SimpleCov in ruby has 2 metrics, line coverage and branch coverage. If you really want to be strict, get to 100% branch coverage. This really helps you flesh out all the various scenarios
Seems like a great opportunity to curtail betting. You want to leach money out of people, well you have to leave yourself open to let the pros do it to you.
My first startup we had to support IE 7 for a bit and then IE 8 until like 2017… I thought I had it bad then. I’m so glad I didn’t have to fight any older version
My friend owns a metal stamping company. One of the things they make are the heat dissipation fins for radiators. That portion of their business has grown 20x in the last few years.
The entrenched interests would fight tooth and nail against this but I think that the drive towards simplifying billing and pricing is a generally good thing.
That being said, in my view, one of the fundamental problems with healthcare is that outside of truly elective procedures like cosmetic plastic surgery and lasik, it's nearly impossible to have free market economics function.
- There are HUGE information asymmetries between doctors and patients
- Judging performance of doctors is very challenge. Reviews are terribly inaccurate, data can be better but has big problems, and even other doctors aren't good judges of doctors outside their specialty.
- Right now at least, price discovery is nonexistent so you can't price shop and compete on price vs quality
- Insurance means that consumers of healthcare are not actually footing the bill so they have no incentive to price shop. And most healthcare procedures are completely unaffordable so there's no way we can do without insurance
- and finally it's really hard to make an economic decision that is literally life and death. Am I going to forgo a $100k surgery if it means I'll die? There's no choice there
All of these things lead me to the conclusion that healthcare is fundamentally incompatible with classic free market economics, and some form of single payer is the only solution to avoid us bankrupting our country spending on healthcare
One of my favorite things when I was here was seeing an Amazon Prime logo on the saddlebag of a donkey. That struck me as a very weird collision of old and new worlds
Microservices make sense from a technical perspective in startups if:
- You need to use a different language than your core application. E.g. we build Rails apps but need to use R for a data pipeline and 100% could not build this in ruby.
- You have 1 service that has vastly different scaling requirements that the rest of your stack. Then splitting that part off into it's own service can help
- You have a portion of your data set that has vastly different security and lifecycle requirements. E.g. you're getting healthcare data from medicare.
Outside of those, and maybe a few other edge cases, I see basically no reason why a small startup should ever choose microservices... you're just setting yourself up for more work for little to no gain.
Splitting off a few services from an application is not the same as using microservices. With microservices you split off basically everything that would be a module in a normal application.
I think that really depends on your definition. But I will also contend that even splitting your system into 2 or 3 services if it's not for strong reasons will 100% slow you down and cause long term headaches.
One project that I helped design had to split out a segment of the system b/c the data was eligibility records coming from health plans. This data had very different security and lifecycle requirements (e.g. we have to keep it for 7 or 10 years). Splitting out this service simplified some parts but any time we need to cross the boundary between the 2 services, the work takes probably twice as long as it would if it were in a single service. I don't think it was the wrong decision, but it the service definitely did not come for free
> But I will also contend that even splitting your system into 2 or 3 services if it's not for strong reasons will 100% slow you down and cause long term headaches.
Even tiny backends usually have, from the start, a database server, some web server / proxy to handle incoming requests and load balance or cache them, and then something running your actual code that requests are passed on to. That's so normal that we don't even think of them as separate services anymore, but they are.
Splitting off a few larger parts because they are self contained, have their own Ops characteristics and might be usable by other projects on their own, vs creating a service for every single entity in your domain modal (or whatever), that's quite a difference.
We have an auth service, a database service for raster geo data, a generic task runner. Those are services. They all have their own pretty unique architecture and stand on their own, they are used by but are separate from the project that they were made for.
Different services for customers, for orders, for invoices, for items in the shop, for items on an order, for promotions, that's microservices. They all look very similar and belong to the application.
In addition to having 1 service with vastly different scaling requirements, having 1 service with vastly different availability requirements may make sense to separate as well.
If you need to keep the lights or maintain an SLA and can do so by separating a concern, it can really reduce risk and increase speed when deploying new features on "less important" components.
Iceland has boiling hot water at the surface and so doesn’t need to drill far to reach hot rocks do to all the volcanism there. This does not apply to the vast majority of the world
Well the question was "Iceland has profitable geothermal, no?" and your answer appears to be yes. Which is important because it means the upshot is that there are viable applications, which contrasts against the argument that lack of generalized solution means we need to reject it wholesale.
You're right that that nuance got lost and I'm sorry I overlooked it.
Insofar as it relates to the commenter I'm replying to, they also seem not to be making a distinction about deep geothermal, but insisting that the difference between Iceland and the rest of the globe is an indictment of geothermal's viability deep or otherwise. Which doesn't follow.
The original comment stated that shallow geothermal can be useful for heating, but did not say anything about shallow geothermal electricity generation.
See the first paragraph. [0] The reference explicitly gets into "deep geothermal" (i.e., EGS) and talks about power applications that are viable because of limited drilling (i.e., shallow).
> The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat.
The building heat comment is just a reference to another residential/C&I application with ground loops. They're not dismissing or not acknowledging the grid-scale power applications.
"Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a lot of drilling just to get some heat."
From my understanding, this is all the original comment says about shallow geothermal. Correct me if I am misunderstanding.
Moreover, I do not see the quote: "The more than 1 gigawatt of geothermal power currently produced globally — from California to Iceland to the Philippines — relies nearly exclusively on such natural outpourings of the earth’s heat" anywhere.
Are we referring to the same comment, or am I misunderstanding something?
Iceland is one of several geothermal "high temperature zones", other zones include effectively the entire West Coast of all of North and South America, including Alaska, as well as a zone stretching from the Mediterranean through the Red Sea that encompasses basically every European country with Mediterranean coastline. There's a major zone stretching from India through Southeast Asia and a separate independent one basically going along the whole western perimeter of the Pacific Ocean.
Geothermal is currently deployed in 32 countries and is regarded as the most abundant source of renewable energy outside of solar, impressively ranking ahead of wind.
So I think the most charitable interpretation of Iceland's example is that it represents one of many regions where geothermal is viable.
Feasable, and the concept has been proposed, but doesn't look likely to be built in the near future. There are still lower hanging (more profitable) fruit when it comes to building undersea HVDC cables.
It's not carbon free. Iceland's geothermal fields have carbon emissions because gasses trapped beneath the surface are released along with the steam when they're extracted. It's still low-carbon compared to a natural gas power plant, of course, but not compared to wind/hydro/nuclear.
And aluminium production is certainly not carbon free: the smelting process reduces aluminium oxide to aluminium metal using carbon electrodes, producing around 14 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of aluminium.
The point is that smelting the aluminium takes tons of electricity, so doing it in Iceland where that's produced via geothermal is effectively exporting that electricity.
It's actually the reducing of the alumina (aluminum oxide) to metallic aluminum that takes huge amounts of electricity. And as mentioned, that is done with carbon electrodes which are consumed in the process, leading to relatively high CO2 emissions. Though yes, if that electricity would be produced by burning fossil fuels the emissions would be even higher. So it's not like there aren't big benefits to doing aluminum refining in Iceland, or other places with low-emission electricity.
There is some R&D work going on though to do this reduction step without CO2 emissions using other electrode materials, see e.g ELYSIS.
And it’s a relatively light material. So if you’ve got some place where the carbon footprint of collecting and transporting bauxite is relatively low, you can use excess power to smelt more aluminum.
The problem with opportunistic loads like wind and solar is whether you can afford to strand expensive factories full of equipment for hours or days at a time while the power availability is compromised. At least with geo this is a smaller problem.
We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be < 5%. It's a different question entirely if it is feasible. It would be the longest sub-sea power cable ever, and the projected cost of $4 billion might be much too low.
In the current situation Europe would profit immensely by sending excess renewable energy to Iceland's pumped hydro and Aluminium smelters while using their geothermal baseload capacity. But in 15 years that might no longer be the case and by then the investment would not have paid off and there might be regret that the money wasn't spent on a different HVDC line like another North Africa - Europe link or Bulgaria - Caucasus (which has a lot of undeveloped hydro potential).
Am I missing something... it looks like the chainring is able to spin independently of the pedals, as if they moved the freewheel from the rear hub to the bottom bracket. Without that this would never work like he demonstrates. I've never seen the freewheel on the chainring/bottom bracket on a bike in the US, is this a common in other parts of the world?
I studied the video, and the only thing that I can conclude is that he simply unbolted the pedals from the chain ring. The pedals would therefore not be doing anything at all except support the rider's feet.
The site says "pedaling recharges the battery." This would require re-bolting the pedals back on.
It's hard to see angles that can really make this clear. Maybe there are some freewheels that let the chain ring spin independently of the pedals, which makes no sense to me.
>> it looks like the chainring is able to spin independently of the pedals, as if they moved the freewheel from the rear hub to the bottom bracket
IMHO that would be a safety hazard if they removed it from the rear hub. Without that, the chain will always be moving when the bike is moving. If your pants or anything else gets caught in there it ain't stopping.
Leaving it in the back AND putting it in the front as well is probably viable if a bit redundant.
No idea how the e-bike guys here did it but Schwinn had a bike for a while (my wife owned one) where the freewheeling was in the bottom bracket, it was called "FFS". It's pretty freaky and wasn't popular. You can see it in action starting at 0:30 here:
It's not common but you'll see it on some trials bikes.
I was always told that that is so you can use smaller sprockets front and rear for the same ratio, giving you more bottom bracket clearance when you're hopping about the place.
Obviously that's a very specific type of bike for a very specific purpose though.
Shimano Front Freewheel System (FFS) for a while in the 1980s. The only bike I know of that had one was the Schwinn World Tourist. I only know about it because I found a World Tourist in the trash and rode it for many years but with a different drivetrain.
There are other more modern systems with a crank mounted freewheel for enduro and DH bikes, allowing the rider to change gear while coasting in anticipation of a pedaling section. Similar to gearboxes, the idea comes back once in a while but never really takes off massively.
There was a french company named HXR components which used to produce that, I think they went bankrupt. Nowadays there is the Rocksteady Magic from boutique euro brand Intend:
https://www.intend-bc.com/products/rocksteady-magic/
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