Hacker News: andygates

New comment by andygates in "Is my plane a 737 MAX?"

andygates — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 17:56:19 +0000

I'm really not sure you can amortize deaths like that to individuals. Folks are dead or they're not.

New comment by andygates in "Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise"

andygates — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 14:00:06 +0000

Deep geological time isn't very relevant to human civilisations. The Fall Of Civilisations podcast has great long deep dives into what does threaten them, and the score is about 50:50 between climate change and Outside Context Problems.

New comment by andygates in "U.S. Air Force Creates Completely New Drone for Ukraine, in 2 Months"

andygates — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 11:58:18 +0000

"siri, what is a proxy war?"

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:17:17 +0000

Nothing runs at 99.99; 85% is a realistic nuclear reactor uptime. And remember to have multiple gensets so you can take them offline for maintenance.

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:16:02 +0000

Variability is smoothed with diverse overbuild and robust inteconnects (sorry, Texas).

Batteries are needed for peaker plants, like gas is used now. But they don't need to be everywhere.

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:14:18 +0000

Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:07:41 +0000

Interesting word choice "consumable" versus "parts require maintenance".

One suggests a lie, the other is just SOP in any plant with moving parts. Are you sure you're an engineer?

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:02:55 +0000

The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgency.

New comment by andygates in "Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution"

andygates — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:00:47 +0000

"Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.

New comment by andygates in "NASA's helicopter survives first freezing night on Mars"

andygates — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 14:29:24 +0000

It's a technology demonstrator, and one of the technologies it is demonstrating is "survive the night". Does the heating, panel and charge management all work as expected? Repeat! Then fly once the daily charge-state is understood.

New comment by andygates in "Is that ship still stuck?"

andygates — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:54:03 +0000

This looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.

New comment by andygates in "Is that ship still stuck?"

andygates — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:41:55 +0000

That's the most obvious part of the grounding, but the ship is properly wedged at both ends. It's not the whole problem.

New comment by andygates in "SpaceX SN9 Explodes on Landing"

andygates — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 10:42:05 +0000

That’s just a bit of wraparound suction flame, no big deal.

New comment by andygates in "SpaceX SN9 Explodes on Landing"

andygates — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 10:39:54 +0000

The landing propellant comes from very small header tanks (to reduce slosh), and those tank sizes constrain how long they can run a landing burn. Future iterations may end up with a bigger header: these are still early prototypes.

New comment by andygates in "Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK"

andygates — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:35:56 +0000

The other key take-home is that nobody got a serious case so that's 100% effective at preventing the collapse of the healthcare systems of the world.

It's really good news all round.

New comment by andygates in "Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK"

andygates — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:33:23 +0000

Yes. The wacky back-seat epidemiology is new with the many vaccine candidates. Most people won't get an actual choice, they'll be offered what their healthcare provider offers and they can take it or leave it.

New comment by andygates in "UK centralised contact-tracing app probably won't work well, may be illegal"

andygates — Tue, 05 May 2020 12:40:03 +0000

Kudos and good feelings, and probably operating costs going forward. Palantir's shady reputation could benefit from some good feelings.

New comment by andygates in "Detroit to restore water to allow people to wash hands to avoid coronavirus"

andygates — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 11:56:06 +0000

Bzzt! It pegs critical care facilities if not contained and then a lot of people die.

New comment by andygates in "App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested"

andygates — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 13:19:59 +0000

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

New comment by andygates in "Lego ISS"

andygates — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 14:24:44 +0000

A year after the Curiosity rover, they were out of stock and being resold at a handy markup on ebay. Hopefully the 2020 rover will get a model too so I can get it in time. I'd advise not to sleep on this.