jodrellblank
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161381
But apparently I’m the only one, so it didn’t make it in.
But I still recommend it and think HN as an audience would find it more relevant than most people as a fictional near-future technology gone wrong story with ubiquitous advertising, remote work, rocketry, startup innovation, a revered CEO, a justification machine which may as well be an LLM nowadays.
Of all the conspiracy theories you have heard of, or can conceive of, anyone who comes to believe one would say that - and almost all of those people would be wrong. Same for almost any fringe idea, almost any revolutionary discovery or invention, medical cure, chemical transformation.
Surely that would store a lot of power, right? Lifting stuff is hard work, I thought. Showing my working so people can poke holes in it:
1000kg is a ton x 5 metres is two storey of a house x 9.8 Earths gravity constant = 49000 Joules is 13.6 Watt hours is …
… not going to power a house very long. it might mostly charge an iPhone 13 mini battery.
Lifting a Ford F-150 at 2.2 tons (5000 lbs) gets to 30 Watt Hours.
A household might use 10kWh in a day, or 660 tons lifted 5 meters to store that and round it up to roughly 1000 tons to give room for conversion losses to get that much electric power out of the system.
So 400+ Ford F-150s lifted up two storeys to store a house’s power for a day.
Convert that to water (1litre weighs 1kg and a cubic meter to a ton) and we are back in the realms of an Olympic swimming pool as a standard size, 40% of one going up 5m this time.
At home, the scaffolding required to take that weight and the space required to lift hundreds of cars or hundreds of tons of water would be immense. We’re talking a town water tower.
And of course you can trade less water going higher but then need more vertical space and if it’s on a hill, more sideways space for the gradient.
The other way I’m amazed is how energy dense LiIon batteries are, fossil fuels are way more dense, and human bodies are very efficient at 2000 Calories/day is about 2.2 Watt-hours.
> "As an example, consider a hypothetical 2-year wellness program that costs $400 per month per person (say, $13 per day for healthy food) and reduces the risk of heart failure by 1 percentage point, from 5% to 4%. For the first 90 days alone, heart failure treatment is much more expensive at $22 000 than the wellness program, but that doesn’t mean that the wellness program saves money. In this case, 100 people must participate in the 2-year program to reduce the incidence of heart failure by 1, from 5 people to 4 people. In other words, the number of people who must be treated with the prevention program to avoid 1 heart failure is 100 (NNT = 100)"
1. Why is the person's food cost attributed to the wellness program, instead of the person's food budget?
2. Most people are overweight or obese. I would expect $400/person/month of healthy food to lead to weight loss as part of the intervention. This skim-read study of 5000 people[1] concludes that "Modest weight losses of 5 to <10% were associated with significant improvements in CVD risk factors at 1 year". The hypothetical uses 1 percentage point, which sounds insignificant.
3. This Novo-Nordisk page[2] says: "According to a post-hoc analysis from the Look AHEAD trial, individuals with type 2 diabetes who lost ≥10% body weight had a 21% decrease in 4-point MACE incidence (defined as CV death, non-fatal acute myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke, or hospitalisation for angina). A weight loss of 5% has significant health benefits". Again relatively small weight loss shows significant improvements.
(Comparison: someone 300lbs losing weight at 1 lb per week takes eight months to lose ten percent of their bodyweight. Healthy weight loss is often discussed at twice that rate or 2 lbs per week. In the TV show My 600lb Life Dr Nowzaradan gives morbidly obese people targets of 5-10lbs/week initially. The hypothetical wellness program is two years?).
The improvements from healthy diet which leads to weight loss ought to be more than just reduced risk of heart attack. Reducing hypertension (high blood pressure) leads to reduced risk of stroke and chronic kidney disease. Reduced body fat and healthier diet leads to reduced risk of Type 2 Diabetes and its complications (vision loss, neuropathy, slowed wound healing, worse immune function). Reduced weight leads to reduced risk of back pain, knee pain, sleep apnoeia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Reduced body fat leads to reduced risk of some cancers, better diet reduces risk of other cancers. The hypothetical only considers treatment for heart attack in the savings but there should be a lot more savings.
The hypothetical only considers the treatment cost of a heart attack for 90 days but is that all the treatment they need? Are they not on regular drugs and checkups long term? And someone who survives a heart attack is at increased risk of another heart attack from all the same reasons they had the first one. American Heart Association says "about one in five people who have had a heart attack will be readmitted to the hospital for a second one within five years"[3].
And avoiding the prodcutivity loss from all the time off work from heart attack, back pain, sickness, medical appointments and treatments over years and decades. Intervention may not save money, but it may lead to increased ability for the economy to generate more money than it cost.
There's probably a point in that article, but why use such an easily criticised hypothetical to try and make a point? Not even going into $13/day vs 'beans and rice' or saving a person money on takeaway, cigarettes, alcohol, gasoline, or the costs to a person of moving to a walkable area or joining a gym, or all that kind of lifestyle intervention.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3120182/
[2] https://pro.novonordisk.com/disease-area/cardiovascular-dise...
[3] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/04/04/proactive-steps-can...
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.
Lifting an Olympic Swimming Pool (2.5 Mlitres) up 1 metre against gravity needs about 7kWh.
7kWh of Lithium battery is tiny, like three shoeboxes. And apparently costs about $1500 on eBay though I was expecting about $5k-$7k.
Surely it costs a lot more to buy two Olympic pools worth of land, dig it out, line it, and buy the turbines and pipes and stuff?
Dinorwig in Wales moves a lake 3.5km long and 26m deep, cost hundreds of millions to build, stores 9.1 GWh and Wikipedia says it’s questionable whether it’s financially viable in todays energy market, estimating 40 years to a return on investment for just arbitrage night to day electricity costs.
It isn't self-appointed, everyone is a 'moderator'. And 'everyone' could vote to re-open closed questions.
Do you spend much time on Quora? Or AskReddit? Do you like that they are endlessly 'the same' questions over and over and over?
It isn't your text. All content is submitted under a Creative Commons license[1][2] which lets StackOverflow 'adapt remix transform' as long as they give credit (username) and indicate if changes were made (edit history). StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this "I imagine the site is something else and I'm making myself mad and blaming them". I don't know why because it's never been a discussion forum which changed, or a personal blog, it's always been a Wikipedia style public edit site. It's like people assume all websites with a textbox and a submit button are required to be the same website and behave the same way.
The first podcast[3] with Spolsky and Atwood from April 2008 has them talking about the site they are designing, and they mention editing other people's answers:
"""Spolsky: Our longer term goal, if we’re successful, is that you're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type "merge two arrays python" and submit that, and our goal is to be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited answer to that question that some individual has contributed and maybe other individuals have edited."""
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
[2] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110827210055/https://stackover...
If a patient with high blood pressure asks "will my face look like Dizzy Gillespie?" isn't it better to answer "No, that was air pressure and cheek damage" than to answer "I don't know who that is, call your doctor"?
That article makes good re-reading in the "Penetrate and Patch" section now, in the days of AI exploits popping up faster and faster.
[1] https://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/...
See the Versailles Wedding Hall collapse in Israel, 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_wedding_hall_disast...
""" An initial inquiry blamed the collapse on the Pal-Kal method of constructing light-weight coffered concrete floor systems which was banned shortly after …
Late in the construction process … a third storey was added. … the structure supporting the new third storey was subjected to much greater loading than was originally anticipated. … somewhat mitigated by the construction of partitions on the floor below …
A few weeks before the collapse, the wedding hall owners decided to remove the partitions. … the floor above began to sag several centimetres. The owners viewed the sagging floor primarily as a cosmetic problem, and attempted to level it with additional grout and fill … a new and significant dead load at the weakened area. """
a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details
b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker
Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.
https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/ - PEP 3000 says it will be a derived from the Python 2 codebase and not a complete rewrite (referencing Joel Spolsky's views on complete rewrites and Netscape Navigator).
https://peps.python.org/pep-3099/ - PEP 3099 is changes Guido van Rossum rejected from Python 3 (including := as a binding operator), parallel iteration, programmable syntax, parser going beyond LL(1), changing the for/else construct.
https://peps.python.org/pep-3100/ - PEP 3100 is things he set as goals for it, things like all strings are Unicode and byte arrays are a separate type, optional type annotations, 'exec' and 'print' change from statements to functions, None/True/False become keywords, old-style classes are gone, changing inequality comparison from <> to != , require C99, drop BeOS support, drop old standard library modules, and more.
actually, more changes than I remember.
I believe it has a larger battery.
That larger battery gives it 25% less runtime.
They didn’t actually say the Oppo gets better battery life, but if they had said it, I would certainly disbelieve them - because “some googled results” of a site which reviews phones and attempts to do standardised tests is stronger evidence, yes.
Link to some of those comments? Should be easy if there are that many.
Say I ask it who are the most beloved Indian cricketers and why, it might not be correct but it will have the right vocabulary - cricket terms and gameplay I’ve not heard of, player names and styles I don’t recognise, things critics and commentators like and dislike about game strategies. And it is like that for almost any topic.
If they hallucinate a Python function, it will look like a plausible function e.g. “hn.create_user_account()”. They don’t hallucinate like
# create HN user account
# requires eye of newt and frog leg
“Oh great spirit of the internet I request and command you make a new account…”
To pick the first Google result that isn’t the manufacturer’s pages, GSM Arena tested the Oppo at 15:45 hrs battery life and the iPhone at 19:20 hrs.
I strongly expect to find the usual camera result from the last twenty years of “marketing megapixels” not translating into image quality, but that’s more subjective.
Doubtless you’re going to say that the Oppo is a bigger screen but then why did you choose to crow about 430mAh more battery capacity and not compare with the iPhone Duo?
https://m.gsmarena.com/oppo_find_n6-review-2947p3.php
https://m.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_18_pro_max-review-3002p3...
That house trades at 13x now.
There is no house of any size for 3x in most areas of the UK.
You can’t handwave that away by saying “central heating”. The cost of part-of-a-house is far less than the total - not 10x more on top.
Part of the issue is population doubled since then but house building didn’t. Part is cheap debt in the 2000s turned everyone and their dog into buy-to-let landlords then AirBnB hosts.
> "Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub—over 36 million in the past year. It’s our fastest absolute growth rate yet and 180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub."
> "Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute, merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month (+23% YoY), and pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY)—including a record of nearly 100 million in August alone."
and goes on a lot longer.
Citing Terry Pratchett’s “Interesting Times”.
“the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects 10% growth for software developers, QA analysts and testers from 2025 to 2035.”
“GitHub counted more than 180 million developers in its 2025 report, and more than 36 million of them had joined in the previous twelve months.”
Seems like a lot more humans are applying and expected to apply?
As people say on Twitter, the machine is coding, puzzling, playing, and unstressed; you are washing the dishes, doing the chores, managing its workload, and responsible for its mistakes. :-|
"""I worked at Google. Google has an internal philosophy of “Don’t complain, fix things”. This is, on the face of it, a proactive and positive philosophy that empowers people to make changes in the workplace.
It’s not. It’s a horrible, coercive, tool of abuse that is a fairly central part of why it only took me six months at Google before I burned out hard and had to quit for the sake of my mental health.
The problem with an attitude of “Don’t complain, fix things” is that it means you can’t point out problems without taking on an obligation to fix them. This means that you can’t point out problems that are too large for you to fix, and that you’re reluctant to point out even problems that you could in theory fix because it increases your workload.
The result, at least in the part of Google that I was in, was very much a culture where people had learned not to notice problems."""