Hacker News: usrnm

New comment by usrnm in "The Mathocalypse"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:26:06 +0000

1) Predicting the future is hard, but so far everyone who was saying that it would get better turned out to be right. It is getting better 2) Waymo exists

New comment by usrnm in "The Mathocalypse"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:16:13 +0000

Contact them again in 15 years and ask if they changed their mind. Could be interesting to see the results

New comment by usrnm in "Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:35:34 +0000

> Payment networks are not an easy thing to build or maintain

Then why are there so many of them? I like travelling and almost every country I go to has its own thing going on, often more than one. I lost count long ago

New comment by usrnm in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:36:06 +0000

Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?

New comment by usrnm in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:37:10 +0000

Places with a lot more sunshine. Morocco is a big one. The ones in my fridge right now are from South Africa and Peru

New comment by usrnm in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

usrnm — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 06:46:38 +0000

It needs two things: sun and water. Water has been solved and California is doing pretty great, don't you think? Let's take a look at another example: I live in the Netherlands and I like having berries with breakfast. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, all kinds of them. And you can buy them all year round in any supermarket, but just for a few months in summer they will have a proud label "made in the Netherlands". Plants had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, millennia of human selection, and still growing berries is not viable here for most of the year. Maybe we will start producing electricity in Morocco and shipping it here one day, just like berries, but producing it domestically using solar will never be effective

New comment by usrnm in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

usrnm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:23:33 +0000

Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.

New comment by usrnm in "First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months"

usrnm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:00:44 +0000

And yet, when the same argument is made about nuclear, all hell breaks lose

New comment by usrnm in "Greenvolt begins building 600 MW/2.4 GWh BESS in Poland"

usrnm — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:08:06 +0000

> Industry can electrify or sunset

The much more realistic third option is just moving somewhere else

New comment by usrnm in "Barcodes are about to go extinct"

usrnm — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 07:00:27 +0000

Decathlon does it in every country, not just France. Same with Uniqlo and a few others, but it's still only very large chains that can afford it

New comment by usrnm in "Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers"

usrnm — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:28:22 +0000

Evolution doesn't care about individual organisms, it's all about reproduction. Our lifespan is enough to raise a few children and pass genes on, so, from the evolutionary point of view, it's adequate

New comment by usrnm in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

usrnm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:52:08 +0000

> Comfort is the fashion

It, most certainly, isn't, people wear all sorts of uncomfortable clothes and shoes in the name of fashion. Fashion is all about signalling your status and belonging to this or that social group. Suits are simply associated with people most folks don't want to be associated with.

New comment by usrnm in "Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use"

usrnm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:05:05 +0000

> where electricity is abundant and/or cheap

Definitely not the Netherlands then

New comment by usrnm in "The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?"

usrnm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:28:25 +0000

That stuff gets rediscovered all the time, the latest example probably being golang

New comment by usrnm in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

usrnm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 08:51:18 +0000

China is very much repeating the history of Japan, and while we can argue how democratic Japan was in the second half of the XX century it definitely wasn't totalitarian.

New comment by usrnm in "C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake"

usrnm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 08:37:19 +0000

But not having fixed size integers (or integers tied to the size of a pointer) was. Both can be useful

New comment by usrnm in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

usrnm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:44:16 +0000

> Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…

I believe you've chosen the wrong tense there

New comment by usrnm in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

usrnm — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:09:11 +0000

That would make it the only company in the world not doing that

New comment by usrnm in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

usrnm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:07:08 +0000

> Europeans don't get that choice

We absolutely, 100% do. Not everywhere, just like it isn't universally true in the US, but it definitely is a choice that many in Europe have. We just aren't chained to a car even in this case, public transport is still great even if you don't live in the city center.

New comment by usrnm in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

usrnm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:11:55 +0000

That makes it even worse for european automakers, if they cannot compete even with a heavily tariffed BYD