I see this as well and it looks to be multiple people buying in to the campaign, especially here on HN.
Having lived in a new, high end apartment that had a heat pump for both heating and cooling for 3 years, I am very unimpressed with the tech. Running nonstop, couldn't heat/cool above/below a certain threshold. Electric bill very high. Clogged and broke a lot. If the general radiant heat and cooling from being in large building didn't exist, I couldn't see this working halfway decent in any place in the midwest. This might work for areas with less variable temperature ranges but for the midwest USA, not seeing it.
Your singular experience is an outlier, not an example of totally normal circumstances.
There is no conspiracy to push broken technology on to the masses. Heat pump technology has come a long way and modern heat pumps are very good at what they do.
If someone installed a heat pump that doesn’t work in the temperature range of your location, they really screwed up. Modern heat pumps can be selected to work down to very low temperatures, and they’re installed with auxiliary heat when necessary. The design parameters aren’t a mystery.
Your high end apartment must have had a low end heat pump installed.
In the midwest a geothermal heat pump would work wonderfully.
Also, they are designed to run constantly in order to maintain the set temperature -- it's not like a natural gas fired furnace where it quickly reaches the set point.
What's the payback time on something like that for a modest home in a place which can get significantly under 20 degrees (F) or over 95 degrees for weeks or longer? How effective is it at those extreme temperatures when it matters the most, and how does this affect maintenance costs?
Additionally, there are multiple types of restrictions on where geothermal pumps can be installed, and navigating this can add to costs.
I don't see it as a one size fits all solution, there are far too many people for whom the household/company math doesn't add up. However, I agree we should be doing fair comparison against other renewable-friendly options for all new construction. I'm sure heat pumps could win out in a great many situations, and we should use them where they do.
Note that a heat pump cooling a building is essentially the same as an air conditioner. So it's more a matter of how efficient the air conditioner you're replacing is. Cooling a house is much easier than heating, because the temperature differences are lower. In your example, cooling 95 F to 70 F is a 25 F difference, while heating 20 F to 70 F is a 50 F difference. The world record for heat is about 135 F, which is the same difference from 70 F as 5 F, a completely normal winter temperature in much of the world.
Obviously nobody can answer the long term cost differences between gas and heat pumps, since the cost of natural gas and electricity can change drastically over the lifetime of the unit.
GP's comment was about the tech, though, and not the cost of said tech.
It's absolutely not a perfect solution for all heating needs across the globe, the the technology is far better than GP is suggesting.
In my view, natural gas is only competitive due to externalized costs and the slowdown/freeze of nuclear energy deployment. I recognize it's the only option for all kinds of situations (my dwelling heat included), but for anyone thinking forward it should be excluded in future development where possible.
My main concern is the overall long term efficiency & affordability of renewable-friendly solutions, because competitiveness in those areas is what will lead to mass adoption. The point I was hewing toward is that I feel the heat pump advocates and providers need to make it more clear which situations are best suited for that solution and which are not, because it would benefit everyone.
> Also, they are designed to run constantly in order to maintain the set temperature
Not all heat pumps are variable-speed like you describe. My own home, built in 2000, has a single-speed heat pump that kicks on 100% or off, like a regular old AC unit.
Right, what I'm trying to say is that it is normal for it to be on 100% of the time when it is cold out. If you are used to gas heat which can turn on for 15 minutes, overshoot the set point, and then be off for the next 45 minutes, a heat pump will seem strange.
Mine is a variable speed unit, but that's not the function that I'm talking about.
The constant running also affords a more consistent temperature because air is continually moving. Decreases the temperature variance throughout the zone. I have a 3 zone heat pump, 2 single room zones upstairs and a main floor with a air handler. We LOVE the setup so far.
Yes, I've been happy with ours and it was a great improvement over the last heat pump that we had.
Habits are hard to break, though, and there's not much value (if any) of lowering the set-point at night during the winter months. People still do it, though, and then the unit is working overtime in the morning to reach the desired set point.
Just to clarify, it is more efficient to lower the set-point in the winter over night. The issue is when your thermostat is set to utilize aux heat if the delta is higher than your set point change in the morning. For example. If you change from 70 to 67 at night. In the morning when the set point goes back to 70, the thermostat is likely configured with an aux delta of 2 or 3 degrees. Meaning every morning the expensive resistive heater is running to raise your temp quickly.
Personally, for my home and climate in the area, I disabled aux heat entirely, unless the temperature is below 0f outside, or if it hasn't reached the set point within 2 hours. Recently had some cold weather and these settings worked well for my home.
I'm using an Ecobee, configurations will vary per thermostat. The big settings for me were using manual staging to configure the temperatures to engage aux, temps to lock it out, etc.
I would just use serverless functions to achieve the same thing personally, if you're in the cloud already, chances are high you can trigger functions based on new records in a database or new file uploaded, or what have you. Then you don't need to import much outside of the serverless SDK which should typically be pretty minimal.
That's how I did a timed function for a Django project we were hosting in Azure anyway.
Serverless functions are good for some stuff: clear this cache on this schedule, run this task when XYZ happens, etc..
But that is not the popular usecase for celery. Often you want "some code" (that you likely already have written) to be executed async. Sure, you can create a public interface for "some code" then write a record, that the serverless function is looking for, that then calls back to that interface (but is it a web interface???? then you have a problem where if the job takes too long to complete, what about http timeouts ... ) and now you're really creating a big circle for something that should be simple: execute some code outside of the request (send an email, hit an api, whatever).
Serverless functions really shouldn't contain much logic either, because it's too complicated to test.
Ive used serverless in this way as well when it was a long running process, basically the end-user needed to upload a Shapefile, and some of them can be quite large, so I kicked off an Azure Function once the file was uploaded to parse the file in the background. If it's something that will halt the browser when it needs to run in the background instead, that's where I'll use Serverless if it makes sense. I'm not fond of having my web server running things in the background it ruins my mental model of the web.
> I'm not fond of having my web server running things in the background it ruins my mental model of the web.
Well yes, and you run into other problems as well (now if your process dies or you deploy or something you have to be careful to not kill running jobs).
Only things that needed to be done behind the scenes that could take a long time, like we would take JTIFFs that could be gigs of data, and analyze them and create variations of the same image. You don't want someone who just uploaded a 1GB file waiting for you to also analyze it as well.
Correct, I only use them for very specific needs where it would slow down my website, or be weird to spin off a new thread in the background. I do know Azure supports WebJobs which is probably the closest you can get to something like Celery, which funnily enough, is what Azure Functions (at least originally) are built on top of.
I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no 'big bang' where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.
This is a strong _advantage_ of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017—2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn't drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn't going viral or spending money on ads.
I'm going to answer for op here and point out the product exponentially self-advertises. As more people send emails using the app, even if there isn't a "Sent with Button-down" it's easy to find out the email-sender so customer's receiving the email think to themselves, I could do that, and use that nice product!
Interestingly, this is exactly how I found about Buttondown, which I've been using for years to send my own newsletter.
It also helped that it was priced way more sensibly than many alternatives, in a way that grows linearly with the number of subscribers (which is also how, theoretically, ads returns from a newsletter can grow): my then provider would meet me with a massive cliff-edge, going from $0 to about $30/month, if I recall correctly. It's a common behaviour – lock in first, then charge A LOT :)
Which makes me wonder – maybe a simple, overlooked way, to start side hustles is to replicate a service, but offer better pricing that works for niche/bootstrapped contributors, as opposed to creating niche versions of the service?
It pretty clearly means that Facebook makes conscious decisions on how to weight what is displayed to users with the intention of politically influencing millions of people. Examples are probably difficult unless there's source code available from different eras of Facebook with a strict chain of custody, which obviously won't happen.
It should be pretty clear if you look at Joes career outside of the podcast. For 30 years he has been in the entertainment industry with stand up comedy, television (News Radio and Fear Factor), to announcing UFC fights.
He was one of the fist big podcasts and livestreamers before others started doing the same. Most of his initial (and repeat) guests are simply friends from these various industries.
Are there any good ebook services that sell books in epub formats? Typically I will try and buy from the publishers website to load onto the Kobo but ideally I can buy the epubs themselves without being locked into a service like Amazon/Kobo.
For the Georgia Tech online MS, what does the process look like? If you wanted to, could you accelerate the timeline (instead of 2-3 years part time)? That is, take multiple classes at once? Are the lectures prerecorded and you only need to complete the required coursework and lectures or are you required to pace at the same time as a traditional degree?
Don't know the current answers to all your questions, but re: courseload: you can take 6 credits max in the fall and spring and 3 credits max in the summer. You need 30+ credits to graduate, so the quickest you can finish is 2 years (but this should be quite doable from a workload POV if you're not working full-time)
I don't know for sure about OMSCS, but in OMSA you can ask the advisors to let you take more than 6 credits and they'll usually approve it. There are a fair amount of people who try to finish it in 3 semesters, although that seems a little crazy to me. It probably depends on your course selection, but I would struggle to take more than 3 classes (9 credits) at once (without working), and I would definitely have a shallower understanding of the material.
Their website clearly states that the Librem 5 USA ships in 90 days when ordered: "Now Shipping! Place your order now, get in approximately 90 days!". I had ordered mine in November of 2020. One year later and still no device delivered.
This either seems like a lie or they are having issues managing a proper queue.
Having lived in a new, high end apartment that had a heat pump for both heating and cooling for 3 years, I am very unimpressed with the tech. Running nonstop, couldn't heat/cool above/below a certain threshold. Electric bill very high. Clogged and broke a lot. If the general radiant heat and cooling from being in large building didn't exist, I couldn't see this working halfway decent in any place in the midwest. This might work for areas with less variable temperature ranges but for the midwest USA, not seeing it.