Hacker News Reader

jsingletonon Cleaning up bad bots (and the climate)

Nice work.

Hopefully this doesn't get flagged to death by bots on here, as is often the case for a story with climate in the title (particularly if it hits the front page). That would be far too ironic.

jsingletonon Climate change: Impacts 'accelerating' as leaders gather for UN talks

Maybe worth emailing the mods?

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

Perhaps a vested interest controls lots of accounts on here and wants to bury stories of this nature (pun not intended)? The comments don't appear to have descended into a flame war so I suspect a bot net has manually flagged it to death.

I've seen it a lot on here and it makes me think it's not worth engaging with HN any more.

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

I think you have perfectly summed up the thoughts of all the school strikers.

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

Talking about things in terms of GDP glosses over the human suffering that it represents.

> a 10% increase in per capita real income is associated with a 1.5% decrease in the crude death rate

It seems reasonable to assume that the inverse is also true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics

https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

This is the number that shows if we are making progress or not: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Spoiler, we're not. It's getting worse and it's accelerating.

Interactive graph: https://www.co2levels.org/

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

Do it.

https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-...

> In the end power is social. Power comes from people showing up to meetings, people showing up for rallies, people going door-to-door convincing other people to vote for the right person or support the right initiative, people blocking roads and making a fuss.

> And that takes time and money.

If you work in tech you probably have a surplus of both.

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

There is an interesting bit here about exporting the problem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/DmZ6C9zSsR/road_to_clean_en...

Regarding China: "It’s the world’s biggest burner of coal, but it’s also the biggest global investor in renewables."

Keep in mind that China is the world's factory and a lot of services (IT etc.) are performed in India, so they are not just national emissions but emissions that we have offshored.

jsingletonon Climate change: Impacts 'accelerating' as leaders gather for UN talks

Looking at the graph there it appears the slope from 2010 onwards is steeper than before 2010 but I'd have to look at the raw data to check.

Edit: It's clearer on the second graph below. From 1870 to present it looks very much like an exponential growth curve, particularly the last few decades.

jsingletonon Climate change: Impacts 'accelerating' as leaders gather for UN talks

This appears to be the report in question: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/landmark-unite...

> Sea-level rise is accelerating, sea water is becoming more acidic

> The observed rate of global mean sea-level rise accelerated from 3.04 millimeters per year (mm/yr) during the period 1997–2006 to approximately 4mm/yr during the period 2007–2016. This is due to the increased rate of ocean warming and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets. There has been an overall increase of 26% in ocean acidity since the beginning of the industrial era.

Appears to correlate with the NASA data of 3.3 millimeters increase per year.

jsingletonon Climate change: Impacts 'accelerating' as leaders gather for UN talks

I assume that is not a quote, as I can't find it anywhere on that page, yet you have made it sound like one.

jsingletonon Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

The data comes from https://climateactiontracker.org/, specifically https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps/ (where you can download a spreadsheet).

jsingletonon Show HN: I made a neural net that analyzes privacy policies

Looks cool. It's a small point, but not pluralising words when the number is 1 shows attention to detail (e.g. 1 scandals for instagram).

jsingletonon Ask HN: What are some interesting open APIs out there?

https://carbonintensity.org.uk/

> The Carbon Intensity API uses state-of-the-art Machine Learning and sophisticated power system modelling to forecast the carbon intensity and generation mix 96+ hours ahead for each region in Great Britain.

jsingletonon Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

I'm taking the train for my next holiday and it is significantly more expensive. Flying is unreasonably cheap. Aviation fuel needs to be taxed but this has to be done everywhere to avoid refuelling in havens. Or maybe tax stands at airports if that can't be done.

jsingletonon Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

Google deservedly get the best rating in this cloud whitepaper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eCCb3rgqtQxcRwLdTr0P_hCK...

Ahead of Azure and way ahead of AWS/Oracle/IBM.

jsingletonon Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast

By the time these bans come into force hardly anyone will be buying new ICE vehicles anyway. It's already cheaper to lease and run an EV than it is to lease and run an ICE.

The decline will be rapid. Why maintain a fuel supply chain when there aren't many customers?

jsingletonon U.K. offshore wind park may generate power cheaper than by burning coal

You can explore the data here: https://electricinsights.co.uk

You can even split wind into onshore and offshore, although the data is patchy.

Wind varies, but from a quick look offshore hasn't gone to zero over the past year and neither has onshore.

jsingletonon Climate Change: what do you want me to say? [video]

9:49 long, English audio but no subtitles.

jsingletonon Fossil fuel divestment has ‘zero’ climate impact, says Bill Gates

This is the report mentioned in the article: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/report/2019-repo...

jsingletonon GetTogether: Open-source event manager for local communities

> Try it free at https://gettogether.community

Goals

- Be feature-competitive with Meetup.com

- Allow multiple instances to share federated event data

- Provide sustainable, cost-effective hosting for FOSS communities

- Be developed and maintained by the communities using it

jsingletonon Awesome Earth

> A collection of resources, services, products, and ideas that you can use to improve your impact on the environment.

jsingletonon BBC Briefing: Energy [pdf]

10.2 MB, 197 pages.

How to use: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48186443

jsingletonon AWS vs. Google Cloud: Which Is Better?

The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018: https://bit.ly/2024wp

jsingletonon Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

They appear to take the environment seriously too, much like Stripe and some others.

https://www.shopify.com/about/environment

https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon

jsingletonon "Ecological grief" grips scientists witnessing Great Barrier Reef’s decline

One method of support is to get out on the streets with them striking, starting this Friday.

jsingletonon "Ecological grief" grips scientists witnessing Great Barrier Reef’s decline

There is a good documentary called Chasing Coral on this topic. It's on Netflix.

The global climate strike is this Friday (20th): https://globalclimatestrike.net/

You can even join digitally too: https://digital.globalclimatestrike.net/

jsingletonon Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) Entirely with C# and .NET

My background in Electrical Engineering has really helped me as a developer. Too often we ignore the computer in computer science. If you are unfamiliar with how you get from silicon to transistors, to logic circuits, to CPUs, then it's worth reading up on.

jsingletonon Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) Entirely with C# and .NET