd — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:01:26 +0000

Ah, yes, the reputable Gartner. The rankers of all things, who around 2014 wanted to include our small one-employee IT consultancy that nobody-had-ever-heard-of as a global thought leader on the subject of "Agile", for the modest compensation of about £80,000.

Come to think of it, should have taken the deal and ran with it.

New comment by a115ltd in "US bans Kaspersky software in federal agencies amid concerns of Russian spying"

a115ltd — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 07:53:11 +0000

Why was the other side of the story banned on HN, but this one allowed?

This is retaliation for Kaspersky showing the middle finger to CIA backdoors, as was reported in multiple non-western news outlets over the past week.