ccalvert's comments

I use Ubuntu Desktop as my primary machine and find it very stable. I use it primarily for development with WebStorm, Atom, VirtualBox, Chromium, Node, and Bash. I rarely play games on it, and my taste in games is not fancy. I handle mail, videos, and writing chores in Chrome and Firefox. I listen to music via Spotify. I use the video card built into my motherboard. The most demanding thing I do with it is record videos that capture what I do on the screen.

Perhaps I am not a typical user, but nonetheless, I rarely have trouble with Linux. Everything just works.

According to the site linked below, the average American produces about 100 lbs of plastic waste a year:

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/trash-on...

To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.

* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs

* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs

* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7

There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.

Thanks. This does look interesting. It's hard to keep up with all the frameworks, but this does look like something worth investing some time in. I'll check it out.

I take your point: the trashed refrigerator may be a heavier environmental cost than the plastic bags.

It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator. But doing either is better than doing nothing. In other words, arguing that one good is more effective than another good doesn't mean that it isn't admirable to do only the smaller good.

Many of us up here on Hacker News are good at fixing things. But some of us might be less skilled in other areas, such as organizing political campaigns or working in the medical field. It's easy to criticize someone for not doing something we find easy, but it is harder to see how they might be skilled in areas where we struggle.

I have modest skills as a developer. I was trying to convert an old static web site into something more interactive. Without really thinking it through, I started building a SPA. I got stuck on the SEO part. I found it innately complex, but the real trouble came from trying to bring together the disparate sections of the old static site while preserving and abetting SEO.

One day I just ditched the SPA and rebuilt the whole architecture with NodeJs and Express. I was done in a few days. It could have gone even faster, but the original static site was really a mess with years of accumulated bad decisions embedded in it.

I know this is just one data point and not really proof of anything. Nevertheless, the linked article made a lot of sense to me. Most of the bulleted points resonated with me, but none more than the SEO issue. There are solutions to the SEO issue, but I personally did not find them easy to implement. If I were part of a big professional team, and we really needed a SPA, I would have called this one differently, but I was working on my own, and I didn't really have the sense at first to see that I didn't need a SPA to achieve my goals. I was perhaps a bit too susceptible to the hype without enough experience to really understand the issues involved.

I wanted to change my habits because I thought it was the right thing to do. So we put solar on the roof and bought a cheap used electric car (a Leaf). My goal was to do the right thing, but the result has been unforeseen benefits.

The solar power more or less makes us net neutral, even when factoring in the electricity for the car.

In short:

- The solar power will pay for itself in less than five years.

- We don't have an electric bill to speak of. (There is an eight dollar a month charge for just being hooked up to the grid.)

- We pay very little to run the Leaf. (We pay nothing when we charge at home, but sometimes we charge on the road.)

I'm surprised by this outcome. I started out trying to do the right thing but ended up doing something that benefited me financially.

We eat a lot of turmeric. If you go to an Indian grocery store, of which there are plenty in the Seattle area, you can buy it in bulk very cheaply. We are vegetarians, so we put it in lots of veggie based dishes, especially stir fries. Frankly, I'm not much of a cook, and adding turmeric and pepper to my meals has led me to experiment with lots of spices, and generally improve the taste of the food I eat. Yes, there have been low points, but overall, it works for us.

We cook in a Kirkland Cookware set which I believe is stainless steel. It is still the same color it was when we bought it. Our blender, on the other hand, is now a depressing yellowish green. But it works the same regardless of its color.

Look at Recode's pictures. There are prices for the items on the shelves.

https://www.recode.net/2018/1/21/16913984/what-does-photos-a...

I think the gift that some upper-middle-class kids get that others don't always get is a belief in their ability to succeed. You also need a strong work ethic, but I'm not sure there is such a thing as a work ethic if a person has no faith in their ability to succeed.

Perhaps it looks a bit like this:

- Some people you can't keep down no matter what you do. These people do things like work full time, go to school in the evenings, and graduate from college in four years.

- Some people will succeed if given the opportunity to succeed. That is, if you give them a scholarship or financial aid or if their parents pay for their education.

- Some people will succeed if you give them a big push. Take them to the financial aid office and help them fill out the form, ply them with encouraging words when they want to give up at midterms or finals, etc.

- Some people won't succeed no matter what you do. Usually, because they have so little faith in themselves that they give up even when success is all but guaranteed.

So yes, government programs are needed to get enough citizens across the finish line. But I don't think this is really about class, I think it is about motivating people -- helping them learn to believe in themselves.

Those who understand Climate Change and love science should not cede the ground to those who disagree with them without a fight.

Most people don't understand science at the same level as many of the participants in HN. They are not bad people, and they are not necessarily ignorant people. But they don't base their decision-making process on scientific principles. Someone needs to reach out to these people and help them understand the world we live in.

Ten minutes on Fox News and similar sites should convince anyone that Climate Change deniers understand how to influence people and do all they can to advocate for those who profit from policies that harm our world. We have to use the available tools to counter their arguments.

One of the things I like about open source is its fecundity. When proprietary software ruled, we went to two or three companies to get most of our tools and libraries. Some were very good, some were terrible. We often had to wait years for features and bug fixes. Some key pieces seemed to never go away even though no one liked them. For instance, IE6.

In the open source world, bug fixes often come much more quickly. If fixes don't appear, we at least have the source and can try to fix it -- though sometimes that's a high bar.

If there is an obvious need for a tool or library, someone implements it and throws it up on GitHub. Sometimes the implementation is great, sometimes it is little more than a starting point for our own solutions. But at least we have the source to act as a starting point.

Quality is important, and open source often encourages good quality, but as the writer points out it does not always do so. Sometimes it acts more like a neural net AI algorithm that keeps failing and failing until one day it succeeds.

What open source does encourage is a rapid iteration as developers all over the world look for solutions to known problems. It's a messy solution, but it works surprisingly well. It also helps spread knowledge of how what the nuts and bolts of good software looks like.

I perhaps foolishly go ahead and teach React and Redux to my students. The first thing I show them, however, is this article by Dan Abramov, who you perhaps know from his conference videos or his amazing work fielding React bug reports.

You might not need Redux:

https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be4...

The little example he provides is remarkably powerful and a great intro to thinking like a Redux programmer.

"stroking his own ego is not what this is about. He doesn't need that."

Forgive me for interjecting politics into this debate, but we all know at this point that there is at least one highly successful egotist in this world who still needs to have his ego stroked on a regular (daily) basis. I admire Tanenbaum and doubt that he fits into this category, but the category does exist.

For years I have written too many tests. Recently I have been trying something more like this:

- One test to prove I can cleanly load the component or object in a module. This is about loose coupling and ensuring that each module contains only one object.

- One test to prove the component or object does what I what it says it does. This is primarily about the Single Responsibility Principle. If I need six tests to prove an object works, then the object might be doing too much and might need to be refactored.

Other tests can be added if bugs appear, but just two tests per object can help us keep things light. Of course, if I have a module full of utility functions, then that is a different matter. But I think the limiting the amount of code in my tests and the overall number of tests is valuable.

Not sure about SeanDav, but I do a lot of compiling and wonder if anyone has any suggestions about the best CPU to buy. I want short wait times for a compile, but I still care about price. I don't want to go over $500 but would prefer less.

As a teacher, I appreciate projects like this. The folks in my classes are "amateurs" learning to code. I can, and do, teach them quick ways to build websites, but that won't help them get jobs in the industry. Many people can build sites with those tools. Companies that hire developers are looking for more advanced skills, and examples like this help (hard working) students learn how to use them. It takes my students at least two quarters to get productive with a tool like React, but once they know it, they have a valuable skill and have hopefully learned some important lessons about the proper way to create a robust architecture.

Amazing story. It's often (relatively) small, individual acts of heroism that preserve the best things in the world. Sometimes that means not doing what your boss asks when you know it will have unintended consequences.

If this desalination system allowed a city to generate even 50% of their water needs, that would be a significant step forward. I keep seeing this metric put forward: Does X generate 100% of the needed water/electricity/heat. Why does it have to 100%? Can't three systems each contributing 33.3% be enough to reach 100%?

Our household solar power installation here in the very rainy Seattle area generates 98.15% of our electric power needs, including that for our electric car. I wish it were 100%, and if the sun shines for a few days in a row, sometimes it does generate 100% of our electric power needs for the last 365 days. It is, however, much better to meet 98% of our needs that to meet none of our needs.

I'm confused. Do you mean that we're allowed to create posts on Hacker News that are not sarcastic? I thought there was a rule, with a powerful AI enforcing it, stating that all posts had to be sarcastic. (Warning, this post is sarcastic and not meant to be taken literally.)

If you have a big project in mind, you can get started by creating a small project focused on an aspect of your bigger project. Since examples were missing from the op's article, lets make one up. Suppose you want to create a site about presidents of the United States. Start with a smaller project that focuses on one president or on a group of presidents. For instance, the first three presidents. Or, if you prefer a technical example, suppose you want to create site on networking. Begin by creating a site on HTTP.