leoedin

18 ms·

151.
by leoedin 1y ago
> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primaril
152.
by leoedin 1y ago
I suspect it’s less a nostalgia for a less corporate time, and more of a nostalgia for an earlier stage of the product lifecycle. Pretty much every technology follows a similar path - after an initial version proves the market there’s an ex
153.
by leoedin 1y ago
The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and
154.
by leoedin 1y ago
Even on Earth, the only reason humans exist is because the “local maximum” of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a meteor. Perhaps comparably intelligent dinosaurs would have eventually evolved - but it’s not a given!
155.
by leoedin 1y ago
It's in the example isn't it? The example is logging "No space for 5 seconds". It's just a helpful diagnostic that subtly turned into data loss. Maybe it's a bit contrived, but it's also the kind of code y
156.
by leoedin 1y ago
I think there are tangible benefits to this being “not Java or JavaScript”. Or any language that brings a resource intensive runtime with it.
157.
by leoedin 1y ago
In both examples given you can have 2 panels in series. So given that in almost all use cases, you can have 2 panels in series, they should just say “max 2 panels in series”. Simple. A good product hides complexity from the user with sane d
158.
by leoedin 1y ago
This is excellent! They're all written against the embedded_hal crates as well, so should be pretty portable to different micros. Normally chip vendor code is a big mess - so this is nice to see!
159.
by leoedin 1y ago
I do think commit messages should give some reference to what they're changing. However, in more than a decade of software development, I don't think I've ever got much use out of commit messages. The only reason I'd eve
160.
by leoedin 1y ago
I’m not sure Paul Graham’s use of “middle class” matches the colloquial one here in the UK. The students who are not getting in to Oxbridge because of their background are broadly privately educated. I don’t think it’s controversial to say
161.
by leoedin 1y ago
The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software.
162.
by leoedin 1y ago
I would imagine the overriding reason people resist encryption is that it’s a pain in the ass. You have to worry about long term key storage and security. You introduce a whole new class of failure mechanisms. It’s always going to lurk at t
163.
by leoedin 1y ago
I think in the UK “shop bought cake” and “home made cake” are basically 2 different things that look kind of similar. Having been to a lot of kids birthday parties recently, I’m firmly on the side of “home made cake”. Shop bought cake has a
164.
by leoedin 1y ago
Hacker News is not most people. Even today most non-tech people I speak to have barely touched AI. Perhaps a bit of gimmicky “ooh that’s cool” image generation or chatGPT, but nothing serious.
165.
by leoedin 1y ago
Because they're fundamentally different things? A house is a machine for providing weather protection. The difference between a modern house and an old one is pretty minor. A computer is a machine for doing calculations. The difference
166.
by leoedin 1y ago
I've spent quite a lot of the last year setting up an embedded Linux device for mass deployment - so I've seen a lot of its downsides first hand. When you have a fleet of embedded devices you want pre-compiled disk images, repeata
167.
by leoedin 1y ago
Setting up and maintaining a custom Linux build for any hardware is pretty complicated. There's just so much complexity hidden under config options. The landscape of Linux for embedded computers is a huge mess of unmaintained forks and
168.
by leoedin 1y ago
I’m pretty sure most cars in the later key era used some sort of chip verification on ignition for the key. It wasn’t just a physical thing. Given it was 15 years ago, I don’t know how cryptographic the proof was - perhaps it was just readi
169.
by leoedin 1y ago
> One could also argue that criminals being able to steal parked cars is safer over all for society as they then don't feel the need to car jack you while you are actually in the vehicle. Here in the UK vehicle theft reached an all
170.
by leoedin 1y ago
I just don't use AWS for personal projects. I got stung once with a $100 bill. Never again. I just can't accept unlimited liability like that in my personal life.
171.
by leoedin 1y ago
A stick seems like a very low tech solution to this problem!
172.
by leoedin 1y ago
I actually find this feature of supermarkets quite useful. Online shopping is far less discoverable - the end result is I forget things from my online shop quite often.
173.
by leoedin 1y ago
Food is way better now than it was in the 90s. Every supermarket has refrigerated ready meals which are actually pretty healthy. Here in the UK, the quality of food in cafes (at least in the major cities) is far better than it was when I wa
174.
by leoedin 1y ago
Why would CO2 be caused by vaping? And surely the amount of CO2 caused by a cigarette is dwarfed by the amount exhaled by a person?
175.
by leoedin 1y ago
Like the parent, I haven't found that's true at all. Most people doing residential work on houses work either on their own or in very small teams. They spend their time working on houses, not networking with other tradespeople. Th
176.
by leoedin 1y ago
I think it's actually quite likely that quite a few "dominant" cultures - both in terms of nations and groups within nations - will effectively die out. But humanity almost certainly won't? Why? Because there are sub-gro
177.
by leoedin 1y ago
Nobody is riding Segways around any more, but a huge percentage of people are riding e-bikes and scooters. It’s fundamentally changed transportation in cities.
178.
by leoedin 1y ago
Did you just post a wind-turbine criticism? These turbines have a diameter of 18m and a speed of 8 to 20 rpm. So a tip speed of 7.5 to 19 m/s - about 27 kph to 68 kph. I guess that's enough to hurt a whale. Although interestingly
179.
by leoedin 1y ago
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades. The imp
180.
by leoedin 1y ago
What do you mean by “the depth of the modulation”? The relative brightness? PWM at low duty cycles tends to be much more noticeable. But that’s where higher frequencies should solve the problem.

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