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If the Bayer pattern makes you angry, I imagine it would really piss you off to realize that the whole concept encoding an experienced color by a finite number of component colors is fundamentally species-specific and tied to the details of our specific color sensors.

To truly record an appearance without reference to the sensory system of our species, you would need to encode the full electromagnetic spectrum from each point. Even then, you would still need to decide on a cutoff for the spectrum.

...and hope that nobody ever told you about coherence phenomena.


Just as important here: The higher the temperature of the storage medium, the higher the fundamental limit to how much electric energy you can recover.

Put differently: If you used the same amount of energy to heat one bucket of sand by 200C (A) or two bucket of sands by 100C (B), you would be able to recover more electric energy from case A because of the fundamental Carnot Limit. This is why sand is a good storage medium (as opposed to e.g. water), and why some solar power systems work with molten salts. Also why steam-based power plants need to operate at high pressure to be able to obtain high-temperature steam.


I'm pretty sure this is intended to store and produce heat anyway. They aren't going to be using this for generating electricity.


Please go have a look -- this is really well done with a clear message, good documentation and the call to action implemented very nicely (which is the background for TFA).


I think a lot of it is covered under "New Public Management" [0], which was maybe a result of the financialization happening in the 80's [1].

And I completely GP, having been in or in contact with academic research since the late 90's, there has been a very strong shift from a culture where the faculty had means for independent research, and were trusted to find their own direction, to the system we have today where a research project has much tighter overlook and reporting than most corporate projects.

A professor with a 4-5 person group will typically need two staggered pipelines of 4-5year funding projects to run risk free. In the EU it is virtually impossible to get funding for projects that do not involve multiple countries, so you need to set up and nurture partnerships for each project. Coordination the application process for these consortia is a major hassle and often outsourced at a rate of 50kEUR + win bonus. And you of course need to run multiple applications to make sure to get anything. When I talked to mentors about joining academia around 2010, the most common response was "don't".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_public_management [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization


> PSA: the "No Tax On Tips" provision expires...

My understanding is that this is true for all the Trump handouts: otherwise the ten-year economic outlooks would have cratered. The Economist had a couple of nice analyses on this.

Of course this means that the next administration will need to start with tax increases just to get to neutral, but maybe that is a feature?


The Republican strategy is to booby trap the US economy every time they are in power since Reagan.


> true for all the Trump handouts: otherwise the ten-year economic outlooks would have cratered

Not just that - they're often timed to expire early into the next administration which, if Democrats win, is an instant "look how the Democrats treat the working folk!" hammer. e.g. "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" from 2017, expiring at the end of 2025[0].

[0] https://theconversation.com/trumps-plans-to-extend-tax-cuts-...


Tax bills are universally passed through the budget reconciliation process these days to overcome the filibuster (can do a budget with only 51 Senate votes). That process has many restrictions on what tax changes can do to projected revenues outside a certain window: https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/tax/prospects-for-budget-r....


> My understanding is that this is true for all the Trump handouts

Only those for humans expire. The corporate tax cuts are forever. Read into that what you will.


Luckily the politicians involved are set to expire around the same time


Those were set to expire this year as well but got extended.


> Of course this means that the next administration will need to start with tax increases just to get to neutral, but maybe that is a feature?

Oh no.

What you have missed is the incredible end run around the spirit of the reconciliation process that the Republicans did this time around.

So, the did these tricks with the tax in Trump's first term, with tax breaks set to sunset in order to have a revenue-neutral effect over the required ten years.

This time around they needed to extend those breaks, right? So they must had to cut spending or raise other taxes in order to do that and have a revenue-neutral effect, right?

Ha ha, no! They convinced the CBO that the baseline for the reconciliation process this time should be whatever was in effect for the last few years. So those breaks are already baked in and don't need to be counterbalanced. It's a two-step, long-term process for making things permanent through the reconciliation process that otherwise one could not.


Did you read the article? The author specifically addresses accessibility in multiple places, including taking extra steps to work around browser bugs [0].

[0]: https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/#fn:10


Seems an overly pessimistic take. TFA specifically mentions per-cell temperature monitoring, and I would assume there is also per-cell voltage monitors.

As long as the controller is made sufficiently conservative, there is no fundamental problem: you limit the current according to the cell that heats the fastest and shut down once one cell is near depletion.

Maybe they have even gone a more aggressive route and build a balancing circuit that can route significant current around a low-capacity cell. Or maybe just charging logic to keep as many cells as possible in the 20-80 regime if they will be limited by low-capacity members anyway. There are so many options here.


This is such a great use. Excalidraw does this too [0], and uses a two-level extension, `.excalidraw.png`.

[0]: https://excalidraw.com/


> Well right now I am very skeptical, but I think we have somewhat given quantum computing plenty of time (we have given it decades) unless someone can convince me that it is not a scam.

Shor's paper on polynomial time factoring is from 1997, first real demonstration of quantum hardware (Monroe et al.) is from 1995: Yes, quantum has had decades -- but only barely, and is has certainly only now started to have generations.

To look at the kind of progress this means, take a look of some of the recent phd spinouts of leading research groups (Oxford Ionics etc.): There are a lot of organisations with nothing but engineering to go before they reach fault tolerance.

When I came back to quantum three years ago, fault tolerance was still to be based on the surface code ideas that floated when I did my phd ('04). Today, after everyone has started looking harder, it turns out that a bit of long-range connectivity can cut the error correction overhead by orders of magnitude (see recent public posts by IBM Quantum): The goalposts for fault tolerance are moving in the right direction.

And this is the key thing about quantum computing: you need error correction, and you need to do it with the same error-prone hardware that you correct for. There is a threshold hardware quality that will let you do this at a reasonable overhead, and before you reach this threshold all you have is a fancy random number generator.

But yes, feel free to be a pessimist -- just remember to own it when quantum happens in a few years.


"When quantum happens in a few years" -- do you mean NISQ (i.e. VQA, QAOA) or actual fault tolerant quantum computing that can run Shor?


We're already at NISQ


I meant practically usable NISQ


> Borrowing and taxation are completely different concepts. Unless I am the only idiot who hasn't asked for their tax back with interest. Possible.

I get the impression that maybe you are not aware of what is implied by the 'buy, borrow, die' tax strategy that parent is referring to: in effect it completely eliminates taxes on capital gains (in the US). [0] and [1] below are first two Google hits.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... [1]: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-ric...


I dont know how to respond to this.

There being a loophole in a single country doesn't seem to invalidate anything I have said. Capital Gains and Death Taxes are their own issues.


Ignore capital gains taxes.

I mentioned the tax strategy just to point out that borrowing against unrealised gains is common. (You can also do it in jurisdictions that don't have capital gains taxes. But there you do it for reasons other than optimising your taxes. Eg you might want to mortgage your house (without selling it) to buy a car.)


Ok but why mention borrowing at all. We are talking about taxation.

They are almost completely opposite concepts.

Borrowing literally defers payment to the future. Taxation on your now land value occurs now.

Why does the ability to borrow against unrealised gains (with the lender speculating on the return on those gains) matter compared to paying a tax on unrealised gains (which is due now, not deferred and barely speculative)


> Why does the ability to borrow against unrealised gains (with the lender speculating on the return on those gains) matter compared to paying a tax on unrealised gains (which is due now, not deferred and barely speculative)

You can borrow to pay the taxes. Or you can 'realise' your gains via a sale to pay the taxes. That avoids the leverage that you point out.


>You can borrow to pay the taxes. Or you can 'realise' your gains via a sale to pay the taxes. That avoids the leverage that you point out.

Thats insane, you know that right? You may have invented a worse financial instrument than the subprime mortgage crisis.

Taxation is an ongoing cost. you pay it every year.

Under LVT, the LVT price is entirely subjective.

If I am a bank, and joe blo has a 200k tax bill, and 20k income, I am already disinclined to lend him money to cover that tax bill because of his income. I think this is where you fall over, and the rest of this is just making fun of your nonsense.

The great thing about joe is he is going to get another tax bill next year, even if he parts with 95% of his land portfolio, I have no idea what the value of the remainder is going to be, subjectively, next year. Its an open ended liability. If I was a good banker who wanted to be nice to Joe I would ask him to leave.

However a normal bank might lend him the money just to receive his land as collateral to take it on when he inevitably defaults. But I thought LVT was about the reduction of land banking, not shifting ownership of land to the banks?


> Taxation is an ongoing cost. you pay it every year.

Yes, just like you gain the land rent from the land you own every year.

> If I am a bank, and joe blo has a 200k tax bill, and 20k income, [...]

My broker doesn't care about my income one bit when they lend me money: they lend against my stock portfolio. Similar, here you could lend against the real estate. Why would the lender care about income?

> However a normal bank might lend him the money just to receive his land as collateral to take it on when he inevitably defaults. But I thought LVT was about the reduction of land banking, not shifting ownership of land to the banks?

No, not at all. That's a common misconception, especially prevalent amongst fans of LVT.

As I said earlier, the LVT changes no opportunity costs between land uses at all. So if for some reason it's a good idea to 'land bank' without an LVT, then it'll still be a good reason to 'land bank' with an LVT.

However, being able to finance the government with an LVT might have second order effects on other taxes and regulations, that might make land banking less (or even more?) appealing. I don't know, it depends on what else is happening.


>Yes, just like you gain the land rent from the land you own every year.

But we arent discussing a renter, right? You know that? The example was som

If your "solution" is for the land owner who cant afford his massive tax bill on his land (a tax bill that he incurred because of a subjective valuation) your solution is that he moves off his land, somehow pays to make it suitable for the rental market and then rent it out? And then what? Rents a place himself? How is this desirable?

>My broker doesn't care about my income one bit when they lend me money: they lend against my stock portfolio. Similar, here you could lend against the real estate. Why would the lender care about income?

No one lends money without an expectation of a return. Yes you can lend on collateral. That works once unless it is paid back. That "paid back" needs to be accounted for in your analysis.

>No, not at all. That's a common misconception, especially prevalent amongst fans of LVT.

So we have struck down at least one of the touted benefits of LVT. Thats something. Thats a small amount of progress.


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