simonhorlick
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1 year ago
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on: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
It's motivated by the ideology of wanting a meritocracy - the idea that if you work hard you can reap rewards. Having some people in society that can sit at home and watch the S&P increase while some have to work 50-hour weeks to make ends meet is seen as problematic.
simonhorlick
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1 year ago
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on: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
simonhorlick
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1 year ago
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on: Starlink Defies Order to Block X in Brazil
X is turning into a wasteland of angry people and bots. Bluesky is much more refreshing, similar to the old twitter.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: 40% of US electricity is now emissions-free
Anything about 2C is extremely risky for civilised society. It’s likely that we’ve already surpassed the tipping point for the West Antarctic ice sheet which over time will lead to meters of sea level rise. Changing weather patterns and simultaneous breadbasket failures will mean food becomes a lot more expensive - if you’re lucky enough to have access to it at all. At 3.5C many places on the planet become uninhabitable. People aren’t able to work outside for much of the year due to wet bulb temperatures. Regular storm surge causes a large percentage of the planets population to migrate. Salination of ground water and water for crop irrigation becomes a serious problem. Mountain glaciers that provide clean drinking water for millions of people dry up. In all, it’s hard to see a situation where we’d be able to maintain a reasonable quality of life under the conditions of >2C of warming.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu:
> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
Note that since about 2021 renewables have overtaken fossil-based sources of energy on price. New installations of utility scale wind and solar PV are now cheaper than their alternatives. Not to mention protection from price fluctuations in the cost of fuels needed to power fossil fuel plants.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Rolls-royce confirms all of its current engines can run on 100 percent SAF
I don't understand how this is sustainable. The fuel is still being combusted and releasing CO2 isn't it?
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How to manage autistic developer?
You need to ask him what accommodations he needs in order to be effective. Only he can really answer this question.
It could be small things like clearly indicating your intent - avoid sarcasm, figurative language and idioms. In a group chat this could mean adding "/joke" to messages. Autistic people generally like structure. Ensure your task tracker is clean and to-the-point. The benefit of this is it also help non-autistic colleagues.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Plex to block all servers hosted at Hetzner
I recently switched from Plex to Jellyfin. It's far more stable and hardware decoding works out of the box.
simonhorlick
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2 years ago
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on: Why the US is one of only a few countries with no paid time off
Capitalism naturally tends towards monopoly. The idea that it breeds competition is a nice fairy tale, but doesn’t reflect reality.
simonhorlick
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3 years ago
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on: Synthesis Report of the IPCC sixth assessment report
It’s a summary report of all of the climate science, research and conclusions that went into the sixth assessment reports. Available as a responsive html site (rather than hidden in a pdf).
simonhorlick
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3 years ago
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on: The future (and the past) of the web is server side rendering
Have a look at Qwik, it’s a new framework from the author of Angular. It does SSR without the need for client-side hydration. It’s fast and immediately interactive.
I’m really hoping it gains some momentum because I’d love to use it in some client projects.
simonhorlick
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3 years ago
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on: Qwik: No hydration, auto lazy-loading, edge-optimized, and fun
Relationships between components and the app state are serialised along with the html. A small (~1kb) library is used to lazy load javascript as the user starts interacting. The key is that it's immediately usable, you don't require a client side re-render before any of the buttons work, for example. This means you can get great PageSpeed scores really easily and the apps feel super responsive.
I have no affiliation with Qwik, but I did try it out on a small project yesterday to see how it works. I'm really impressed so far.
simonhorlick
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3 years ago
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on: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future
The richest 10% of the global population are responsible for an estimated 47% of emissions. The problem has never been that there are too many people. The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.
simonhorlick
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4 years ago
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on: Tell HN: China Is Entering Lockdown
Over time, the effects of covid19 on heart, brain, lungs, vascular system, sensory system, kidneys & more will become better understood.
Until then, any reassurance that massive levels of infection are ‘ok’ for society is a gamble—a gamble with unknown long-term costs.
(quote from stanford infectious disease doctor Abraar Karan)
simonhorlick
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4 years ago
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on: Brussels Airlines makes 3,000 unnecessary flights to maintain airport slots
The USA is the 2nd largest emitter of CO2, on a per-capita basis it's almost double that of China.
simonhorlick
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4 years ago
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on: Trans-Pacific Cable Chaos, Shifting Asian Hubs
We already know that the US monitors internet traffic on a global scale, so it’s a bit rich of them trying to police the rest of the world on this.
simonhorlick
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5 years ago
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on: Expanded testing of video conferencing bandwidth usage over 50/5 Mbps broadband
They measured video quality subjectively. I don't think you can just take the researchers at their word that it "looked good enough". Any rigorous video quality test would use at least some kind of objective numeric measurement.
simonhorlick
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5 years ago
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on: Write site-specific extensions to replace sites' JavaScript code
At what point do we draw the line between free software being beneficial and being overly ideological? If I buy a printer I'd like a copy of the driver source code so if the company goes bust I can still use my possibly expensive and still working hardware. But if I'm using a web app? Half of the source code is going to be sitting on someone else's machine anyway - making the client side free-software doesn't really change that.
simonhorlick
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5 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change?
The climate crisis is the defining issue of our lifetimes. Solutions to this problem are unlikely to come from technology. Start organising, start protesting and demand that governments begin to take this issue seriously.
