Batteries have a much faster dispatch time than pumped storage. Pumped storage is good for offsetting reduction in other production capacity, and its dispatch time is faster than peaker plants, but its not as fast as a battery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_Uni...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833

2020 numbers had 22,894 MW of capacity. More storage capacity for power is needed.

The "where are things located" is in the mountains where there's a significant elevation change. Most of the country is too flat to have pumped storage be practical. Installed pumped storage in Michigan (about 2GW of capacity there) does little for the power demands of North Dakota.

And then... there's also building new ones.

    Even though FERC has issued licenses for three proposed pumped storage projects since 2014, no new pumped storage projects have come online in the United States since 2012. EIA’s most recent survey of planned power plant additions shows no pumped storage projects under development.

    At 5:12 a.m. on December 14, 2005, the northwest side of the upper reservoir was overtopped when water continued to be pumped from the lower reservoir after the upper was full. This led to the catastrophic failure of a triangular section of the reservoir wall and the release of 1 billion US gallons (3,800,000 m3) of water in 12 minutes. 

   ...

   As of 2011, Ameren was reported to have paid a total of close to US$200 million in settlements related to the 2005 breach.

The current PRs: https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers/pulls

Yes.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...

One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...

https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...

Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...

    Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.

If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/former-miami-lawmaker-fra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Artiles#Election_fraud

It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).

From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:

https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/10530/j-ann-...

    But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.

From 2024 https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/11885/j-ann-...

    But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.

    Last week the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls with questions about the authenticity of its surveys. In response, the team behind the supposed pollster acknowledged that its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”

    The project had an impact on election campaigns, with polls it did since June on many races, “shifting from one midterm battleground to another,” the New York Times reported, including Michigan, Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin.

    ...

    The media has reported that Wedgewood began releasing polls in June. On July 7, a story by Urban Milwaukee raised questions about a Wedgewood poll on the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Up to then, the most recent Marquette poll had shown Hong with 14% of the vote, and a more recent internal poll released by the campaign of Sara Rodriguez showed Hong at 22%. But the Wedgewood poll had Hong at a whopping 30%, which could “help convince Democrats who doubt her electability that she is running away with the race,” the story reported, noting that Wisconsin Republican Chairman Brian Schimming had said that for Republicans Hong would be the best opponent.

    ...

    But the Wedgewood “experiment” clearly sought to push Democratic voters in a way that would help Republican candidates. Just as it tried to elevate the candidacy of Francesca Hong, the most liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, it released a fake poll showing Mallory McMorrow, the moderate candidate in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, “plummeting into single digits,” as Time reported. “McMorrow said donations ‘dried up’ and she was ‘hounded’ with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the infamous’ Wedgewood poll numbers.”

AI hallucination could be a way to generate fake polling data, but that doesn't matter given that the intent is to generate fake polling data. It could have been done with a bag of dice just as easily.

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 (8 months ago, 366 points, 178 comments)

Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 (9 months ago, 140 points, 71 comments)

Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.

I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too!

And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.

I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account).

Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one).

The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board).

Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies.

While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle.

If you want to protest these things at your employer, start a union at your employer. Here are the steps: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...

Trump is not deserving of its name.

From two years ago: What's Going on With Shipping? SS United States - Fastest Cruise Liner and Flagship of US Merchant Marine - To Be Sunk! https://youtu.be/XFIPAJEl1TE

The Iran war that we're currently in is officially at 43B and estimated at 48B. https://iran-cost-ticker.com

There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...

https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...

You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.

The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.

It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.

Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )

Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956

If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.

(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)

Most of the helium on the Earth is from radioactive decay.

The helium on the moon, however, is from capture from solar wind... and has a higher concentration of helium 3. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...

The helium reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East...

The US has drawn down on the first one substantially and sold the second one to the private sector a decade ago that had no interest in maintaining it.

> On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.

> Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.

> ...

> The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.

---

The Helium Stewardship Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527

https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/helium/stew...

---

And its been on the "todo list of the federal government for decades"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_storage_and_conservatio...

> ... Since 2013 the world's largest helium hub is no longer located in the United States of America but in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project and meets 25% of the global demand. One challenge related to bringing new helium sources onto the market is that it usually requires venture capital financing. Another challenge is that the current selling price of U.S. Cliffside helium is too low to encourage more new producers to enter the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247597

Points: 45

# Comments: 8

50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.

In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.