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Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 Percent

https://spectrum.ieee.org/delhi-electricity-loss
118•rbanffy•1h ago•61 comments

AI companies leak data to advertisers [pdf]

https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/wp-content/interactivos/20260916-Prompt-like-a-butterfly-sting-lik...
266•damaru2•5h ago•82 comments

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-the-american-host
330•barry-cotter•2h ago•275 comments

Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models

https://github.com/PostHog/jeeves
105•nicowaltz•2h ago•44 comments

Without the Hot Air

https://www.withouthotair.com/
31•0sake_rs•1h ago•16 comments

500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-s...
200•ilamont•2h ago•121 comments

Using any C++ library in Godot

https://blog.conan.io/cpp/conan/gamedev/godot/cmake/2026/09/29/Using-Any-Cpp-Library-In-Godot.html
100•czoido•5h ago•26 comments

US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/the-netherlands-is-rolling-alternative-nixos-based-software...
193•mywacaday•2h ago•125 comments

Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display

https://jagi.studio/posts/phyllotaxis/
184•evakhoury•21h ago•27 comments

The new Firefox design is here

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/new-firefox-design-is-here/
39•timpera•54m ago•28 comments

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1673071/booted-up-in-1993-this-server-still-runs-but-not-fo...
124•doener•1d ago•65 comments

The systems that no one will test

https://blog.christianperone.com/2026/09/the-systems-that-no-one-will-test/
107•perone•1d ago•38 comments

Show HN: Raven – The harness of harnesses, built for RSI

https://github.com/EverMind-AI/Raven
25•cyfyifanchen•4h ago•18 comments

1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds

https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7361622
34•colinprince•1h ago•3 comments

Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/digital-audio-on-the-zx-spectrums-1-bit-beeper/
7•ibobev•1d ago•0 comments

California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

https://www.kqed.org/news/12101534/california-farmers-are-struggling-to-sell-grapes-as-demand-for...
291•randycupertino•18h ago•723 comments

Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second

https://4hiroshimas.info/
29•blondie9x•1h ago•21 comments

Software occlusion culling in Block Game

https://enikofox.com/posts/software-rendered-occlusion-culling-in-block-game/
56•airhangerf15•2d ago•4 comments

Pirating the Pirates

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates
642•piotrgrabowski•22h ago•322 comments

Optimizing x264 settings and per-title ladders

https://streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/optimizing-x264-settings-and-per-title-ladders.html
14•dabinat•2d ago•0 comments

Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote

https://countingfromzero.blog/2026/04/24/four-chi-26-papers-i-wish-i-wrote/
26•luu•2d ago•5 comments

The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines

https://phys.org/news/2026-09-beatles-permeated-papers-academic-disciplines.html
11•pseudolus•2d ago•5 comments

Startup Nights 2026 is comming up on 5-6 Nov. in Switzerland

https://www.startup-nights.ch/event/
37•sschueller•6h ago•18 comments

Tank Body Problem

http://www.jimsitu.com
148•jimbooonooo•13h ago•33 comments

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/microllmlab/
263•logicallee•19h ago•96 comments

ESP32S3 cluster running 1.58-bit (BitNet) Language model

https://github.com/Low-Zi-Hong/ESP32s3-LLM-Cluster
127•nkko•16h ago•29 comments

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

https://archaeologymag.com/2026/09/gobeklitepe-burials-hundreds-of-scattered-bones/
153•yusufaytas•3d ago•42 comments

Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes – Brought to You by Telephone World

https://evan-doorbell.com/
21•mikecarlton•5h ago•6 comments

Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

https://github.com/firelex/jeff
536•firelex•17h ago•204 comments

Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
780•slowin•22h ago•641 comments
Open in hackernews

Without the Hot Air

https://www.withouthotair.com/
31•0sake_rs•1h ago

Comments

jpm_sd•51m ago
title should be "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air"

It's a bit out of date at this point. The author passed away in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay

_aavaa_•45m ago
The books is good(ish) for it's time, but some of its analysis and forecasts are fundamentally flawed since it falls for the primary energy fallacy by comparing the chemical potential energy (in J) directly to electrical energy (also in J). The two are fundamentally different things and called be compared 1:1. E.g. To heat up your home with natural gas you need ~1J of chemical energy to get 1J of heat into the home, but with a electric heat pump you only need 1/6 J to get 1J of heat.

It is also a product of its time in terms of wind/solar vs nuclear. His forecasts of the impact of solar and wind is based on prices and performance from 2008. Prices have come down an order of magnitude since then, and performance and lifespan have increased drastically.

azornathogron•31m ago
Heat pumps, and their efficiency (getting more than X Joules of heating for X Joules of electricity) are discussed in chapter 21 Smarter Heating, see for example the diagram and discussion on page 150: https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_150.shtml

I imagine the economics (and perhaps technical improvements) of some things may have changed more than the book could forecast. But heat pumps were definitely understood by the author.

bryanlarsen•24m ago
Which means that not including the conversion in the primary comparison is particularly egregious.
_aavaa_•16m ago
I’m not saying he was unaware of heat pumps, I’m saying he’s comparing apples to oranges simply because they use the same units.

Look at “3 - Cars” on page 29. He says the typical car uses 40 kWh/day. 40 kWh of what? Chemical energy in the gasoline.

The go to page 33 where he looks at how much energy onshore wind could produce per days in the UK. His number is 20 kWh/d. 20 kWh of what? electricity

He then compares those two numbers directly and uses that comparison as the basis of his arguments: “Britain’s onshore wind energy resource may be “huge,” but it’s evi- dently not as huge as our huge consumption.”

This is simply incorrect. A combustion engine converts less than half of the chemical energy in the gasoline into mechanical work that can move the car. The electric model converts >90% of it. So we don’t have to replace 40 kWh/day, we have to replace less than half of that since the electric process is more efficient.

This same issues, the primary energy fallacy, underpins large parts of the book.

TeMPOraL•4m ago
I remeber the book differently - I remember it being primarily about getting exactly this right. Lot of space spent discussing efficiency and losses and comparing apples to apples.

(Admittedly, I read it many years ago, my memory may be off, though I strongly doubt it.)

js8•2m ago
I think in 2008, it wasn't clear whether cars are going to be replaced by electric and what the final efficiency will be. It could also have been more because you would need to convert electricity to fuel first.

So I think as a conservative estimate, it kinda works.

bryanlarsen•25m ago
> Prices have come down an order of magnitude since then

$10/W to 0.30/W is closer to 2 orders of magnitude than 1.

perennialreport•29m ago
Worth reading even with the dated numbers. MacKay's lasting contribution isn't any specific forecast - it's the discipline of expressing everything in the same units (kWh per day per person), which makes energy arguments commensurable instead of vibes-based. Once you've internalized that, most energy coverage in the media starts reading like category errors. The specific figures have moved - solar costs, EV adoption, heat pump uptake - but the arithmetic habit hasn't aged at all.
sam1r•29m ago
The original author was blogging just a couple days prior to his death. Rest in peace

https://itila.blogspot.com/2015/09/what-do-you-tell-children...

peri-cl•20m ago
The author is coincidentally the author of a (free-to-read) information theory book which is also popular on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34618613 ("Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (2003) (inference.org.uk)")

esafak•18m ago
The late author.
js8•17m ago
Love the book, but as others have noted, it is very much dated. Although I believe someone started a project some years ago to update it.
danrecht•8m ago
David McKay was a great public speaker as well: https://youtu.be/GFosQtEqzSE?si=Gyrcep1VDae6xDo1&t=110
nirinor•3m ago
Actually, the better link might have been <https://withouthotair.org/changes>.

Note the .com->.org: its a version of the book whose numbers are maintained here <https://github.com/life-itself/without-hot-air/commits/main/>.