Hacker News: skrause

New comment by skrause in "New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S."

skrause — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:34:17 +0000

In 2025 China built 696 TWh of new wind + solar power and 13 TWh of new nuclear power. So to a first approximation it's fair to say that even China isn't really building out nuclear power anymore.

New comment by skrause in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

skrause — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:25:42 +0000

In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.

There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.

New comment by skrause in "Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US"

skrause — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:39:10 +0000

You always combine solar power with wind power, that already solves more than 90% of the storage problem. In places like Europe the darker winter is usually quite windy.

For example, last Sunday Germany covered more than 100% of its own power load with renewables even though winter is approaching. Only a small part of that was solar power, most electricity was generated by wind turbines: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

New comment by skrause in "We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3""

skrause — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:11:23 +0000

The baby monitor could have its own SD card and webserver and then you provide a smartphone app which uses local network discovery to find the server and talk to it.

In that case no parent needs to know about Synology or even IP addresses.

New comment by skrause in "Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)"

skrause — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 22:12:46 +0000

That law has existed since 1951 and is based on an executive order from 1931 by Hindenburg.

New comment by skrause in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available"

skrause — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 06:14:05 +0000

Because even when you encrypt the foreign third party can still lock you out of your data by simply switching off the servers.

New comment by skrause in "ChatControl update: blocking minority held but Denmark is moving forward anyway"

skrause — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:32:38 +0000

The name is "Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse".

"Chat Control" is not an official term, but a name chosen by critics of the law.

New comment by skrause in "Buypass discontinues issuance of TLS/SSL certificates"

skrause — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 09:37:06 +0000

Buypass was one of the free alternatives to Let's Encrypt that also supported the ACME protocol and even gave you 180 days validity.

New comment by skrause in "Google is burying the web alive"

skrause — Mon, 26 May 2025 19:05:32 +0000

It doesn't really "find" any personal sites, you have to tell it about each manually with a pull request: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/submit-site-to-marginali...

New comment by skrause in "Taiwan to ramp up gas imports after shuttering last nuclear plant"

skrause — Mon, 19 May 2025 16:16:43 +0000

Germany isn't ramping up gas imports, it's replacing both nuclear and coal with renewables.

And even though gas power plants are the designated backup power plants for times when there is neither enough sun nor wind, this doesn't actually happen often enough that you need even more gas. So gas consumtion in Germany is actually projected to decline by at least 50% until 2040 [0].

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/energie-nachfrage-nach-gas...

New comment by skrause in "Every UUID Dot Com"

skrause — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 22:16:10 +0000

It was 52!, the number of possible permutations of 52 cards: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

New comment by skrause in "Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest"

skrause — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 10:08:01 +0000

Food security is not an issue at all. For example in Germany around 20% of all farmland is used for "energy plants" (biogas etc.). Even in Germany solar planels have around a 28 times higher efficiency per area than biogas plants, so there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food production at all.

New comment by skrause in "How to do distributed locking (2016)"

skrause — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 06:38:05 +0000

You link to table level locks which are different from advisory locks: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.htm...

Are you sure that you're talking about the same locks? What are the pitfalls exactly?

New comment by skrause in "How to do distributed locking (2016)"

skrause — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 06:34:53 +0000

PostgreSQL has pg_advisory_xact_lock which releases the lock automatically when the transaction is over.

New comment by skrause in ""Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable""

skrause — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 19:37:46 +0000

I'm using using multiple profiles when I want to have a different set of extensions, bookmarks and browsing history. Multi Account Containers help with none of that.

New comment by skrause in ""Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable""

skrause — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 19:28:13 +0000

I'm doing all my banking in a separate Firefox profile where uBlock Origin Lite is the only installed extension. So there a zero extensions that have permission to access the pages or requests.

Of course I'm still using the normal uBlock Origin in my main browsing profile.

New comment by skrause in "Brazilian Electric "Suicide" Shower Heads [video]"

skrause — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:17:23 +0000

Seeing the constructions makes me think that we're blessed in Germany for getting all three phases even in single apartments.

Here it's quote common (if no cheaper method of central hot water is available) to have on-demand water heaters like https://www.clage.com/de/produkte/durchlauferhitzer which usually have a maximum power output of 21 kW, so they aren't just used for showers, but can also fill up a bathtub quite quickly. They also don't hang inside the shower, but on any nearby wall.

They're connected to three-phase power with a 32A fuse on each phase.

New comment by skrause in "Gas stoves may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California"

skrause — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 07:00:01 +0000

> try cooking with a round bottomed wok on electric

It's not an unsolved problem, I recommend the recent Technology Connections video titled "Induction cooking - but what about woks?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzJKxUCKOBg

New comment by skrause in "Malaysia backtracks on DNS redirection decision"

skrause — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 10:05:39 +0000

Malaysia is already doing the first one.

New comment by skrause in "Malaysia backtracks on DNS redirection decision"

skrause — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 09:35:34 +0000

We're talking about two different issues though:

1. Blocking or redirecting some pages when using the ISP's DNS server. This is what you're talking about. The workaround is to use a third party DNS resolver.

2. Intercepting all unencrypted DNS traffic to any DNS server and redirecting it to the ISPs' DNS servers. This is what Malaysia was planning to do.