Hacker News: deepnotderp

New comment by deepnotderp in "Who invented the transistor?"

deepnotderp — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:51:25 +0000

> t also required just the right combination of natural resources (coal) and economic conditionsL deforestation

This argument is repeated often, but I don't think it's really true. Both Savery and Newcomen's engines were initially aimed at evacuating flooded metal mines and not coal mines.

New comment by deepnotderp in "Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling"

deepnotderp — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:01:36 +0000

It’s difficult to cmp diamond is the issue I’d assume

New comment by deepnotderp in "New England's last coal plant has stopped operating, according to its owners"

deepnotderp — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 03:29:57 +0000

Yay for fracking!

Yay for natural gas!

New comment by deepnotderp in "OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss"

deepnotderp — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:22:34 +0000

New hardware could greatly reduce inference and training costs and solve that issue

New comment by deepnotderp in "Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy"

deepnotderp — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:28:18 +0000

Yes but one of the reasons that coal is being replaced by gas is because of the capex of the steam turbine

New comment by deepnotderp in "Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy"

deepnotderp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 21:08:35 +0000

Oh my bad, you’re right

Re: Nat gas, agreed, it’s not solar though, storage is much more expensive

Thermal energy still needs to drive a turbine to generate electricity

New comment by deepnotderp in "Disrupting the DRAM roadmap with capacitor-less IGZO-DRAM technology"

deepnotderp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 21:07:12 +0000

Sure, but conventional DRAM endurance is 10^15 or more

New comment by deepnotderp in "Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy"

deepnotderp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:39:27 +0000

$3/GJ is $108/MWH which any large scale fission buildout would easily beat for thermal energy costs

New comment by deepnotderp in "Disrupting the DRAM roadmap with capacitor-less IGZO-DRAM technology"

deepnotderp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:25:19 +0000

10^11 cycles is not “practically unlimited endurance”, that’s less than a second of use at 1 GHz

New comment by deepnotderp in "Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy"

deepnotderp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 04:45:10 +0000

Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost

New comment by deepnotderp in "Can cheaper lasers handle short distances?"

deepnotderp — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 02:12:19 +0000

MCF has a bunch of challenges, eg no good pigtail connector, need for rotational alignment, inability to radix (MCF is great for point to point, less good if you want to fan out from one chip to multiple chips), etc

And then even after all that, it’s still 1-2 orders of magnitude lower density than waveguides

New comment by deepnotderp in "The unlikely revival of nuclear batteries"

deepnotderp — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 17:32:14 +0000

They do have higher energy density, it’s just a low power density

New comment by deepnotderp in "Solar-plus-storage technology is improving quickly"

deepnotderp — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:45:28 +0000

This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH, but most places outside the U.S. don’t have access to tons of cheap gas so it’s more expensive there”

And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)

New comment by deepnotderp in "Copper is Faster than Fiber (2017) [pdf]"

deepnotderp — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 23:03:26 +0000

FEC latency is >> propagation delays at these distances, so that's probably the dominant factor in most cases

New comment by deepnotderp in "Photo calorie app Cal AI was built by two teenagers"

deepnotderp — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 16:44:40 +0000

Hyperspectral camera?

New comment by deepnotderp in "U.S. homelessness jumps to record high amid affordable housing shortage"

deepnotderp — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 18:32:30 +0000

We need to move zoning to the federal level like Japan

We must decide whether we’ll be a civilization that bows to NIMBYism and stays stuck in squalor or allow building the future.

New comment by deepnotderp in "New research suggests that Walmart makes the communities it operates in poorer"

deepnotderp — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:50:21 +0000

Once again nonsense, productivity has been increasing in America over the last 20 years but real wages have not.

As always, don’t confuse textbook theory with real life!

New comment by deepnotderp in "New research suggests that Walmart makes the communities it operates in poorer"

deepnotderp — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:49:07 +0000

Nonsense.

“Free trade” here refers to inter-country globalized trade across borders, not free markets within a confine.

There’s a much stronger case to be made that industrial policy has resulted in prosperity for Asia, ironically the opposite of free trade :)

New comment by deepnotderp in "A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology"

deepnotderp — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 18:07:24 +0000

You can actually make curved dies already- there’s a company doing that for image sensors, if you thin silicon down it becomes flexible

New comment by deepnotderp in "A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology"

deepnotderp — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 01:29:28 +0000

No, there’s a class system for laser safety

The rating is for you to stick your eyes right up to it for a long period of time and still be fine