S201

I don't have one personally but I did some research into their hardware when making a DIY clone a few years ago: https://github.com/shanet/clearair

The EPA published a paper calibrating the sensors PurpleAir uses with their much more expensive sensors and found it was fairly close after applying a correction factor (which I also used in my implementation). https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the ship on autonomous aerial surveillance has long since sailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...

> In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope. One journalist observed, "If telescopes of this caliber are languishing on shelves, imagine what they're actually using."

I built a new Rails app with importmap-rails last year and it was an absolute joy to work with. Being able to forgo all of the JS compilation bs was a massive simplification. I've wasted so much time in the past dealing with Babel and Webpack so finally being able to kick all of it to the curb was a joyous day.

For commercial lawn care crews time is money and leaf blowers are much faster than a rake.

And replace them with what? Because if you're not in or at least near a city you'll be stranded without a car.

It works the same as always for me on Linux with SSH port forwards.

It's not so much as there is a "longer version" designed and sitting around, but more that the wings were built with a potential future, longer fuselage variant in mind. This is more evident if you look at a top-down view of it and note that the wing-to-fuselage ratio is higher than that of other planes, similar to how the 747-SP looks much shorter in length than its wings should be designed for. There's more details on the Wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Variants_proposed_...

I get what you're saying, each party has their flaws, the GOP more so than democrats. I think my point here is that politicians are politicians regardless of what party they are aligned with. But in general, in a country with 300M+ people, there are still many millions of average republicans who hold traditional conservative values. And while I may disagree with them, I can at least hold a respectful conversation with them as opposed to so many of the MAGA-nuts who just want to scream about conspiracy theories. But that's the type of nuance that's lost in comments painting everyone who identifies with the letter R as evil and fascist thus only leading to more division.

> But yeah, sure, tHe pArTiEs aRe tHe SaMe.

The root of sarcasm is truth. There are indeed awful people and decent people on each side. Politics is not a team sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV2Zk88beY

> Please show me an example where in the same period of time the Democratic party has done anything as egregious as the Southern Strategy.

Democrats purposefully supporting far-right candidates in the 2022 primaries because they believed they would be easier to win against in the general election doesn't exactly speak towards their supposed self-righteous ideals.

I don't know about you, but amplifying the voices a party claims to be so dangerous purely because they believe it to be in their own short term self-interest is pretty damn egregious to me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/democrats...

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/19/keri-lake-democrats-ariz...

> Engineers don't assess every molecule of the materials they construct bridges out of. Doesn't mean they're not accountable when one collapses.

If it's something completely unpredictable then, no, they're not generally liable. It's called an "act of god" and you'll find that language in virtually every contract.

> Also, your saying doesn't mention anything about people who point out to others who should be stoned. I'm assuming that's okay, as well as letting people know what they did that would deserve a stoning. Just in general, not advocating anyone be stoned.

I have absolutely no idea what your point is here.

> Let him who is without sin cast the first stone

So you're telling me that you've reviewed every line of every library you've ever used?

Exactly. This sentiment is the general problem with China. They expect the world to bend over backwards to accommodate them and their economic goals while allowing none of the same reciprocal treatment with other countries. They want all of the upsides of being a larger player on the global stage while accepting none of the downsides. You can't have it both ways.

Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on HN?

[citation needed]

> Your property tax & insurance [...] goes up 2-3% (in most places).

Heh, or in my case: 30% this year.

1. All of my email addresses from different providers are in one location

2. I have a local backup of all my emails

No, this is not correct at all. I am saying that I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware that I own and pay for. There's no effort from the manufacturer required at all for this in the same way that I can currently run whatever code I want on my laptop without the support of the manufacturer.

> Okay, is unleaded avgas mandated?

Not yet because we're just now finally rolling out the unleaded avgas. It's probably a safe bet that the EPA will move to ban leaded avgas as soon as it's feasible to do so once G100UL has more wide distribution (which, again, is in the process of happening this year and next year).

> Is it dramatically more expensive than leaded?

The manufacturer says it will cost about $1 more per gallon for unleaded. It may end up costing about the same when you consider the overhead that EPA regulations for leaded gas add to the final cost of 100LL.

> For how long should I look up and see a GA aircraft knowing it's some rich idiot spraying my neighborhood with lead?

Honestly, this statement shows a gross misunderstanding of GA. GA is far more than "rich people flying in their planes." For one, the really rich people are flying in jets or turboprops which burn jet fuel like airliners do. Second, GA with piston planes is training for future airline pilots, medical flights, law enforcement, aerial survey, and much more. The people that do fly GA for fun with piston planes are solidly middle or upper-middle class. Flying for a hobby is very similar to having a boat or RV with most GA pilots flying around in not-at-all-fancy 1970s-era Cessnas. In terms of lead contamination, you should be more concerned of lead pipes and paint than the tiny amount that comes from 100LL fuel.

More than that, there should be a "right to do whatever the hell you want" from day one. It's your device, you paid for it, and you own it, yet for whatever reason we allow these companies to tell us how we can use the hardware we paid for and own.

Unleaded avgas is now fully approved for the GA fleet with existing engines and is actively being rolled out this year with more widespread adoption next year. https://gami.com/g100ul/g100ul.php

Ah yes, here it is. I was looking for the "but leaded gas is going to kill us all!" comment in this thread.

First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic.

Second, unleaded avgas is here so even that 99% reduction is about to be 100%. G100UL is fully approved for the GA fleet and is in the process of being rolled out this year with more widespread adoption to be seen next year. If you're going to spout unfounded fears at least be up to the date on the facts.

https://gami.com/g100ul/g100ul.php

> Well why don’t they just lower it to zero?? As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

For the same reason we haven't dropped fossil fuel use overnight: It's not practical. You can't just wave a magic regulatory wand to elimination all air pollution without expecting (severe) economic impacts.

> I think mostly from boredom: down to the store, to buy a tool

How exactly is buying a tool or grocery shopping (what I assume is meant by "the store") driving out of boredom?

But to your point, a tax on driving ICE vehicles may indeed incentivize different behavior in areas where there are other transit options. Proposing such a tax is a very urban-centric view, however. Anyone in an even somewhat rural area would immediately realize how impractical it is. For example, if I personally wanted to use public transit I would first need to walk 5 miles each way along a 50mph road without sidewalks to get to the nearest bus stop.

Of course increased public transit options are a piece of the puzzle here, but there are huge areas of the US that have a population density far too low for any type of public transit system to make sense. These areas also tend to the be the areas where buying an electric car is far out of reach economically as well. Like it or not, ICE cars aren't going anywhere for a while.

Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by the way, hardly exists in the US anymore.

> Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.

Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed basic problems actually are?

> First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of 2022; solar is 2.

Nuclear can certainly be made quicker if we had the political will to do so but I'm not going to try to argue that it's quick. That said, if we would have invested in this 20 years ago like we should have it wouldn't have been a problem. The argument has been "wind & solar are going to ramp up so quickly in the near future so why build nuclear?" and then it takes longer than we thought and underwhelming progress is made.

Regardless of how long it takes:

> The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

> It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start producing after the first station is done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the times as the parts are swappable.

This argument doesn't really make sense. You can't add reactors to a nuclear plant? Or retrofit them as needed? The primary form of generating all forms of electric other than photovoltaics uses steam to spin a turbine; that's the same now as it was 100+ years ago. Who cares if it's 2022 technology in 2072 if it's producing useful electricity?

I'm sure solar panels have some runway to the technology, but that's not the point here. Solar currently does not have the ability to drop into the existing grid with large scale, on-demand energy nor will it in the foreseeable future. It's a slice of the energy pie, but to say that it's going to improve so much doesn't mean it's a wise idea to put all your eggs in that basket.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against solar here. We should be building as many forms of non-carbon-emitting energy generation as we possibly can.

A challenge of large solar plants like you're describing is getting the energy to where it's needed and when it's needed. A ton of solar panels in the desert does no good if there's no way to store that energy or get it to a city a few hundred miles away. All of that requires significantly more investment in storage mechanisms and interconnectors to move it around the grid. The latter actually being most concerning to me simply because of NIMBYs fighting projects to build more high voltage power lines because they're ugly and ruin views from their properties. It's hard to quantify that, but when you need to run so many power lines over such long distances that touch so many people's properties it becomes a permitting nightmare which dramatically slows down, or even cancels, projects.

I also touched on this in another comment below: In terms of storing solar energy with our current method of lithium-ion batteries, well, the cost of lithium is up ~500% in the past two years and is expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...

As to Swanson's Law, sure, I get where the trendline currently is, but as a counterexample: How's Moore's Law holding up these days?

I'm sure there's plenty of articles about different battery storage methods and all that being researched, but the fact is that we need proven, on-demand energy generation that drops into the existing grid NOW and nuclear provides that. But by all means, build all of it: nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Having too much carbon-free energy is a much better problem to have than too little.

Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in the past and given all of the demand for them I don't really see it going down any time soon, at least not until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in the near future.[2]

1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

2. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/06/09/...

Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.

> If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up.

That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance.

Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly risky bet to make if you ask me.

In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary, great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.