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Ok, we've merged (most) comments moved thither. Thanks!

Thanks. I'm upvoting that instead

Also ignored is that not all rectangular flags are the same proportions, e.g. the Belgian one is 13:15.

TIL the shiny metal coating on top of vacuum tubes is not an X-ray shield, but a reactive coating to scavenge any remaining molecules out of the vacuum.

You'll find a similar thing in vacuum fluorescent displays as well [0].

[0]: https://ibb.co/XZHWLD3x


It doesn't look like it.


Ah, thank you. Couldn’t put my finger on it.


That sounds like a great way to attract scammers and dissuade honest people, so if it's ever been tried it must have failed spectacularly (I also searched for variations of this idea but didn't turn up anything).


It probably worked for Romans because the taxes you were allowed to collect was so much more than you had to send back to Rome that you could get rich 'honestly'. That and you had options to prove the fraud that meant the other was unlikely to try.


Of course a 1960's design isn't adapted to current weather conditions. That doesn't mean the whole technology is useless, like so many commenters imply.

Any new build can and will include cooling adapted to hotter conditions.


There's a nuclear reaction in the sky beaming free energy to us, let's just use that


According to solar statistics by country in 2025:

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

Hungary had the highest share of produced solar electricity of all the countries in the world 27.3%. And even with this results nuclear energy is usefull for them and plan to build new reactors. (with help from Russia, so there may be same changes in this plan)


Hungary is already using that (today we were 90% carbon-free thanks to solar), the problem is what to do when it gets dark.


Batteries?

Starting this year, in Romania you cannot put new PV capacity online without the storage for it, is mandatory. Possibly for existing ones, but I am not sure.


Yes, absolutely colossal amounts of batteries though - what if it’s quite hot but also cloudy for 5 days in a row?

You either have to significantly oversize the PV (easier said than done, when its energy density is already not that high per m2), or have enough batteries to last for multiple days of full load. If you do the maths that’s a lot of batteries


>what if it’s quite hot but also cloudy for 5 days in a row?

The main idea is to then import power from somewhere sunny and/or windy or mountainous, using money you saved when they had the rain and you had the sun.

Batteries and other storage mechanisms will gradually reduce the need for doing so, but aiming to entirely eliminate all need for cooperation with others seems a bit paranoid.


They're being installed but it's going to take a while.


Much faster than any nuclear build though.


Sure, but it doesn't solve today's problem with the low Danube.


In Poland you cannot own big capacity storage because it makes you independent from the grid and Gov does not want that.

So you can have storage, but not too much, only as much to still be dependant on the grid.

See the hypocrisy here?


You are not allowed to have own PV and big capacity storage without connection to electric grid?


You cannot have big storage either way. Its normal to have two installations and be able to switch between them.

Not in Poland, because you are too independent.


The legislation was updated:

"According to the adopted act, devices with a capacity of up to 30 kWh are exempt from any construction procedures; only reporting to the grid operator (OSD) is mandatory. Those between 30 kWh and 300 kWh in a building and 30 kWh and 2000 kWh freestanding are obliged to prepare a land development plan and make fire safety arrangements."

https://renewablesnow.com/news/poland-adopts-rules-to-ease-e...


Mechanical ones so we aren’t left with a waste disaster in 10-20 years?


"the problem is what to do when it gets dark"

Batteries (or pumped storage hydro, which is more like a gravity-driven capacitor)


Hungary is flat as hell, there's nowhere to build enough hydro storage.

But yeah batteries would be nice.


AFAIK the mountains are about as high as Wales? It looks like there's a 600MW storage scheme in the planning stages. That's about a third of the capacity of Wales's largest system (which is the biggest in Europe) and about twice the capacity of the second system.

It's a meaningful contribution I would have thought.


You can do low(er) head pumped hydro storage [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...


Can't speak for Hungary specifically, but the problem with flat terrain wrt hydro storage isn't just elevation difference - which can be offset with flowrate - it's the large surface area to storage and to depth ratios.

Large lake means more losses, mainly due to evaporation, but seepage is also to be expected. Now put this fact in the thread's context: water shortage/stress...


Hungary is very flat.

"Most of the country has an elevation of less than 200 m. Although Hungary has several moderately high ranges of mountains, those reaching heights of 300 m or more cover less than 2% of the country."

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

"Hydroelectricity is not prevalent in Hungary due to unsuitable geographical conditions and civil resentment. The country's capacity of hydroelectricity was 57 MWs in 2015."

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


> Now put this fact in the thread's context: water shortage/stress…

But doesn't adding a large reservoir mitigate both? You're not pumping the entire reservoir up and down hill every day.


It depends on the water balance. Reservoirs would help you smooth out variability/seasonality and mitigate infrequent, short term droughts, depending on its size. They would not help with a long term drought or if you are water stressed (i.e. you simply don't have enough to meet demand). Quite the opposite, they may exasperate the issue as they consume (or lose) water themselves.


Collect solar power in orbit (where sunlight is uninterrupted) and microwave[0] it to earth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Microw...


I'm fairly sure that when it's dark where I am (because I'm in the shadow cast by Earth), it's also dark in orbit above me (because it's in the shadow cast by Earth).


Calling the sun’s fusion "a nuclear reaction" in a discussion about fission reactors is a bit silly.

> let's just use that

Also, let’s use both?


It's not matter of "can", it's a matter of "how much does it cost?" and "who pays for that?".


Precisely why the Netherlands does not have nuclear power plants. Cheap coal. Cheap oil. Cheap gas. And now cheap wind and solar.

They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.



That math leaves out externalities when pricing gas, oil and coal. You may have heard of a few fires going on in Europe in addition to nuclear plants shutting down?

Beyond that, those resources are also the lifeline for a dictatorship in the east causing increase defense spending.

There definitely is no such thing as cheap gas, oil or coal for Europeans, all things considered


The one that shut down in Romania is a CANDU, built in the 80s.


More like a CANNOTDU ;)


And new builds take a lot of time and a lot of money.

And then you habe the whole Russian drone war thing, where concentrating so much energy production on one point maybe be a bad idea


[flagged]


You're probably going to struggle to come up with a motive for that behaviour. It is much more likely that they simply aren't very thoughtful. Complex webs of deception in a public argument are certainly possible, but it generally relies on some group having a clear financial incentive to misdirect. That doesn't exist in the nuclear debate.


> a clear financial incentive to misdirect. That doesn't exist in the nuclear debate.

It's very obviously not in the interests of "big fossile" to go either solar or nuclear.


Because HN was a forum for oil executives to gather and discuss prices? Big fossil isn't in the room here. It would surprise nobody if there were 0 people in the comments who even work in a fossil fuel company.


>You're probably going to struggle to come up with a motive for that behaviour.

No, I'm not. Not in the slightest.

Number in top right go up. Monkey brain feel goooooood when that happen. Monkey brain keep doing behavior that make that happen.

> It is much more likely that they simply aren't very thoughtful.

They're plenty thoughtful. They'll contrive all sorts of arcane logic, plausibly deniable lies and witty turns of phrase (some of which are quite impressive).

What they're not is self aware (the dishonesty is a byproduct of that).

> Complex webs of deception

Those are possible but I don't think that's what's happening here.

> but it generally relies on some group having a clear financial incentive to misdirect.

Internet fanboys work for free. They have no financial incentive. Therefore we fall back to the monkey brain incentive.


Very well-written text, not a whiff of AI generation to it.

Your example is not even a run-on sentence!

I enjoyed reading it, many thanks to the author.


I really enjoyed it, but I think there’s more than a whiff.

> That curve is gone. The compromise is going with it; and the workload-shaped machine, the thing Harland was building in 1984, is what comes back.


Nope, and Pangram agrees with me, 100% human written with high confidence.

I really enjoy this style and I think it's not _that_ close to AI output (it's much better in fact).


I was never arguing that it was AI-written.


Right, this was in response to tclancy.


Yeah I'm not sure, just identifying that subjectively, this is the impression I get. Maybe I just associate any style which is especially fluent and avoids vernacular with AI at this point.


This seemed promising at the beginning, but do yourself a favor and skip to the end to see the hilariously slow end result.


Yep, it's astoundingly inefficient. I've been meaning to pull the code back into working memory and do the things I mention in Future Considerations, but it took long enough just to do this write-up; could be years before I get around to it.


Older editions (second hand or new) often have largely the same content at a fraction of the price...


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