PG&E screwed up pretty bad prioritizing shareholder dividends over maintenance/vegetation management. That said, their potential exposure for liability feels something like the situation which led the the demise of small aircraft manufacturing in the US. The Western US is a tinderbox, partly by nature, partly by a century of a suppression only-approach to wildfires, made worse by an ever-increasing wildland-urban interface, and partly by warming/drying of the region associated with climate change. If a fire is not started by overhead lines, there are still plenty of other sources: grills, fireworks, dragging trailer chains, lighting strikes on dead snags. Reducing the incidence of the portion of fires due to overhead lines does not come cheap and comes with diminishing returns. There are technical and operational solutions: undergrounding, new circuit breakers that can detect arcing, preventative blackouts during high winds. But this requires money from somewhere and even a large investor owned utility probably won't have it after a large settlement.
Given that this is hacker news, the answers here are unsurprisingly biased towards building toys. Blocks/Duplo are great, but who is going to explore the newly built environment? Enter the die-cast toy cars/trucks/construction equipment/farm equipment. I've had good luck with the Ertl 1/50th scale stuff, which can be purchased in lots on Ebay.
I was hoping that the pendulum would swing the other way with the scandal over too many passengers bringing out their bags on a recent AA evacuation caused by a burning tire. The push to eliminate checked bags has created a chaotic cabin environment that probably exacerbated the situation. There's no sign of it getting better either. The overcrowding of overhead bins creates a prisoners dilemma where flight attendants pressure passengers to put smaller bags under their seats, disincentivizing bringing anything but a big roller bag.
Paying for a group to sit together is really just a roundabout way of charging extra for the middle seat that solo travelers don't want. There's something gross about it, creating a market price for a nonexistent good.
I don't know about their other expenses, but SEO/advertising is probably one of their better uses of money even if we don't like it. It's hard to gain market share against a browser that is pitched each time you do a Google search no matter how good the product is.
It might, or it might just become the next CAFE. Disappointingly, the proposed regulation does not apply to vehicles over 10k lbs gross weight. This notably includes heavy duty pickups, a fast growing market segment thanks to the increasing popularity of 5th wheel campers as an alternative to self propelled RVs and their exemption from CAFE. Within 5 years HD pickups will probably be the only class of vehicles available with V8s, further increasing their popularity.
Context: As of September 2024, the NHTSA is proposing that the US adopt pedestrian safety crash requirements for vehicles up to 10k lbs. North Americans may not be aware that engineering solutions already exist for medium-duty trucks such as Mercedes-Benz's line of low-entry trucks, linked here.
The original sure looks bland, but a HTML4-esque webpage gives absolutely the wrong message about the maturity level of a browser regardless of how much more usable it may be. Branding matters even if it's a tough pill to swallow.
The browser is good, but Mozilla has been consistently losing market share despite being well-funded. There is considerable debate as to what specific mistakes were made, but the foundation spent a lot of money on side projects that did not benefit the browser such as Servo, Rust and FireFox OS. Likely market share could have been improved had this been spent on marketing or engineering work that directly benefited the browser.
Back when I worked out of an office in an industrial park in the suburbs of Boston, a number of the younger/single folks would reverse-commute in from the city. Since it was against the prevailing flow of traffic it was a pretty easy drive for them.
Adding to the list of 2010s-era Japanese cars, the 2nd gen Mazda3s have good reliability without the "Toyota tax." If you don't want to go with a 10yo car, current Toyotas will let you disable the 4G modem by pressing a series of buttons, and have physical HVAC controls. There's pretty much no getting away from touchscreens in current cars, though. The only alternative is Mazda with their selector knob, but I've found it more distracting when I rented one.
I was about to post a snarky reply, but after actually reading TFA, it's not clear that this plane does anything different from a modern-ish commercial aviation autopilot except for being able to set it remotely. Still waiting for "real" autonomous flight meaning path planning.
I'm sad to hear that not only the man himself but Harris Cyclery passed sometime in the middle of COVID. For the younger folks, it's hard to appreciate how influential his kludgey-looking website was. Pre-YouTube it was the go-to source for bike repair info, and was likely the catalyst for the fixed-gear craze of the early 2010s.
This one does seem too expensive for what it is. The GBD-200 at $150 seems much more appropriate for a smartwatch-lite, besides scratching the itch for a modern take on the old Casio squares [1].
For a more modern language that scratches the same minimalist syntax itch as Forth, try Red [1]. It's list-based rather than stack-based and includes the "killer app" of a really nice DSL for GUI layout. Even including the excellent PySimpleGUI, it's the fastest way to build up a custom GUI without a GUI builder tool.
I work with a lot of uncompressed structured binary files so I finally broke down and wrote my own system based on the Restic chunker: https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver
It's pretty basic, but it works for me and will hopefully inspire someone to make a "real" data VCS based on content-defined chunking.
I recall some figure that 90% of the Canadian population lives in a thin band extending a few hundred miles north of the US border. So average population density is very misleading.
A lot of people are debating if this post is legit. I can't make any definite statements, but an 87% response rate for any job application is extremely high.
Like most people here, I love the minimalist 90s UI and the lack of need to create an account. Unfortunately it's a ghost town of scammers now in my area. Craigslist really dropped the ball on policing their site and let competitors take over. Facebook is terrible, but the closed yard-sale groups really cut down the number of scammer responses.
1) Turn the basement into a granny flat if it has a separate door. If you live in any metropolitan area you can charge pretty good rent for it.
2) Probably it's starting to get common now, but 240V to the garage in case you want to add an EV charger.
3) 240V in the kitchen if you want to add an induction cooktop or wire in a UK-spec 2kW electric kettle
4) Echoing the people who say to put in wired Ethernet. WiFi sucks if you have a big house, especially one with courtyards meaning long halls and bad signal
This is a pretty well-observed phenomenon that the relative sadness of humans and cute animals dying in movies and real life is (presumably) reversed. Someone had even coined a term for it - “dog-dying-in-movie sad.” I’m at a loss to explain why, but it feels like Peak Internet Discussion so hopefully someone here will feel like expanding on it.
It's good to see that Fritzing is still alive. I recall that there were plans to move it to a web platform that fizzled out, and the original application was unmaintained for a while. I'm a little surprised to see that the pay-to-download button is still there. While I understand that the maintainers would like to be compensated for their time, it's not a good way to grow (or maintain) a userbase. Fritzing gets hated on a lot, but it has its niche. A salty forum commenter described that it's not actually intended for noobs, but actually for more experienced electronics hobbyists who are writing tutorials for noobs and want to draw a breadboard layout. And for drawing breadboard layouts, it's not bad. The PCB layout portion is that bad - it's probably the worst PCB layout tool I've ever tried using, and I can't come up with any reason for its continued existence other than to get referral money from a board house. And yes, KiCAD is great, but this doesn't and shouldn't compete with it.
Semi-related, but last night I watched City Beautiful's video on YT [1] that explains the troubled relationship between poor fire management practices in the western USA and poor development practices - meaning intermingling of houses and forest so controlled burns become impossible.
It does seem like like a somewhat straightforward application of spam filters, doesn't it? Clickbait headlines follow strong trends ("...and here's what happened"). So do the linked "articles."