phenol

I normally don't like talking politics on HN, but as someone who actually worked alongside talented and diligent federal employees I really can't abide this slander. Most of the people I worked with were brilliant and technical people. You think we didn't know we could pull down 2-5× the salary in the private sector? We stayed in the civil service because we were mission-driven and we cared about impacts beyond a quarterly profit motive, even though it paid like shit.

We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.

The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.

(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)

You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".

If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.

thank you for actually reading the article and realizing that the team of energy scientists + engineers doing this have thought more carefully about the viability of the process than a HN commenter that learned about it this morning

kind of. the real figure of merit here is the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH), which requires you to build a technoeconomic model to simulate the total cost and production of a hypothetical unit over its lifetime. focusing just on "energy efficiency" will be misleading (in favor of geoH2!) because, relative to a green H2 elyzer, this approach has relatively lower operational costs (OPEX) and relatively higher capital costs (CAPEX) because you don't need stoichiometric amounts of electrons but you do need to drill a bunch of boreholes. if you just looked at "energy efficiency" you'd fail to amortize the drilling capex which is probably a bigger cost driver than electricity opex.

and fwiw estimates of LCOH by this process are $0.50-1.50/kg compared to maybe $3-6/kg for green H2. but these are obviously pie-in-the-sky NOAK figures and a technoeconomic analysis is only as good as the assumptions you feed into it. is it actually cost effective? there is only one way to know for sure, and these guys are gonna find out it's the hard way.

sure, and I'm saying that it's not a well-defined number because it's not a closed thermodynamic process. it's kinetically limited, so your H2 yield is a function of how much time you're willing to wait. it also obviously will depend on the type of rock, electrohydraulic fracturing parameters (pressure, voltage, pulse sequence) and so on. and in practice one of the biggest challenges in this field is actually capturing and collecting the hydrogen you stimulate, which is difficult to model and can depend on the precise geology and downhole microbiology. you simply can't compare it to electrolytic H2 on an atoms-per-joule basis.

this is an absolutely valid Bayesian approach to this problem. sadly, this point is not even touched upon in this article, which deals solely with minutiae of the probability distributions (kurtosis, etc) of coins that are indeed fair.

to make a fair comparison here, you need to normalize per mole of metal. these enthalpies of formation are reported per mole of oxide, but there's twice as much Al per mole of Al2O3 than Ti in TiO2.

I don't think people are upset because they "got big", but because they were acquired by a corporation that signals a core shift in their ideals. If they were bought by Valve, or even Microsoft, I don't think there'd be nearly as much backlash -- because it's not that they're BIG, it's that Valve and Microsoft would not be pushing for a different market with their product (not to say they wouldn't later).

I seriously doubt the correlation between "liking porn" and "refusal to purchase a device that does not have official porn apps, especially considering I could stream porn from my phone or computer to my Chromecast just fine. In fact, if I'm being honest, I never install porn apps, even on devices that allow them, even if I intend on watching porn on them anyway.

New events? New sectors? New systems and subsystems?

New content from Chris Avellone?

Just playing devil's advocate here, but are you sure that the same sort of start-up culture pervaded the industry when these single-letter-NYSE companies formed (some over a century ago)? Don't you think that the presence of mass media (specifically internet presence) has greatly changed the importance of a name?

I have never seen this notation used, but perhaps it is mean to represent steradians (the unit of solid angle)?

You totally can get good at it, it's a skill like any other. I've won like 40 games out of 200 or so, and I'd say that I win about half of my games I decide to play past the first sector.

You just have to have a good feel for progression. Always fight as many ships as possible, and only leave the sector when the rebel fleet is riding your ass. Know which weapons, events, and upgrades are good, and roughly what order in which to get them.

I have played over 100 hours of FTL. Help me.