Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | onli's commentslogin

Id like to recommend that even a bit more, maybe from a different perspective. I took a salsa course back in university because a girl asked me, her boyfriend wasnt interested. That lead to dancing a bit more, bachata was just part of the course especially. But also not just one course: It turned out there were tons of opportunities later to join these dance evenings organized in bars. So doing that one first step enabled so many more.

I never got good, but: It is still a useful skill to even just know a little bit. To have the option to join instead of having to stay put at the table when your group decides to go dance. I wound up meeting people from latin america later, so that was way more often than was reasonable to expect. Im pretty sure having some basic ability helped me win someone over - to be able to show interest in that hobby -, and even just feeling better when showing my child now how to dance is nice.

Especially when you otherwise are mainly interested in technical stuff it is a good counter point.


No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.

Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).

Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.

> Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute

Even without dunkelflaute, the absolute bottom per kwh emissions of Germany in summer still doesn't reach the maximum emissions of France in winter.


> Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production

The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...


But 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.

There was not a single moment in time in which all nuclear power plants were simultaneously shut down. The shut down was gradual [1]. 2011 is relevant because it is when the German government decided to phase out its remaining nuclear power plants.

[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out....


How much solar/wind can you really install in the area covered by a nuclear station?

That's not the problem; Germany has enough space to build solar and wind capacity to satisfy its consumption – on average. The problem is storage.

Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.

Heating can also use heat from the ground.

Also the market should be seen more holistic with water energy from the north and sun from the south.


That's prohibitively expensive. And not possible everywhere. And Germany's grid is not ready for heating with electricity.

Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.

Ground heat pumps still use electricity.

Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.

Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.

Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.


Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.

There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.


Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...

Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.

Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.

Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.

But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.


Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.

* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.


Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.

No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.

The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.

Yes, it should be PWh/year.

Yes those are wrong, but I didn't reply to that. The one I did reply to is also wrong :-).

Germany uses “,” as the decimal separator.

But this document does not. Note it says 12.5%, not 12,5%.

1 TWh on the scale of a country is very little - a 1 GW nuclear plant operating continuously would generate over 8 TWh a year.

Nevertheless the back of the napkin math of land requirements for solar check out, so it was probably just a typo and OP meant to say PWh.


Yeah, seems like I got a wire/SI prefix crossed there. The land use should fit in terms of orders of magnitude, though.

5% of the entire German landmass? That seems feasible and desirable to you?!

I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.

But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.

Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.


And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).

You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.

Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.

No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.

(1) https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/energie/erneuerbar...


Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.

If my electricity prices are no longer linked to gas prices, I can have cheaper electricity - my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.

> my provider only produces green energy. But in the past raising gas prices would have also raised my prices, regardless. So yes, regular consumers can profit from this.

It's one single grid. You get coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and everything else. If you buy from a provider, you get that mix.


Well, the electrons arriving in your home will the same as your neighbours, regardless of which supplier you choose. But by choosing a different supplier you can steer which energy sources will be used to feed that grid, so it still makes a difference, just not exactly where you live.

Massdrop was interesting, as a place to get stuff you couldn't get elsewhere easily (even if I never bought something there, I considered it multiple times and I think I had some things on my wait list). Is there already something like a successor platform? Drop.com as a site for branded corsair gear is completely useless.

For keyboards specifically, there are still community run group buys happening on the geekhack forum.

It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.


> Is there already something like a successor platform?

I too would like to know. I bought many keyboard build kits from massdrop back in the day as well as my terrific Sennheiser headphones.


Suggestion: instead of just popping in the computed graphic add a placeholder immediately - four low grey bars should work well, in the same width as the final sparkline graphics. That way the text on the page will not jump later when the final sparklines are ready.

What a strange list. Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing. So I looked up the background and indeed it's based on strange methodology, citing wikipedia: "Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?"

Makes more sense like that.


For a French-leaning list I’m surprised not to see Memoirs of Hadrian, “often considered the best French novel of the 20th century”, per the recent LRB review. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/joanna-biggs/beneath...


I agree, though the list contains "L'œuvre au noir", another wonderful novel by Marguerite Yourcenar.

I think some of the books on this list had very few readers, but were selected because of their relative fame among a list of 200 books. For instance, how many people have read the full "Gulag archipelago"? Or writings by Lacan or Barthes? Or the "Journal" by Jules Renard?


> Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing

Most of them make sense to me. I don’t know some of them but then I don’t know everything. The methodology can be discussed (and indeed, a pre-selection of 200 books is at the same time a lot and not that much), but none of these lists can be perfect.

Out of curiosity, which one would you remove from the list, and which ones would you add?


Hm, you are right. Those lists can't be perfect and giving this a second look, I guess my comment was hasty. For the choices I thought weird I can mostly see the justification when researching the titles a bit more (and partly by checking for their names in my language -> properly identifying them).

For what it's worth and what mostly triggered my comment, I expected 1984 to be on the list but thought it missing, but as mentioned in the other comments I was wrong about that, it's just listed with the numbers written out. Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french, but I never got the appeal. Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries, and regardless of that I think its just not readable. I would kick out two of the Lord of the ring books, one is enough and it's not like each of them had a different impact.

Maybe even more subjective, The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today? If not, which would be my opinion, should it be on the list regardless? And I'd consider replacing Thomas Mann Zauberberg with Tod in Venedig, just because I liked it a lot.

For missing books: Louis Begley is an author I felt to be missing, probably with Wartime lies, or About Schmidt. The first Harry Potter as well, but I understand that in 1999 it was too early for that judgement. Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre. Talking german literature with Thomas Mann above, Alfred Andersch Die Rote would have a place on my personal list, as well as Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer. Haruki Murakami is missing, though maybe with 1Q84 he better fits into a list of the current century. Stephen King? Paul Auster? Philip Roth? Though maybe that would be for The Human Stain, and that's from 2000.

As an aside, I was happily surprised to see The Master and Margarita on the list. It's one of the more known books that I thought had a very special charm, but not one I'd expect to see working on many, as one would have to have read Goethe's Faust and liked it...


> Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french

It is very popular and a huge influence. I am not surprised (but then I am French and always found St-Exupéry fascinating).

> Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries

Me too, to be honest. Quite a few English-speaking authors are maybe unexpectedly quite popular (Hemingway and Fitzgerald are there, and I think it is deserved; Dickens and Mark Twain should have been), but I would not think about Ulysses.

> The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today

Crime is an important genre and Sherlock Holmes is quite popular (even though I would personally put something by Maurice Leblanc or Agatha Christie instead).

> Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre.

Sci-fi is underrepresented. I would put Neuromancer definitely, and at least something by Jules Verne. I cannot believe 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas did not make the cut.

Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll have a closer look at the books you mention I don’t already know :)


> Sci-fi is underrepresented

That's because "from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists"



Yes, I saw that, Der Zauberberg is the german title.


Out of interest, why does that seem a strange methodology?


When reading "Books of the Century" I expected a list of the most important, most influential or just best books. Skewed towards the french perspective, given Le Monde as a source. But this was never the goal, just a "what stuck in your mind" question.

For example, 1984 is missing, and Louis Begley Wartime Lies. And I wouldn't have expected Ulysses in there given the french source, for me it was incomprehensible gibberish and I thought only the US ranks it high. But that gibberishness makes it certainly memorable, so given the question it fits.


Ulysses was written in Paris, where James Joyce lived, and was published in Paris by the now legendary Shakespeare & Co. The US and UK banned it for being obscene.

When I don't know, I ask and don't judge (and lacking omniscience, I don't judge anyway).


It's completely irrelevant where it was written, where it was published and where it was banned, I'm talking about how it is seen today. It is possible I am getting this wrong -certainly possible, since I'm taking this impression from English speaking sites like this, that I attribute to the US what should be attributed to England -, but I have seen no argument so far that even strives the point I made.


What is your question? If you just want to know why Ulysses is seen as influential you can start with the wikipedia article. If you want to try again to read it you can try to read it with a guide of some kind, there are multiple, I used this one https://www.ulyssesguide.com/1-telemachus.


No question. It's completely against my being to consider something as good if it can't be enjoyed without a guide. I hated the tendency in computer science to hide simple definitions behind jargon. I'm okay with stuff having hidden meaning, with texts being interpretable, I'm not okay with it just being gibberish when not studying it in closest detail.

I'm aware that some think this book is influential, I'm not clear on how widespread that belief is. Also, whether regular readers really like it. And no, Wikipedia does not clear that up.


Since you have no question I won't venture to answer. :D


Of course it's relevant to how it's seen today. French culture nurtured the author, a French publisher published it, and France didn't ban it while other countries did. This is all evidence that the book was well-liked in France when it was published, and there's no reason to think that would change over time.

If anything, it's surprising that English-speaking countries like it so much.


I disagree, those aren't relevant factors. Just based on those facts it's possible there was one sponsor in France who published the book and then it bombed, never to be read by a significant amount of the public. That it wasn't banned is normal in a free society, but also says nothing about its popularity.


Anything is possible, but the facts make some things more likely, especially combined with the book's later popularity in France.


Ulysses was first published in Paris during the 20 years that Joyce lived there.

>I thought only the US ranks it high

Joyce never even set foot in the United States... You could say this about The Great Gatsby, which US sources might rank in the top 5 compared to 46 in this list.


Right, Great Gatsby is another book one could highlight, where it's surprising that it is on the (french) list, while it would be on an US list. But I haven't read it, I do not know whether it is a good example for the difference between a good or important book and a memorable one.


If you found Ulysses confusing, what would you think of Finnegan's Wake? Ulysses is practically a children's book in comparison. As for the lack of 1984, Orwell was an important author sure, but not particularly a good one. People read 1984 and Animal Farm for the messages, not for the exquisite prose that someone like Joyce can manage.


Sorry, I haven't tried to read that one. If it's even more, hm, abstract?, then I won't ever try.

Note that 1984 is listed, just as "Nineteen Eighty-Four". I missed it when searching, didn't think of searching for "Orwell" instead.

I'd disagree with you about its quality, I remember it fondly (well, as much as possible given the topic of having one's identity erased), it was a powerful experience - and I do remember it vividly, so when asked for books one remembers I'd absolutely mention it, and in a list of books of the century it does belong.

Joyce "prose" on the other hand did nothing for me but make me despise his book.


If you want a shot at liking Joyce try "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."


1984 is 22 on the list.


Upps. Searching for 1984 didn't turn it up.


> most influential

> "what stuck in your mind"

That's strongly correlated IMHO; and I don't really see any objective metric for the influence of a book anyway.


James Joyce wearing his bottle bottom glasses (thick glasses) would like to have a word with you. You can call him genius, dirty, knowledgeable in many languages but certainly not gibberish. He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish. In our book club we often discuss for hours what he was trying to say on a page. Sometimes he says things in 3 different dimensions by writing a single sentence.


Woolf had his number, she was right on every count.


Are you sure you are not just reinforcing my point? :)


Yep.

> He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish.

My was so clever, that he had to verbally harangue people into finding his writing clever.


1984 is N°22 on that list...


1984 is listed at number 22 under its actual title, written out.


Starting with only 200 titles in the survey, for a final list of 100, seems off to me for starters. Every book surveyed has a 50% chance of making “book of the century”


It’s a shortlist that is ranked by a committee, just like how the Oscar’s have nominees and winners.

Or put another way “Every book surveyed” does a lot of heavy lifting here.


That makes it sound like 50 shades of grey would have had a 50/50 chance of getting into the top 100 if it only was included in the wider selection


Obviously 50/50 if random. But even if not random, I estimate 50 Shades would be 500-100,000 times more likely to be a book of the century using a list of 200 with it in it, vs an unaided open ended survey.


If the question is "which book stuck in your mind" maybe it would've had a good chance to be listed as #1?


How is this strange? It’s pretty much what I’d expect from francophone readers. What were you expecting?


Which version of LOS do you run exactly? Did you compile it yourself, or did you pick a pre-made version? One from XDA?

I ask, because the device is not officially supported by LineageOS, but if it works well with a different approach it would be an interesting option for me as well.


A good example for upf that is not likely to be bad for you is (European style) frozen pizzas.

And I think your comment is wrong. Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is. However, in general, processed does not mean having additives, it means processed, running through multiple industrial processes to be made.


> Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is

The definition of upf is 'food having additive of no culinary or nutritional value'. That's the current definition.

The original nova definition is 'food with additive of no culinary value', which isn't useful for nutritionists, hence it evolved.

I seriously doubt all frozen pizza are upf, the main advantage of frozen food is that you don't have to add nitrite salt or other conservatives. Maybe in some pizzas, to keep colours bright?


Why should it be the new norm? We have an abnormal situation now, of massive amounts of investor money being poured into unprofitable bets, that this time had the side effect of eating up hardware components. There are two possible outcomes:

1. Yes, it's the new normal, then production capacity will be increased and prices fall.

2. No, it's not the new normal, the bubble pops and component prices come crashing down when buyers default etc.

Option 2 has been the normal outcome of these situations so far. But sure, questions remains how long all of this will take.


Option 3: the global wars increase and continue to be the new normal with shipping routes disturbed until the climax, china annexes Taiwan.

In that case prices will continue to rise (among other things).


Remember that law is not technical. This is a declaration to be interpreted. The Interpretation that a specific person with the legal name Runxi Yu is designated here is very clear, the link just a helper to identify the correct person at the time of writing.


Thank you for pointing out this mistake. Of course, there also is nothing technically preventing anyone to ignore the GPL; the license itself is "just" some legalese.

I do believe, though, that these kind of references (from paper into the real world) often introduce surprising gotchas. Especially when they are intended to address some future (mostly unknown) issue.

The designated anchor point (person, technological artifact, legal entity) is itself often more likely subject to change than the thing it's trying to govern. Persons may be hit by a car, registries may expire, companies may go bankrupt. Governing laws may change. Countries may cease to exist...


The LAW® has literally millennia of dealing with these kinds of things - especially with regards to physical property, the definitions of which may refer to a king of a country that hasn't existed for five hundred years. You can find all sorts of examples, look to the US southwest or Europe or any country that has been controlled by another for a time, and then stopped.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: