Hacker News: cbmuser

New comment by cbmuser in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

cbmuser — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:05:40 +0000

Might be because the article doesn’t tell you the whole story.

New comment by cbmuser in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

cbmuser — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:04:53 +0000

Well, it’s HN. People love to spread articles that push renewables. In the meantime, France has the cleanest and cheapest electricity among the large countries in Europe.

New comment by cbmuser in "1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant"

cbmuser — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:45:33 +0000

France is proving every day that load-following is a thing for nuclear reactors.

I don’t understand why people keep spreading this nonsense.

Just stop it, it’s simply untrue!

New comment by cbmuser in "1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant"

cbmuser — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:43:52 +0000

A nuclear power plant cannot free all of its energy at once as the fuel enrichment is too low for an exponential excursion of power, i.e. an explosion.

New comment by cbmuser in "1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant"

cbmuser — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:42:13 +0000

The nearby nuclear power plant produced these 6 GWh every four and a half hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and more than 8000 days of the year.

New comment by cbmuser in "3.4M Solar Panels"

cbmuser — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:07:05 +0000

»We're off grid and have 7kw of panels, and 40kwh of 48v lithium batteries, with a generator for backup, which is rarely used since we are frugal with electricity and switch everything off when not in use.«

Good for you, but this is neither a concept for large cities nor for the industry.

New comment by cbmuser in "EFF is leaving X"

cbmuser — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:57:53 +0000

I find it hard to believe that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have almost the exact same number of users. This seems to be skewed data.

New comment by cbmuser in "EFF is leaving X"

cbmuser — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:53:51 +0000

Would you call it free speech if the whole world was able to track your position anywhere in the world 24/7?

New comment by cbmuser in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

cbmuser — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:24:18 +0000

> What you should do instead is write all your code so it is little-endian only, as the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x, and if someone wants to run your code on s390x, they can afford a support contract.

Or you can just be a nice person and make your code endian-agnostic. ;-)

New comment by cbmuser in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

cbmuser — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:06:44 +0000

Compare the price and carbon density of the French electricity grid with that of California to understand why that rebuttal is justified.

New comment by cbmuser in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

cbmuser — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:04:10 +0000

Capacity doesn’t matter, generation does.

New comment by cbmuser in "Solar is winning the energy race"

cbmuser — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:15:57 +0000

»In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.«

Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.

Sounds like a fair system.

New comment by cbmuser in "Solar is winning the energy race"

cbmuser — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:14:41 +0000

Yeah, just build a 300 GW transmission line from the US to Europe. It will basically costs nothing.

New comment by cbmuser in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

cbmuser — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:18:25 +0000

> It is just so much simpler with electricity.

Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.

We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.

New comment by cbmuser in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

cbmuser — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:15:17 +0000

Unless you produce it using the Sulfur-Iodine cycle in a high-temperature nuclear reactor.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle

and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...

New comment by cbmuser in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

cbmuser — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:49:33 +0000

I'm not sure why your comment is being downvoted, but it's spot on.

Rust has definitely gained some ground while they're hardly any relevant products using Zig.

New comment by cbmuser in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

cbmuser — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:44:30 +0000

A new software stack isn't free. Someone has to maintain it.

And if the new software stack just improves a fraction of the ecosystem, it isn't worth the effort.

New comment by cbmuser in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

cbmuser — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:42:42 +0000

> As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it.

It's another language stack that would need to be maintained within Linux distributions for years to come (security support, architecture support etc).

Upstream developers always seem to assume that there is no cost associated to introducing new software stacks. But in the end, someone has to maintain it. And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.

And I'm not sure what's so revolutionary about Zig that couldn't have been solved by improving other languages.

For Zig in particular, the language isn't even stable enough that you can compile packages like Ghostty with any recent version of the Zig compiler. It has to be a very specific version of the compiler.

New comment by cbmuser in "Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support"

cbmuser — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:35:36 +0000

SysVInit on Linux isn’t true Unix though as the way it abuses runlevels to start daemons was never intended by the original designers of init.

New comment by cbmuser in "Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support"

cbmuser — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:34:25 +0000

SysVInit is abusing runlevel scripts for starting daemons which has always been a hack to be able to resolve dependencies between daemons.

Learning Linux or Unix from scratch shouldn’t include using crude hacks.