Hacker News: hnmullany

New comment by hnmullany in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

hnmullany — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:21:37 +0000

I don't see any on data on nutrition in that reference.

Organic grown food tends to be higher in anti-oxidants and secondary metabolites, possibly because the plant immune system is activated more frequently due to better microbial biodiversity. From what I remember at least - it doesn't maintain any advantage in macronutrient density (carbs/nitrogen etc.)

New comment by hnmullany in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

hnmullany — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:30:55 +0000

Organic grown food is more nutritious and I'm glad we have a significant percentage of farms who have gone organic, but the yield gap is very well documented. Organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly and unpredictably and can't match artificial nitrogen for plant uptake.

E.g. a 25% average yield penalty in this meta-analysis:

Alvarez, R. (2022) ‘Comparing Productivity of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: A Quantitative Review’, Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, 68(14), pp. 1947–1958. doi: 10.1080/03650340.2021.1946040.

I studied the productivity benefits of adding beneficial fungi as part of my master's thesis. On average they provide a yield benefit, but it's not ubiquitous and they're far more likely to work in arid and semi-arid soils that have poor microbial diversity in their baseline. They don't tend to be as effective in temperate soils - partly because they have to compete with existing soil microbes.

New comment by hnmullany in "Accelerando (2005)"

hnmullany — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:08:06 +0000

I think he peaked in the aughts - his latest stuff is ho-hum.

New comment by hnmullany in "GitHub's Fake Star Economy"

hnmullany — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:18:32 +0000

I came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almost all the star growth from the previous year, resulting in a 20% YoY record. The company eventually got acquihired.

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

hnmullany — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 11:08:16 +0000

Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.

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

hnmullany — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 11:03:46 +0000

Just a note that 46,000 is a 2050 target - which covers current demand AND all the growth in electricity and heat demand over the next 25 years.

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

hnmullany — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:59:55 +0000

Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.

But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.

New comment by hnmullany in "An Update on Heroku"

hnmullany — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:35:30 +0000

Heroku got a lot of attention and funding within Salesforce at least for the first few years - they grew from about $1M in ARR when they got acquired, and I think they peaked at around $200M (second hand - so I don't know if part of that was funny-money revenue allocated from Enterprise agreements.)

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:38:49 +0000

Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison.

Nuclear capacity: +2GW in 2025 (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...)

Solar capacity: ¬300GW capacity

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202512/26/cont...

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:21:03 +0000

The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.

The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.

Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:16:27 +0000

That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.

2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:13:38 +0000

Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:09:44 +0000

Coal generation production in China did decline in 2025 vs 2024 - but that was the first year for it to happen.

New comment by hnmullany in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

hnmullany — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:04:15 +0000

It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.

New comment by hnmullany in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

hnmullany — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:49:44 +0000

I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016.

I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade around 2016, because so many of the questions asked had been answered (and answered well) already.

New comment by hnmullany in "Microsoft will finally kill obsolete cipher that has wreaked decades of havoc"

hnmullany — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:01:38 +0000

What are the bets that the NSA has been encouraging Microsoft to keep shipping this?

New comment by hnmullany in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

hnmullany — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:31:46 +0000

Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.

New comment by hnmullany in "Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds"

hnmullany — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 09:23:54 +0000

I did a meta-analysis for my masters thesis and I was convinced that 2 of the 39 papers in my dataset had fraudulent data.

New comment by hnmullany in "Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet"

hnmullany — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:27:29 +0000

I wrote an introductory piece on the economics and technology of enhanced geothermal with good technical sources. I think it summarizes the state of the tech better than the New Yorker article.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energ...

New comment by hnmullany in "DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes"

hnmullany — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 23:02:28 +0000

The more competitive the market, the less that companies are able to pass on income tax increases (as opposed to input tax increases - like tariffs). If companies are able to pass along income tax increases, it means that they have pricing power.