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> With a roundabout, you only have to look in one direction

When being taught how to ride a motorcycle, one of the lessons is a series of extra checks that you're not taught when learning to drive a car. These are known as lifesaver checks.

Entering a roundabout is a left turn in Ireland (right turn in right hand drive countries) so you would check over your left shoulder to make sure nothing was on your left. This is performed after doing a normal right and ahead check for traffic already on the roundabout.

I have never caught anything with a roundabout lifesaver (I have in other situations) but I can see how it's useful on roundabouts with multiple entry lanes, or if something like a bicycle had appeared on your right.


I'm somewhat confused with the analysis of his predictions of the price of PV panels.

Is it saying Smil said (is that meant to be countered with?) PV would cost 0.05 USD/W in 2020? Or was that meant to be Al Gore claiming that price? It seems it can't be his predicted reduction as he said 25% less, so did he want to say that is would be 3.38 USD/W in 2020 (75% of the 2009 price)?

And the current cost - 0.2W/USD is 5 USD a Watt - are the units reversed there? A quick google shows a variety of prices, with nothing being 20 cents a Watt [0] - $0.5-1.50 for the less efficient thin film types quoted here. All seem quite a bit cheaper than $4.5 a watt though.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...


One detail here is that 1981 dollars aren't 2023 dollars, so to compare they need to be adjusted.

Using [0] $3.5 bn in 1981 would have been worth $11.7 bn in 2023.

Another comment [1] noted (but unfortunately didn't cite) that two years later the damage was assessed at $36 bn, or $110 bn in 2023 dollars.

[0] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41295116


No, they don't need to be adjusted. The linked website has already adjusted for CPI. There's even an option to turn on/off adjusting, and it's on by default. I didn't cite because this is using the same data / website as the original claim.


> Normal glasses are recyclable

Is this the case in reality? Everywhere I've lived drinking glasses were not accepted as part of domestic glass recycling due to their composition [0]

Perhaps there is a commercial recycling route for pubs though? A quick google didn't turn anything up.

[0] https://www.friendsofglass.com/ecology/what-glass-can-you-re...


I assumed my city wouldn't accept drinking glasses due to safety issues. The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut. Turns out it isn't really compatible with recycling beer and wine bottles.


> The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut.

All the places I know (Denmark/Germany) the glass you want to recycles is getting dumped in containers where it breaks most of the time when you toss it in.


Interesting!

The recycling containers here have separate containers for clear glass and coloured glass and I've always thought glass is glass.

Now I checked in detail what is accepted, and sure enough, drinking glasses and mirrors are specifically disallowed.


AFAIK (but may be massively wrong) is that most clear glasses have many composition types and don't mix well and the industrial brown/green is all the same.


I take that back then. Would these hardened glasses be recyclable though?


"Yes"

From a glass making point of view you don't want them messing with expansion coefficients and bulk properties so they're off the table there - it's a waste of energy to reheat them up to ~ 1,000 C.

But you do end up with large volumes of glass .. a relatively consistant material, you might want to crush and tumble that (to take the sharp edges away) and use that sized grit | frit as driveway material, as additive to concrete where structurally sound, as fish tank "sand", etc.


IIRC concrete aggregate should be jagged so that it interlocks with itself. You actually can't just use any old sand, you need sharp sand, which is an increasingly scarce resource.


My bad .. mentally insert more commas and juggle the clauses :-)

The tumbling was only meant to be applied to application requiring rounded grit, you're correct that concrete and other uses might prefer jagged.


"you need sharp sand"

Hmm, practical concerns about acquisition aside, would lunar dust work?



I don't have an opinion on the health effects of sweeteners, but as I noted in a longer comment on this page, multiple sweeteners are commonly used together and aspartame is far from universal in the mix.


> Virtually all artificially sweetened soft drinks in the Uk are sweetened with aspartame

A quick look at a few soft drinks I could think of, and their UK sweeteners:

  Fanta: Aspartame, Acesulfame 
  Coke Zero: Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Enzymatically Produced Steviol Glycosides
  Pepsi: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Irn Bru: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
  Tizer: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Old Jamaica Ginger Beer: Sucralose
  Lipton Iced Tea: Steviol Glycosides from Stevia
  Ribena: acesulfame K, Sucralose
There seem to be no clear winners, with the most noticeable finding that multiple ones are usually used.


Acesulfame-K and friends is normally used in small amounts with aspartame; individually they both taste bloody awful, particularly Acesulfame K, but together they taste borderline acceptable.

Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.


A personal guilty pleasure is sugar-free red bull. Sorbitol, Sucralose, Ace-k unfortunately.


Huh, how much sorbitol do they put in it?! I thought that one was mostly only used in low-volume applications, because in large volumes, it's a laxative (AIUI this is why you rarely see sugar alcohols used as sweeteners in drinks.)


I'm not aware of a B-52 being crashed in a barrel roll, but this did make me think of the 1994 Fairchild crash[0] that was caused by a pilot who was known as dangerous due to excessive self confidence. In this case he banked too tightly at low level causing a stall into the ground. The whole crash was caught on camera[1], which is indelibly burnt into my memory.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_...

[1] - https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-bud-holland-the...


The last 3 seconds of your life as the copilot must have been some revolting emotion knowing that the overconfident asshole in the seat next to you just killed you.


Dutch roll, Bud Holland... Netherlands trifecta is in play.


Thanks, my mistake, this is what I was referring to. Apparently "Bud" would brag about "rolling" B-52s (https://www.historylink.org/File/8716), but the fatal crash was actually just a low-altitude stall as you pointed out. It's now a textbook case study for systemic leadership failure.


I'm pretty sure that's the crash GP was referring to. It sort of looks like he could have been going into a barrel roll.


Man, that is just one big ass airplane to even consider wanting to do any kind of maneuvering without threat indicators blinking/buzzing/beeping/toning that your death is imminent without doing some of that "pilot shit".

The story from your [0] about one of the crew's last flight with his family on the ground waiting for the post-flight rituals where his wife and 2 kids watching is just horrific. What a fucking asshat of a person.


There is a very well written version of this from many years ago on the Daily WTF:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery

It is written well enough that I could just about convince myself this actually happened!


> 8 reached EOL in the last year or two

Java 8 is still under Extended Support until 2030 (and indefinite sustaining support). Java 11 left Premier Support September 2023.

"Java SE 8 has gone through the End of Public Updates process for legacy releases. Oracle will continue to provide free public updates and auto updates of Java SE 8 indefinitely for Personal, Development and other Users via java.com".

https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roa...


Oh that’s right. My company didn’t want to pay the insane Oracle fees to keep getting support. I think it wasn’t even a discussion once the saw the number, but that’s basically a rumor.

So we have to stick to OpenJDK which means 8 doesn’t receive security updates and is untenable.


Seems like willful incompetence on the company’s part.

Just for note, JDK 8 came from the same time as Windows XP. Sure, the attack surface is different, but if they have no plans on moving forward and doesn’t even want to pay for support, then frankly fck them. Then they just surprise pikachu when a bunch of their user data leaks.


That seems oddly hostile.

We moved to the latest LTS. Continuing to use an old version with no security updates would be moronic. Of course we didn’t do that.

All I was saying was sticking with 8 wasn’t tenable for financial reasons.


Err, what? Windows XP was EOLed a month before JDK 8 was released.


Oracle JDK support is not the same as OpenJDK support (for both better and worse).


I have an English uncle who grew up around the time lager became the go to beer in England. He drinks a variety of beers these days including ales and lagers, but when he was young only drank lager.

Many years ago I asked him why he switched to drinking larger when he was younger, and his answer boiled down to consistentcy/quality.

Ale in England is pumped by hand into a pint glass, with a quaintly named beer engine, from a cask (not keg). The casks are open, so each unit of beer extracted is replaced in the cask with air. This means many opportunities for infection and oxidation of the beer so it goes off very quickly, and the lines between the cask and the engine need frequent cleaning.

This is expensive and time consuming, so bad pubs often push it as long as they can before doing it, or often just let it go bad. I've been to one pub where I tried every ale and they were all off.

Back when my uncle was drinking in the 60s and 70s he found this very common, so ordering a pint of ale often meant you might get a bad beer.

Lager is in a keg which is CO2 pressurised, so any larger removed is replaced with CO2 this helps keep it drinkable for much longer. The CO2 overpressure is what forces it out of the keg, so it's served from a tap not an engine.

Ale isn't pressurised with CO2 as it has low carbonation, so using pressure to force it out would also carbonate it further and change the product. So that can't be used to extend its life. You can get a soft spile to put in the literal hole in the top of a cask, that keeps flies out, but still air flows in. There are devices called cask breathers that would replace the beer removed with a blanket of atmospheric pressure CO2 so no further carbonation, but much improved life of the beer. CAMRA in the UK fought hard against these as they claim ale needs some O2 to mature (maybe breathing like a wine). I think they fought too hard, harming ale sellers and drinkers. I don't know what their contemporary opinion on them are.


You left out a couple of things here. One is that ale can also be served from keg, and commonly is, so the cask version is often known as "real ale". Guinness, for example, is a keg ale that uses nitrogen to mimic the mouthfeel of real ale.

The main thing, though, is that cask ale is easily the best form of beer that there is, when it's not off. Something about the sparkling freshness of beer that just finished fermenting in the cask, the cellar-cool temperature, and the low CO2 just makes for an incredible taste experience. Most beer goes downhill from the moment it leaves the brewery, but cask ale is at the very height of perfection the moment the cellarman puts it on. Well-kept cask ale is simply the best thing there is.

Interestingly, the best way to drink lager is in Bavaria, from wooden barrels, with low CO2 and relatively warm. It's not quite as sophisticated as real ale, because there's no life in the barrels, but it's still great.


That’s interesting, I have no idea where I’d even find cask ale in the US. Been drinking beer enthusiastically for years and never heard of it.


I went around Oregon in 2008 and it seemed every beer bar (like brewery taps and specifically beer themed, not just a regular bar) had a single beer engine, usually with some local real ale on it.

I've seen a few in NYC, usually Williamsburgy areas. Beer festivals might have a cask or two as well.

Otherwise I've very rarely seen it in the US.


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