FLHerne

Bear in mind that there's a form of survivorship bias with these stories -- you only read about groundbreaking work by dedicated teams that changed the industry despite that always being the exception.

No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.

That's how it came, and while I've incrementally added or replaced a lot of things there's no point switching.

I would probably go with 24V if starting from scratch - there's a huge market of automotive and caravan parts that are 12/24V and generally don't support 48V.

If relying on an inverter more I might have a 48V main bank and run the low-voltage stuff off a DC-DC.

Space for panels is very constrained, they already get in the way more than I'd like.

I'll probably expand the battery bank at some point, but that only averages energy over a wider time period rather than increasing the total available.

I've spent very little on 12V equipment - my router and laptop are easily run off DC-DC supplies and USB supplies/lighting/water pumps/radios etc. are widely available. The only thing that's powered full-time and would have been significantly more expensive at 12V is the fridge, and I got that for free with an easily-replaced failed thermostat.

Doubling my present battery capacity would definitely cost more than I've spent on everything else.

It's not needed, but if the batteries are full the energy might as well go somewhere useful.

Not the poster, but I live off-grid on a boat in the UK and pretty much everything (including the laptop I'm commenting from) runs off 12V DC.

I have 800W of solar panels and a 3.5kWh LFP battery bank.

I use approximately 2kWh per day in summer, 1kWh in winter, 500Wh when it's cold enough that I can turn the fridge off.

In the summer I dump any excess to an immersion water heater.

At that level the self-consumption power of an inverter, about 5-10W, is significant so I avoid relying on it for anything powered all day (but it's useful for appliances, power tools and other intermittent items).

Using incredibly wasteful amounts of energy isn't necessary, people just do it.

They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.

The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.

Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.

So the OP can create a UG with €1 capitalization.

They can be cheerfully undercapitalized and counterparties, seeing that it's an undercapitalized UG rather than a GmbH, can make their own decision on financial risk.

> And the cheap door has a price of its own: to some clients, “UG” reads as “not serious,” and they would rather deal with a GmbH.

...turns out the OP doesn't like that.

> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk. If I want to start with nothing, that is my call, not a toll the state collects before it will let me try.

> And the cheap door has a price of its own: to some clients, “UG” reads as “not serious,” and they would rather deal with a GmbH

The post itself explains exactly why the first complaint is a fallacy and the second one is true:

> The simplest setup is a sole proprietorship [...] also makes me personally liable for everything. A client sues? They are not suing a company. They are suing me. My savings, my apartment, my name.

> So I wanted real limited liability, which means a company.

The liabilities of a limited-liability company aren't your risk.

The people who stand to lose out if your company folds are not you but your customers, creditors and anyone else with a claim to more than the company can repay.

The more capital it has, the less likely it is to collapse while having more liabilities than assets.

That seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me. To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever.

There were a couple of definitions I did think were a bit off, e.g. 'zenith' and 'nihilism'. And one word where two answers seemed valid but I forget which.

Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice.

In general I think it's a fun quiz - agreed with others though that the word selection brackets aren't ideal. It spends a lot of time on everyday vocabulary, then jumps straight into long words that someone made up one day as a joke.

The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.

Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.

I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.

These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end. They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later. All with no prospect of any tangible return.

If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.

The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower. It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.

It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.

Ruffle is quite good now. I haven't found many applets that don't work with it.

I find it's convenient for knowing which companies have immediately - and illegally, in this country - sold my details on to third-party spammers. Makes it easy not to do business with them.

If I'm understanding it right, the idea is that the DNS configuration for company-staging.com is identical to that for company.com - same IPs and servers, DNS provider, domain registrar. Literally the only differences are s/company/company-staging/, all accesses should hit the same server with the same request other than the Host header.

Then you can update the DNS configuration for company-staging.com, and if that doesn't break there's very little scope for the update to company.com to go differently.

Real "rugged" laptops are far too expensive for schools to buy by the dozen. Also, while robust against the environment they're not so much against deliberate vandalism or theft. The target market for those seems to be construction/industrial and similar, and of course the military.

All school laptop fleets I've seen are simply the cheapest thing they can buy in bulk, when it breaks provision a new one.