There isn't really much to learn when going from Java to Kotlin. Most Java devs with a bit of experience should be "fluent" in Kotlin within two or three days.
Screw a pulley down to the seabed. Run a cable from a float through the pulley to a reel on a winch driven by a motor-generator. (Could be on shore, in a boat anchored out there, or bolted to a wind-turbine post.)
Crank the float down toward the seabed when you have power to spare. Let the float reel back out when you need that power back.
For extra credit, attach a whole series of reels to one winch, with clutches, so one winch can crank down as many floats as you have reels, one or two at a time. (Floats, pulleys, and reels are cheap, motor-generators expensive, so it pays to share.) Maybe, instead of a winch and clutches, the reels are driven with hydraulics.
Size the floats so the winch is a catalog item, say <1000-ton capacity. Use as many motor-generators on winches as you need for the MW you must generate. Use as many pulleys/floats as you need for the MWh you need to store.
The deeper the pulleys are, the more MWh each float can store. Keep adding floats until you have enough.
I'd really like to know the reasoning for that as well.
I was in the market for a year and was interested in something outside of a city. I could afford the larger 5 bedroom homes, but had absolutely no use for that amount of space. Nice 2 bedroom homes in the suburbs just aren't a thing for some reason. Smaller homes exist, but the quality drops dramatically.
Perhaps there is an untapped market for high quality 1-2 bedroom homes outside of cities. I'd certainly buy one.
Except that’s not what consumers want by and large. Most buyers will add more space if they can. Often in anticipation of having a family and needing more space. Easier to grow into a bigger house than move.
Many companies actually prohibit employees from selling shares to third party investors (including investors on marketplaces like EquityZen) without board approval.
This is a really fair and important point - I appreciate you bringing it up.
I've seen a couple of Stripe secondaries before so I assume that some set of employees are able to transact on the secondary market.
However, important disclaimer that not all companies have the same terms - and the terms can change depending on when you were hired. Startup equity isn't absurdly complicated, but it very much is situation-specific which is where the confusion usually comes from.
On one hand, this may help reduce congestion in the city during peak tourism season. On the other hand, paying to visit an entire city (and literally having to book a visit ahead of time) seems incredibly odd; I certainly am not a fan of the idea.
If raising money via tourism is the goal, a more widespread tourism tax on food and services would likely both raise funds and partially reduce tourism overload, without the burden of requiring visitors to go through the arcane process of booking a visit.
The goal is probably discourage short term visitors. In the many, MAAAAANY past HN topics about this, complaints about them were constant.
Basically Cruise Ships barge in (sometimes literally, hitting other boats or even buildings), then people climb out, make a mess, annoy everyone (including the tourists that are on hotels), then leave again, since they are sleeping on the ship anyway.
Lots of stories here on HN of how the day tourists often don't even spend any money, they probably paid to eat on the cruise ship, so they just climb out, take photos, roam around, pollute, then go eat and sleep back on the ship and don't buy anything.
Same thing happens all over. Cruise ships and the people on them make otherwise enjoyable places absolutely terrible. After my first experience with it it’s something I check now and I won’t go to any place that cruise ships frequent.
Darn those people-who-arent-me wanting to go to the cool places I want to go to. They should be kicked out so that people like me can enjoy the places without all that riff-raff running amok
i mostly agree with your tack here, but there's something to be said for pulling up your boat of 5,000 people to the dock of a town, I'd be curious to know how democratic of a decision that is.
On a related note, I highly recommend the book "Do Travel Writers Go To Hell", written by a Lonely Planet author who reflects on the conundrum of publishing the best beaches and bars he finds, knowing they will be overrun with tourists as soon as the book is out. (I don't recall if the book is nonfiction)
elitist because he found a local dive bar on a Brazillian beach with good vibes, that he knows will not be the same once he directs a flow of Americans toward it?
It's about knowing the consequences - not just keeping the bar a secret for his own benefit, but knowing he's going to ruin the experience for everyone else who liked the peace and quiet (of course, the owners of the bar are likely to be grateful for the uptick in business)
At the risk of drawing too much excitement to this thread: if it is unacceptable and inherently racist to be upset at millions of people per year coming across your border uninvited to stay permanently, why is it super cool and totally fine to flip out about hundreds of thousands of people (who already file identity paperwork and pay travel taxes) who just want to visit for a few hours and buy some overpriced tchotchkes, coffee, and gelatos?
It does seem to me that if the first is an inalienable human right, then surely the second must also be.
Perhaps the idea of somebody coming to a place, setting up shop, and participating in a local community feels pretty inherently good, while somebody showing up, buying a coffee, then bouncing does not feel so good.
I do think that tourist areas are ultimately not “owned” by the locals, but there is a truth to tourism economies sucking the oxygen out of building a more sustainable economy that would benefit people more.
A hotel is maybe good for some jobs, but maybe some other commerces or industries would actually make a place less dependent on the whims of tourists. Externalities aren’t fungible of course (how much litter is having one more hotel job worth).
Places like Paris tend to work well because there’s huge amount of infrastructure built out for large population fluctuations like trains, and ultimately it ends up benefiting people well. Compare that to many island tourist destination where you basically have tourist-only infrastructure.
Cruise ship arrivals were only 7% of Venice visitors in 2018. They have already been diverted to a nearby industrial port since reopening after the pandemic
There are costs for tourist visas in some countries. There are costs/permits for particular areas (national parks, public buildings, etc). Maybe it feels odd just because there's not much precedent for this particular tier.
The price and details seem pretty reasonable to me. Fundraising to improve the place and reduce burdens on residents dealing with but not profiting from tourism seems smart.
I visited Venice almost 20 years ago, and it was fairly miserable while the daytrippers were there tromping over bridges, but improved dramatically in the evenings and early mornings. I was a backpacker on the road for a year with a constrained budget, but would've been fine with paying $10 had we not stayed overnight.
Flat-out limiting numbers would be a greater restraint, I think. There are a number of places (many in the USA) where visitation is via limited permit - things like climbing Half Dome or visiting The Wave, now climbing Angel's Landing. Even driving through the main roads of Glacier NP or Yosemite NP.
> Fundraising to improve the place and reduce burdens on residents dealing with but not profiting from tourism seems smart.
That's absolutely fine, but I feel like a reservation/ticketing system such as the one proposed is not the best solution. Again, a tourism tax across the city might achieve the same effect without such a system.
In my opinion, the cost (within reason) is absolutely irrelevant. Raising money for the city and locals is a great effort and I applaud it. It is simply the requirement of yet another "hoop to jump through" that bothers me. After years of a pandemic with legally questionable restrictions and requirements throughout daily life, I simply don't want more "hoops to jump through".
Unless I'm reading the wrong site, it looks like the visa application fee for someone eligible for the US visa-waiver and ESTA looks to be $14. Not sure if this was an intentional US-3W joke though. Non-VWP looks like Tourism B-2 and $160?
I wouldn't have guessed China and India are third-world. From a quick search, both seem to have visa costs. Thailand, Turkey, also. Someone from China visiting the UK seems to cop UKP100 for a Standard Visitor visa. I'm pretty sure I've paid visa charges for various not-overly-third-world countries in the past.
I'm Australian. To visit the USA as a tourist, it's US$160 for a Tourism B-2 visa or US$21 for the ESTA under VWP. I might be missing another option as a tourist, but the ESTA is certainly the encouraged option and one I've used a couple of times before.
I find it somewhat concerning that charging tourist visa fees for third-world visitors is listed as an exception, as if the fees and often more laborious interviews and documentation that the majority of people in the world face doesn’t negate the so-called freedom of movement in virtually every western country.
I've been prescribed a "fairly serious" antibiotic for a skin condition that has been plaguing me for several years (I've gotten like 5 different diagnosis and tons of different Rx). I'm otherwise incredibly healthy, so this antibiotic scares the shit out of me and I have yet to start taking it.
No lasting effects but it was only a year ago so who knows - my completely amateur take is you've got to balance the payoff with the risk - in your case the payoff of getting rid of a skin condition that's been plaguing me for years seems like a fair trade for the risk of the antibiotics if I were in your shoes... it's not like you didn't try to let your body resolve it on its own (since you've had it for years)
Have you tried cleaning your washing machine regularly ? People often think of washing their pillow cases and sheets once a week, but if the washing machine isn't well maintained, the bacteria don't get properly killed and you spend all nights and day with them, and no amount of skin-cleaning and hydrating products will be able to work.
1, don't use mental capacity for remembering things, do that in a trusted document that stores things you need to remember
2, always be (mentally) knolling, staying organized and recording things you need to refer to later should be a reflex. Supplement this with weekly reviews of everything going on in your life.
3, categorize actions into long, medium and short term tasks. A short term task is something you can do immediately if you have the right context and opportunity.
4. if you're blocked on something, figure out the next immediate task, i.e. "email user group to ask if anyone else has seen this problem before" NOT "figure out problem with spatial join"
Emacs org-mode was a huge help in getting started on this. there's a vscode port of it thats semi-usable. I haven't been a fan of other organization software.
I wonder how viable a sort of "micro PE" firm would be, basically a company that just buys many of these micro indie projects with positive cash flow with the goal of holding on to them for profit or investing into their operations and eventually reselling them.
There's been this trend of new firms popping up that acquire small ecommerce brands (in fact, there was one on HN just the other day). I'm wondering if the same model can (or has) been applied to small "indie" companies and projects.
I think it's going to be more common than it is. Or, maybe its already super common and we just don't hear about it.
My reasoning is as follows: small products/companies have de-risked the initial PMF exploration, but aren't at a scale where they can hire specialists. Sure, maybe you can find a 10 hours / week data engineer who can build your analytics infra MVP. It's more likely you don't find someone good, IMO.
Building a portfolio of these means you can hire a specialist who can focus on the low hanging fruit of 3-4+ companies at a time. That's a huge advantage over the small companies.
I've also thought about this a lot wrt microsaas projects. Specifically, looking to acquire projects that are small but match my tech expertise such that I can consolidate certain aspects of them easily. Ultimately maintenance will probably be the biggest problem with acquiring numerous small projects, so making that as easy as possible is important.
It would probably not be "viable" in the sense of it becoming a unicorn, but it probably is a viable small business or side project. I get the feeling that once you become a medium sized business, you kind of necessarily outgrow the "micro" part of the monicker.
I do remember seeing one, actually, aimed at smaller bootstrapped SaaS products doing >10k/MRR. But I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.
It doesn't, at all. I've heard suggestions that great news coming out of SpaceX does impact Tesla, but not the other way around. Plus, SpaceX isn't a public company.
