VBprogrammer

58 ms·

1. 1681.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   There is nothing which stops you converting from coal to natural gas. Plenty of coal plants have it or are in the process. Coal power plants pulverise coal until it is so small that it can be picked up in hot air and blown into the furnace.
2. 1682.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   Ah, I should have checked, I assumed it was mostly hydropower like BC and AB. However, the problem still exists, you have countries in the middle east which politically will never be allowed civilian nuclear power (only 32 countries out of
3. 1683.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   > Partly because fracked gas is cheap. Indeed. It's easy to look at a 2% drop and pat everyone on the back for buying a shiny new Tesla and installing solar panels on their roof but the fact is the drop is just because per unit mass
4. 1684.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   Yes, room temperature superconductivity would also be a good solution to the problem. If we have the ability to transmit power around the world without huge losses from where it is being produced to where it can be consumed then a lot of th
5. 1685.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   Coal is abundant and cheap and well suited to day and night base load power. The emissions are awful but there is no suitable replacement right now which fits those criteria (nuclear falls down on the cheap point). Sure, we can keep burning
6. 1686.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   Only vaguely related to the original article but I've often wondered what causes the loud screeching noise as an Airbus 320 shuts down. I did a bit of reading around it and came to the conclusion it is actually the PTU (basically a hyd
7. 1687.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   There are also hundreds making a sensible living and thousands making a decent supplemental income. My dad makes holiday videos and various guitar repair / upgrade videos, he doesn't earn enough to live off of but it's bought
8. 1688.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   I'm trying to understand what your point is, are you denying that there was a vulnerability? As it stands it just sounds like you are just being a jerk on the internet.
9. 1689.▲
   by VBprogrammer 7y ago

   > No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with. I think in a lot of places this isn't nearly as true as maybe it once was. The top selling newspapers in the UK p
10. 1690.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I would almost guarantee you that people before the advent of modern time pieces had a much better sense of what the "time" was because they'd have been more reliant on it.
11. 1691.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    > The reason it was optional is because AOA doesn't mean anything to civilian pilots and the option only made sense for airlines who hire ex-militaray pilots who can actually read the AOA indicator and make sense of it. Do you have
12. 1692.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I'm not saying you are wrong but brand awareness ads are, if I'm reading correctly, exactly the kind of wasted ad money the parent was talking about. They are the cluster bombs of the advertising world. I think the Parent was actu
13. 1693.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Sure, thought needs to go into the location of these things; avoiding migration routes and habitats of endangered birds. Using scarecrows and possible trained predator birds (presuming these can be trained to avoid the danger zone!) etc. Of
14. 1694.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    The problem is generally trivial compared to the number killed by domestic cats and glass windows.
15. 1695.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I don't think it's showing anything more than an entertaining bit of marketing. There are plenty of ways it could be terrible at towing but still appear better at this test.
16. 1696.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I doubt many donkey and cart owners encountered the no right turn onto Piccadilly! All of the things I mentioned are very much 20th century additions.
17. 1697.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I doubt there is a good solution to the problem in general but having ridden a motorcycle aimlessly around central London on my own little sight-seeing trips I can certainly get on board with the idea that London has been designed to be min
18. 1698.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Yes, you can tell that someone is trying to make it sound bad by using the inflated 'trips' figure rather than number of drivers. This is mostly the fall out of political pressure from black cab drivers and their associations. I&#
19. 1699.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I've noticed this myself but wasn't sure if it was just me. Almost every CV we get has a ML slant but the candidates struggle to write a simple SQL query. From a pure numbers perspective 95% of jobs in our industry have nothing to
20. 1700.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I've had an account on HN for more than 10 years. I'm sure we used to have the convention that you should not down vote comments just because you disagree with them. I don't see it in the FAQs anymore but I sorely wish we cou
21. 1701.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Honestly, if this "loophole" is allowed to exist then the GDPR is not worth the paper it is written on. The idea that consent should be freely given is ludicrous if it can be overridden by simply including it in a term in the term
22. 1702.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Having taken the pads out of my helmet to clean them on occasion and seeing the colour of the water afterwards. The crash worthiness of a used motorcycle helmet would be the least of my concerns. I'd sooner wear someone else's dir
23. 1703.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Because it's written as an entertaining book presumably. I don't know why anyone would even consider it reference material.
24. 1704.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    If that's something which interests you then you should read The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch.
25. 1705.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I get you! Apologies if what I said came across negatively.
26. 1706.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Meh. I've used the same handle online for more than 20 years. Why stop now. For most of the last 10 I've been working in Python.
27. 1707.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    When I see a 100 line function it almost invariably is doing stuff at very different levels of abstraction. It's making DB calls here and API calls there; it's handling flags to indicate the end of iteration; is dealing with some
28. 1708.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    I suspect the reason is you want hot water stored at ~60C. If you pump water through it slowly enough / enough times to attain that temperature then you are actually increasing the temperature of the panels (assuming air temperature is
29. 1709.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    At a wild guess I'd say 50% of UK homes would have at least one instant hot water electric shower. The other option being a power shower driven from the hot water loop on their gas central heating.
30. 1710.▲
    by VBprogrammer 7y ago

    Yes, I think you did. Indeed it's almost embarrassingly cheap, about 25p for a 10 minute shower.