Hacker News: rwke

New comment by rwke in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

rwke — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:41:07 +0000

I recommend also have a look at how eCommerce is done in Chile, e.g. Transbank (WebPay), FinToc and others. Chile passed some very good FinTech legislation a few years ago.

New comment by rwke in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

rwke — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:06:44 +0000

Without knowing much about the details of it, this might be interesting to evaluate as a potentially economically more attractive alternative to DAC in the supply chain of e-fuel production?

New comment by rwke in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

rwke — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:59:41 +0000

With more and more parts of our lives depending on often only one cloud infrastructure provider as a single point of failure, enabling companies to have built-in redundancy in their systems across the world could be a great business.

Humans have built-in redundancy for a reason.

New comment by rwke in "SVB Shares Down -54%"

rwke — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 19:44:57 +0000

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/silicon-valley-bank...

SVB Shares Down -54%

rwke — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 19:44:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/markets/companies/SIVB.O/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085674

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by rwke in "Seawater electrolysis by adjusting the local reaction environment of a catalyst"

rwke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 03:34:08 +0000

Fully agree with you on the significant efficiency advantage of electric cars vs. ICE-cars.

There might be several use cases, airplanes is one for sure, given the energy density per kg is too low in batteries vs. kerosene today. Pure hydrogen planes have big risks associated to them.

Potentially not having to drill into the ground anymore to extract oil for fuel production is another one. Producing conventional fuels and plugging them into the existing distribution system is beneficial in terms of how rapidly we could replace CO2-adding fuel with CO2-neutral fuel. The market would take care of this as soon as synthetic fuels are cheaper than “old fuels”. This is especially relevant if you think about the billions of people in the developing world that today cannot afford electric cars or the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to support electric cars. Batteries also still have cons in their production process (extracting lithium for example), and recycling is not solved neither. Again, this might be solved at some point, but scaling existing battery tech today to billions of cars would have its own side effects / feasibility issues.

Another benefit I could think of is we would reduce our reliance on certain countries that own most of the oil, geopolitically a very important factor as well.

Just thinking out loud here. Increasing our odds to potentially produce billions of liters of conventional fuel that might be cheaper than “old fuel” at some point, while taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, sounds promising to me.

New comment by rwke in "Seawater electrolysis by adjusting the local reaction environment of a catalyst"

rwke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 02:33:35 +0000

I’m not very deep into the topic, but this new process might positively affect the economics and scalability of pilot plants like these as well:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/porsche-pumps-first-synthe...

With advances in nuclear fusion or other technologies that lower the price of CO2 neutral electricity, we just might be able to build plants that produce conventional fuel, using seawater and removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the same time. This would allow scalable production of conventional fuel, without affecting our drinking water or having to replace several billion cars all over the world.

I’m probably simplifying here way too much, but exciting developments in that space.