hnmullany

7 ms·

1.
by hnmullany 5d ago
Because it's now headed by an ex-lobbyist for the chemical industry
2.
by hnmullany 7d ago
No that was above my pay grade. They met with the engineering leads directly.
3.
by hnmullany 7d ago
For 4.51, it was $100k per cert slot. We were just trying to cover the cost of the engineering team.
4.
by hnmullany 8d ago
I was the product manager with responsibility for root certificates in the Netscape 4.51 browser. It's crazy to see someone factor it 25 years later. Just to reply to some people in the comments. Yes, we knew export grade encryption wa
5.
by hnmullany 1mo ago
I was a private equity analyst in the 90's and we owned Berol - one of the classic American pencil companies. Their classic wood pencils were made the exact same way - batch oriented and quite labor intensive. Their next gen process wa
6.
by hnmullany 2mo ago
I worked in private equity as an analyst in the 90's - we looked at an ambulance service that was up for sale - the underlying operating margins (before you load on debt) were pretty reasonable, although I don't remember the detai
7.
by hnmullany 2mo ago
I worked in private equity in the 90's and looked at one of the big regional ambulance service companies that was up for auction. The underlying operating margins were fairly reasonable - the private equity owned companies only have is
8.
by hnmullany 3mo ago
I think the strength of the "vouch" is understood to be much weaker in Silicon Valley - it's more like - I've talked to this guy for 30mins to an hour and I can vouch that he (or she) is not a waste of time for you to ta
9.
by hnmullany 3mo ago
On every tech that would have made HTML5 an effective application platform (databases, advanced AV, animation) - Apple has been 5-10 years behind Google and Firefox, and in many cases simply vetoed or wouldn't implement.
10.
by hnmullany 3mo ago
Flash didn't disappear when internet technologies got better. Flash disappeared because Apple refused to distribute it on iPhone - partly because Adobe couldn't effectively shrink it down to early generation iPhone technical capab
11.
by hnmullany 3mo ago
You might want to look up the value of those "fat pensions" - a lot of them are substantially less than US Social Security. e.g. in Ireland, the state contributory pension (aka what you paid egregious social security taxes for) ma
12.
by hnmullany 4mo ago
I don't see any on data on nutrition in that reference. Organic grown food tends to be higher in anti-oxidants and secondary metabolites, possibly because the plant immune system is activated more frequently due to better microbial bio
13.
by hnmullany 4mo ago
Organic grown food is more nutritious and I'm glad we have a significant percentage of farms who have gone organic, but the yield gap is very well documented. Organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly and unpredictably and can'
14.
by hnmullany 4mo ago
I think he peaked in the aughts - his latest stuff is ho-hum.
15.
by hnmullany 5mo ago
I came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almo
16.
by hnmullany 6mo ago
Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.
17.
by hnmullany 6mo ago
Just a note that 46,000 is a 2050 target - which covers current demand AND all the growth in electricity and heat demand over the next 25 years.
18.
by hnmullany 6mo ago
Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built. But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach n
19.
by hnmullany 7mo ago
Heroku got a lot of attention and funding within Salesforce at least for the first few years - they grew from about $1M in ARR when they got acquired, and I think they peaked at around $200M (second hand - so I don't know if part of th
20.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Nuclear capacity: +2GW in 2025 ( https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... ) Solar capacity: ¬300GW capa
21.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range. The cost models for
22.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years. 2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and
23.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
24.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
Coal generation production in China did decline in 2025 vs 2024 - but that was the first year for it to happen.
25.
by hnmullany 8mo ago
It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
26.
by hnmullany 9mo ago
I think one of the phenomenon that people haven't mentioned is that the question space was heavily colonized by 2016. I was one of the top 30 or 50 answerers for the SVG tag on SO, and I found that the question flow started to degrade
27.
by hnmullany 9mo ago
What are the bets that the NSA has been encouraging Microsoft to keep shipping this?
28.
by hnmullany 10mo ago
Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.
29.
by hnmullany 1y ago
I did a meta-analysis for my masters thesis and I was convinced that 2 of the 39 papers in my dataset had fraudulent data.
30.
by hnmullany 2y ago
I wrote an introductory piece on the economics and technology of enhanced geothermal with good technical sources. I think it summarizes the state of the tech better than the New Yorker article. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse

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