Hacker News: sehansen

New comment by sehansen in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

sehansen — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:06:01 +0000

$1/kWh is ludicrously expensive. It's only hit that level for a handful of hours here in Denmark across the last decade. Most years the most expensive hour doesn't even clear $.70/kWh and it doesn't stay at that level for long. In the past year the spot price only cleared $.50/kWh in 24 individual hours and the longest stretch was 4 hours. Most days the price doesn't even hit $.30/kWh during the evening peak. So there isn't really that much opportunity to make up for the low prices the rest of the time.

New comment by sehansen in "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"

sehansen — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:37:15 +0000

rrr_oh_man is claiming that wholesale fixed rate electricity is generally cheaper than varible rate domestic electricity. Or that the wholesale-bit is higher order than the variable rate-bit. Not that it's a big issue, bob1029's point doesn't actually care about one situation being wholesale. It's just a somewhat narrow, (in this case) inconsequential, but also valid, nitpick.

New comment by sehansen in "Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat"

sehansen — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:03:42 +0000

The reason is people don't want to specify the full set of requirements to that podcast app ahead of time. You can spend your year and $500,000 and then the users will play around with it for ten minutes and then tell you it needs to do this and that as well. And one of those features requires you to go back and make fundamental changes to your architecture making you redo a lot of your subsequent work, including a lot of the formal verification.

So it is harder because there is so much freedom in terms of what features a program can have and what the set of requirements can be. And that's just for getting to version 1.0. Software is expected to change much more than hardware is and if the requirements for version 1.7 can only be met by a severe change to the architecture or an ugly hack, the ugly hack will look very tempting.

Having said all that, I'm not sure I disagree all that much with you. A lot of this could be improved with more big E Engineering in the software world.

One way could be with some kind of professional engineer certification. It should be reasonably easy to get the first time by passing a test on some hard and concrete software engineering principles. But if you are ever found to break them, you lose the license and will have to go through a lot to get it back. That of course only works if companies care about people having this certification.

Which leads (as you mention) to government regulation. As someone who works with medical device software I can see that it actually works. The regulations succeed in forcing us to figure out a reasonably complete set of requirements early, but it is an ordeal. For a recent project we had working prototypes for basically all functionality and still we spent four calendar months doing nothing but requirements before we started developing the actual product.

And yet medical devices still have software bugs. There are 24 software related recalls in the FDA medical device recall database just this year so far: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfRes/res...

New comment by sehansen in "Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age"

sehansen — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:49:24 +0000

They exist as aftermarket modifications: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/367812/classic-citroen... I've seen them used as foodtrucks for events a few times here in Denmark.

New comment by sehansen in "Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age"

sehansen — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:43:33 +0000

Leapmotor sold 19700 cars in total in Europe in the first half of 2026. That's across three models: the T03, C10 and B10. The T03 accounted for half of the sales at 9400, so ~1600 a month. That's quite a bit below the 20th best seller in GPs link, the Volvo EX30 at 3649 sales in August 2026.

Source for Leapmotor sales numbers: https://ievchina.com/brands/leapmotor-stellantis-europe-upda...

New comment by sehansen in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

sehansen — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:57:46 +0000

If they'd done those two things Wordpress would probably have been far less successful. Which certainly is a way of making WP Engine not even want to do what they did. Heck, they would probably not even exist.

New comment by sehansen in "Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished"

sehansen — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:13:54 +0000

US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization. They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system. The costs for the producers aren't really a factor.

New comment by sehansen in "Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)"

sehansen — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:07:23 +0000

I wonder what they call maize in Egypt then?

According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?

Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.

New comment by sehansen in "USDA recalls 30k pounds of Argentine beef sold in Texas and Florida"

sehansen — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:13:52 +0000

800 lbs is 360 kg, but I think you meant 600 lbs per cow. Still seems realistic.

New comment by sehansen in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

sehansen — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:57:39 +0000

No, ARM means "Acorn RISC Machine" and was developed by Acorn Computers, a British computer manufacturer, because the 8-bit MOS 6502 they had based their previous designs on was obsolete, available 16-bit processors "a bit crap"[0] and available 32-bit designs too expensive. So the ARM ISA was developed by a computer manufacturer for use in their own chips in their own products, quite far from an "academic exercise".

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf67JYkUCHQ at 7:35

New comment by sehansen in "NP-overrated"

sehansen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:09:48 +0000

It't not a matter of generations. There are plenty of old mathematicians who are very interested in applications and plenty of young mathematicians who are only interested in generalized abstract nonsense. It's more of a difference in personality that will always be there.

New comment by sehansen in "Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences"

sehansen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:45:46 +0000

Fish and rice isn't synonymous with sushi. Grilled fish, tempura-fried fish and soups with pieces of fish are all popular in Japanese cuisine.

New comment by sehansen in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

sehansen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:59:33 +0000

I can't speak for the others, but ST has six fabs in Europe and only one in asia. ST's smallest process node is 18 nm and made in their fab in Crolles, France. In any case trying to compete at the cutting edge of process technology seems to be too expensive to be worth it.

New comment by sehansen in "Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone"

sehansen — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:49:02 +0000

If "closest star" is Proxima Centauri, we're talking 4.5 light-years. Getting there in 1000 years means an average speed of 0.45% of the speed of light. At that speed less than 0.01 cm of titanium is enough shielding to keep the radiation out according to figure 1c) in my source below. Which makes sense because because this is ~10% of the speed of "normal" alpha radiation which is stopped by just your skin.

"Radiation Hazard of Relativistic Interstellar Flight" by Oleg Semyonov: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0610030 via Project Rho: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.php

New comment by sehansen in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

sehansen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:28:51 +0000

Unfortunately that inside source is often coached by the PR department and are just there to say things they can't get away with saying publicly or don't want to have their exact words on record. I.e. just as much a misrepresentation as the official press releases. Or sometimes even more of a misrepresentation since nobody can actually be held accountable for their words.

New comment by sehansen in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

sehansen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:51:36 +0000

No they didn't. They had a hiccup in 2020 when the transition to electric cars really started accelerating but after they got their own electric cars into mass production they've reclaimed the top spot at 13.9% of the Chinese market. That's just ahead of Geely at 13.8%, Toyota at 7.8% and BYD at 7.1%.

It was hard to find reputable numbers for all of Q1, so my source is only for january and february: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...

New comment by sehansen in "GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup"

sehansen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:11:41 +0000

In a nuclear energy context "closed cycle" just means that the uranium and plutonium is separated out from the spent fuel for future reuse. The loop is only closed in the sense that some of the spent fuel material that leaves the reactor will enter it again in the future. It doesn't imply that new inputs won't be added to the loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle_in_France#C...

New comment by sehansen in "Organic Maps"

sehansen — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:25:05 +0000

A lot of normal people I know used to love maps.me but have become dissatisfied with the ads and other unwelcome commercial elements. They would definitely chose coMaps over Organic Maps just to lessen the risk of that happening again.

New comment by sehansen in "Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant"

sehansen — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:27:19 +0000

Yeah, with how much focus there is on the capital costs of nuclear power plants it's easy to forget they also have moderate operating costs. With the developments we're seeing, you're right that the LCOE of solar and wind is or will soon be lower than the operating costs of nuclear. That leaves the only remaining upsides of nuclear being production stability and energy diversity, and grid batteries are making the first less and less important every year. Not to mention that the capacity factor will be pushed down from the demand side worsening the costs even more since not all operating costs are proportional to the amount of energy generated.

New comment by sehansen in "OpenPrinter"

sehansen — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:13:02 +0000

Quite a lot of open source hardware is licensed under the BY-SA Creative Commons license which is an actual open source license. E.g. the Arduinos and things like the Milkymist One which can actually run linux.