dakna

> It’s usually worse, less document and less tested than the popular alternative.

That's often true, but the situation is not much different to framework stagnation.

"Popular" frontend frameworks I have worked with throughout the years, which are all more or less obsolete now:

Dojo, KnockoutJS, ExtJS, Backbone.JS, AngularJS, Angular 2+, Ionic

Web frontends are replaced every couple of years, often triggered by new feature development using the shiny new framework, and the cost of supporting the old, now unpopular framework.

Focusing on the actual web standards instead of another framework abstraction has long term value. For example, being able to query a DB using SQL is as relevant as it was 30 years ago, despite the numerous ORM/QueryGenerators on top of it.

>It does not 'cause problems'.

Like with most policies, the details are much more nuanced.

Check out the history of the Gropiusstadt in Berlin:

https://www.goethe.de/ins/jp/en/m/kul/sup/boe/21633080.html

> If you had to feed 100M people with a nutritionally complete diet forever, how small of an area could you manage to generate the food?

I don't know the answer for centralized food production, but for local food production based on what I know about self-sufficiency and homesteading, my back of the napkin math goes like this:

Minimum food production area for family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) based on diet:

1/2 acre for vegetables/chickens

2-3 acres for dairy products

5 acres for grains/nuts

10 acres for meat

Plus 2-3 acres timber for heating

That's ~ 20 acres per family, working all day, almost every day to produce food and heat.

That is still assuming you would be able to use modern technology (tractors/implements etc.) instead of manual labor and do this in a moderate hardiness zone, probably 5-9. There is a reason in the 1800s homestead land grants were up to 160 acres.

From a US perspective: The US has roughly 900 million acres of farm land. If everyone would homestead (unrealistic), and every family would be relocated to a productive area (unrealistic), this land could support 45 million homesteads.

> and leaving ethics off the table (Soylent Green, etc)?

I expect this to be an unrealistic scenario as well. IMHO people will start roaming for food and stealing from those who produce it, instead of patiently waiting for their government handout of whatever astronaut food was stored.

While I certainly dream of building a true passive house, it is much more reasonable to follow the Pretty Good House approach, in it's current 2.0 version described here: https://www.prettygoodhouse.org/pgh-20

As with most engineering efforts, the last 20% of optimization tend to be costly. But covering the basics (mainly around insulation and air-sealing) has a huge impact already without increasing upfront costs by the same ratio.

Also the wall/roof assembly needs to match the climate for the region, mainly because of the dew point and how it relates to temperature and moisture differences between inside/outside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_point

The local food bank. This serves an immediate local need, especially for kids not having lunch at school.

Quote from their website:

> For every $1 donated we can provide 2.5 meals.

In our household we strive to have one dollar meals pretty often, which usually involves produce from our own garden, but I'm still amazed by this ratio.

And yet, there is overwhelming demand for what the government calls "cyber security". As a developer it is easy to get good at your craft by practicing and learning, how in the world is a security specialist able to practice without asking for permission or already having a job? A home lab setup? A college degree and formal education? I'm curious how people actually evaluate this career choice.

There was always the option to send links to the Hampsterdance site to people that just started using Winamp to play music on their stereo.

"Di ba didi dou Didi didldildidldidl houdihoudi dey douDibidi ba didi dou dou" on high volume goes a long way in the middle of the night.

This looks great, congrats!

Since academic researchers are your customers, would you mind sharing a few tips on how to get your product in front of academic staff?

I'd assume the university department has to approve this expense, or do researchers pay out of their own pocket to avoid budget justification?

As a fellow immigrant working in the US and as someone working with non native speakers from other regions in the world, I can assure you this is not about racism. It is about team cohesion, clarity, getting things done in an international team. People have to spend extra brain cycles just to tune in to how you say things, before they can focus on what you actually say. This is especially true at the beginning of working with someone who's accent you have never heard. There is a big difference in accents between someone from India, France, Ukraine. While there is nothing wrong with that, it has value for international teams to mitigate this difference and settle on a common standard.

> people really believed that

> we would find a way to

In this case "people" and "we" just doesn't refer to the same cohort.

> Good green building design isn't entirely rocket science.

Agreed, I think the Pretty Good House concept sums it up quite well without going too deep into building science: https://www.prettygoodhouse.org/the-whole-shebang-in-one-rea...

> being a water shortage that makes the west unlivable

Unlivable? Probably not. But more expensive? Absolutely.

And once the agricultural economy needs to shut down due to free water not being free anymore, I'll expect ghost cities all over the West, starting with small communities not able to provide enough jobs and not attractive enough to turn into retirement places for people with money.

So far the projections on temperature and rainfall changes are in line with what we see today, but hey, the jury is still out on that. Once we know for sure in roughly 25 years, it might be too late, so I take my chances based on what I know now.

> Dirt is a very good insulator of both heat and sound

Sound yes, heat not so much. While it can store heat due to it's thermal mass, it will release it quickly due to a low R-value, depending on moisture content the R-value could be below 1 per inch. Cellulose has around 3.5 per inch.

Without adding additional insulation to restrict thermal transfer, you need to build very thick walls. In sunny desert climates where days are hot and nights are cold, you can build your wall in a way that allows it to go through the heat exchange synced with the 24hr sun cycle, and then it's very efficient. Thinner cob walls need to be wrapped with insulation to slow down heat transfer.

> the Dutch figured out how to live with cities below sea level 300 years ago, we'll manage

They also paid for this infrastructure over the course of 300 years on a national level. How this will work for a single city in a huge state in a short amount of time is unclear to me, besides the fact that Amsterdam was built at the end of a bay, which the Netherlands then closed off using floodgates. Miami is facing open water. Lots of open water.

r22 has a much lower ozone depletion potential than r11/r12, which were used as refrigerants before. AC use in developing countries is more a global warming issue than an ozone shield issue. A lot of replacements are highly potent greenhouse gases.

The ozone shield had a 4 percent loss since the 70s in average, much larger local losses aka "ozone holes". Fortunately not many people live at the north or south pole.

This sheds some light on what it took to get enough support to actually change regulations:

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/whateve...

> the rest of the world industrialized and are using ozone damaging chemicals on a massive scale

I would like to know more about the rest of the world you mentioned, since the Montreal Protocol (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) has been ratified by all United Nations members and the European Union. Based on observed data, it also seems to have the expected positive effect.

There is a strong sentiment in the US against paying more taxes in general to level the playing field a bit and help people in need, it's usually labeled as socialism. And now it's not even ok to use the incentives put in place for people who want to give extra money? Registering as a charity is the only way to make donations tax deductible, taking that away would basically reduce the donation and their effectiveness by the average tax rate of people with money to give, and they are usually not in the 12% bracket.

> what are the underlying causes

I don't want to reduce this complex issues to just one cause, but

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

might help to understand at least parts of what we are seeing.

At least people stopped using applets for web site navigation fairly quick. The transparent 1px spacer GIF lived for much longer.

I recommend 3 movies to every family member willing to deal with financial topics as a form of edutainment. The Big Short and Margin Call are two of them.

The 3rd one is 99 Homes. The key line is: "Don't get emotional about real estate." What is sold as a place for family memories for some, is just another asset class for others.

I'm in a fairly similar situation, albeit on a smaller scale (6 acres) and I do this for reasons you already mentioned (nutrition, inflation hedge) plus climate change. I have years of experience growing veggies in my backyard and I agree, it takes a lot of money to get the same quality food elsewhere, and some specialties are out of reach. It's also a lot of fun.

I'm also planning for retirement in the 2030s and I'm trying to funnel my software engineering money into a small productive farm/market garden that produces enough to make a small profit and hire some help when needed. I haven't found a good way to offset my initial investment costs as a beginning farmer against my regular income from my main job, but I just started to learn more about Schedule F Profit/Loss from farming. Any pointers on what to read or CPA recommendations are highly appreciated.

Greetings from Hardiness Zone 6, which I assume will turn into Zone 7 within my lifetime.

You might want to check what a "Fachhochschule" (University of Applied Sciences) actually is. It is not a vocational school in the way the US understands it. You can get accredited Master's degrees there, but usually no PHDs. The line is blurred though, some actually carry out research nowadays, but often in cooperation with another University.

Take a look at the recently introduced minimum instances setting : https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-...

Nice work combining the two sources, saved!

> The first thing I did was to read the entire Wikipedia page on UNIX. I also read this original paper written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson from 1974

We need more people like you. Kudos for having the attention span to do this. Enjoy your HN top spot, well deserved.

Words matter, especially when you are the so called leader of the free world. It is not the responsibility of the media to make sure every interpretation of meaning and context is as close as possible to the intention (which is unknown anyway) to shield a public representative from himself.

Or as Steve Jobs put it: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."

A good spin has at least one verifiable element and the rest is vague enough to not be accountable, but still gets the message out.

Which newspaper would you give money to?

I think the term is just fine. For me it doesn't mean that there is no server involved to run the app, it means I'm not involved to run the server.

World Education Services (and others) evaluate foreign degrees and determine the US equivalent, the Central Office for Foreign Education in Germany does the same for US degrees and determines the German equivalent.

The equivalence of credentials matters for example once you get into the realm of government jobs with strict requirements, or getting accepted into Master or PHD programs.

> the equivalent for Fachhochschule in the United States are called Trade Schools

This is not true. Students can get accredited Master's degrees at a University of Applied Science. Some of the Universities even do research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachhochschule

I'm not aware of any trade school in the US where students can get higher credentials than a certificate or associates degree.