In Finland, where you can easily get 30cm or more snow, all roofs are required to stand 100-300kg/m2 by law and most roofs are less than 30 degrees (e.g. 1:2 ratio).
A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.
30cm is just kinda cute. Try 600cm - you'll find a lot of A-frames up the mountain, where they routinely get >700cm of snow each year and generally no thaw until spring. Alaska, similarly, but there you'll find more domes and steep-roofed chalets, since it gets proper cold (-40) and insulation uber alles is the rule.
The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
Total accumulation matters in roof design, not single-day dumps. The mountain I'm referring to (and others like it) can get 100cm+ single day, but that's not super common.
Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.
Just looking at a map though, and Helsinki is on the south coast. It appears Finland extends right up to the Arctic circle. I would guess they get more snow up there? Any Finns like to chime in?
Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Rainier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
As I found out a while ago on HN when I complained an extension I used stopped working, ?sk=h_chr still works to get a sane FB view. No sponsored shit, no algorithmic suggestions, no posts people have reacted to, just chronological posts of people & pages you follow.
Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have control over what you don't get to see.
I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country) that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does anyone else hate immigrants??" posts).
Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
The feeling have is that we don't browse the internet in the same way.
RSS for HN and other specific sites I want updates about. old.reddit/r/.../new pages. A third party app for YouTube to just view new things from people I subscribe to.
I definitely have fight harder and harder to, browse like it's 2006, avoid the Algoslop Train, but it is possible more places than you'd think.
What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.
> That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit,
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
What are your thoughts on lemmy, maybe the hobby can be extremely niche but you can even be the moderator yourself on a lemmy instance and I think that a federated reddit alternative would be nice too!
If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking about?
I was big on it during the reddit excursion. Eventually I figured out that because it’s so small, that many/most people read the equivalent of /r/all, where many, many posts would end up. So even your small niche community would get "genpop" users. That’s what made me return to reddit instead and delete my instance (that, and the politics of the creators infesting some major instances).
The only halfway sane community I found was beehaw.org, which defederated aggressively, but that came with being very small, and I always cared most about the discussion over the links themselves. So eventually I left that as well.
ETA: I would probably summarize it that Lemmy is (or was, been a while now) better than big subreddits, but worse for small niche communities which imo are by far the best part of reddit, and the only part I care about.
The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't, there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).
I completely understand your comment and found the reference to eternal september fascinating and how it happened 35 years ago and people were talking about internet being too crowded. thanks for reference, learnt something new.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
> I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community
HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly its subject matter repels popular interest and especially youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly the hard rule against political stories helps). And as the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-able and phone-centric.
But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.
>I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho.
Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just can't be artificially created.
>Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are you even aware that many of these websites didn't even require an account to post? That was only if you wanted your name attached to some comment that was really clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet itself... making for conversations about anything and everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or have some agenda. If they could even imagine that, then it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the software/website itself were bad, eventually it would be improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior, there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia connections or Illuminati endorsements.
What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward ranking content rather than displaying it chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media platform. Just a question of time.
When I used 4chan the lack of voting made engaging with the actual substance of a post much easier. This was something observed by many other posters I talked to. This is going to sound wishy-washy, but my theory is that the brain is so attuned to socially trying to figure out the in-group or who is in the wrong that putting a number that signals social agreement on a statement will immediately stimulate the more primal social pathways in your brain before you can even think.
Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
In the first decade of the 2000s my only "social" platforms were traditional (chronological) forums and the average level of discussion and effort to contribute was way higher than what I usually see now on social media.
Yeah I used to enjoy forum discussions. Reddit is agree or stfu. It got worse a few years ago (probably longer than that) with a new rule change and something about chibese ownership?
It depends on lot on the sub and how their moderators police the community, but yeah, I've seen lots of that.
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
> All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
Yes, but HN still has a strong culture of considering both sides, excellent moderation, and some measures to help nudge people in the right direction. For example, right now I can only upvote your comment. I am not given an option to downvote it. That's a good thing!
Ah, no, the HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs, which is a thing that needs to be acknowledged. "Considering both sides" is not something I've ever seen as common practice in any organic online community I've been a part of, full stop.
HN's redeeming quality over much of the rest of the web is that low-effort hot-takes and aggressive content are actively discouraged by the mods and community. (These are things that other communities devolve towards, because they tend to drive engagement faster and easier than quality.)
> HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs
I don't know whether this is true, but I've seen exactly the same "complaint" from both sides of the USA political spectrum (USA politics are overrepresented for obvious reasons).
It's because you're new. Powerusers can downvote and even flag comments. A couple flags and the comment is (by default) invisible. Enough flagged comments and your comments are flagged by default. There's a reason this place is called orange reddit
But this is antithetical to what Reddit is. It's not like StackExchange websites, where the whole point is to create a database of canonical questions and answers. Reddit doesn't have some basic forum functionality by design.
I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously visited for good content have turned into their own little echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.
There are cases where I would start the coding process by copy-pasting existing code (e.g. test suites, new screens in the UI) and this is where LLMs work especially well and produce code that is majority of the time production-ready as-is.
A common prompt I use is approximately ”Write tests for file X, look at Y on how to setup mocks.”
This is probably not ”de novo” and in terms of writing is maybe closer to something like updating a case study powerpoint with the current customer’s data.
Government pension funds are a part of it, but it’s a combination of many things, like:
- The US has been a single market for a much longer time than the EU, and the EU still is not a single market, primarily due to language barriers (Germany, France, and Italy are large enough markets to have their own localized, but slightly worse SaaS options)
- European societies are more arranged around the common good and have lower income differences between people and super-wealthy individuals by design. The US is built around being the place where talented people can make the most money out of their skills, which results in many people worldwide choosing it as the place to go to, as the talent market is a global one.
- European values tend to value making as much money as possible or competing and being the winner less, which results in people grinding less and being happy when they become rich enough to focus on other things.
Yes on the single market being a huge issue, but the other "cultural" differences are total BS, and just modern media narratives.
Western Europe and the US had essentially the same level of government safety nets (and government spending and economic growth) from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Who do you think started all of the European industrial giants that are still globally competitive today? Europe had no problem competing in the industrial revolution, if these were actually European values there would be no competitive European industry like there is no competitive European tech. It's only the digital revolution that Europe has struggled with.
I feel the main issue was that the US historically was the place to go if you want to study or work with the "best" tech minds so talent flocked there. During the industrial revolution you couldn't so easily just pack up and move across the world.
Even now where I don't think that holds true so much (there are small pools of talent elsewhere, e.g. Stockholm is hot right now), a good senior engineer in Europe may be able to get €100k, and you are looking at 2 or 3 times in the US, so it's still attractive to relocate.
Cultural differences (mainly language barriers) made it hard for somewhere like that to evolve in Europe. Yes everyone in tech speaks English, but if you move to say Poland and want to rent an apartment or see a doctor, you would have had a hard time without at least a basic understanding of Polish. It's completely different from someone moving from Texas to SFO.
Ironically all the immigration of Russian speakers over the last few years has actually helped embrace English in these countries, as for nationalistic reasons they don't want to embrace Russian.
In the 2000s and early 2010s London was the tech hub of Europe (English speaking, many high ranking universities in the vicinity), but Brexit f***d that up.
Claude Code has worked well for me. It is easy to point it to the relevant parts of the codebase and see what it decides to read itself so you provide missing piece of code when necessary.
Most startups will use funds like in addition to VC funding. It allows you to increase your runway so you’re better positioned for your next funding round.
Edit: imo, just another owner, a yawn for most employees/contractors. Part of the reason for the spin, combined with the need to placate the new owner.
A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.
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