Viewing profile — avernon

Hub and spoke is primarily used to fill large planes. If you have 10-20 passenger electric planes you'd land at some random county airport, eat a hamburger or a taco while the plan…

Yes, I read the underlying paper a while back. It only looks at the very first step of a Dow-like process, before any electrochemistry happens. Instead of dumping hydroxide in a ta…

They mention that they are doing electrochemistry. A huge portion of historical magnesium production is from electrolysis, including the only operating plant in the US. Past method…

In this case it is boil sodium, condense sodium to heat air, run air through turbine.

Quaise wants to use old coal plants. So yes if you can drill down super deep to hot enough temperatures.

Will your system be robust to changes in solar farm design? Like if the industry goes towards the Erthos model of installing panels on the ground without racking or trackers?

Germany has a 220 euro/kWh feed in tariff subsidy for geothermal.

Drilling cost is usually estimated for drilling in sedimentary rock with assumptions about how casing is run ;) It is possible that drilling 30,000' of granite has conditions that …

Tesla was founded in 2003, Rivian in 2009. So Tesla took five years to start Roadster production, while Rivian has taken 12 years until first customer deliveries. Maybe Rivian will…

The data is observational, which generally means you should ignore it. It is too noisy. There were those studies that showed moderate alcohol use improved health and only heavy dri…

The people I know with electric cars charge at home the vast majority of the time. Swapping adds a lot of complexity and cost in the pack design. NIO is doing swaps as another comm…

The problem here is the form factor of the cell as much as the chemistry. Pouch style cells are very difficult to regulate temperature in. This is a key reason why other automakers…

This must be surprising to people, but the prairie co-evolved with ruminants like cows and buffalo. It literally dies and undergoes desertification without them. Buffalos can't bre…

I think there are enough hackers that come from agricultural communities to give it a little boost. If I had discussed whether cows were evil or not, it looks like it might have go…

Did you choose batteries for the first version to simplify the power train? Also, why use hydrogen instead of a cheaper, buoyant neutral fuel like propane? If you are worried about…

Is the chain open source with permission-less validators?

austinvernon.com was taken, I had the ENS name, and I was curious about IPFS, so I used it. The system works surprisingly well, mostly thanks to Cloudflare. I've only been using it…

First you need to get a metamask wallet. Then you buy some ETH for the wallet. Finally go to ens.domains and register your name. It is very friendly with IPFS, which is how I host …

Thanks! If I would have known it would go to front page of Hacker News I would have had one of my construction science friends proof read it first! I've been writing for fun and to…

You are 100% correct. This has been a common term in the manufacturing industry when focusing on ergonomics safety and reducing repetitive stress injuries for quite some time. The …

https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/post/will-boom-supersonics-...

The Concorde basically used afterburners. It used fuel at incredible rates. Boom is using more modern engine technology that can achieve the high cruise speeds using less fuel. Thi…

Since you are piggybacking on their system, you'd save on peripheral equipment costs and operating costs, too. The subsystems surrounding these cooling water systems are immense. T…

I think most process engineers at an ammonia plant would be interested to hear about it because it is an elegant solution. I'd focus any pitch on working with them to make sure you…

I love this. I started laughing when I read the description. I laughed because a Harvard physicist (funded by people like Bill Gates) had the same idea to use cooling towers for th…