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Do you have/do you plan to open source this anywhere? I'd be really interested in checking it out!


I've not put a ton of thought into a plan to open source it, but we've got comments from friends who also have a lot of genealogical info that it would be super helpful for their info, so maybe? It's basically just a CRUD Django app at it's core, so I don't know how interesting it would be.


I think a lot of people would be into this. If you're willing to, you should totally do it! You might get some good contributions from the community, too.


What a strange take. It reads as "nothing is worth improving on if it cannot 100% completely replace the thing that we're trying to get rid of". If we can reduce our dependence (say 50%) on a power source that has huge negative externalities, isn't that a worthwhile effort?


I've seen this kind of thinking very often.

Like the controversy when traffic light bulbs were replaced and incandescent were phased away in favor of LEDs. In some places where it gets very cold they got obstructed by ice. Because incandescent bulbs were so inefficient and generated so much heat, they didn't have the same "problem". So, because they could not handle the few days where this was a problem (just because it's cold, doesn't mean ice will form there), people were arguing that they were a bad idea.

It didn't matter that for 300+ days they would save a lot of energy. It didn't matter that they were better (and in most locations this would never even be a problem in the first place). It mattered that they were different and had different issues that needed to be solved. In those places, having a different design (or adding a heating element, only active when temps were low) would solve the remaining problem.

I've seen this sort of thinking in corporate settings too. A vastly inferior solution stays in place because a new solution doesn't solve all problems people can possibly think of - even when the existing solution doesn't solve them either!

It boggles the mind.


Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8

What's worse is that he points out you could have a lighting system with integrated defroster that only gets turned on when it's super cold, and you're STILL using less energy overall.


This article (and the included video) has a bit more detail for those interested in the mechanics of how they accomplished the move (like me!): https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...


Tesla has not "monopolized" charging stations in any reasonable understanding of the word. They spent somewhere south of $1B to built their own infrastructure. Any other company could have done that, but they chose to drag their heels instead. Even still, they could _still_ do that (and maybe EA will be that network). Electricity is pretty much everywhere, and there's definitely room for lots more long distance chargers. I don't understand how anyone could think what Tesla has done with it's supercharger network is a bad thing....


Tesla does not let other vehicles charge at their stations, at least in the US.

I don’t have this issue with any gasoline stations.


Should they? Why should one private company be forced to build infrastructure for other companies that are intentionally dragging their heels? GM doesn't run gas stations

It would be great if they could be altruistic to let anyone use them, but altruism isn't really a good path to profits in our society


Because electrical distribution infrastructure is a utility in every other case.

Good on Tesla for building a solution, but their stations are monopolized, and this isn’t good for EV adoption overall. It’s good for Tesla.


Ok, then the government should be doing it and investing to meet current and future demand. A private company (in a non-regulated market) can't be forced to do so.


I am not suggesting any of that. I explicitly said above that PHEVs are the more immediate solution to the situation.


Yes, in the same way a Cuisinart blender is a "monopoly" since I can only buy a Cuisinart blender from Cuisinart

No one's preventing anyone from building a better solution and making it available to consumers. Not a monopoly


I am not suggesting that Tesla has prevented anyone else from building charging stations. I am using the word monopoly in the non-antitrust sense here.


In what sense do you mean it, then?

Are any of these what you meant? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

None of those seem to apply to Tesla's charging stations to me. Could you explain more about what you're trying to say here?


> To dominate or use to the exclusion of others.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/monopolize

Tesla's network of fast charging stations are owned by the manufacturer of the car, and they exclude others from using their network.


> Tesla does not let other vehicles charge at their stations, at least in the US.

IIRC, the EU forced all EVs to adopt an industry standard charger interface. So, yes, it's a stupid US thing.


Musk said on an earnings call they expect to open the network up to other models by the end of this year.

https://electrek.co/2021/08/18/tesla-prepping-giant-supercha...


Forward looking statements from Musk don't have a good history of accurate timelines.


What do electron fumes smell like? :)


Ozone


The thing is, they're not "ludicrously expensive". Sure, Teslas and Porsches and Jaguars are, but you can also get a late-model used Nissan Leaf for under 10k, or a brand new Kia Niro for ~30k after tax credit. That's well within the bell curve of what people spend on ICE cars, used or not. A Leaf might not meet your needs, but it's not like there aren't other options out there. If you factor in longer-term costs like fuel cost, maintenance, and wear-and-tear, the equation tilts even further towards EV.

Not to say they shouldn't be cheaper, but they'll definitely get there. We're pretty close to price-parity as is (just not tons of options).


Yes, see this plot from IEA: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

This is as of 2018, and one would expect that the grid will continue to get cleaner as time goes on, which means the BEV options will get cleaner as well.


In this case, "in and out of focus" is actually variations in the amplitude of the probability function for the electron density projected onto a single plane (to a first approximation). Sometimes the wave functions of all the electrons interfere constructively, so you see a bright spot, and sometimes deconstructively, so you see dark. Depending on the orientation of things, this results in the images of "atoms" that you see in the picture. As the crystal changes shape and size, the interference patterns change, which partially explains why it disappears and reappears a few times. There's a bit more going on than that, but the physics of what's happening in a TEM image is really neat.


Most of the electrons in a NaCl crystal are quite localized (all the core electrons od Na+ and Cl-, and it's not a good conductor, so the valence band is full). So I don't expect too much interesting interference patterns. It looks like a problem with vibrations that make it go out of focus.


Wow, mind blown. Thanks for correcting me. Amazing to learn that the wave function is so directly sampled by TEM that the image we get shows Moiré patterns caused by its phase :)


Per the other comments, I think time scale is far to large for that to be the case in any not-also-explained-classically sense.


Maybe, if you're unlucky. In all likelihood, you'll be asymptomatic and spreading it to a bunch of other people without realizing it (which is most of the reason we're in this mess). Then those people do the same, get sick, and/or die.


That's pretty much correct. Single-atom imaging is possible using aberration-corrected scanning TEM, but the beam doses used will typically obliterate anything organic through radiolysis or ionization damage (although there are emerging ways around that using some interesting compressive sensing techniques).

Most "atomic resolution" EM images you see are actually images of columns of atoms, since the imaging mode is transmission, so necessarily the image is summed through the plane of the sample (so atomic resolution is only in the perpendicular plane).

The techniques used in this paper get around the dose issue by taking many images of very many presumably identical proteins (called dose fractionation) at very low dose. Computer algorithms are then used to stitch together a 3D model based on the low-dose individual images. Making it really cold also helps things from breaking down under the beam.


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