Hacker News: sehansen

New comment by sehansen in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

sehansen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:37:45 +0000

Sure, but the problem with coal and oil is not their chemical composition, per se. The problem with specifically fossil coal and oil is that the carbon atoms used to be buried deep underground and end up as part of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. Making synthetic kerosene for jet engines is one of the top contenders for long-distance air travel in a post-fossil fuel world, IMO.

New comment by sehansen in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

sehansen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:33:23 +0000

Germany: electricity 56% renewables, 4% GDP growth since 2021Q1, 6.4% unemployment

Denmark: electricity 92% renewables, 14% GDP growth since 2021Q1, 2.7% unemployment

I don't think renewables are what's wrong with Germany, more likely it's a) their lack of infrastructure investment and maintenance in the past decade-an-a-half, b) their excessive coddling of established and well-connected businesses.

New comment by sehansen in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

sehansen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:10:23 +0000

135% is quite low for an air source heat pump. For instance a Samsung HHSM-G600005-1 [0] claims to have been tested to be 485% efficient at heating water to 35°C and 283% efficient at heating water to 55°C, both with 7°C air temperature. For Finland you'd want to find a heat pump with a datasheet specifying SCOP for specifically the EN 14825 Northern Europe climate zone. I couldn't find one with some quick googling, but I found a Swedish site selling a air-to-air heat pump[1] claiming 222% efficiency at -25 °C.

0: The Cop numbers in this product spec: https://www.snhtradecentre.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...

1: https://varmepumpshopen.se/luftvarmepump/panasonic-hz25zke

New comment by sehansen in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

sehansen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:23:02 +0000

No, natural gas _peakers_ don't need water for cooling, since they don't have steam turbines like combined cycle gas plants. Cooling is only necessary in thermal plants to condense the steam on the low-pressure side of the steam turbine.

And excessive stability is also a terrible quality in an energy source. The only reason we used to put up with base-load power plants was because they were cheap; if they weren't we might as well have used peaker plants all the time.

New comment by sehansen in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

sehansen — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:40:03 +0000

Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.

New comment by sehansen in "Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years"

sehansen — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:48:35 +0000

The fact that low-grade parasite-infections dampen autoimmune diseases isn't that big of a win. Presumably our immune system is as aggressive as it is in part due to the parasite-load our ancestors were exposed to.

New comment by sehansen in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

sehansen — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:54:45 +0000

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" for the new era. MSVC doesn't compile a secret master-password into your software, just a Copilot ad.

("Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...)

New comment by sehansen in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

sehansen — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:31:36 +0000

Part of the reason money has such a big influence on elections is that first-past-the-post election system you have over there in the US. When voters have to make a binary choice between two participants, low-information campaigns like hit-pieces are able to make a big difference and are cheap to communicate en-masse. When voters have a actual choice between four parties on the left and four parties on the right, hit-pieces will only make a voter switch from, say, one left-wing party to another. So since the return-on-investment on political advertising is much lower, much less money will be spent on it and there will be less of it. And what will be there will be of higher quality.

New comment by sehansen in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

sehansen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:49:45 +0000

Dell has the P5525QC, a 4K 55 inch screen. Here in Denmark they sell it for 8846 DKK (~$1300 USD). I use a predecessor with my Apple TV and it works great.

Link: https://www.dell.com/da-dk/shop/dell-55-4k-sk%C3%A6rm-til-m%...

New comment by sehansen in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

sehansen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:27:16 +0000

In 2025[1]: 64.3% in Sweden - 69.3% in Denmark - 55.2% in Finland. Across the EU 2.6 million BEVs were sold out of ~13 million cars in total, i.e. 20% in 2025. That's on top of 1.3 million PHEVs which is an even faster growing segment.

So it's not quite 80% yet, but it's getting there fast.

1: https://www.tradingpedia.com/forex-brokers/global-demand-for...

New comment by sehansen in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

sehansen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:14:42 +0000

There were plenty of Peugeots, Fiats, Hyundais and Geelys when I went there in 2017. The old 50s American cars were either beatifully maintained for tourist rides or easy to fix rural work-horses.

New comment by sehansen in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

sehansen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:41:58 +0000

The only things GM sells in Europe nowadays is the Corvette and the Cadillacs Lyriq, Optiq and Vistiq. Opel and Vauxhall were sold of almost ten years ago.

New comment by sehansen in "Honda is killing its EVs"

sehansen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:12:47 +0000

German automakers are suffering because their sales in the Chinese market has tanked. Not going hard on EVs would have left them in an even worse situation.

Take VW: in 2020 they were by far the biggest automaker in China with ~16% market share. In 2023 they had fallen to number two at ~10% behind BYD. But now that they are starting to have competetive BEVs in their lineup they are tied for first place in the market at ~13% market share.

New comment by sehansen in "Honda is killing its EVs"

sehansen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:55:56 +0000

Don't many of them have soldered SIMs or pure-SW eSIMs now?

New comment by sehansen in "Honda is killing its EVs"

sehansen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:54:44 +0000

The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.

And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.

Sources:

https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/hvor-mange-elbiler-er-de... (Danish)

https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/saa-meget-steg-salget-af... (Danish)

https://www.tradingpedia.com/forex-brokers/global-demand-for...

New comment by sehansen in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

sehansen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:51:27 +0000

Welcome to our cozy little country; I hope you're settling in well.

Just out of curiosity: Assuming you're a SW engineer, did you join IDA or Prosa or did you decide to not join an union? I'd like to gathers some more datapoints to help other engineers moving to Denmark make an informed decision.

New comment by sehansen in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

sehansen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:46:49 +0000

The shareholders are responsible for the management of the company who are in turn responsible for their employees. By wiping out the shareholders in these companies hopefully other shareholders in other financial companies will demand more oversight. In the end people respond to incentives and the individual employees that sold the fraudulent loans were implicitly or explicitly incentivized to do so by management, who were in turn rewarded for this by shareholders. Going after the specific employees that sold the loans is of course morally satisfying, but if we want this to not happen again we need to make shareholders and executives keen to avoid a repeat. Looking at how popular Klarna, gambling companies and now private credit has been with investors, it doesn't seem to have worked, unfortunately.

But, yes, it is a travesty that more of the subprime loan salesmen weren't prosecuted. It has a lot of value for a society to actually convict people that have done actual wrong. We all want to live in a just world and seeing that people who have done wrong get what they deserve is part of that. Looking at the US from the outside I think a lot of the polarization we've seen in the US over the past 15 years could have been avoided if more prosecutions had happened in 2008-2012.

IMO this is also why big companies being allowed to do settlements without admissions of wrongdoing is so bad. They fail to fulfill the moral purpose of law enforcement. Ironically Goldman Sachs _did_ admit wrongdoing in their settlement with the SEC over their Abacus CDFs...

New comment by sehansen in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

sehansen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:09:29 +0000

The categorization the Fed uses for NBFI is broader than private credit. E.g. if a hedge fund gives a loan to a private company, that's not private credit because hedge funds seem to have their own category. And lending backed by securities is also in a different category, it seems.

So I guess the Fed expects these other kinds of lending to be safer than private credit?

New comment by sehansen in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

sehansen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:31:10 +0000

Hundreds of financial institutions with greater or lesser responsibility for the crash in 2008 went under in those years[0]. The shareholders in almost all of these companies lost all of their money and the responsible employees lost their jobs. This includes some of the most guilty companies, like Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch (through First Franklin Financial), Bear Stearns. But all these companies are completely forgotten now.

Instead everyone hates on Goldman Sachs. Sure, Goldman Sachs deserves hate, but of the big banks they were the _least_ guilty of the crash in 2008. Not saying they were saints, but in 2008 they were the least bad.

0: This list only covers banks, not non-banks like Countrywide Financial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...

New comment by sehansen in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

sehansen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:27:46 +0000

I'm not sure I agree with your list.

Aircraft:

Airbus seems to be leagues ahead of Boeing, not just in the civilian market, but also in military aircraft. Just look at their competing modern military tankers: the Boieng KC-46 is a worse plane than the Airbus A330 MRTT, but had huge cost overruns and delays.

EU is also at the cutting edge in helicopters, in fact 3 of the 5 new classes of manned helicopters introduced by the US military in the 21st century are from the EU: the MH-139, UH-72 and TH-73.

Submarines:

The Swedish Gotland and Blekinge class, and the German type 212 are both ahead of anything the US has. Wrt. bigger submarines, I don't think there's enough public information to argue that the French Triomphant-class is worse than the US Ohio-class

Advanced missiles:

The IRIS family, MBDA MICA and MBDA Meteor are cutting edge, European air-to-air missiles. MBDA also has a set of modern long, medium and short range anti-shipping missiles: the Otomat, Exocet and Marte. And that's on top of the evolutions of the Saab RBS 15 and Kongsberg/Diehl/Nammo 3SM. And the Swedish Saab NLAW anti-tank missile has been very successful with Ukraine in the past four years.

Cutting edge medical equipment:

Medical equipment is a huge field and very diverse and specialized, so it's easy to miss the areas where the EU is cutting edge. Just some examples I know of:

Siemens and Phillips are still top dogs in MRI machines. Three of the top five hearing aid companies are Danish: Demant, GN Store Nord and WS Audiology[0]. German Karl Storz is _the_ world leader in urology equipment. Danish Ambu is _the_ leader in single use endoscopes. Finnish Planmeca is a leader in dental equipment and their subsidiary Planmed one of the top 3 mammography companies in the world. Danish 3Shape and German exocad are more-or-less the only choices in dental implant CAD/CAM. Just to give a few examples

High voltage grid equipment:

Europe has been constructing a lot wind farms, many of them off-shore, and a decent amount of high-voltage, international electricity connections in recent decades. Most of that has been with European-made equipment. Some of the companies manufacturing that in Europe: Danish NKT, German Siemens and Swiss/Swedish Hitachi Energy (formerly ABB Power Grids) are three I know on top of my head. And then there are companies like Alstom that makes all the infrastructure around electric rail.

Ships:

European navies use warships built in Europe and I've seen nothing to suggest they are worse ships than Chinese warships. So the technology and shipyards are there to produce cutting-edge merchant ships, it's just not cost-effective.

Electric motors:

I've seen nothing to suggest Chinese motors have surpassed anything Swiss/Swedish ABB or Simens motors can do. And there are a ton of smaller, specialized motor manufacturers, e.g. Danish Grundfos that makes specialized motors for pumps.

Steel, aluminum:

The EU is self-sufficient in steel. A quick list of major companies producing steel in Europe: Spanish Acerinox, Luxembourgish ArcelorMittal, Austrian Voestalpine, German ThyssenKrupp, Italian Riva Group, Finnish Outokumpo, German Salzgitter, Swedish SSAB and French Vallourec.

Wrt. aluminum, the EU isn't quite self-sufficient. But ~75% of the imports are from Norway, Turkey, Iceland and Switzerland. So it depends on your definition of Europe.

Oil:

Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself, on the contrary it's seen as almost a curse, re:Dutch disease and so.

Cutting edge pharma:

If there's any category of company that's permanent fixture of EU stock indexes, it's pharma. To give just one example, Biontech, developer one of the two main Covid vaccines, is German.

Wind turbines:

In wind turbines Danish Vestas is number one and Spanish/German Siemens Gamesa is number two. The Chinese are catching up fast, but they're still behind.

Trains:

Spanish Talgo, French Alstom and German Siemens are all world-class EU train companies. Stadler is world-class, but Swiss, so it could also count. Then there's Hitachi Rail Italy (formerly AnsaldoBreda). As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class", but the driverless trains they have supplied to the Copenhagen Metro meet the mark.

So I'd argue that there's at least 10 more categories where the EU is at least tied.

0: the last two are Swiss Sonova and American Starkey.