tda

very helpful comment, you might want to add that to the readme or a pinned issue

The Prius utilizes the Atkinson cycle rather than the conventional Otto cycle, which is more common in traditional gasoline engines. The Atkinson cycle is designed for higher efficiency, sacrificing some power output for improved fuel economy.

The Atkinson cycle has a longer expansion stroke compared to the compression stroke, resulting in a more efficient conversion of heat to mechanical work. However, this cycle tends to have a narrower range of operation, with less torque and power available at lower RPMs compared to an Otto cycle engine.

Perhaps a more efficient cycle is possible by reducing the RPM/torque range even further, but I am under the impression that a lot has been left on the table efficiency wise.

Are you aware you are essentially describing the original Toyota Prius? the engine is optimised for constant low rpm/low torque/high efficiency, whilest relying on the battery/electric motor for torque and temporary extra power

With an e-bike the range you can comfortably and regularly cycles roughly doubles (says I). So the number of useful destinations you can use your bike for roughly quadruples.

An electric car has enough batteries and other raw materials to power about 100 e-bikes. So if more than one in a hundred people can ditch their second car because of e-bikes this is already a win. But especially with the advent of electric cargo bikes the number of replaced second cars is much higher. As long as at least some e-bikes replace cars, e-bikes are a giant win for the environment. Cars are just so wasteful compared to everything else.

And yes, normal bikes are greatly undervalued, I have a 80 year old "transport bike" and it is virtually indestructible. I can take one adult passenger and cycle or a ton of cargo and cover a few km without sweat. But I also greatly value my electric cargo bike, especially when shuttling the kids around on longer trips (regularly up to 10km in half an hour, and incidentally for day trips up to 75km). For my commute I use a normal e-bike. Most days of the week neither myself or my wife need the car.

as an owner of a Van Moof I think they had their moment, but now it's time for the company to go bankrupt. They have made too many mistakes, and focus on the wrong things, so it is time for some darwinian pruning.

Let me explain: they were early to introduce a cheap e-bike with a nice design (the S3 came in at €2o00 + €400 3 year service). Cheap is of course relative,but at the time most reputable brand ugly as hell bikes sold for €3000+.

Where they went wrong is that they took minimalism too far. The combination of automatic shifting (and there are no buttons), absence of a pedalling force sensor (cause cheap) and an internal gear hub (can't really shift under load) is basically a recipe for disaster. Combine that with general lack of QA and all of a sudden you have a company burdened by it's repair costs almost to the level of bankruptcy...

Just confirmed he still does that

Wow:

> The loss of sperm oil had a profound impact in the automotive industry, where for example, transmission failures rose from under 1 million in 1972 to over 8 million by 1975.

I remember when my kids were younger they always had difficulty climbing onto the cooler play structures. Somehow the first few steps of the entrance are the most difficult. So I just had to help them get on and they would be fine. At first this annoyed me a bit, but later I realized that this must be intentional; if the kid manages to get in/on the play structure in the first place, they'll probably be fine. If they fall when trying to get on it, they fall in the sand so also no problem. Only the kids with some physical ability are able to reach some height, the smallest have to stay on the ground

No poor people will die from e.g. flying less, downsizing our cars or eating less meat. That is because the really poor (or perhaps half of all humans) don't fly, don't have cars and don't have a cheap meat based diet.

As a rule of thumb, energy use by poor people is negligible with respect to the energy use of the rich. I'm sure Australia, the US and Europe could do just fine witb half their current energy usage. Take for example the situation in Europe : energy prices skyrocketed last winter and as a result 30% less natural gas was used. On a macro level this was only a minor inconvenience, nothing more.

If we want, we can buy less styff, fly less, reduce the temperature in our homes, eat less meat and spend less time commuting to a bullshit job. All without causing major inconvenience.

Remember how the entire world was effectively able to switch to lockdown+work from home overnight without coming to a standstill? Very inconvenient, but definitely not the end of the world

A stable beachy coastline is in dynamic equilibrium. Erosion is the result of more sediment being washed away from the system than is deposited. The root cause of the disturbance in the system is probably some damn in a river which is mentioned in the article.

A local measure that reduces wave energy creates a sediment trap, reducing or reversing local erosion.. However some where downstream from this site there is now less sediment coming in than is going out. So there it is going to erode now.

These type of measures usually end up pushing the problem downstream (a coastal system has a dominant sediment transport flow direction).

Actual solutions must look at an entire coastal system and usually involve continuous dredging, damn removal or lots of breakwaters, walls etc. This is all well known amd cam be modeled to a pretty good accuracy with software. However time amd time again a town solves their problem by pushing the erosion to their neighbours

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No, depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience. Depriving your children with a future is on a whole other level. And that is exactly where we are heading: climate catastrophe leading to famine, drought, flooding, unmanageable sea level rise etc.

People could do with a lot less energy 40 years ago, I'm sure we can get by just fine with a little less.

How do you mitigate the flood risk in a basement. Sewer malfuntioning, heavy rain, but also firefighters flooding your burning house?

I would think (no numbers to back it up) for most houses the risk of flooding is higher that the risk of burning down

And the best thing: new top layers are applied frequently (sometimes yearly). And they are literally applied overnight: construction starts at 23:00 and is completed before 06:00. And even better, the road isn't even closed. One night they pave the right lane and the next the left lane is paved. Complete road closures for maintenance are exceedingly rare. And if they happen, it will be at night and/or in the weekend. Compared to any place I've been Dutch road infrastructure and maintenance is really on another level. Not just some roads, but pretty much all roads in the entire country are designed and maintained to an entirely adequate baseline (not saying there is no room for improvement, just that the baseline is so much higher than anywhere else).

I'd be so happy with a 24,000 page PDF, cause then at least you know where too look, and you can the search tool. I programme Siemens hardware and the docs I need are spread out over many tens of PDFs (of 100-1500 pages). I haven't found a proper tool than can let me search and view all this documentation properly. Best I found is ripgrep with some PDF extension to search which document I need, and then use SumatraPDF for finding the right page... ughh

Somehow this feels like the logical conclusion of capitalism/big tech/AI: optimize human interaction into some soulless algorithm but pretend to be human enough to fool the masses. This somehow feels pretty dystopian, and I hope this will trigger a counter reaction where we start to demand actual interaction with an autonomous human being (that has empathy, can provide context, and perhaps even has authority to make actual decisions).

What if the majority of people just told Brenda: "I wish to speak to a human, please call me at ####."

I guess the main factor is if the market is a sellers or a buyers market; who's time is more valuable, mine or the real estate agent

rinse and repeat that a few times, and the only remaining winning move will be not to play

I guess the bigger the company the more interesting niche problems and processes there are that are worth spending a lot of time improving/automating etc. And yes a big company has more "high end" perks (better hotels when travelling, priority boarding, more expensive company events). But I enjoy a cheap beer with an enthusiastic group of colleagues more than I could possibly miss a fancy hotel.

What helped for me was switching from a 5000 employee company to a 50 employee one. I really loved my previous job, but just witnessing the politics made me want to quit, and I'm glad I did.

I just got my feet wet with an s7-1200 and I could not have imagined how horrible the programming of a PLC is. I spent a day just to get the plc send out UDP packets at 25Hz.

Apparently going above 10Hz is not really supported so you have to do silly tricks. I ended up running the send command on every tick, and running a time triggered cycle that toggles a bit at 50Hz and then using the rising edge of that bit to actually start the secretly async task of sending 20 bytes on the wire.

Son far I have learnt that async tasks are hidden, memory is measured in Kb, there is no guarantee for cycle time whatsoever, the programming model is really awkward, lots of config cannot be stored as code, version control is a bolted on nightmare, etc, etc.

Really makes me wonder what a PLC can do that an arduino/esp32/rp2040 can not. I'm really struggling to see the value other than that the hardware is reliable and "industrial".

I saw the same video, and had the same thoughts. I saw a comment mentioning flashing the Emporia with ESPHOME, of which I am a great fan. What I really like about that option is you can push all the logic to the "edge" device with ease (including hosting a webserver), or just merely expose the data and use e.g homeassistant to manage it. I'm sure you could probably also have it post the data directly to clickhouse if you want. All this to say esphome is really great and I love its flexibility.

Are you sure it is the best performing? The article only compares to influx and timescale, which are very far from the fastest timeseries databases out there. How does it compare to clickhouse? I found this https://questdb.io/blog/2022/05/26/query-benchmark-questdb-v..., but the numbers are so far off (and clickhouse is much slower than timescale in their examples) that I kind of struggle to believe them.

Didn't try this yet but what caught my attention is that you can write a (micropython) program and run it on the hub itself instead of on some mobile device. The options to control a LEGO boost hub over bluetooth are rather laggy and limited, whilst the pre-defined models in the Boost kit clearly indicate that there are more possibilities than are exposed via the app (as the models can e.g. self calibrate and zero the axes much better than you can do with the exposed blocks). So I am hoping this unlocks the full potential for these devices. Anyone tries this yet?

Can confirm everything you said from experience, including the remarka on the hubelino marble run. Quite a fun set but clearly not the same quality as real lego

I find this very fascinating, but when searching for more information online I only found very shallow aeticles rehashing the same bits of info. Where is the 3d pointcloud of this city? Sure the most intricate 3d structure of old os a prime candidate for 3d mapping. Actually I did not even find a proper 2d map of the place.

https://matterport.com/discover/space/mehu-tomb-mqbrh-mhw of derinkuyu would be awesome!!

I think that the term industrial revolution is a bit misleading even, it should be named the fossil fuel revolution. Because cheap and abundant energy is what differentiates the world post industrial revolution from the world before more than anything else

Digging around a bit I must say I am very impressed by all the data-viz stuff the antv group makes. Would really like to be able to try out their GraphInsight tool (https://github.com/antvis/GraphInsight/blob/master/README.en...) but it seems to Chinese only for the moment

Thanks! Looks great, I hadn't heard of it

"This quote keeps on showing up out of context." — Alan Kay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11799963

Did you use a particular library for the drag and drop graph building UI? Woukd like to know as I could use something like that for different project