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It's "easy". You just spend a couple of years reviewing PRs and working in a professional environment getting feedback from your peers and experience the consequences of code.

There is no shortcut unfortunately.


21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.

This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/dat...


Would any free market proponent like to chime in here? Why hasn’t this occurred?


It's not a free market in Europe since there is vast amount of planning regulations involved etc. If you want to see free markets in action, look at the electricity prices in Texas, where ironically renewables are also the dominant source. https://www.gridstatus.io/live


Texas is an interesting example because they allowed true unregulated rates for residential consumers. Consumers liked getting lower rates until that winter storm a few years ago had bills for some in the $thousands. Then they didn't like the free market so much.


It did suck, but even when we factor that spike into the equation (including the outages), Texans end up paying for less for electricity in aggregate. Texas has also beefed up winter hardening requirements since then.


It's actually fine in theory but it's nearly impossible to build anything in Ireland due to the way the planning laws work.

In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.


weird, because wouldnt part of the price for electricity include the network?

Are you telling me that the electricity purchasing is like me purchasing from amazon, but but never charges shipping, or factor it into the products, and then suddenly cant ship because all trucks are used and no money to buy new?


Demand has gone up largely because of data centers. Supply has not increased enough so expensive options are the marginal supplier. Grids costs are also build into tariffs.

What is your point?


| more and more cost-of-living protests

They must have been real quiet. Most the protests are related to how expensive it has become to rent / buy in this country.

Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.

| now importing most of our energy

14.0% of its electricity in 2024 according to https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...


> Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.

It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.


Agreed. As I said in another comment it is a policy decision to rely on market forces while making little effort to reform the planning process. We should be a world leader in wind energy but the planning process holds us back hugely.


Governmens around the world trying to shift blame from gtid caoacity managers (so, themselves) to users because "they just consume too much".

In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.


Real estate and energy prices are both two sides of the same coin and included in the cost of living...if you aren't aware?

Also, both of these problems are caused by the same thing: NIMBY-ism.

Modern western governments generally hate people new building new things. Whether its a renewable energy project, a fossil fuel plant, a housing development, etc. It's all the same problem.


They are the same side of the coin but one has a much larger effect then the other depending on where your are. Energy has always been expensive in Ireland and home insulation poor (though there have been lots of grants)

| NIMBY-ism.

True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws


You always need some backup when the wind does not blow, although in Ireland it blows almost everyday. A deal with the UK (although Milliband has idiotically jumped way too far on the green bandwagon and prevented North Sea drilling) should guarantee that.


The graph on the BMI calculator is incorrect. While it is a pretty minor bug how many other "minor" bugs are in these tools.

It's great to produce something for free but if it wouldn't have been more then a couple of hours work to verify each of these tools, write tests etc. Even better would have been to produce a open source library


This is what a probation period should be for. Even with all of the above you normally still have to pass probation. I've seen numerous people in the EU get let go in their 6 months for not meeting expectations.

I think that is a risk with hiring regardless. Both sides have an information gap.

I joined a place and within a week realized it was a disaster and I didn't want to work there. If the company had informed me half the teams had quit / was in the process of quiting I would not have joined. It's not like I could go back and get my old job


I think it is. Employers love to include whatever they can in a contract.

Non competes in Canada and the EU are generally not enforceable but you see them regularly. Why should this line be any different.

Edit: which -> why


Which should this line be any different?

Because it most definitely is not about non-compete agreements in the usual (post-employment) sense.

You understand that, right?


I understand the difference. Most jobs would like to own your 24/7 for minimum wage. They can also have clauses about discussing pay or other gray / illegal points. Just because you've signed it doesn't mean much to me.

If you're meeting their expectations it's none of their business in my opinion.


Don't know what to tell you other than "Sorry, but this isn't how contracts work".

But hey -- you're quite welcome to believe otherwise, of course -- and to throw yourself against the wheels of the legal system on the basis of your "opinion" of how they ought to work, if you like. It's a free country, after all.


They work based on what someone is prepared to enforce and the laws of the country they try to enforce it in. Having it written and signed isn't some magic catch all.

I'm sure they can fire you but it seems to be "at will" employment in most of the US anyway.

In Ireland and Canada such a clause would likely fall under being "unreasonable" for low paid employees. Similar to how a "non-compete" is not worth the paper it's written on (excluding when direct financial compensation is paid. Eg gardening leave).


Its is about as misleading as saying "X% of them are not wearing a seatbelt" the helmet comparison is not fair here.

In every US state (as far as I can tell) you are required to wear a seatbelt while operating a car.

Similarly in nearly every US state you are also required to wear a PFD while operating a personal watercraft. Enforcement seems a lot more lax on this though.

The legal status of the requirement makes this a valid comparison though it is implicit. This isn't an extra safety device. Though like helmets on motorbikes it is still one an individual may choose to forgo.

https://www.boatsafe.com/pfd-requirements-state-boating-regu...


If you want to go further back in time you can check out IBM DOORS. Though it does have some great features you see shoehorned into Jira these days.


The EU also has charge backs as well. I would have assumed all credit cards would have this as a feature.


I can very much relate to this but also have very little sympathy here.

I have a special character in my name, an apostrophe, and it causes trouble regularly online and with tooling. A number of years ago I decided just to never use it when it came to anything to do with technical work be it email, logins or usernames.

Unicode characters are a pain to deal with and I have suffered from it first hand trying to handle it. At the end of the day it is much easier just to not use the special characters and move on with your life rather then be battling the constant frustration.

I'm sure these tools have lots of issues opening and you would be surprised at the amount of time, effort and testing it would be required to provide fully Unicode support. Most people would see it as a very small positive and not worth the effort. I find it hard to disagree.


My legal last name is "Sirén". When I was younger, I almost always used "Siren", because it was easier to type. Then, ~15 years ago, I started noticing that American websites sometimes rejected it, because they considered it inappropriate. Sometimes "Sirén" would work, sometimes it worked but caused minor annoyances, and sometimes it would not work for technical reasons.

Both versions work most of the time these days, but I still run into trouble once in a while no matter which name I use.


Why would Siren be an inappropriate name?


Someone who I know has the last name ‘Island’ and was unable to sign up for Facebook forever because they thought it was a fake last name.

Maybe ‘Siren’ is similar. It’s a pre-existing word that perhaps flags some sort of weird edge case.


My best guess is the Sirens of greek myth, who are often (incorrectly) depicted as sexual temptresses. Bit of a stretch, though.


Totally agree with the sentiment. It has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years. Very frustrating to have your name blacklisted by that. It does seem most system have a very US focused design.

I still find it funny that even in my home country you can't use a lot of local special characters in names. Also most airlines won't accept it so technically I'm not giving them my true name!


I can relate, mine is O'Rourke and even in 2021 I get:

- websites telling me I have an invalid name

- post addressed to O'Rourke, O\\\Rourke, O&Rourke

- "my account" pages say "Welcome, Mr O\Rourke"


The best one I have every seen is O\apostropheRourke for a car rental in France. I have no idea how they thought that was a good idea!


I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to put a non ASCII character in their username. I'd never do that.


I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to not allow non ASCII alphanumerics in a username.

Unicode has been a thing since 1988. Names have included non a-z characters since forever.


Well in this case they were explicitly allowed it just caused problems down the line when other system attempted to consume them.

String come up again and again as a hard issue to deal with especially once your start looking at Unicode. I think it would be very reasonable to assume only ASCII works and even then it doesn't always work!


Unicode really wasn't practical at all back then. Unless your entire system end-to-end was built internally, you'd have to interact with some non-unicode software. There was also no agreement on a common UTF-8 encoding, and other unicode encodings were all broken anyway.

Names have been spoken and hand-written since forever yet somehow computers aren't good at that so we all tolerate converting them to printed-looking text. Nobody cares, it doesn't matter.


ASCII only is not appropriate in some locales, as the keyboards don't have a-z. This is why in Thailand people tend to use their mobile phone number as their password, because it can be typed on all the common keyboard layouts they will encounter.

Also, with Windows 10 users will often not even choose their username. It gets generated from their given name + surname (which is a whole different issue for people without one or t'other).


There's nothing special about a username vs any other string. If there is, that is a problem.


Since identifiers like usernames are seen by people they are susceptible to homograph attack and _do_ deserve to be treated a bit more carefully. Also you probably dont want usernames like ń̸̡͍̲̲̫̰̦̔͛̋̉͊̔̈̈̈́̀͑͘i̶̜̔̐̅̔̑̈̕͝͝g̶̢̭̮̲͕͉͔͙̳̥͖̉̏̇̎̊̈́̊̆̃̎̑͆̿͠ͅh̶̡̛̪͔̯̯͈̼̿͊̂̍͐͒͐͐̆̽͛̄̽͝t̸̛͔̮̆͊̋́̑̓̅̀̆͋̕ͅf̸̤̗̺̣̤̝̟̱͎̦̀͒̽̓̋̏͌͋̇͛ͅḷ̶̭̓̿́y̵͍̦̫̫̠͆͛͋̓͑͑͋̔͑́̔̽̚̚


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