Hacker News: lakis

New comment by lakis in "Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion"

lakis — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:01:17 +0000

  What if the new government also imply that you have to change our religion? What if the new government does not believe in "free enterprise" and will TELL you which company you will work for. What if the new government change the sports teams you like? What if the new government change the language you speak. 

  See for the example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace#Timeline  . Notice how the official language suddenly changes when a new "government" from a different nation take over. Are you so sure that the French Canadians will not have a problem with suddenly English potentially been the official language?

New comment by lakis in "How many bytes does gzip compress?"

lakis — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:04:24 +0000

On the explanation for step 1, the author only removes "the" as redundant. But there are more byte ranges that can be removed The following can be removed as reduntant "the " (notice the space) "at"

New comment by lakis in "Keep these Stupid American Trucks out of Europe [video]"

lakis — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:52:42 +0000

The European new headlights are illegal in US. They are superior but still illegal.

New comment by lakis in "Chinese woman convicted after ' biggest' Bitcoin seizure"

lakis — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 03:28:19 +0000

$6.7bn!! WOW

What CutOver used to be [video]

lakis — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 07:42:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saRir95iIWk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45124669

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

How will age verification for porn work and what about privacy?

lakis — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 19:54:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceq7ye3q2zwo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44586148

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by lakis in "Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption"

lakis — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 18:06:56 +0000

IN https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/ , there is a very interesting quote. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has also been lauded for its growth in storage, but when put into perspective of load, the gap remains quite large. Comparing all-time peak load and peak storage discharge (non-coincident), ERCOT's battery fleet would have met less than 5% of demand, while CAISO's battery fleet would have met about 16%, more than triple the value in Texas."

Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.

New comment by lakis in "U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts"

lakis — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 04:03:42 +0000

Ireland is in EU. UK is not in EU anymore

UK demands access to Apple users' encrypted data

lakis — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:40:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g288yldko

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975986

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by lakis in "The FAA's Real Air Traffic Control Crisis Runs Much Deeper"

lakis — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 19:50:57 +0000

From the website "The FAA has discontinued use of this Behavioural Assessment since 2018."

That was 7 years ago.

New comment by lakis in "Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd for English skills"

lakis — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 19:38:30 +0000

And they are 1st in Japanese Skills !

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?

lakis — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:57:48 +0000

Article URL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241031-00/?p=110443

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42008718

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by lakis in "China's chip capabilities just 3 years behind TSMC, teardown shows"

lakis — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:32:37 +0000

This seems to be a joke. China has 70% of the world global research share on advanced aircraft engines Seriously? Maybe in writing papers . But that does not translate to actual product. China has 50% of electronic warfare and 45% of radar? In what planet? Any test to see if a lot of what is going on in other countries is not published?

New comment by lakis in "Can solar costs keep shrinking?"

lakis — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 03:36:46 +0000

> The California failure is a good example What California failure? Take a look at record battery discharging for CAISO https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Bat...

Do you notice anything? The records keep falling ever summer. The battery discharge per day went up by 100% in the last year.

I do not see any bending of the curve. California is the perfect example of building enough batteries can solve the duck curve problem. Even in Texas, with the government actively against renewables and batteries, you see record been set for battery storage all the time https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Pow... Texas quadruple the battery storage in the last year. Difference between California and Texas. California is about 3 years ahead of Texas. When the economics are so much cheaper, battery power is build .

New comment by lakis in "Unrealized Gain Tax–A Coming Sea Change in FY2025 Budget Proposal?"

lakis — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 16:26:58 +0000

No. Let's say I have $100 million. Every year, for 50 years, I get a $2 million loan against only $2 million of my asset. The loans keep rotating and keep going. At the end of 50 years, I die. When I die, the assets go to my estate AND (and this is important) my assets base value is rebased to current values. My heirs sell some assets to pay off the loans. BUT the assets have been rebased to current value, so there is no tax due (since sell value is the same as base value). Let me repeat. My estate pays NO TAXES at all since the assets were rebased.

That's called tax efficiency ;-)

Scarlett Johansson lawyers up over ChatGPT voice that 'shocked and angered' her

lakis — Tue, 21 May 2024 01:32:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/tech/openai-pausing-flirty-chatgpt-voice/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40423038

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by lakis in "All Cars Sold in the US Will Soon Have to Be Able to Automatically Avoid a Crash"

lakis — Wed, 01 May 2024 04:41:23 +0000

  I actually have to set up a car alert for when I go above 90, because the car is so quiet and powerful that I can easily go above 90 without realizing (obviously on the highway) . 
  New cars have improved tremendously.

New comment by lakis in "California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days"

lakis — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 05:01:07 +0000

See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago. A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm. Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30. So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.

New comment by lakis in "California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days"

lakis — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 04:54:04 +0000

Take a look at https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW

You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW. We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).

That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.

Diesel enginemaker agrees to nearly $2B in fines with feds and California

lakis — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 06:20:53 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/01/diesel-enginemaker-agrees-to-nearly-2-billion-in-fines-with-feds-and-california/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38948482

Points: 1

# Comments: 0