tda

I had my share of controller issues, where the bike would give an error. Removing the battery a few times usually solved it, but somehow the magnetic connector is too sensitive. Worse is that it is really easy to improperly connect the charger, so sometimes it would not charge at work Depending on wind and temperature that would give me a ton of range anxiety. Especially as cycling on a stromer without assist is very very hard. So all in all it was ok, I rode 13k km and it mostly worked. But when it didn't I really hated it.

The €250 travel charger is only 80W, so a full charge takes 12 hours. I ended up writing a script to poll the api to make sure the bike was actually charging when at work.

That is why being able to use the bike as normal when off/dead battery was a primary criterium for me. The bike I have now has a cheap little hub motor on the front wheel, and it lets the wheel spin freely when the bike is off.

A final remark, I used my Stromer ST2 exclusively for commuting. Just not practical in the city, only in between cities. I use my regular ebike for almost all trips, so I get a lot more value from it.

I recently sold my ST2. I could get only 30-60km on a full (1kwh) battery at max speed (46 kmh). But then why would you go below max speed om a 7k bicycle? I got rid of it because it was also very expensive in maintenance, and because cycling on the road slightly slower than cars really sucks (a few too many encounters with aggressive cars). The stromers are near impossible to ride without assist, think because of the regenerative engine. When the battery was empty or I had one of those weird error 18 things I could go abou 17kmh with a lot of effort. I got a vanmoof bike instead niwy, so much nicer. 30kmh, easy to pedal past assist speed cause of light front wheel motor. Lightweight, 500wh battery is pretty ok (also same 30-60km range). Lots of repairs (under warranty) though, build quality is subpar. My 30km commute is 65 minutes now on my vanmoof, where it was 50 minutes on a stromer.

Willow tree branches are still used ins some modern hydrailic infrastructure construction today. And nor for historical reasons, it is still practical and cost effective. In the past the branches had two functions: as a rigid frame and as a filter layer (to prevent soil from being washed away from under the erosion protection). The frame functions to make the filter a rigid structure that one can sink to the bottom in a controlled manner by dumbing rocks on it. In modern construction geotextiles are used as filters, but these are sometimes made rigid with bundles of willow tree branches.

Yay, 13USD x team size to keep a simple architecture diagram up to date. Enterprises are rich, I get it, but tools like this should cost max 0.50USD/user/month. Or even better, someone should bundle several tens of these kind of tools and sell them for a single enterprise license. Effectively that is what M$ is doing of course, it offers all of github/devops/azure in a single subscription, so that is what I get to use.

Even though I might prefer pivotal tracker or zenhub, codecov, readthedocs or whatever, no way I am going through the hassle of getting all these 5-15/USD/user/month services paid for one by one. But if they were all bundled in a single subscription I might reconsider

This is because we don't price energy and raw materials as much as we value them. Putting a higher price on extracting natural resources will swiftly lead to less waste and less frivolous uses as they then become uneconomical. But as of now, compute is cheap and available, power is cheap and available; what else than wasteful use would you expect?

Hopefully not that corporation would somehow feel morally obliged to abide by some arbitrary standard and make less money along the way. But that is effectively what you are suggesting.

Better get on with it then. There is not a single solution, we must pursue each and every viable path. But in the meantime our religious leaders are still advocating against anti conception and against abortion. Reducing population growth will not magically solve anything, but ignoring it would be foolish IMHO

I disagree: the climate crisis is the single most scariest thing that we have done to our planet. Other forms of mass environmental destruction (next to what you mentioned also mass animal extinction,rainforest destruction,PFAS) are all horrible but are more of a temporal and localized nature. With enough will and effort they can all be addressed like the hole in the ozon layer. The climate crisis is already many decades in the making and cannot realistically be prevented. It is happening and the only question is not if but how much you will be impacted

I would much rather have an old fashioned dumb tv than a spying, adverising injecting, sluggish smart tv with crappy apps that never get updated. So the hedonic adjustment should definitely be negative.

My wife has worked for several logistics companies, and one of the striking things was that she said a lot of them have signs everywhere banning truckdrivers from using their toilets. Quite dehumanizing if you have to defecate in the bushes cause there is no place you are allowed to use a toilet in a rich and highly developed country. And come to think of it, I regularly see delivery drives relieve themselves by the road because we as society fail to provide them with any other option.

Not being able to use toilets is, on the grand scale of things, maybe not the most important thing, but it probably adds to the feeling of being disrespected.

It moves along the coast mostly, until it is either blocked by e.g. a port entrance breakwater or in a shallow estuary, or it is washed up to shore and gets blown into the dunes

The country of the Netherlands just about owes its current existence to the practice of beach nourishment. In a lot of cases it is the most economical and least impactfull way to defend an eroding sandy coast. So called hard solutions (rock and conrete based) mostly fail within a few years/decades. And what is the point of living along the coast if there is no beach anyways?

Note that it is well understood that beach nourishment is a recurring thing, and thus will be planned/budgetted for. Any other kind of coastal defence structure will also need (a lot of) maintenance which is oftentimes neglected, leading to catastrophic failure (sudden collapse/breach). A sandy coast can certainly fail to provide adequate protection, but it is rarely sudden breach/collapse/rupture.

Am I the only one who considered the touch wheel a regression? I really liked my iPod with physical clicky spinning wheel

most American have a fair chance at reaching the top 10% by age at some point in the future. not sure of the numbers but I would guess at least 50% of the population is expected to reach am age where 90% of the other people are younger

I have never ever been ale to find anything on Wikipedia with search, except if I know the title of the article I'm looking for. But as I often do want the information from Wikipedia, I just search <search term + wiki>, and it takes me straight to where I want to be, whether I'm using DDG or Google. Works so much better than !w

And someone was really quick to make this: https://www.twitchearnings.com/

Thanks! I listened to this story this morning, really made my day. Just incredible to hear someone casually tell how he grew from living in the streets of San Francisco to a millionaire software developer. As I had never heard of Paul Lutus before, every turn of the story was another pleasant surprise.

I really like how you put the interviewee front end center. I have enjoyed the other episodes I have listened so far too, especially with the SQLite developer. Any of the older episodes you can recommend in particular?

The primary (only even) cause of the climate crisis is the fact that we have burnt and continue to burn a ton of carbon and emit it as CO2 in the atmosphere. And as most of the world functions with some form of capitalism, it makes a lot of sense to put a price on something to make it less desirable. In fact it makes so much sense that until we have put a significant price on fossil carbon use we cannot tell our children that we really tried to do something to prevent this crisis.

Pollution and global warming are two separate things we both need to prevent. We do not need to choose, we can and should address both. In Western countries pollution is generally better contained/addressed/regulated than in poorer countries, however Western countries contribute hugely more greenhouse gasses (certainly per capita, and especially US and AUS) than poorer countries. So no, carbon is not the wrong thing. It is the primary, singularly most important things we should address. And indeed, as long as we don't put a properly high prico on it one way or the other we are just fooling around and making the earth that much less inhabitable for our children

And preferably tax carbon as close to the source as possible (crude oil). Because leaving oil in the geound is so much easier than putting it back in.

yes, exactly. So that is why it is time to change the incentives / tax structure because there is a real housing crisis gling on for young families. Nearly everyone I know with a nice big house is over 65. And half of them are alone. On a personal level I understand amd sympathise with their choice not to downgrade to a smaller house. On a systemic level this is pretty ridiculous. Land value and property taxes should be raised significantly, whilst income taxws should be lowered. I still need to so more reading on Henry George, but I think this was a key part of Georgism

Technically feasible sure, but I thibk I used 1100m3 gas last year (would have to look it up teo be sure). So to invest 30000 euro to save 50% of that makes no economical sense. Only when the windows need replacement anyway I'll upgrade to the latest and greatest. But for now I'm conetemplating investing in a moderate air/air heatpump (about 5000 euro, 5kw or something). I think that will also reduce my gas consumption considerably for all but the coldest days. Because labour is so expensive and replacing all windows is so wastefull (they are all oldish double layered windows) better insulation is not so appealing.

I must say though that a properly insulated house can have a better climate in winter as you can keep the humidity much higher.

Used to take 45-55mins on a speed pedelec (45km/h) but I sold it and bought a regular ebike set at the US speed limit of 32 km/h. Depending on wind it takes me 60 to 70 minutes for 28.7 km.

I don't think there are more than a handful of "heating vs eating" people in the Netherlands. On the contrary; poverty is positively correlated with obesity.

We do have lots of baby boomers in big houses that they heatup just for themselves. My mom has 4 times my heating bill by herself than I have with a family of four. It would solve a lot of problems if the elderly move to smaller houses and leave the bigger houses for families that need them.

These high energy prices mostly hit wasteful industries like greenhouse tomato growers. That is because they gave always relied on cheap, subsidized natural gas. Consumers pay approximately 75% energy tax already so even a 100% rise before taxes results in only a 25% percent rise after.

I live in a 100 year old, poorly insulated house with my family of 4, and we manage to use half of the average for a family house here. And we are not really trying, only thing we do is limit what parts of the house we heat (not the bedrooms) and set the temperature smartly.

I cycle 30km to my work on an electric bike to exercise and limit car usage.

So yes, I really don't think the price rise will have too much impact on consumers directly. I think most people in the Netherlands can halve their energy consumption here with very limited impact on QoL just by heating less and using their car less. And if the price really gets problematic our gov could just lower the taxation

Even with the recent rise in prices, energy prices are still way to low to actually influence choices most people make. Trains are still more expensive than car travel by car, flying is still cheaper than rail, I still don't know how much I pas to heat my house because it is negligible compared to what I spend on other things....

Energy is so important, yet so cheap. I still hear people flying in for a two hour business meeting, or commuting by car tens of kilometers. Only when that ceases to be economically viable we should call the price high. Until then, I'm happy it finally makes economical sense to reduce CO2 output.

I hope the folks at nextcloud are paying attention!

Previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266924

Of course different languages have different syntax, but it is a pretty hard requirement that within a (specific version of a language the syntax rules are both explicit and consistent.

And that is why perhaps so much of us like programming: there is exactly one correct way to interpret code. And stylistic differences (different notation for the same thing) are usually discouraged with style guides

I have created an app with such a hybrid approach as the part if the model was very dynamic. The idea was that I would slowly migrate the stable bits to proper columns, but in practice that never happened. Partly also because it is not really broken, and the performance is actually quite good. You can add partial indexes etc to improve where needed.

But writing analytycal queries is definitely more complicated so the cost of not having a "normal" data model adds up over time. To allow business analysts to work with the data I endend up creating a a bunch of views om the data without JSONB fields as a quick fix. So though the approach worked, I am not sure I would do it again.