The article succumbs to wishful thinking in critical areas:
"So yes, Germany has a lot of gas-fired plants, and a lot of coal-fired plants, but they are actually used very little - only when demand (including from France) is very high and renewables supply is very low - which does happen, but not that often anymore."
This will continue to happen for the foreseeable future during the winter months. Solar is almost neglible, and wind obviously has slumps.
To fix this problem, the article brings up the recurring theme of saviour technologies that simply are not there yet:
"flexible generation, whether hydro, new forms of storage"
Total consumption for 2021 in Germany: ~500TWhs [1]. That means ~10TWhs per week.
At the moment our storage capacity is in the small GWhs ballpark [2]. We would have to increase this thousandfold. I haven't seen this gap adressed with actual projects yet.
I don't think this is wishful thinking as Denmark is ahead of Germany in switching to renewables and Denmark is already in the situation you quote.
Many people completely ignore how well EU contries are interconnected and how EU is pressuring Germany to become even more well connected to other contries.
So electricity generation in EU should never be considered at country level only.
Today it is windy in Denmark. Wind mills produce 103% of current consumption, solar 33%, bio/coal 17%. Surplus is exported to Norway, Sweden, Nederlands and Germany.
During night time this often switches around and we import from those contries. Most days wind blows in Denmark during day time and not during night time, so we are extra hard hit by up-and-downs in renewable generation.
Tech for long distance transmission of electricity has also improved a lot over the past years but this is often ignored when speaking about renewables.
Lack of sun/wind in Denmark correlates strongly with lack of sun/wind in Germany and surrounding countries. The importing of electricity works precisely because the surrounding countries still have the "baseline" power plants the article dismisses so boldly.
Transmitting electricity over larger distances remains very expensive, which is why the idea of using the African sun for Europe (e.g. Desertec[1]) has stalled [2].
Apart from Denmark, few countries have enough wind turbines installed to power the entire country. Certainly, countries like Germany, The Netherlands, UK, don't come close. The Netherlands does come close to having enough PV to power the country during mid day on a bright sunny day.
So at the moment there is not a lot to export, and there is not of excess electricity from sun/wind to store.
The next thing is that, for example, The Netherlands needs a lot of green hydrogen for industry. So quite a bit of new wind turbine installations may go to powering that.
Germany has an other problem, building enough transport capacity within the country.
There is a big difference between transporting electricity all the way from Africa, including the question if it is smart to depend on those country for your electricity needs and transporting electricity between countries that border at the North Sea.
Most wind power in Germany gets generated close to Denmark, in the northern plain and offshore in the North sea and Baltic. There are very few wind plants near Stuttgart. (There were lots of nuclear plants in Baden Wuerttemberg though - but they were switched off and not replaced by renewables.)
"Flexible generation" also means coal and gas... So it is not an elusive technology. Neither are hydro power plants which can be varied in their output.
There is a working system commercially available in Germany, but it is pretty expensive [1]:
Long-term energy storage with hydrogen, with 1-5x 300 kWh. Which allows for full electric independence (not including heating though).
Price: 85,000-125,000 €, minus government subsidies.
Let's say you want to use the system for heating with a heat pump.
Your energy consumption for heating might be ~ 3000 kWh/month during the winter months (Nov-Mar) for a moderately insulated house.
Assuming your PV produces only 10 % of the demand during these 5 months (so you have to rely on stored energy for the remaining 90 %) and your heat pump delivers a Coefficient of Performance of 3.5 then you'd need to store ~ 3900 kWh.
As to my back of envelope calculation, one standard 50 l bottle of hydrogen contains ~ 30 kWh worth of energy when filled at 200 bar.
So you'd need ~ 130 such standard bottles to store enough hydrogen.
That's quite a lot. But of course with a well insulated home, you'd maybe only need a third, so that'd be 3-4 bundles (with 12 bottles each).
Its definitely worth it to use all available space.
Still, it definitely cannot generate enough to bring you through the german winter.
Some example numbers I have read: A 10kWp solar system that generates up to 1,400 kWh in a summer month will only provide about 200 kWh in December.
You can get more power in summer by using a vertical bifacial panel positioned E-W.
And if you position it N-S you'll get slightly less power than a standard setup, but it'll be less concentrated in the summer, and also spread through the day more.
So 57-83 €/kWh, or on average about 175x more expensive than the current already insane electricity prices in central Europe. This is the concept that will save us according to the (qoften German, for some reason) anti-nuclear fundamentalists who have gotten into this pickle in the first place.
Diesel in a diesel generator is already roughly on par with the current insane electricity price, dunno about cooking oil, but it's probably roughly similar.
You could have made the same argument against solar panels 15 years ago.
This is a pioneering product for early adopters - expect prices to go down significantly with economics of scale. And further research in this area is far from exausted.
I mean, I don't disagree. The problem is that lots of anti-nucluear-fundies are comparing existing nuclear power to hypothetical hydrogen storage - "it's just a matter of research".
My point is: Deploy nuclear power now, continue RND on large scale hydrogen storage that maybe will pan out in 20 years.
Yes, I was not proposing such system as a large scale solution for the coming winter. It would be prudent to keep our nuclear reactors running for now.
As always, There is No Silver Bullet™.
Nuclear is not the perfect solution. It cannot be powered on and off on short notice, which would be useful for complementation of solar and wind that have high power output, but also sudden slumps. Ironically, the ideal companion for renewables would be gas...
Lithium batteries could compensate short outages, but don't have enough (feasable) capacity for long seasonal shortages.
Enter Power to Gas. Hydrogen can be a good tool in that area.
A commerically available hydrogen storage system (that is in high demand even despite its price point) will definitely accelerate innovation very effectively. I think this tool will be available quite soon for mere mortals.
I'd add that it's also prudent to build new nuclear reactors now. The tech exists and there is a very clear lack of mostly plannable power supply in many countries/regions.
The tech for building reliable, safe, affordable, large-scale hydrogen "batteries" isn't here yet.
New nuclear reactors are also not here yet. They might become ready in 8+ years if started now.
So the solution is simple. Nuclear has its place. Power2Gas too. Build and invest in both. And in the meantime, use what we have without ideolgical eye patches.
Please respond to my argument instead of implying bad faith.
I can sharpen my argument even further:
Existing nuclear reactors - keep them going. They are here today.
Solar - leverage its decentralized, bottom up expansion by the people that can use their own roofs, reduce beaurocratic hurdles. Its expansion does not have to wait 8 years. The products are here today.
Power 2 Gas - celebrate existing products on the market. They are here today.
All these things are here today and part of a solution which contains many parts. I welcome each and every betterment, because we will need it.
You on the other hand are dismissing key tools and instead focus on one thing that is not here today and will maybe be ready in 8+ years.
Nuclear power plants take years to build. Even if a plant were approved today, it wouldn't be finished before large scale hydrogen storage either fails or takes hold, at which point it would be an expensive and unnecessary boondoggle.
Reminder: You're comparing the construction of existing tech (nuclear power plants) vs tech that doesn't even exist: large scale, safe and affordable hydrogen storage.
So one clip tells you everything you need to know. Do you judge everyone this way? One mistake and their whole character is defined by that?
Do you live up to that standard, or would someone be able to find some damning evidence of some dark side of you?
Is it possible that people are messy, not always consistent in their behaviour, that they have bad days? That they haven't thought everything through, that they get caught in the moment and regret it later?
Ah well that makes it ok I suppose. Was he also a much younger man back then and he couldn't have been expected to know better? That usually excuses a lot too.
If there was a single clip of me giving zero pushback to someone talking about sexually preying on dozens of women, even as a "joke", I would hope that my peers judge me accordingly.
My degree is in neuroscience. People aren't consistent. The self is mutable. That doesn't mean we shouldn't hold each other to standards? We're intensely social creatures, the opinions of others has incredible transformative power (positive and negative) on our behavior.
Rogan has had opportunities to apologize for the clip or change his behavior. He has not.
Apologizing is (unfortunately) a trap for a public figure in this modern era, it basically never helps, as its viewed as an admission of wrongdoing by your enemies,(who will bring it up at every opportunity going forward) and weakness by your allies who supported you.(who will not support you again if something new happens as they viewed the time they spent prior wasted)
For someone complaining about the lack of nuance between too black or white you sure are being binary abour this. If someone says a mildly sexist remark, sure - grey area, could be a mistake or it could be they're a dick. But if someone says they support Hitler's ideals that's not just a mistake you can overlook.
That doesn't fit my experience at all (I'm from Germany).
As soon as couples start to have concrete plans for children (or children are already on their way), marriage suddenly becomes very relevant for many relationships, and is often demanded by at least one side of the partnership.
This puts aside the romanticised view of marriage (which might be perceived equivalent to living together) and points to a more fundamental reason for marriage: Securing resources for your offspring. And offspring needs a lot of resources for a long time.
In the end, its commitment that counts. And marriage was built for ensuring commitment as much as humanly possible, with a high barrier for abandoning.
Being married makes a lot of bureaucracy around kids and so on a lot easier. Especially in case one parent dies. The legal aspects of loosing your partner are less important without a house and mortgage on it and without kids.
I agree so that marriage is, also historically, as much about economics as it is about love.
Good point, it's indeed common for couples to get married when having children.
Still, I think what's helping ensure commitment in that case are the children, rather than the marriage. It's much easier for a married childless couple to split up than for an unmarried couple that has children.
It is quite debatable if children actually stabilize marriages (I know a lot of counterexamples).
I would argue exactly the other way around:
A lasting marriage is not itself the goal (though certainly nice to grow old together), but serves the purpose of raising offspring - that's what counts for every species that has survived.
In the US, the resources for the child can just be court ordered as child support even if you were never married. So the legal commitment to the child is there regardless.
From the neighbors in the Netherlands: it is interesting to see these local differences as at least in my circles you don't need to get married to become part of the in-laws or other social circles.
Really, most couples I know really only marry when they are already very well established in each-others circles, as sort of a affirmation of their love. Maybe this is also because legally you can achieve the same protections for your children a lot simpler than getting married.
But this doesn't mean the whole of the Netherlands works like that, just my social circles :)
Lets say your 19 year old daughter wants to introduce her boyfriend of same age into your family.
How would you rate her (and his!) seriousness if
a) they lived in his apartment or
b) they are organizing their wedding.
I would wager b) would be "well-established" much quicker, especially in the wider circles, and thus have more "social resources" sooner, thus giving their potential offspring better chances. Of course, with kids out of the picture, it wouldn't make much difference. But that is exactly my point: Marriage serves having children.
The NIH has also prioritized ivermectin for another big, randomized clinical study. This research takes time. People need to be a little patient and not jump to conclusions.
For now there are a mix of smaller studies, some of which show no benefit and others which show a significant benefit. Most of those studies had different treatment protocols so the results aren't directly comparable.
Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."
My only successful product to this date is an app I built because my wife asked me to. It is in an non-technical domain which I knew nothing about. I thought it was rather non-promising, but, since it was a pet-peeve of hers, I gave it a try.
It was an awesome (and very bonding) experience - she explained me the problem(s), and I tried to simplify and structure it (didn't think gardening could be so complicated). Both of us were in their respective element, and from back and forth an app was forged.
To this day I only half-jokingly call her my product manager.
The app has brought in 5 digits last year and is rising.
Last week, she briefly mentioned another problem, in another hobby domain of hers...
Lucky you. I tried to make a game with my (then-girlfriend, now-) wife and it kinda fizzled out. Sure, took on too much, I'm not the best with bringing projects to launch, but whatever.
I really can't say who spent more time (she did graphics, I wrote code) but to this day it's a bit of a sore point to talk about, just that we were both absolutely not happy with the outcome and see it as completely wasted time.
a game seems less about solving a problem though. Educational games can semi help with solving the problem of learning specific topics, but often hard to pull off well.
I'm sure you've tried but you might want to try and find another perspective. I did a similar joint project with my wife. At more than one point we butt heads. It was pretty tense to say the least I don't want to embellish. On the other hand we did create something and learned much about each other along the way. If you finished something that is a success.
My wife and I also started making a game. Though the game didn't go far, I ended up learning new technologies specifically for the game to be scalable that landed me a nice job in another country.
I remember giving an "advice" on this in one of my comments: developers can discover amazing things once they step away from their day to day stuff,where there are already so many things created that it's pretty hard to come up with something unique. Gardening fits the bill pretty well in this case.
This also strikes me - After I live with my girlfriend for a while, I (or she surprisingly) found I have no interest in social media apps, discounts, traveling, eating tasty foods, mainstream movies/TV series...
Being immune to popular things is nice sometimes. But not being able to have empathy with most people is a great disadvantage for product development, since markets which are too niche mostly cannot easily afford rents or just don't worth it at all. It's much nicer to "build ... my girlfriend a tool" TBH.
My wife works in fashion and sometimes has SaaS ideas that fill a niche in her world, and which I never would have thought of myself. Unfortunately so far my programming skills are not up to snuff to fulfill her needs. But I’m working on it!
The ideas generally fall into “my company is paying lots of money for some really powerful, complicated software, and we use about 5% of what it offers. Why not create cheaper software that just does the 5%?”
I'm not into gardening myself, but looking at all of the other comments people responded with I can see that you have done a great job -- and also, you know, the fact that it's been doing so well too ;). Nice work :)
The world is a small place! I once worked for a startup, one of our investors was from Herford, apparently got rich off Bitcoin. We visited their coworking space, it was pretty fun.
That's pretty cool! Have you thought about making it into a PWA and ditch the proprietary ios/android ecosystems and just allow anyone with a browser to use it? It doesn't seem like there is much in this app that NEEDS to be a "mobile" specific app. It looks like you could do it all with html/js and some local storage. I'm a big believer in open crossplatform systems, when it's possible. Obviously if you need access to hardware sensors, etc, it wouldn't work very well.
For a big portion of the app, I would agree (arguments about native feel aside).
But well, there is the virtual planner feature that makes heavy use of carefully tuned iOS gesture recognizers for zooming, panning, dragging, tapping and holding, all in combination for a smooth and useable editor on a small screen.
Not that I have actually tried, but I suspect I would have to lay more groundwork to implement the same experience with the browser DOM.
This could of course just be a lack of knowledge on my part, but my time is finite :)
Hi, web app dev here. It’s possible to do. Whether it piques your interest or is worth your personal effort to do is of course up to you, but it is doable. Some may scoff, but I’d even say it’s possible to do it elegantly.
Sorry - but Uber is very much a app first app. Most people using it are coming through the "proprietary" ecosystem parent wants to get rid of.
I don't use starbucks, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also had a proper app store app and didn't require users to use a web browser to access the app.
If anything - this proves the user preference for apps vs websites.
This is a totally random suggestion but, I used to work with a Marijuana company that wanted something almost exactly like this to track their plants between different strains, lifecycles etc. that were on a grid system. This was a few years ago. You might want to check out that market and might be able to re-use a lot of this feature set?
Looks nice! As someone thinking about building an app, how are you balancing the app's free functionality with paid functionality? That's the tricky thing — you want the free functionality to be useful, but you also want as many people as possible to upgrade.
My girlfriend and I share a couple raised beds at the local community garden. We talked about building a similar app like this together, looks like you beat us to it! Will check it out!
Or they accidentally clicked the wrong level and linked there, since it was a little bit irritating that the OP did not provide a link - I mean I was about to ask for one.
Yeah.
That really was some PR story, completely fake.
Omidiyar admitted it later on. I think the first thing to ever be listed on eBay was a broken laser pointer.
Sorry I don't often go on HN.
I believe this was in an interview of Pierre Omidyar, although it may unfortunately be in French. He has not done much of these, so I think I may be able find it, I'll check.
It makes sense that building something that other people want to use is going to be more successful than building something primarily for yourself. Particularly if "other people" means "non-technical people", because anything you can build for yourself, any other technical person can also build for themselves. (Just look at the crazy number of javascript build tools and dependency managers.) But building for non-programmers, well, that's a potential customer base.
Any serious contender should have an answer to the MBPs extraordinary touchpad. It is key to working without a mouse, and therefore being truly mobile and comfortable at the same time.
So please post at least some information for this aspect, which is one of the things the OP explicitly listed.
Some examples:
- Would you be able to do some solid Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender work with the touchpad/knob of your proposed MBP-replacement?
- Can you comfortably and efficiently organize your photos/files&folders with it?
Yes, me at least (design work is not my main profession but needed for creating e.g. mobile apps).
It was my biggest surprise when I first bought a macbook: After a few weeks I noticed I didn't miss a mouse enough to bother bringing one with me.
I do 95% of my work when I'm commuting by train. Only for the last 5% super involved work I have to resort to plugging in a mouse when I'm in the office.
With all other laptops I have ever dealt with (admittedly not the replacements proposed in this thread), the ratio would be more like 50:50 or worse.
I also had a pretty high quality trackpoint from a business line Dell. Still missed the mouse.
I've got an Asus C302 Flip Chromebook, and the touchpad on it is as good as the Mac touchpad. It's just a shame that this machine is so underpowered, because it would be absolutely perfect with an i5, m.2 SSD, and 20g of RAM.
What I do now is set up virtual desktops on my server and connect to it via Chrome Remote Desktop from the C302. I have a Thinkpad for when I need to travel, but it really sucks having to switch back to a mouse (the touchpad on that thing is horrible).
The technical requirement I see as a prerequisite would be support for the Precision Touchpad standard. That's a major part of the magic inside Mac Touchpads. It's a shame there isn't that many external Precision Touchpad hardware. Users would pay a lot more attention to touch if so. That said, at least there's a Windows Precision Touchpad driver for the Magic Trackpad 2:
I don't necessarily care if it's a point or pad. I need it to get the jobs done that I mentioned above.
Can you with your laptop, and if so, which is it?
I had a Dell Precision M4300 for quite some time. Good laptop, decent trackpoint - but it was not good enough for design work:
My main problem was offsetting the cursor a tiny number of pixels, which needed some starting force on the trackpoint, which lead to more pixels than I needed.
Some trackpoint laptop might have figured this out by now. But if not, I'm not interested.
There are dozens of us! I've tried to get comfortable with touchpads, but I always find them frustrating (yes, even MBP touchpads). For instance, selecting text with them is a disaster. Trackpoint or external mouse for me.
Assange doesn't write news, and classified documents are not, themselves, the product of journalism merely for being leaked. Writing a story about the Pentagon papers is journalism, printing them verbatim without context or comment is not journalism.
If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.
> So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?
I don't know, ask Wikipedia, because my comment was using the definition you provided via that site.
Either way, the answer isn't relevant to Assange or Wikileaks. He's not an editor in chief, because he doesn't run an organization which has editorial policies or which writes stories which have to conform to those policies. We disagree that the definition you provided applies to Assange - as I see it, it clearly doesn't.
There's a reason Snowden didn't go to Wikileaks - he wanted journalists to handle the release of his information responsibly, and to provide the necessary context and framing narrative to the public. Wikileaks would simply have dumped all of them onto the web, because that's what they do.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netz-_und_Anlagenschutz