Hacker News: sunshinesnacks

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "America's Geothermal Breakthrough"

sunshinesnacks — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:19:06 +0000

EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:26:58 +0000

Maybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”.

There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.

Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:56:12 +0000

> They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.

That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:22:42 +0000

None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.

You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:19:08 +0000

That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.

Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Coffee linked to slower biological ageing among those with severe mental illness"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 02:42:46 +0000

Good point. It was all locally roasted beans at that point, so maybe that was what made the difference. Or at least contributed a lot.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Coffee linked to slower biological ageing among those with severe mental illness"

sunshinesnacks — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 02:38:37 +0000

I cut coffee for a year or so 10 years ago due to stomach issues, then slowly added fancy espresso drinks back, figuring that if I was only having coffee once a week, it might as well be fancy. I don’t seem to have stomach issues now with 1-2 lattes/cappuccinos a day.

Maybe it’s unrelated, all in my head, better beans, or the 3-4 oz of whole milk, but maybe give espresso drinks a try if you haven’t?

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:41:22 +0000

The goal of using CRPS is to produce an ensemble that is a good probabilistic forecast without needing calibration/post processing.

[edit: "without", not "with"]

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Building the Future with Blockly at the Raspberry Pi Foundation"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:45:57 +0000

From the Raspberry Pi blog post on taking over Blockly:

> Platforms like Scratch, MakeCode, and MIT’s App Inventor are all built with Blockly. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of young people have learnt the fundamentals of computer science using software that is built with Blockly.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Building the Future with Blockly at the Raspberry Pi Foundation"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:14:00 +0000

Building the Future with Blockly at the Raspberry Pi Foundation

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:14:00 +0000

Article URL: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/10/blockly-graduates-from-google.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871556

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Solar panels + cold = A potential problem"

sunshinesnacks — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:57:53 +0000

Voc is just the open circuit voltage measured at the terminals (plugs). “Nameplate” Voc is at standard test conditions (STC) of 1000 W/m^2, 25 deg C cell temperature, and a standard are mass/spectrum. The combo of 1000 W/m^2 and 25 C cell temp is not common in the real world in most climates, but still happens. Even relatively hot climates can have times in winter that exceed nameplate Voc if inverters turn off (making the panels go to open circuit).

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "World Wide Lightning Location Network"

sunshinesnacks — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:01:35 +0000

Hey! That’s exciting! Open-meteo is great.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "World Wide Lightning Location Network"

sunshinesnacks — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:09:16 +0000

Open-meteo does have ECMWF data and forecasts. Free for non-commercial use. I think the person behind open-meteo is on HN.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "World Wide Lightning Location Network"

sunshinesnacks — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 13:37:42 +0000

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but ECMWF provides a lot of data and forecasts for free [1]. And they are increasing the amount of data that is free [2].

[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data

[2] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-...

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:26:20 +0000

Like from coal ash ponds that might leak heavy metals into drinking water?

https://alabamareflector.com/2025/08/02/capped-alabama-coal-...

https://alabamarivers.org/coal-ash/

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations"

sunshinesnacks — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:04:15 +0000

I don’t watch my local PBS over antenna much anymore, but it is great, just like you describe. Amazing what you can watch for free OTA, when you think about it.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "The accuracy of weather forecasts"

sunshinesnacks — Tue, 20 May 2025 02:51:36 +0000

This NOAA National Blend of Models (NBM) viewer lets you enable observations and then roll back the forecast initialization date to see forecasts and observations at the same time.

It’s experimental, and selecting weather stations is a little clunky, but it has some really cool info that’s hard to find other places.

https://apps.gsl.noaa.gov/nbmviewer/?col=2&hgt=1&obs=true&fo...

Edit:

This GEFS plume viewer is cool, too.

https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gefs_plumes/index.ht...

You can check a box to plot observations and then pick an older “cycle”.

Both are limited to the US.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Project Aardvark: reimagining AI weather prediction"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:18:05 +0000

I think it’s replacing data assimilation. Ingesting observation data from lots of sources. Not replacing observations themselves.

New comment by sunshinesnacks in "Project Aardvark: reimagining AI weather prediction"

sunshinesnacks — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:16:08 +0000

The Nature preprint references this zenodo archive with data and code in a big 13GB .tar file: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13158382

I haven’t downloaded it to see what’s in it.