Hacker News: raphaelj

New comment by raphaelj in "EV demand up 50% in France and Germany since Iran war"

raphaelj — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:20:18 +0000

Well most of the increase in prices goes into petroleum companies' profits (at least the ones that can export). So it's technically not lost and will be invested somehow.

Like a Carbon tax, the money doesn't disappear. But to whom it gets distributed, that's another story...

New comment by raphaelj in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

raphaelj — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:18:32 +0000

That's only about 35% more than the main telecom operator here in Belgium (Proximus: $7.2B revenue in 2025, $2.5B market cap, positive earnings for 15+ years).

Obviously Starlink can and will growth. I'm just pointing out how insane the market cap is, when compared to similar scale "connectivity" businesses.

New comment by raphaelj in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

raphaelj — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:31:12 +0000

That might be part of the answer.

But IIRC, in Belgium at least, these plants are also remunerated on "secondary" markets for non-productive tasks. These secondary markets are mostly for grid balancing.

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:49:11 +0000

It is 800W, but the battery allows it to buffer the excess and never output more than the legal limit.

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:04:17 +0000

Mine (Ecoflow Stream Ultra) has two 1200W regular sockets I can use while the grid down.

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:54:12 +0000

These inverters have to switch off if they cannot detect a grid signal, or if the grid frequency/voltage goes out of the safe range.

Same legislation as the non-plug&play inverters.

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:18:38 +0000

You have to register to the utility, but that's just a form to fill with the model and power of the kit.

With a e-meter, you will get compensated when you're generating a surplus (+/- €0.04/kWh last time I checked).

However, thanks to the battery, I'm self-consuming almost all that electricity, saving around €0.30/kWh.

Expect 800kWh of annual production per 1kW of panels.

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:07:13 +0000

House is facing South, but I'm laying them flat on the floor for economic and aesthetic reasons, with some 3D printed brick-based ballast [1].

Buying supports for PV is actually less economical than buying additional PV panels.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/tDPevmM

New comment by raphaelj in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

raphaelj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:53:29 +0000

We legalized these in Belgium last year.

I bought a 1600Wc + 1.9KWh kit (Ecoflow Stream) for +/- 1300€ last summer. It took us about 2h to install (we had to setup a new plug outside), and I already saved 200€+ since July. I am expecting to save about 350€ per year.

Also, as u/jstch said, it's extremely fun to setup and generate your own power!

New comment by raphaelj in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

raphaelj — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:42:02 +0000

A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.

That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).

New comment by raphaelj in "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"

raphaelj — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:13:21 +0000

Companies that do not reduce their workforce might outcompete you.

It might not be about bringing more revenues but retaining market share.

New comment by raphaelj in "Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%"

raphaelj — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:28:58 +0000

I like Scaleway a lot too.

New comment by raphaelj in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

raphaelj — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:02:11 +0000

Interestingly, the Renault 5 Turbo 3E is more Cyberpunk than anything Tesla is making!

New comment by raphaelj in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

raphaelj — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:07:23 +0000

Same experience here.

On some tasks like build scripts, infra and CI stuff, I am getting a significant speedup. Maybe I am 2x faster on these tasks, when measured from start to PR.

I am working on a HPC project[1] that requires more careful architectural thinking. Trying to let the LLM do the whole task most often fail, or produce low quality code (even with top models like Opus 4.5).

What works well though is "assisted" coding. I am usually writing the interface code (e.g. headers in C++) with some help from the agent, and then let the LLM do the actual implementation of these functions/methods. Then I do final adjustments. Writing a good AGENTS.md helps a lot. I might be 30% faster on these tasks.

It seems to match what I see from the PRs I am reviewing: we are getting these slightly more often than before.

---

[1] https://github.com/finos/opengris-scaler

New comment by raphaelj in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

raphaelj — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:44:56 +0000

Could you try with some open-weighted models, e.g. Qwen3-coder, GLM-4.7 or Devstral-2?

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

raphaelj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:00:33 +0000

The UK is actually world leading in wind electricity generation (especially offshore). So it's not all bad.

New comment by raphaelj in "Garbage collection is useful"

raphaelj — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 23:22:50 +0000

Why does he need to manually do the tracing or reference counting of all these nodes?

Instead, he could just use the references he needs in the new tree, delete/override the old tree's root node, and expect the Javascript GC to discard all the nodes that are now referenced.

New comment by raphaelj in "US to rewrite its past national climate reports"

raphaelj — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 10:36:58 +0000

Made a typo, I meant 00s. I edited it, thanks :)

New comment by raphaelj in "US to rewrite its past national climate reports"

raphaelj — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 10:32:59 +0000

> What is the basis of these revisions?

Ideology

New comment by raphaelj in "US to rewrite its past national climate reports"

raphaelj — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 10:30:16 +0000

Meanwhile, according to the IEA, renewables investments exceed those in fossil fuels since +/- 2022 [1], and are expected to be the top electric power generator by 2026 [2].

The Trump administration is basically following Kodak's strategy from the early 00s.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/exe...

[2] https://www.eco-business.com/news/iea-renewables-will-be-wor...