Hetzner is great if you’re in Europe, is there an equivalent in the US or East Asia?
Readit Newslars512 commented on I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars rameerez.com/send-this-ar... · Posted by u/sebnun
lars512 commented on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain wastedwind.energy/... · Posted by u/bashy
It's good to raise awareness of this.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
lars512 commented on Git Notes: Git's coolest, most unloved feature (2022) tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/Delgan
I had a good use case at Our World In Data for the public data pipeline, where one repo had the pipeline and one git-lfs repo had the build output of the pipeline. A git note added to a commit to the code pipeline recorded the hash identifying the built data.
Overall it felt elegant, and needed no maintenance after setting it up, but honestly it was never used. I think the need to look back in time was rarer than expected, and git notes being hidden by default didn’t help for awareness.
lars512 commented on Carolina Eyck, renowned superstar of the theremin smh.com.au/culture/music/... · Posted by u/asdefghyk
And here I thought it would be the antagonistic undecagonstring...
lars512 commented on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions feldera.com/blog/the-pain... · Posted by u/qianli_cs
At Our World In Data we ended up using Buildkite to run custom CI jobs, integrated with GitHub, but on cheap, massive Hetzner machines. I can really recommend the experience!
lars512 commented on How fast the days are getting longer (2023) joe-antognini.github.io/a... · Posted by u/antognini
When living in Stockholm, I came to appreciate the various levels of twilight and darkness, rather than thinking of day and night so strictly. The sun being low on the horizon also scatters light across the sky in ways that are very beautiful and last much longer than sunrise and sunset in Australia where I grew up.
This looks nice! It could be a replacement for me for duckdb-parquet, a plugin for Datasette that lets you run it on top of DuckDB instead of SQLite.
lars512 commented on Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/suraci
I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
You can check out a range of important development statistics on India here: https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
lars512 commented on Ask HN: Best way to simultaneously run multiple projects locally? · Posted by u/suralind
To throw yet another option in, you could consider an LXC container per project, if they’re small and you don’t find you need Docker. LXC containers are basically multiprocess containers, unlike Docker’s single process containers, making them feel more like VMs and giving you a great dev experience.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
Distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Share: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-in-poverty-relative...
The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.