Hacker News: d_silin

New comment by d_silin in "Sodium-ion batteries approach cost parity with LFP"

d_silin — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 01:36:23 +0000

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22858

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-rise-of-lithium-ion-bat...

Early Li-ion battery tech was developed by none other than Exxon itself (in second link)

New comment by d_silin in "Sodium-ion batteries approach cost parity with LFP"

d_silin — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:32:13 +0000

Exactly the same as today.

Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.

Project "Ares" – start to colonize Mars in 10 years, for a $42B budget

d_silin — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 04:23:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX00YRuLPDI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50348038

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by d_silin in "SpaceX No longer needs NASA"

d_silin — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:32:36 +0000

What are the rest of US launch vehicles doing?

* SLS (NASA) - operational (for Artemis missions only).

* Electron (Rocket Lab) - operational.

* Vulcan Centaur (ULA) - return to flight scheduled for November 2026.

* New Glenn (Blue Origin) - return to flight scheduled for December 2026.

* Antares 300 (Northrop Grumman) - under development, first flight NET 2027.

* Terran R (Relativity Space) - under development, first flight end of 2026(?).

* Neutron (Rocket Lab) - under development, first flight NET 2027.

* Firefly Alpha Block II (Firefly Aerospace) - under development, first flight Q1 2027

* Nova (Stoke Space) - under development, first flight NET 2027

New comment by d_silin in "The importance of communities around software"

d_silin — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:09:22 +0000

LLM don't care. Humans do, but humans with LLMs are more prone to "drive-by" style of software development or substituting "expensive" ingredient (human time and attention) with "cheap" one (LLM tokens).

New comment by d_silin in "The importance of communities around software"

d_silin — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:54:05 +0000

The longer I think about the impact of AI on software development, the more I see parallels between "pets" and "cattle" types of software projects. Or more aptly, fine china and disposable styrofoam plates. LLM-based development allows large-scale production of essentially disposable software. Which is fine for many business cases - software is a cost for them. Even with software as products, it makes sense to optimize production costs.

But open-source software is far more about the process than the product. And therefore longevity of resulting software can be expected to be far greater. Foundations of our software stack - libraries, source control operating systems, compilers, databases and numerous other pieces require people capable and willing to do a long-term care of the software - hence, the community that need to last decades. Linux and PostgreSQL is 35 years old, git is 21, OpenSSL 28.

I believe human-only software development will remain for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of LLM-based ones, just like mass-produced grocery bread didn't displace the artisanal bakeries.

New comment by d_silin in "New Dwarf Planet Candidate in Our Solar System"

d_silin — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:01:32 +0000

Bigger than Ceres, btw. Who knows many of those drift in icy, cold darkness of Kuiper belt and beyond.

New comment by d_silin in "Global warming will breach 1.5°C – but deep, fast cuts can still bring it back"

d_silin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:42:09 +0000

Considering rapid rise in demand for power generation due to AI boom across developed world, there will be no deep and fast cuts.

On the other side I suggest avoiding "doom and gloom" mentality - Earth's biosphere will be fine at up to +10C.

New comment by d_silin in "Abolish AI Manifesto"

d_silin — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:51:25 +0000

"You can't fix social issues through tech axis"

LLMs are not AGM (though some have internal monologue)

d_silin — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:51:01 +0000

Article URL: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2026/10/15/llms-are-not-agm-though-some-have-internal-monologue/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110870

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by d_silin in "Hiking the world in search of rare cheeses"

d_silin — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 03:54:29 +0000

It is quite good.

2026 Mars Society International Convention

d_silin — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:18:39 +0000

Article URL: https://convention.marssociety.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013191

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by d_silin in "Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager"

d_silin — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:36:44 +0000

There is an observation that donated organs sync to a biological age of the recipient.

https://www.inc.com/lucia-auerbach/can-transplanted-heart-be...

New comment by d_silin in "Our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is in orbit"

d_silin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:41:57 +0000

Doing compute in space for ML is perfectly possible (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi-Sat-2), making it competitive with terrestrial compute is a much harder question to solve.

New comment by d_silin in "GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design"

d_silin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:14:57 +0000

I am very skeptical about benevolence of our future overlords, humans or AI, towards people they don't need anymore.

New comment by d_silin in "GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design"

d_silin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:36:51 +0000

The point stands, though. Senior engineers can detach themselves from implementation details because more junior engineers still do the hard parts. In the AI case, agents are the "engineers". Eventually all competency will be within AI domain and none within human one.

Why people are so eager to surrender their birthright to the machines for the mess of pottage?

New comment by d_silin in "Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea"

d_silin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:27:20 +0000

Identifying what social policies work best in the long-term, hopefully. Or why certain cultural patterns persist and how they contribute to the society well-being.

New comment by d_silin in "Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea"

d_silin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:02:44 +0000

I was thinking of applying partially ordered set theory to social science. Order theory assumes only comparison operation ("less than" or "greater than") is possible to perform on the elements of the sets, so ordering is possible, but the values themselves can be completely non-measurable.

New comment by d_silin in "Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea"

d_silin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:51:32 +0000

Almost any ideology, no matter how noble and inspiring, can be hijacked by the worst kind of people for their own selfish wants.

How to fix this problem?

SCP 06F6

d_silin — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:53:11 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_06F6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49846979

Points: 1

# Comments: 0