solraph

> If you know both languages, which one would you pick?

The one with the best density of good developers in your hiring region if the application ends up scaling.

> Alternatively: what would you suggest someone getting into web development to learn? PHP or Ruby?

Neither. I would tell them to get into the Javascript ecosystem - not because I think it's necessarily good, but because that's where most of the work is. I'd also reccomend picking up at least one other general purpose language to be a bit more rounded such as Golang, Java, C#, Python.

It's been a long time since I had to deal with Laravel, but that code snippet looks very similar to the Laravel version I had to work with ~6 years ago.

I hated it (Laravel) for those reasons, along with the madness that was the DI container. Guess I'm just not "web artisan" enough.

Honestly, this is the right answer. I have a HP ProDesk 300 G3 mini (the mini version of the server the OP is using) running home assistant, syncthing, a bunch of other random 24x7 stuff, and the "server", router, and PoE switch powering two Wifi APs is drawing a grand total of 9 watts*. It just doesn't seem worth the effort to try and make this more efficient.

* According to the UPS.

Because they have other things they need to do, and mastering it may not provide benefits that repay the investment.

I say this as someone who has run Linux on the Desktop for over 20 years. I do not give a crap about knowing the ins and outs of everything on my system. I have zero interest in learning how bluetooth & Wifi & and all of the hundred other subsystems on my computers work. 99% of the time I want to install the OS, and get on with work.

Sometimes that work means getting down and dirty with a subsystem when I want it to do things that isn't on the normal happy path, but the rest of the time, I want Wifi to autoconnect with a saved password and my bluetooth headphones to autoconnect like a normal person and not futz around learning the intricacies of every daemon and config file in the OS.

It's same reason I pay someone else to service my car. I have fully capable of learning to do it, but I don't care. I have better things to do with my time and money, and there's only so many hours in the day.

(Several edits because I misplaced lots of words pre-coffee)

I agree with this. Anacdotally I spent years fighting my way out of the perception of being a "PHP programmer". Despite having open source projects in a litany of languages, it was all interviewees wanted to talk about.

I eventually lucked into working for a consulting firm who trusted me to work on goland and python and JS projects for two years, and that job on my CV means magically my twenty years of experience is now worth much (~$100k) more on the job market and nobody asks about my PHP work anymore.

Oh, that was unclear. Having a "Total" option next to the states. That way it would be possible to see the renewable percentage for the grid as a whole.

15MWh of storage seems very high? I appreciate I don't know your raw numbers of production and consumption, but don't you still produce some power during the winter? ie; you would only need to cover your shortfall.

For context, I live in the cloudy-ish south of Australia, and have similar problems with our solar power in winter. However, we still produce reasonable amounts of power through the day, and our total winter shortfall is only about 500 kwh, once offset against the daily production.

So for us, 500kwh -> 2080.8 MJ -> 462.4 litres of storage required (assuming 4.5 MJ / litre and ignoring round trip losses), which seems an entirely reasonable for local storage, safety aspects not withstanding.

This is super interesting! As an idea, would it be possible to get a totals of AEMO greenness/renewable?

> This must depend on the kind of work you're doing.

Very much so, but 10 years ago most devs suffered on a laptop, now most devs would not.

Obviously if your workstation reference is a multi-socket beast then you will not be satisfied with a laptop, but most devs aren't recompiling large codebases from scratch every time.

> Its still difficult to find a laptop with 32 gb of ram, let alone 64.

I can't quickly find one with 64GB, but there's Lenovo Thinkpads with 48 GB (which is what I have), along with with 8/16T Ryzen cores. I can't speak to what it's like recompiling large C++ codebases, but I don't wait when it comes to compiling things written in golang fwiw.

I think this was true ten years ago when laptops could not effectively drive two monitors, and had some serious deficiencies in the processor/ram/HDD space. I would put up with the duplicate desktop/portable system so that I had sufficient power when writing code.

These days, my work laptop happily drives a pair of QuadHD monitors, and even suffices for light gaming. I have yet to max out all the cores and ram. On top of that, I no longer have to deal with having two systems and all the data shenanigans that goes along with that.

> * Inflation and energy crisis will cause such a large social unrest in the west that one or two governments will be overthrown, betting on Europe, NZ or Australia

I'm curious why you think AU or NZ would have this happen. Both have robust processes for electing new governments, and despite what the news might tell you, the vast majority of people are fed and are not struggling to keep the lights on.

(I have no opinions on Europe in this matter)

> It's implausibly high for the number of people who use it as their primary workstation OS

This might just be the bias of the circles I move in, but over the last five years me running Linux on the desktop in a development work environment has gone from a weird oddity, to uncommon, to boringly normal. I've had a few non-work tech-adjacent friends ask for opinions on running Linux on Thinkpads for example.

I strongly suspect there's a multitude of factors including the rise of the cloud, the maturation of Linux desktop distros, Linux being the default/only options for things like Raspberry Pi's, developer software being multi-platform, etc.

While some hardware issue still remain, getting Linux compatible hardware of any type is pretty easy. It's not 100% guaranteed situation like Windows is, but you'll have multiple options for whatever you are looking for, which is a massive difference compared to years passed where some hardware categories simply did not have a fully fledge Linux compatible option.

> Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms.

This is very much dependant on the country. For example, New Zealand beef is about 96% pasture fed, Australia is about 66% pasture fed, and Brazil seems to be about 90% pasture fed.

> and i know A LOT more people, who'd like a kid, but "when they can afford one", and that 'when' isn't 'now' (mostly due to housing prices)

On top that, I think stress from modern life contributes a lot. Anecdotally, my partner and I had been trying for over a year, and as soon as we went on holiday and detached from our stressful jobs for a couple of weeks... boom, pregnancy.

I can't say if life easier or harder 30 to 50 years ago, but there definitely seems to be a lot more stressed people than there used to be.

My family went through reducing our meat intake to a few days, and honestly - it kinda sucked, since it reduced many of our meal options, since they "had" to be vegetarian.

After about twelve months of this and getting sick of it, we settled on meals that usually have meat, but using less of it. For example; Pad Thai usually calls for mostly animal protein + noodles + tofu, so we usually pad it out with lots more vegetables, which is healthier anyway.

Not to negate anything mentioned in the sibling comment, but yes. A home solar installation in Australia is about AUD$1.5 per watt for a complete system (panels, inverter, cabling, installation, sign off, etc) before subsidies.

For comparison with the OP system, an average 6kw system producing 8Mwh per year, with a conservative 15 year lifespan works out to AUD$0.075 per kwh.

($1AUD is currently USD$0.65)

Come to Australia, AUD$150k is fairly normal for a (actual) senior developer now.

Note: This is a very recent thing since the start of 2022. Salary guides from even 2020 probably show $30k-$50k less.

Maybe it's less patronising, and more just blindingly obvious to those of us who have had crap jobs in the past?

Having grown up adjacent to upper-middle class people (I'm arguably entering that sphere now, but I definitely didn't start there), I think a bunch of them could benefit from hearing this story from one of their peers.

> Right now the only oven with a good Consumer Reports rating requires a Wi-Fi connection

Is this some weird American only thing? I keep hearing on HN how everything requires wifi now, but in Australia, I couldn't find any major oven that had wifi at all, and only 14 out of 504 fridges on a popular appliances site (Appliances Online) had wifi at all.

I'd be interested to know what the options look like in other countries.

This is absolutely a real problem, but I think WFH has really only exposed the issue of most peoples lack of real community, rather than causing it.

Since starting a new job a few months ago, I reached out to some former tech colleagues that live close by, and meet up every few weeks at a local pub. It's kind of of like a meetup, but there's no agenda, speakers, or specific tech focus. People are encouraged to organically invite other people that fit the group, which has seen it grow from three to twelve people in about three months.

I honestly think it's one of the best tech groups I've been part of, and has been a big part of keeping me sane in my 100% WFH job.

> but there isn't really a standard for 220v household extension cords

Well, there is there in the rest of the world, outside of North America. Most of the power plugs are 220v-240v @ 10-16 amp (depending on country, plug, etc).

Picking an existing standard would work here I think.

Could you explain the logic there? I understand the first statement, but I don't understand how the current military dependency on petroleum for land war blocks mass adoption of EVs in the civilian market.

> Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.

The commercial nature of social media is that there's a perverse incentive to keep people attached to the app or site rather than encourage them to leave the app for physical face to face meetings.

I think the problem is social media in general. As an alternative, a friend of mine recently invited me to a "IT nerds social group" that meets every few weeks at a local pub. There's no agenda other than spending time with like minded people. We have dinner, a few drinks, talk about random stuff, then go home. Sometimes, members will organise between them to meet up for lunch, dinner, or board games.

People are invited by group members if a member thinks they fit the group. The entire thing is a list of email addresses and a regular calendar invites. There's no platform to monetise, no chat groups, no special software.

It's honestly been better than any IT related meetup I've been to.

Money (depending on location).

I had solar installed last year in Australia. The 6.5kw grid tied system has an estimated payback time of approx six years, even with Australia's appalling buy:sales ratio for electricity (3:1 last I looked). For various reasons, I was not eligible for subsidies, and it was still worth it. I pay around AUD$350 per year for electricity, which is mostly in winter.

In summer, pulling an average of 30 kwh per day off the panel and running that straight into the AC without needing to worry about the electricity bill is amazing.

It's worth noting that due the original subsidies to get the industry going, Australia has some of the cheapest residential solar installation prices in the world. A 6.6kw system (pre means tested subsidies) is around $8,000. That's the panels, the inverter, all the other bits and pieces and the installation. Electricity prices range from $0.20 kwh to $0.40 / kwh.

Known good hardware I expect. There's definitely some hardware out there which is sorta-kinda supported on Linux, but only really works for one kernel version on one distro, and doesn't only supports the bare minimum of requirements.

> Bluetooth pairing fails occasionally.

I never had this issue on Linux until my most recent laptop, which shipped with a Qualcomm 1103 card, which gave me no end of issues with Wifi and Bluetooth (resume from sleep failing, weird power drain, random drop outs).

I swapped out the wifi/BT module for an Intel wireless card (AX210), and all the above problems immediately resolved themselves.

Maybe it's just the bluetooth hardware?

> Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately work.

I've honestly not had to worry about this in at least ten years across ~8 different machines. It's just worked on all three major graphics vendors. I haven't used Wayland yet, so I don't know if if that's a factor.

Which low wage people? Super low wage people can't afford cars, and benefit from the improved low cost transit provided by public transit and walkable neighbourhoods.

In the Anglosphere, these neighbourhoods have typically been expensive because they are so uncommon, and the laws of supply and demand push up the prices. However, as more neighbourhoods move to a more walkable model, they become more affordable.

In the meantime, those who need to travel for work (tradespeople, delivery drivers) benefit from vastly decreased traffic.

Honestly, having worked directly & indirectly for a multitude of large enterprises over the last couple of decades, every large organisation suffers from this.

It doesn't matter if their private, local, state, or federal government, charity, or whatever - the larger the organisation, the less efficient, and more failed projects there will be.

My personal opinion is that this is caused by a combination of communication overhead, politics, and larger organisations giving more places for useless / lazy people to hide.

Agreed. At this point, I view anyone who worked for more than six months at any of the big IT consulting companies - and especially accounting firms pretending to be IT consulting companies - with deep suspicion.

I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer comes from!

I can't speak for the specifics of using a Nest, but pre-cooling a house earlier in the day is definitely a more efficient use of power.

Earlier in the year in Australia when day time temperatures were 35°C-40°C (95°F-104°F), waiting until midday to turn on the AC would mean using another 10 kwh more than if the AC was turned on at 9am.

Granted, this is an new Australian house which means it's built to standards about 30 years behind what you would expect for a first world country.

Had a play with it, and it has great promise. I love that the keyboard interface is given priority.

I have a a couple of thoughts around the interface that might (?) be useful. I absolutely realise this is a work in progress, and you may already have these in mind. :)

* A keyboard shortcut to bring up the right click/edit menu. There's the existing menu key on non-Mac keyboards, which is probably the best thing on non-Mac keyboards to hijack.

* There doesn't seem to be any easy way to pick nodes that not right next to each other and or delete connections. ie; Something that emulates holding down control, and clicking on multiple items (or even just two).

* Potentially, a way to search in the graph using the node text. ie; hitting / would create a search box, which typing it would select the subset of nodes that have text matching the search text, which could be use to select from.