PaulDavisThe1st

For older readers, see also "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley (originally published the ACM journal, later reprinted as books).

I know people who bought an entire train station in the former DDR for less than 100EU ...

Not just disputes. Also absorbing some significant part of the cost of fraud.

For centralized equipment, yes.

For wiring/plumbing/ducting runs ... not so much.

If you've ever done residential wiring or plumbing fixes in an older home, I suspect you'd share my opinion.

That's why I differentiated between robots working on new construction sites, where I do think that a 15-20 year timeline is entirely feasible (not necessarily desirable, but feasible). That's an entirely different task than renovations in an existing building, which is much *much* harder even for humans.

Also note that there's another way of thinking about where technology will take housebuilding that already exists: more factory-assembled modular cosntruction. That's less popular in the USA, with its focus on single family "unique" homes, but is taking off elsewhere and is already highly automated.

There's a very large difference between robots on a new construction project - we're still quite a few years away from that - and the sort of flexibility and problem solving required for "old work" (fixing broken pipes, installing new wiring in existing homes etc. etc). I very very much doubt that the latter type of work will be roboticized within 50-100 years, even if the former might be.

> if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital.

Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).

Precisely the same objections can be made about someone who takes one particular job instead of another. There's an opportunity cost to deciding to go and work for company/person X instead of company/person Y (or maybe to not work at all, and instead study, or raise young children etc. etc.)

Capital has no special position here.

Equality in outcome doesn't need to be the goal. I much prefer the idea that someone who puts in (40|30|20) [0] hours a week of actual work gets some sense of dignity and purpose from that work along with a reasonable standard of living, no matter what the work involves.

[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period

Yeah, my county is a so-called combination department: mixed career and volunteer stations. There are 4 career stations, fully staffed 24/7 365 days. Then there are another 10 or so volunteer stations where we're available if we're available.

Congrats on the 12 years - apparently 3 years is the average for volunteer FF's.

We did a med call where every water container object in the person's house (sinks, toilets, showers, bathtubs) had backed up with shit-filled septic water. In addition, the entire house stank of animal (and possibly) human urine.

Delightful. But you do it anyway, because that's the nature of the task.

I decided to become a (volunteer [0]) firefighter at 60 (software development background). It has been awesome.

Last year, I considered becoming an "EMR" (Emergency Medical Responder) - the lowest level of certification for emergency medical care that there is (basically, you can get vitals and stats from the patient if they are conscious). Because of timing considerations, I ended up not doing the course.

A year later, I see my 2 fellow firefighters who did become EMR's having to 20+ hours a year of mandatory continuing ed/training to their lives, and I'm pretty glad I ended up not doing that.

The firefighter part, given that we're a small, very not-busy volunteer rural fire district with an awesome district chief and culture, continues to be fantastic.

[0] thanks to the unions in my county fire department, volunteers are required to go through all the same certifications as career firefighters. We lack their level of experience (mostly) because we don't go on as many calls.

This is a mild understatement ... as in, possibly the understatement of the year.

Alternatively, consider any program which loads dynamic shared libraries (called "plugins" in many contexts). The program itself might be bug free; any plugin that is loaded will run (typically) with the full priviledges and access of the program (and thus likely the user).

The user may have no idea that the plugin is malicious; the program remains bug-free (if it was beforehand).

This gets tricky when it comes to dealing with currency conversion. On my most recent credit card bill, foreign currency transactions show an exchange rate with 10 digits of precision.

It might be a valid strategy for "growing", but "growing" is not necessarily the goal of all creators in any medium, certainly not in the sense that you mean it.

This was already done for a documentary on Brian Eno that came out a couple of years ago. Nobody who watched the documentary could be sure that they had seen the same as anyone else unless they watched it together in the same physical location.

> Original youtube is there, it's called subscriptions tab. A curated list of high-quality content creators accumulated for over a decade.

Alternatively, it's there in my RSS reader app, where I can see new stuff showing up without even visiting or interacting with YT.

Most/many structure fires that are caused by wildland fires start due to "ember cast" - hot embers carried by the wind (for distances, almost unbelievably, of up to a mile). While taking care of building-adjacent vegetation is an excellent step to reduce fire risk, it won't stop fires that start on the roof, or around the soffits, due to embercasting. That requires different approaches (roofing materials, careful roof/wall interface design and more).

ps. Firefighter II (volunteer), Santa Fe County, NM

So much this.

But then again, there's presumably some sort of balance. If someone insists on building and rebuilding in a flood or fire zone, it's not obvious that everyone else should see their premiums go up to cover that. One option is for the insurance company to just cease insuring the property(ies), but I suspect there's more overall negatives to that than if they bump the premiums of clients in specific locales.

The publisher of this book (and the series) was my second programming mentor, and the person who introduced me to the GNU Project and libre software in general, back in 1986/87. I call him Dr. X and he calls me "The Professor".

> There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters

Asserted without evidence, and I very much doubt that it's true. I suspect it varies dramatically by subject matter, intended audience, book length, data density, and more. I have no evidence for any of that. Do you?

There is nowhere that renewables are remotely close to working "nearly alone" if you are talking about total energy needs (which MacKay is/was).

There's some incredible progress for electricity generation, but there's still huge amounts of energy being used in ways that are not currently electrified and not close to electrifiable in the short term.

We should celebrate the forward progress, but also not be blind to what is not yet feasible (while also hoping that it may soon be so).

30C here in New Mexico outside is pretty tolerable (super low humidity, 6000'/3000m altitude). 30C in my office when I'm trying to think about anonymous closures is over the line.

Sure, but then think about OSes ... not just "software".

Why does this article have this title? I could see nothing in it at all that relates to the question posed by the title.

The level of outrage in my inner self isn't a measure of anything particularly interesting, though.

Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.

When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.

Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.

I rarely see it inserted into threads on HN where it is not relevant.

Also, I'd say that "Trump bad" and "Elon Nazi" are, in that form, shorthands for a much longer argument that most people don't want to rehash.

There are two high level takes on Trump.

One is that he's just a normal US politician, within the range previously seen, he was elected president via the usual mechanisms and will leave office and be replaced by someone else, again via the usual mechanisms. His policies and actions may (or may not) be more extreme than most previous presidents, and many may disagree vehemently with them, but that's the nature of representative democracy.

The other is that he's a major departure from previous elected presidents, via a combination of his corruption, illegal behavior and openly racist and sexist language. People who see Trump in this way also likely feel that the SCOTUS has aided and abetted him in acts that are plainly unconstitutional (despite overwhelming numbers of decisions by lower courts against him). They fear that his language around elections, and particularly even his raising the possibility that he would run again, mark him as having crossed a line that makes it impossible to consider him an ordinary elected president. Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.

If you hold the second view, then the fact that around half the voting population view him as a "perfectly normal" politician is itself a substantial and terrifying issue.

I probably don't disagree with that.

However, that doesn't equate to what I believe was being implied: HN as a business promotional tool specifically for YCombinator.