duckmysick

It's funny because I learned about the regenerative farming and no-dig approach from Hacker News out of all places. A couple years ago there was a thread about soil quality and someone mentioned Richard Perkins, who runs a regenerative agriculture farm in Sweden. He also had a Youtube channel which I checked out. Then I found out about Charles Dowding from Britain who popularizes no-dig approach (don't use a spade or a fork to turn the soil, but plant directly in a thick layer of compost), also on a Youtube channel. Down the rabbit hole here we go.

I was sceptical at first - it sounds too good to be true and runs against the conventional wisdom I followed. But I started experimenting with a few vegetable patches and I was happy with the results. Then I expanded over time, still amazed with the outcomes.

It's more of a hobby operation, so I'm not worried about optimizing yields. To me the biggest factor is that gardening became super enjoyable. I guess it's because efforts-to-results ratio got so much better. I got many compliments from strangers about my garden (including incredibly oversized pumpkins), which made me proud.

Not sure how it fits into a hacker's ethos, but there you have it.

What's the timestamp? At 3:43 there's Luna Modeler.

https://www.datensen.com/data-modeling/luna-modeler-for-rela...

> I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose

Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.

> you'll suffer lower yields for a few years after you stop tilling, while the soil builds up a proper layer of decomposing matter on top.

Anecdotal, but can confirm, I observed lower yields (sometimes minimal, in the range of 5-10%) for a year or two after starting to till. But it's so much worth in the long run. Granted, I'm talking about the market-garden size yield. Could be different in multi-hectare yields, but I can see the difference on my scale. After the initial one or two years I can see increased yields with lowered herbicide use and less frequent weeding activity.

Super off-topic, but somewhat related. What people use to automate non-browser GUI apps on Linux on Wayland? I need to occasionally do it, but this particular combination eludes me.

- CLI apps - no problem, just write Bash/Python/whatever - browser apps, also no problem, use Selenium/Playwright - Xorg has some libraries; even if they are clunky they will work in a pinch - Windows has tons of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solutions

But for Wayland I couldn't find anything reliable.

I don't think it's wrong. I think it's confusing and creates unnecessary friction. Especially if the term is well-established in the profession or the community.

This is what the Jargon File says:

> [common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term “free software”.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/O/open-source.html

I looks like open source means more that just ability to read the code.

For a more detailed recount of McKinsey adventures (including their involvements in South Africa and with the opioid crisis), check out the book "When McKinsey Comes to Town" by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.

The "tricky to get right" part is so true.

One time I was involved in automating a business process. Nothing super complicated - scrapping data from a portal, filling forms, some data wrangling. It had to handle a few edge cases and involve a human in the loop. I tried to include as much data validation as possible, but this being a business in real world there were of course some exceptions. I implemented a Superuser Override which was basically a button that launched a popup with another form where the app users requested an approval from their manager to accept the unvalidated data. It was red and scary and it had Bootstrap .danger all over because it was a cool thing to do back then. Don't judge, ok?

Things worked as they should have. The automation saved tons of time, even if some fields were missing. Occasionally, there was a Superuser Override request which sent an email to the manager overseeing the process. Actually, things worked too well - the volume of processed data increased and so did the number of the Override requests. The manager - busy as they usually are - started approving all the requests. Manually at first and then they ran a macro that did it for them.

Eventually the app users got wind of it and they started using the Superuser Override liberally. Before they shown more restraint.

I wish there was some clever punch line to this story but I don't know what happened after.

If I had to do it again, I'd be more aggressive with validations, make the approval process more like a code review, involve the most experienced app users as the Superuser, and have audit logs. Oh and Tailwind instead of Bootstrap.

I've hardly seen here any proselytizers from Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and they are dong just fine. Ditto for Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook - they used to be represented more here, but their exodus hardly made any difference.

Gartner has more influence on tech than Hacker News.

Pretty good for a rough estimate!

The best I could find was a document by the National Audit Office from 2017 (using 2016 estimates); page 18, figure 2 - The expected costs of Hinkley Point C.

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...

Back then the construction was estimated at £18.2 billion. Ongoing operation costs (including fuel, staffing, and grid charges) were priced at £29.3 billion and decommissioning (without the uplift) at £7.3 billion. Total project cost was put at £54.8 billion.

Again, it was from 2017 so things have changed.

Thanks for posting it! Good point about adding the right lighting rig, haven't thought about.

I use a planer a lot but I'm still struggling with making multiple passes down a wide piece of wood. I often end up with grooves. I've gotten better over time but I'm still not happy with the results.

That's not the assumption I got from the OP's comment. What I got was - and I agree - that the intersection between the members of the technical field (specifically those responsible for apps UI) and the members of the woodworking field who also use an advanced, single-purpose tool is tiny. The assumption will be the same if you replace the belt sander with a guitar amplifier, a lawn aerator, or a pressure canner and woodworking with their respective hobbies.

If you have better data that shows an overlap between those in the technical field and those that do woodworking with highly specialized tools, I'm all ears; I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

In the meantime, here's another anecdote for you - I do woodworking (and gardening and constructions) and I don't own a belt sander.

Some of the handy Excel functions (like XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA) are only available in the newer versions. Sure, they aren't universally used because of the inertia, but in my opinion useful enough to justify the upgrade.

Linear (of linear.app) has a highly polished UI. In fact they had a dedicated period for fixing just usability issues:

https://linear.app/changelog/2022-12-01-polishing-season-202...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231003205004/https://linear.ap...

What does this suppose to prove? The OP said "very few" not none. Of course there will be a few anecdotes of overlap.

A better way would be to compare the size of Stack Exchange boards at https://stackexchange.com/sites . It's not perfect but it's as good as it can get. Stack Overflow has 26 million users. Woodworking has 17 thousand. A fraction.

Further still, not every woodworker will use a belt sander. It's used for a specific purpose (large flat surfaces) and it's not a beginner's tool. So the fraction gets smaller. I'd say the assumption stands.

Not sure if it fits your definition, but how about Flash/ActionScript/Adobe AIR?

The only thing the authors owe the users of their open source projects is fulfilling the terms of the license. Anything else is extra. Additional support is not guaranteed.

The most successful ones have a combination of favorable geographic/geological conditions (geothermal vents, suitable rivers, good offshore to land ratio) and small size. It would be hard for Germany to copy solutions from let's say Iceland or Norway.

Isn't the bulk of Apple Intelligence processing on-device? You want to have powerful chipsets for local, more privacy-friendly processing.

HN threads from the past discussing the articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16786698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3576261

Insurers often require to have Endpoint Detection and Response for all the devices, from a third-party. In-house often won't cut it, even if it makes more practical sense.

You're right (not sure about the exact factor though) - and there's also additional costs when those systems fail. Someone, somewhere lost money when all those planes were grounded and services suspended.

At some point - maybe it already happened, I don't know - spending more on preventive measures and maintenance will be the path of least resistance.

To clarify, in this scenario, the confidential informant would be a streamer or an influencer - a person that has a sizeable following, operates in public, and creates a lot of attention? And that there's a large network of such informants and none of them were compromised (had their true nature exposed in public)?

I'd say Edge is more popular, especially in the shops that go all in on Microsoft/Office 365. It integrates better with the whole ecosystem, you have more control over it with policies, sync is easier, and most importantly, underneath is all just Chromium.

It clarifies it's not something else I've heard of (markup language, machine learning). The ML abbreviation shares the space with other terms so it can be confusing. Compare it to HTML which is 1) more popular and 2) unique in the context of programming.

"The war after the next world war will be fought with sticks and stones" gains a new meaning. What would the sticks be though? Thor rods?

Batteries are getting cheaper too.

If there's malware on my device, isn't it game over already? Even if I have a second factor elsewhere, the malware can access session keys to whatever service I logged into from that device, among other things.

For API keys you want to look into secrets management, for example Hashicorp Vault or OpenBao. AWS/Azure/Google Cloud also have their own secrets management features.