There are plenty of slag heaps (spoil tips) near coal plants, wonder how it could work with those? I guess the specific heat capacity is greater..
Readit Newsmaxbaines commented on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries austinvernon.site/blog/st... · Posted by u/pfdietz
maxbaines commented on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries austinvernon.site/blog/st... · Posted by u/pfdietz
I visited a pumped storage facility a while back that stored electricity by pumping water uphill to store it and then draining it past a turbine to reclaim it. Ever since I’ve been intrigued by using gravity instead of batteries.
For home use, it seems like you could rig up some heavy stones on pulleys to do the same thing could be fun because you’d get to physically see your batteries filling up. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that an array of ten 10-ton concrete blocks lifted 10m in the air could power a house for a day (ignoring generator inefficiencies)
This type of plant is generally used for emergency power to balance the grid, whilst other plant come online.
maxbaines commented on AI-powered Reddit marketing for indie founders simplemarketing.tech... · Posted by u/Georgii007
Really like the idea of this, and good timing for me. Will give this a try over the weekend.
Have a soft spot for digg
Best thing I have seen on HN in ages. Also interesting for a CNC geek.
maxbaines commented on GPT-5 is already (ostensibly) available via API old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/c... · Posted by u/consumer451
"Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" is pretty impressive though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1mettre/gpt5_is_alr...
Pelican riding a bicycle is only official when it comes from Simon Willison https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/
maxbaines commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil
maxbaines commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil
Yeah lets just kill all the bugs, good move.
maxbaines commented on Nuclear Reactor SIM by PeteTimesSix petetimessix.itch.io/nucl... · Posted by u/ofrzeta
Reminds me of http://www.gamtech.com/oakflat.aspx loved blowing triggering SCRAM as a kid
Also very important for a lot of use-cases: Node-RED is open source, but n8n is not.
https://github.com/node-red/node-red/blob/master/LICENSE
https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/
We previously looked into integrating n8n but they wanted $50k for a commercial license, which didn’t make sense for us.
Thankyou for the reminder, long term Node-RED user here, I recently looked again at n8n and wondered why I never took it to far, this is the reason. When you see a git icon and repo it's easy missed.