Hacker News: mayama

New comment by mayama in "Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise"

mayama — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:17:28 +0000

To be specific, solar with 4hr storage is price competitive with grid right now. Storage becomes expensive after that at 8hrs even with projected sodium or lithium prices. For a datacenter usage they probably need couple of days storage at 50hrs like the planned google datacenter. Only alternate chemistry batteries that could be scaled up easily like flow, iron air, zinc etc. could be competitive for multi day storage, though most of these are still at experimental or pilot stages.

New comment by mayama in "Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise"

mayama — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:15:46 +0000

> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.

There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.

Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.

New comment by mayama in "On non-rooted Android 17, ADB uninstall of system apps fails"

mayama — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:57:48 +0000

I said the same thing about waiting for 24hrs before being able to use adb to install apps. About 24hrs being not a big blocker and that it was good for security. It's all about boiling the frog slowly, 24hrs is the start and then they'll add more restrictions once users accept that. Ultimately goog would like to have the system as much locked down as apple or even more.

New comment by mayama in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

mayama — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:05:09 +0000

Adding simd in std and even being used in map is nice. Would have to look for places to experiment with it in hot loops in code I have.

New comment by mayama in "Europe's fires are just the start"

mayama — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:45:35 +0000

> How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there.

Cleaning is huge financial burden and has questionable outcome. Only extreme solution I can think of is fireblocks if situation gets worse which could worsen climate change by clearing trees. Divide forest in to grids, building roads wide enough to fire from spreading. Fill roads up with gravel or concrete to stop fires from spreading. Climate activists would never allow such plan to be implemented.

New comment by mayama in "Europe's fires are just the start"

mayama — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:34:27 +0000

> You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2.

You can use pyrolysis to reduce usage of energy. Instead of building ethanol using corn etc, some fast growing crop can be converted to biochar using pyrolysis. And stored indefinitely underground or somewhere. Of course this isn't profitable and probably will run in to climate activists roadblocks.

New comment by mayama in "Go Analysis Framework: modular static analysis by go team"

mayama — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:33:02 +0000

There are so many proposals for improving errors, even half implemented ones that are dropped. I even stopped checking pros and cons after a few. As ultimately everything got rejected and the message is that you have to live with verbose checking with llms now.

New comment by mayama in "Android may soon restrict on-device ADB"

mayama — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:07:20 +0000

> and only because by some miracle there are companies out there who started trusting Graphene's attestation keys.

Are the bank apps trusting graphene keys or google them self? Isn't play attestation completely in the hands of google.

New comment by mayama in "India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch"

mayama — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 05:36:46 +0000

Most locations that could provide guaranteed power for western companies with stable governments are also full of NIMBY or NGO who could easily blockade those datacenters. Then you'll have to run to offgrid locations where you have to build 24hr battery for solar with closed loop cooling. Is 24hr battery+solar on earth cheaper than LEO satellites in constant sun without batteries? That's the question that would make or break satellite datacenters, as political climate against AI datacenters is increasingly getting bad with increasing electricity prices.

New comment by mayama in "India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch"

mayama — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 05:23:57 +0000

In case of collision in LEO, wouldn't the debris have chance to go high altitude and cause further collisions?

New comment by mayama in "India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch"

mayama — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:46:16 +0000

Regarding Indian private space sector, In addition to skyroot solid rocket, following are noteworthy

Agnikul is planning to launch semi-cryo kerosene rocket pretty soon. Their engine is 3d printed and use electric pump fed 25kN small engine. Planning to launch 4 clustered engines as first stage and already did suborbital test, with some parachute splash down reusability claims.

Astrobase is recent entrant. With decent funding and former ISRO scientists as core team, developing 800kN FFCS methalox engine. FFCS is called holy grail of liquid engines. They have acquired largest metal 3d engine and planning VTVL 1st stage reusability

New comment by mayama in "India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on debut launch"

mayama — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:28:42 +0000

India has developed ASAT, which is arguably more complicated that ICBM, agni series, they developed. India routinely understates ranges and appear non threatening. Agni5 and 6 are genuine ICBM, and with little tuning could reach anywhere in the world. India's bureaucracy and MEA is beset with gandhian mindset who try to avoid confrontations and minimise belligerence, opposite of PRC wolf warriors I guess.

New comment by mayama in "UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction"

mayama — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 04:31:23 +0000

Not just about PoS device. During early credit/debit card days, lot of stores would pass on merchandise fees directly to customers, giving discount in case of cash transactions, some stores still charge extra. This is not allowed in west as credit cards require same price as cash transactions, and most users perceive credit card rewards as something positive as one would lose out on this rewards when using cash. In India perception is that one would be making loss* if using credit cards. UPI with no fees as of now, is perceived as equal to cash by most people not dealing with black money.

New comment by mayama in "Linux 7.1"

mayama — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:34:10 +0000

Chaing priority wholesale is not needed just to install kernel image and might break other packages. Just install kernel image from backports after enabling backports.

> apt install linux-image-amd64/stable-backports

Somehow installing with `trixie-backports` isn't picking up latest kernel for me. Used what is being displayed in `apt search linux-image-7`

New comment by mayama in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

mayama — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:26:25 +0000

My personal solution for this is to install a simpler distro in chroot, alpine, and install dev newer apps in to it. Additionally, I run chroot via bwrap sandbox and have been doing this for quite some time now before flatpak became famous.

New comment by mayama in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

mayama — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:54:30 +0000

It's simple power vs energy equations. Let's say you need to supply steady 1MW to town for 1hr, 2hr or 10hr. This needs total of 1MWh 2Mwh or 10Mwh respectively. Let's say battery would cost $200/kwh, then this would cost 200k, 400k or 2M resp. Battery storage is generally used for less than 2hr duration currently where they are price competitive. For the rest, either gas peaker, coal or hydro is used.

New comment by mayama in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

mayama — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:30:22 +0000

Fore more than 2 hours capacity, batteries are expensive than most other and cost keeps increasing as more hours of capacity needed. Without gas or coal to burn when 1hr battery capacity runs out, battery storage is expensive.

New comment by mayama in "We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued"

mayama — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:00:03 +0000

> 1 -- Signal jamming exists.

How easy is jamming starlink? I don't think it is as easy as jamming gps. As I've seen numerous warning from Russia that they providing starlink to Ukraine is bad idea. That they're going to shut it down etc. But, starlink is still being used in Ukraine.

New comment by mayama in "We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued"

mayama — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:32:04 +0000

After articles on how starship is never getting off launchpad, I'm sceptical of news regarding elon, pro and anti. Sure, things like FSD are hopium or scam, but not everything could be. Haven't seen hard science estimates on their new ai satellites.

New comment by mayama in "Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised"

mayama — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:16:24 +0000

docker service that sets up containers runs as root. podman does away with that service.