Hacker News: fpoling

New comment by fpoling in "I don't understand quantum physics (2018)"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 23:28:34 +0000

There is no interference pattern from a single photon as it hits the registration device at a particular place. But collect a big enough sequence of single photon measurements and it emerges.

This is the reason for statistical interpretation of QM that states that a wave function is just a way to calculate probability with no inherent meaning.

So wave-particle duality is just an artifact of Copenhagen interpretation of QM, not something that one can observe. What one clearly observes that photons travel through a region where they should not classically be and never appear in the region where they should be classically.

Note that even classically waves does not exist as they are just an artifact of motion of collection of molecules that on average can be described by wave-like equations.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:51:14 +0000

Germany has not learned anything from the war in Ukraine and still think that dependence on gas imports from other countries is fine even for backup.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 07:04:52 +0000

The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 06:41:33 +0000

Keeping coal plants around is cheap to cover that. Longer term things like producing ammonia during summer and converting it to electricity in fuel cells will allow to remove needs for fossil fuels completely.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 06:19:01 +0000

Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 05:52:50 +0000

Batteries already kill peaker plants as a grid-scale battery that lasts 4 hours became cheaper than running natural gas turbine to cover the evening demand peak.

New comment by fpoling in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

fpoling — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 05:32:36 +0000

And vise versa, a proof that P!=NP do not exclude an algorithm that is fast enough for practical n.

New comment by fpoling in "I don't understand quantum physics (2018)"

fpoling — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:26:34 +0000

Particles do exist for practical purposes. If one can distinguish individual photons, then the picture is nothing but a bunch of particles with only averages producing wave-like pictures. But the puzzle is that they do not travel in straight lines and we cannot predict individual point where they will hit.

New comment by fpoling in "Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:24:03 +0000

I have used gandi.net for many years. They provided good support and offered things like free email forwarding. Then they were bought and the new owners just double or more prices and made anything extra including email a ridiculously expensive extra.

New comment by fpoling in "DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:11:14 +0000

Cloudflare has verified bot program.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:50:11 +0000

In 10 years when the batteries will cover 24 hours of demand to cover few weeks without sun and wind nuclear will be too expensive as reactors requires maintenance even when they do not work. Coal will be vastly cheaper beating even natural gas as one can store coal in bulk.

But right now we do not have excessive capacity and smoothing the curve for nuclear allows to burn less coal and natural gas. Essentially right now batteries are killing peaker natural gas plants, not nuclear or coal.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 07:53:18 +0000

Storage is still expensive. But if there is enough storage to cover the demand for couple hours then it can also be used to store excessive energy from nuclear making throttling down the reactor output much smoother. In few years when the storage will be cheap enough to last the whole night it will kill nuclear, but while the capacity is low why not to use it to make running nuclear more efficient.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:58:59 +0000

Modern coal plants are more efficient and have bigger daily throttling capacity offsetting some of the above.

EDIT: batteries also help on China scale to throttle coal output much more smoothly and efficiently. Eventually the batteries will kill coal but for the next 5 years in China they are making coal plants cheaper to operate.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:45:09 +0000

The problem with nuclear is that their daily throttling capacity is low leading to those minimal price contracts. So it makes sense to pair nuclear with batteries as coal plants in US started to do. With that having nuclear as a base load during winter or prolonged bad weather would still make sense.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:24:06 +0000

Batteries are still too expensive to cover the whole night. So it will take few years before they will threaten nuclear base load. But they are already cheaper to serve electricity from solar or wind during 4 hours evening peak consumption than running natural gas peaker plants. Plus they reduce the scale of grid upgrades in many cases.

New comment by fpoling in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

fpoling — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:06:26 +0000

Battery at a coal plant also allows it to operate at less variable output which is more efficient. Modern plants can throttle more than the old ones, but even with them a battery to smooth the load curve make sense economically to use less coal.

New comment by fpoling in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

fpoling — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:34:35 +0000

I had a dentist who preferred to see patients each 12 months for a relatively cheap routine check while avoiding doing anything if something was discovered during the check if that could wait. She fixed a minor cavity for me like after 4 years of checks. At some point she stopped accepting new patients because she had too many of them.

New comment by fpoling in "Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data"

fpoling — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:33:27 +0000

The upside is that you can know everything of almost any person as well. Whether that upside is beneficial for you is a different matter.

New comment by fpoling in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

fpoling — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:41:19 +0000

EV in China with a reasonable range is already cheaper to manufacture and to buy. Inevitable the same will happen in Europe in the next couple of years. Given the massive improvements in charging infrastructure I do not see why EV would be a default option.

New comment by fpoling in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

fpoling — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:47:33 +0000

The point of diesel heater is to remove the need to plugin hybrid in many cases and just go with EV plus heater.