bloudermilk

I've been thinking a lot on knowledge classification systems lately. It's surprisingly challenging to find the right balance between flexibility/comprehensiveness and simplicity/rigidity. Have you documented your research on this topic anywhere beyond that GitHub issue? I'd love to learn more about the strategies you considered.

A group of us built the open source website https://climatescape.org for exactly this purpose. You can browse by sector and technology.

Sure, depending on the scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law#United_S...

I've had a successful career as an independent consultant for the last six years and in my experience branding hasn't been a primary concern at all. As @brudgers already pointed out, sales should be your top priority. Until you're fully booked you should be speaking with friends, acquaintances, and strangers every single day to find work. Your next priority should be delivering the absolute best work you can, so that you can stop making cold calls and start fielding inbound leads. Your past clients are your best source of new business. Even better, keep your clients long-term so you're not kicking off new projects all the time.

I don't think this matters as much as what I mentioned above, but I'll answer your questions:

* Maintain your LinkedIn, Twitter, AngelList profiles just enough to back up your credentials when a potential lead google's your name.

* Don't waste your time blogging unless you plan on committing to being the "go-to" individual for a very niche technology/service. You'll read successful content creators advising the opposite, but for each one of them there are 1000 who never got traction, didn't publish anything valuable, or simply gave up.

* Your most important asset is your reputation

* Use your "personal brand" for as long as you can (i.e. until you're hiring other people). Building a reputation is hard enough, don't make it harder on yourself and others by adding misdirection when it's really just you behind the curtain.

* My niche for the most of my career has been "early-stage startup needs product-minded engineer to wear many hats". There has never been a shortage of rewarding work for me, but your mileage may vary.

Good luck! Happy to chat some time if you want to dig deeper. Contact info in my profile.

Apologies if I wasn't clear, but I was trying to defend you not offend you. In my experience, a lot of people hate on Airtable for being a toy, but I've had a great experience with it. I really like what you built!

This is a great concept! I'm not surprised to see you getting flak for building on Airtable, but as a "real developer" leaning heavily on low/no code lately I wanted to share how well it's worked for our open source team over the last few months.

In terms of scale, it has supported dozens of editors, hundreds of public submissions, and several thousand rows of data. We have also successfully scripted a number of use cases using the API for workflows that can be automated.

The biggest benefits from my perspective are:

1. Minimal overhead for schema changes. We have been able to overhaul our schema on more than one occasion with no intervention from developers up front. We let the content team shape the data in a way that makes sense then update our client code to fit

2. The UI is obvious to technical and non-technical users alike. Who doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet?

3. No-code workflows are trivial to prototype and launch with blocks and forms.

Is it going to work forever? No, we're already moving the more stable+dynamic tables into a SQL database. But I'm sure that we've saved dozens if not hundreds of hours of time in our frequent iterations these first few months. I'm sure we'll keep using Airtable for new features.

[0]: https://climatescape.org/ [1]: https://github.com/climatescape/climatescape.org

Judging by the 100% match rate with Crunchbase I'm guessing this is an analysis of CB data. It's still valuable, but I'm curious if/how they managed to secure a license to redistribute this publicly. I've spoken to their sales team before and they've very particular about how you can export & share their data.

If you like autonomous ships, check out Saildrone

> Saildrone designs and manufactures wind and solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles called saildrones, which make cost-effective ocean data collection possible at scale. We are building the world's largest high-resolution ocean datasets, working with governments and private companies around the globe.

https://climatescape.org/organizations/saildrone

Bootstrap adopted a native font stack that looks great and doesn't require any web fonts.

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/content/reboot/#native-fon...

It's fascinating how many event-driven IO libraries and associated web servers have come in and out of fashion in the Ruby community over the last decade. I hope this or another effort finally sticks and becomes part of the stdlib, so we can have a real lasting ecosystem built around it.

Funny you mention this–my dad bought me this book at that age. I read it over a couple of days and loved it, but I don't think I really "got it" until I re-read it in my 20s. I've read it three or four times since then. Some beautiful concepts in this book if you can get past the sexism typical of sci-fi novels from this era.

Island by Aldous Huxley

It's basically the opposite of his better-known Brave New World. It offers a fresh take on how a small isolated society can live, largely inspired (as I see it) by indigenous culture.

Has anyone written extensively about these types of corporate contradictions? On the surface what happened in this situation is obviously absurd, yet I don't find it surprising at all. I can't begin to imagine how far removed the person who manually flagged that content is from anyone at Warner familiar with that lawsuit. Companies that big are simply incapable of managing this kind of minutia properly.

I'm not saying it's right, but I don't see how you avoid it.

We have a “Government & Policy” category that was a little light to launch with. Would be happy for you to help us fill it out!

Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback.

You bring up some great points regarding categorization–choosing a sensible taxonomy has been by far the hardest part of this project so far. I'd love some help in this area if you or anyone else is interested.

> Should GE be on the list?

I've been asking myself this same question for weeks and haven't come to a conclusion yet. What do you think? How about O&G companies with big green tech budgets?

> Also, what about governments? ... Shouldn't they be included on the list?

I think this would be a very interesting data point to track indeed, though I suspect someone else is already tracking this.

> Finally, a search or full list to Ctrl+F

Agreed, added this to our backlog.

My personal opinion is that we're not going to convince people to stop flying, so we should decarbonize air travel regardless of its relative efficiency.

Thanks so much and congrats on your new career trajectory! We'd love to integrate with some job boards in the future. In the meantime I can point you to a blog post with some great advice on this topic:

https://medium.com/@leventov/how-to-find-a-job-in-a-tech-com...

Definitely interested in indexing orgs, events, and jobs by location once we have that data!

Hi all, creator here–so cool to see this on HN.

I made Climatescape after seeing dozens of people go through a similar process of cataloging interesting climate-focused companies in spreadsheets, notes, and elsewhere. The goal is to unify these efforts and provide the content free to anyone who might find it useful. The website is open source[1] and content is Creative Commons licensed.

This is really just the beginning of what I'd like to see the project become. We want to go deeper by including key org attributes like headcount, location, investments, and more. There are also plans to increase the breadth of the database by including books, podcasts, events, data sets, and other important resources related to climate.

If anyone is interested in contributing please get in touch! brendan [at] sinceresoftware.co

[1]: github.com/bloudermilk/climatescape

Thanks for taking a look. It's a laborious process to collect good descriptions for each submission–some are better than others. The text is cut off intentionally, rather lazily now, but we're planning on making it clearer visually that this is intentional and allowing visitors to expand each record.

Thank you for the feedback! Maybe "indexing" or "cataloging" would be a better term here.

There's a great video from one of my favorite YouTube channels about Magnetohydrodynamic drives. Really fascinating drive design and channel for anyone interested in engineering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3GQk9ETRU

Anne-Laure Le Cunff just published a blog post that appears to be a summary of the book, which you might find interesting.

https://nesslabs.com/how-to-read-a-book

The warming of our atmosphere is easily predicted by basic science related to greenhouse gasses and solar radiation.

This isn't disputable as randomness any more than an object can be said to have randomly fallen to the ground when dropped.

Here is one of countless sources you can find that explain this principle and the consequences: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

The macro-level progression of digital security really worries me. Each day the attack surface grows, the number of bad actors grows, the number of internet-connected individuals grows, and the quantity and sensitivity of data per-capita grows.

Is there a well-researched theory that considers a "breaking point" in this pattern? Where we either a) accept that all data is at risk of being exposed or b) develop fundamental security patterns to privatize our data or c) something else?

There are some grassroots communities where you can volunteer your time and network with other climate-focused professionals:

https://www.techforcampaigns.org/ https://techimpactmakers.com/ https://climateaction.tech/

Ironically it's a bad day to be researching this as many climate-focused websites are on strike...

Not sure what your source is, but this contradicts Drawdown:

> Shifting to a diet rich in plants is a demand-side solution to global warming that runs counter to the meat-centric Western diet on the rise globally. That diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

> Plant-rich diets reduce emissions and also tend to be healthier, leading to lower rates of chronic disease. According to a 2016 study, business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet, which includes cheese, milk, and eggs. $1 trillion in annual health-care costs and lost productivity would be saved.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/plant-rich-diet

That's rather beside the point. Just because I advertise my IP doesn't mean I want my service providers to disclose my activity publicly.

Great to see this posted here! I read this and several books about cooperatives last year with the intention of growing my small software consulting business into a cooperative. If anyone is interested in this topic and wants further reading, let me know!

> a given CO2 level determines a rate of global heating

This IS the greenhouse effect. Increased levels of greenhouse gasses result in a warmer planet over time as Earth reflects less solar energy back into space. This warming leads to many known runaway feedback loops: increased wildfires that release more CO2 and destroy natural carbon sinks, reduced albedo from ice melt, increased moisture in the atmosphere, warmer oceans leading to less carbon sequestration by phytoplankton, methane release from ice melts.

There are more. Please read some recent literature to understand this better than anyone can summarize on HN. I recommend The Uninhabitable Earth