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Sounds like you're describing the uncanny valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I'd argue it's more malleable than a skyscraper.

How rapidly has business software changed since COVID? Yet how many skyscrapers remain partially unoccupied in big cities like London, because of the recent arrival of widespread hybrid working?

The buildings are structurally unchanged and haven't been demolished to make way for buildings that better support hybrid working. Sure office fit outs are more oriented towards smaller simultaneous attendance with more hot desking. Also a new industry boom around team building socials has arrived. Virtual skeet shooting or golf, for example.

On the whole, engineered cities are unchanged, their ancient and rigid specifications lacking the foresight to include the requirements that accommodate hybrid working. Software meanwhile has adapted and as the OP says, evolved.


Twilio's Flex isn't far off this concept. For building simple voice and text message applications, it does quite a lot out of the box. It's their full telephony stack but presented at a much higher level of abstraction.


That looks significantly more like a long-term energy strategy than grabbing oil from Venezuela and Greenland.


Greenland's appeal is more about expanding the US military's presence in the Arctic rather than petroleum.


US military already has a base there.


If you think there is oil in Greenland I think you should not contribute to these types of discussion for lack of knowledge on the topic.


Was curious, so I did a 30 second search:

"The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves."

Source: https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-res...


Also, Idk what that source is but the US has way more barrels than that. Proven reserves mean that’s what’s been proven via drilling, not speculative (which is what the Greenland barrels are). There is a lot more “unproven” oil out there but it doesn’t make for a sensationalist statement that fools readers.


Another 30 second search would show you that their oil is not readily available and is unproven. Otherwise Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate like Norway.


> "Denmark would already be an even wealthier petrostate"

Denmark does not (since 2009) control Greenland's minerals, nor take revenues from resource extraction[0,1]; and Greenland's democratic government has in fact totally banned oil exploration[2].

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-neglect-greenland-min... ("In 2009, Denmark handed Greenland's inhabitants control of their natural resources...")

[1] https://english.stm.dk/the-prime-ministers-office/the-unity-... ("Revenues from mineral resource activities in Greenland are to accrue to the Self-Government. Such revenues will have influence on the size of the Danish Government subsidy, cf. section below on the economic arrangement.")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871672 ("Greenland bans all oil exploration (cbc.ca)" (2021))

> "Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semi-autonomous territory of 57,000 people."

> ""The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain," the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it "wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis."


Let’s be honest with ourselves. If there were hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of accessible oil underneath Greenland they would start drilling tomorrow.


OK, so...there is oil in Greenland, and your snarky response was actually completely incorrect. Got it.


He’s correct there is oil but there is oil everywhere. Whether it’s feasible to extract it is another thing. Do you really think if they had worthwhile oil reserves that someone wouldn’t have thought to extract it? So I would say Greenland doesn’t have any oil which means they don’t have any worthwhile oil to extract.

Regardless, the US isn’t taking over Greenland for its oil. That is just ridiculous and there would be far easier targets to go after if that was the case.


Only there is no forever when you're talking about a finite resource, like fossil fuels.


They're talking about our nascent circular economy.

Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals (and will continue to improve).

The learning curves for battery and solar tech will more than make up the for the shortfall.

Meaning at some point in the near future (2050 IIRC), humanity will have mined all the lithium it'll ever need.

Also, in the same time frame, it'll be economical to mine our garbage dumps. Further reducing the need to extract raw materials.


"Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals"

Not of plastic - recycling rates are decreasing. This is largely due to the excess ethane begin produced as a by-product of US fracking.

The ethane is converted to ethylene, then to polyethylene as a cost below that of collecting, cleaning, and processing used plastic.


True. The situation for both off-gassing and plastic recycling is rather bleak.

Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.

Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.

Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.


Source? These are big claims and the collective shouldn’t rely on your recall as fact.


Excellent. Found me three other stars and one to that I knew from before but hadn't started. Nice!


I'd like more tries to pick out the notes when pecking at the on-screen keyboard. I don't need to hear the pattern again, I need to learn where the note pitches are on the keyboard.


Thanks for the feedback! I'll have to give this some thought. You mean something like a, "X Tries To Get the Next Note?". I could add it as an option.


I think this suggestion you took in an earlier subthread solves GP's problem as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46558500


Is that teaching a bad habit though? Is it one of those things where's importantly to be confidently wrong or right?


One of the important keys in learning is engagement. If you frustrate the student preventing them from progressing at their own rhythm they will disengage, losing interest in what you are teaching.


Both things can be true though, right?

Maybe it just needs to reset faster or maybe start more gradually so you can build up muscle memory of intervals.


Not quite true. This pub's changed hands now but it was possible to pay in bitcoin for several years.

https://www.wired.com/story/london-bitcoin-pub/


Inside scoop: the pub group who owned that pub (still going, owns four in Cambridge and environs) was cofounded by Steve Early, a Cambridge computer scientist who wrote his own POS software, so it was very much a case of "yeah, that sounds like fun, I'll add it". (Until tax and primary rate risk made it not fun, so it was removed.)

The POS software's on GitHub: https://github.com/sde1000/quicktill


That's brilliant insight, thank you. I enjoyed reading Steve's extensive read me.

Also I'm planning a trip to Cambridge so I've bookmarked one of the pubs for a visit.


For anyone who takes doing their taxes seriously, this is a nightmare. Every pint ordered involves a capital gain (or loss) for the buyer. At a certain point you're doing enough accounting that you might as well be running the bar yourself (or just paying in cash)!


Depends. If you hold crypto for more than a year in Germany, gains are tax free.


I can't see how half of the icon choices made in the article would pass internal testing, let alone actual user testing.

Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to explain why this is a bad idea."


Lovely project and a really great idea.

Have you come across soft tooling for injection moulding? It's a lower cost, short run approach using much less durable moulds from various materials.


Before you have that working you'll have 3D printed a containerload of these ;)

Besides the lack of flexibility if you want to make changes. I've used soft tooling for some projects but I was (1) never really happy with the results and (2) ended up breaking the molds quite often resulting in a lot of wasted material and expense. 3D printing is the way to go for projects such as these.


Thank you!

I didn't know that was a thing - I'm going to look into it.


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