schimmy_changa

In addition, the massive investment may be overbuilt, but then likely will end up being useful long-term. This is just as the initial buildout of the internet to power pets.com was a bust at the time, but then led to Amazon, YouTube, Zoom, etc and in fact led to us being able to weather Covid better than you'd have expected.

The modern internet came from folks getting connected over-exuberantly based on near-term returns (with a lot of investors losing their shirts) but then humans figured out what the actual best use of the technology.

Highly recommend this book for more, Carlota Perez is very insightful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...

I'm getting 403s when trying to download basic census tract shapefiles. You might have the same problem / if you have regular jobs that rely on public datasets they may start failing randomly.

Looks like this might be another victim of the current administration's fun with databases (although I admit that's speculation).

There's requests for evidence / input on the Seattle subreddit if you have time - I think locally we can get some pressure on them for you if you can back it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1hyhzf0/student_fa...

Perhaps, but there's a reason that anyone in supply chain or logistics tries to standardize on the fewest SKUs as possible. Planes are a special case because weight _really_ matters and thus it's worth the loss of standardization.

Imagine the nightmare of what happens when a driver grabs the wrong bus and is several miles along their route before they notice. Do they return to the school? Do they get as many kids as they can before they run out of charge while a dispatcher furiously tries to coordinate a place within range but still further along the route to send a whole new bus to switch the kids onto? What happens when the driver who's bus got taken drives off in ANOTHER driver's bus, perhaps with the same results cascading onwards?

Currently you have to balance drivers, bus capacity, and bus breakdowns/availability, but you don't have to manage bus charge because the gas range is large enough and the driver can quickly top up if needed. Adding another dimension of complexity into it likely isn't worth it compared to the cost of having a somewhat larger battery.

similarly, on mac this bug is a showstopper for me, so I'm using Brave currently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1149826

(the bug is that text replacement does not work in FF on mac, something that saves me so much time daily)

Hmm very interesting response by @somat about malicious actors, and I like your point about the disappointment of web3 here.

One reason I'm not super surprised they didn't implement publishing is that it seems like there's an inherent complexity to information passing in two-way systems. See as an example the difficulty in a grid with distributed renewables or how long websockets took to come along. Consider even an economy: you bring simply money to the store, not goods that you've created to barter, because of the complexity in figuring out the value of the offered goods, the cost of the negotiation, and potential mismatches in needs.

Maybe, just like with the electrical grid, we can start to get more creative now that the costs of 'the usual way' are more well-known and can start being internalized instead of externalized - this is the case with air pollution and carbon for our electrical grid, for instance, which is helping to drive distributed generation.

hmm - it's not like trains were (or are) built for rugged terrain either. If anything that point would be in favor of Switzerland...

True for SF & LA, but many other cities depend on State Water Project water which gets used by Ag as well - it's not just small towns.

Promptly, sure - but there's a system that can be changed overall, we should have the power to do so. For instance, groundwater depletion from ag limits municipal water supplies, or other ag use uses State Water Project water 'before' it gets sent down to SoCal. The more SWP water they use, the less Colorado water they use. It is a grid, and not always fully fungible, but more connected than people think.

Right, the computers were built for the preliminary programs which ... were stages on the way to Apollo! Yes, theoretically, but sometimes you need a big bold exciting goal or everyone will say "why are you wasting my tax dollars inventing flight computers? these don't seem very valuable...". The side effects may even be the point of the project, but the goal is essential to getting the politics right.

Mostly just... the British have a LOT of history and so the stacked ranking of wars over the course of just the British Empire includes over a dozen more consequential wars than the War of 1812. The poor high school students have enough names and dates to remember!

I've read a few of his books and can also recommend them, with a caveat: Smil asserts confidently that something is infeasible or impossible, yet what he says is impossible _has since come to pass_.

The main example here is the cost of solar and wind - in his earlier books he assumes that the transition to renewables must go slower than it has, simply because solar and wind couldn't possibly be cost competitive with fossil fuels. (Yes, it's not cheaper in many circumstances, but I'm talking about cost-competitive against coal unsubsidized, for instance, something he would not have predicted would happen in the mid 2010s)

He's a fantastic historian of energy, but falls into one of Clarke's laws: _When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong_

Yes, the energy transition is very hard and will take longer than many boosters want, and the history suggests this, but he also doesn't realize that history can also be changed by _learning from_ that history.

> The videos are more ephemeral and imperfect than what you usually see on IG, and there's a lot more joy in what's being captured. It really is a step change in the ability to build communities around shared interests.

... so far. But with any technology it seems that, once the attention goes towards something, money and polish and 'Moloch' take over and the magic of amateurs and the joy of discovery are lessened. Perhaps TikTok will be different, however! It's not inevitable, but just a trend I've noticed.

Large cargo vessels do try to avoid bad weather, even though they can sail through most of it. It's a crew happiness, risk, and loss avoidance concern (knowing these companies, probably mostly the latter two!).

I was on a cargo ship in the pacific which diverted into the Bering Sea to avoid some weather instead of skirting just south of the Aleutian Islands as planned. The captain gots orders via satellite from a land crew that's crunching the numbers of risk vs extra fuel costs at all times for the fleet. The first mate was frustrated by how this all works. He said (English not being his first language): "This is terrible! We never get to decide anything for ourselves. We are like Muppets!". I think he meant "puppets"...

I'm also curious! If anyone has ideas, please let me know...

TL:DR:

Turbine blades have previously been challenging to recycle due to the chemical properties of epoxy resin, a resilient substance that was believed to be impossible to break down into re-usable components. This has led to many technology leaders attempting to replace or modify epoxy resin with alternatives that can be more easily treated. Vestas’ solution is enabled by a novel chemical process that can chemically break down epoxy resin into virgin-grade materials. The chemical process was developed in collaboration with Aarhus University, Danish Technological Institute, and Olin the partners of the CETEC project, a coalition of industry and academia established to investigate circular technology for turbine blades.

This is not very relevant to tech / hacking, but is instead just world news... Let's keep HN focused, and not let it end up like the front page of reddit, etc

This book is an easy-to-read and short reference for all of the financial jargon / skills you'll need to know: https://financialintelligencebook.com/. Worth it to read and to be able to reference quickly. (Covers cashflow, balance sheet, working capital, etc)

Agree with others here that working with someone else at the C-level to help you come up with your own small curriculum would be great, even if they don't need to teach you themselves.

This is a bit of a hyperbolic title and post, but it does seem like a real issue that the Golang devs should address. Letting the socket do its thing seems like the right way to go, although I'm not an expert in networking.

Any ideas from the devs or other networking experts here in HN?

Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770

It's a great idea - transparent, able for anyone to verify, with a paper trail.

If you don't think it's a problem that land was stolen, then I'm sure you won't object to that land being stolen again from the current owner and used for it's highest society-wide agreed-upon purpose (not just the purpose that the current owner prefers)

This comment's type of thinking wants to have it both ways. In this mindset, the landowner gets to decide what to do with the land and to control it because they 'own' it. This ownership is because they are descendants (or paid them) of the first white people who took land from native peoples. This 'right' is sacrosanct, and the government (i.e. other people) have no right to tell them not to mountain-top-removal mine it, etc etc.

However, this sacrosanct ownership right is on very shaky ground, hence the hostility to questions about land use. If first-come first-serve counts, then native / indigenous folks should have the land. If people with power can take the land for other uses legitimately, then there's no reason why any particular landowner has sacred rights to their property - the government would be justified in taking the land to support buffalo habitat without ANY compensation, just as white settlers took native land by force without any compensation.

Ultimately, these folks want a simple, completely indefensible rule: "Whoever was here first gets sacred property rights to this land... except if it was an indigenous person, we took it from them fair and square. But that was OK because it was olden times, and so you can't be mad about it, and definitely you can't reverse that decision or take this land from us or even restrict what we can do with it, that would be theft!"

Man, people are really negative about this, but it's a great idea.

In the old days, paper ballots would also 'go missing' from districts known to be favorable to the other side (aka be chucked out of trucks on a bridge over a river). The best option seems to be open source voting machines + paper audit. This way you get immediate counts and then an audit trail, so would-be manipulators have to mess with BOTH at the same time which is significantly harder.

Think you know a better way HN? Let's hear it.

I don't want to feed the trolls, but this requires a response as it is highly misleading.

Cars last 100k+ miles now, and that 13k break-even number in your link is with the current US energy mix, which is rapidly decarbonizing. It is a big deal, and worth moving to EVs.

I took a break from tech and got a Masters of Environmental Science and Management if you are interested in that path. It helps you really have additionality rather than being a hired tech person in the climate space. Also the Work on Climate group is good!

I'm guessing that possibility kept a lid on predatory lending, especially by for-profit colleges. For instance, if you know that your students have an option to discharge, then you'll make sure not to charge them enough that they see that discharge and stain of bankruptcy as better than just paying off the loan. It was a (dramatic, drastic, and undesired) weapon that consumers had in their back pocket.

Get rid of the safety valve, and then see what happens as the colleges realize there's no balance of power... you get the current situation.

^ small nit - cold panels are more efficient than hot ones, not dry ones!

Canals are tough because the maintenance of the canal is much harder, and the flow of the canal also makes things tricky. Dr. Brandi McKuin has done some work here, looks like the best way to do this is to hang the panels suspended on cables over the canals, but that requires a lot of steel and is thus fairly expensive. I don't think we've cracked that nut yet...

this is correct ^, it is net positive for healdsburg, for instance

And yes! I agree it's a no-brainer. Big barriers: 1) Getting all the stakeholders to agree (US Bureau of Reclamation, the local reservoir joint-powers authority, the Santa Barbara city council, the local utility, etc) 2) Avoiding NIMBYs and those that might be worried about ecosystem effects (e.g. Audubon society). While the evidence suggests it's not an issue for wildlife, those folks tend to be very conservative (even if they are missing the forest for the trees, IMO)

Agrivoltaics are far more expensive, and farmers have to change their behavior significantly. Floating solar doesn't require any of that partnership and ongoing behavioral change, just slightly more expensive up-front costs.

Also - in SB county, there is an ordinance banning utility-scale solar within the county (thanks local zoning laws....). We get exempted because the reservoir is federal land.