Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.
It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.
My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.
You could get a small propane burner or a lot of people have propane grills (sometimes with burners) in their backyards. Gas burners and stoves aren't bad but expanding the gas network to new homes is a huge expense.
I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!
Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.
Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
Sadly one of those countries is the United States.
Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.
Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.
North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.
I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.
In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.
On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.
> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...
Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.
Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.
An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.
The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.
I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
There are models that include a battery to reduce the input power requirement. That's not quite the same as the question, but it answers it, you just need a big enough battery and they are fine.
Any licensed wireless networking gear is going to operate in very specific frequencies. The government requires it! If we were going for "the best" gear for avoiding detection you would have frequency hopping with jumps far enough apart that a listener has a harder time pinpointing a transmitter. Making repeaters roving makes it even harder for your adversary.
Private cells or wireless mesh networks with satellite links to avoid government controlled networks. The problem is for a robust network you have to be prepared with gear ahead of time.
I could see capturing cell towers and replacing the network link with satellite to restore some network without controlling physical wires.
The goal is to have comms even if the government turns off their networks. Mesh networks or private cell networks do that. Some desire to get information out of Iran. Others just want to check in on loved ones. Anything is better than nothing.
Running comms during war is dangerous but it has to be done. I think the people I have seen asking how to communicate when the government turns of networks understand the risks.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
A contractor manages bridge hardware so I am missing details. They set it up. I troubleshoot and use the data.
AIS is connected to a serial-to-ethernet converter. That allows me to get the AIS stream over TCP/IP. I wrote an application to consume AIS and do what they wanted with it.
The serial-to-ethernet converters are the magic ingredient. It allowed us to have tracking and telemetry regardless of terrestrial VHF stations in the area. The original setup also provided a feed from Transas but we stopped using it. We also use a private AIS VHF recorder as a backup source of AIS messages. We used that a lot more before Starlink due to terrestrial blockage of VSAT links. The backup source was a good compliment to the primary. They had the most infra in areas that were blocked most often.
Don't tell the current administration that there's something so un-American about the currency: they will insist on fixing it, and probably retire Jefferson as well.
Fun fact: While the US spent more than 3 cents for every penny minted and distributed, it spends about 14 cents for every nickel minted and distributed!
When they decided to stop minting pennies I think they should have gotten rid of nickels and (I know this will be controversial) quarters as well!
Keep dimes and ramp up production of half dollars. Then we can just drop the second decimal place and standardize pricing everything in 0.1 dollar increments.
The fact that quarters are still somewhat commonly used in machines (vending machines, parking meters, laundry) is probably the biggest practical obstacle.
This may be the most practical go-forward plan. The Euro's .20 coins are also attractive too. But you're correct that quarters, as the smallest common currency that you can plausibly buy something with just a couple of them, are just everywhere, from laundry to car washes, so the pain in retiring them would be widely felt.
What I've learned from the penny retirement is that people are deeply distrustful of simple high school level statistics! Millions of people have angrily seethed that somehow stores are or will be using the penny retirement to rob them, despite knowing that most transactions have an unknowable amount of different items, and sales tax, so attempting to manipulate prices to gain a statistical advantage out of rounding would be incredibly difficult and would yield a pitiful return. Let alone how the cash transaction share is declining every year.
We need to keep the physical dimensions and material properties of the quarter, but why not change the face value? Demote them to 20 cents, or even better, make them 50 cents because the real half dollar coin is obnoxiously huge and impractical.
What of the economic impact of doubling the value of all quarters? Eh, it'll probably be fine. We'll just write it off as an AI datacenter loan somehow
I have long believed that changing coin value upward would be the #1 way to get 100% of citizens on board with currency reform. Or at least buy them from citizens at above face value.
Unfortunately, I think that vending machines specifically would frustrate this scheme though, because you can bet that most operators of them would, rather than reprogramming the machines which would be expensive (especially given how many old machines must be out there without any manufacturer support available), just leave everything the same physically and double all their prices.
Do you mean in the zinc mining and Coinstar? Pennies have been a bizarre ritual for years, wherein the government made zinc worth less than its pre-minted value, distributed them to banks nationwide, banks in turn to stores, stores using them once to give meaningless amounts of money to customers, customers in turn immediately throwing them on the ground or at best eventually dumping them into a coinstar, and coinstar returned those to banks.
Nothing of value was going on there. I'd rather pay any zinc miners and coinstar drivers who have been displaced to play video games all day while still saving all those resources, fuel, and most of all, time.
I, for one, look forward to the new 5oz "Donald Trump Freedom Nickel". Probably resulting from a deal he did with the Big Trousers lobby groups to wear out coin pockets faster.
(I would have made a gag about a 7g replacement nickel, but you people have already used up the team "quarter" for different denomination. Although the idea of a new 40 cent coin called an "eight ball" amuses me...)
Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.
The most targeted book in america is Looking For Alaska. You and I have a very different understanding of what "sexually explicit material" means if you think that this book is erotica.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
Apparently I made my point poorly. Kama sutra was an example that I think everybody could agree shouldn't be in a children's library. My point was that everybody gets to decide what is in their children's library. Most of the people in that area probably agree. But, everybody can still go to any bookstore and find the same books. They are not banned in any way. As the OP said, without criteria on why a book is "banned" lists like this are pointless. A library or school district deciding they don't want a book doesn't make it banned. The problem is that people thousands of miles away think that those people far away are too restrictive or liberal in their book selections presented to children.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
Bigoted parents forcing librarians to remove books that they feel have educational merit because they offend the sensibilities of bigoted parents is bad.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
every parent that is “pro” book banning is a shitty parent, period. I am kind of glad this book banning has spread as it helped me weed out some people from my life. life is to short to spend around shitty parents. I can pretty much live with any flaw (I have 100’s) but being a shitty parent is not one I am willing to be around
Conversations like these are so immensely frustrating to have on Hacker News.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
The objective is a foothold in culture war stuff, largely around LGBT people but about other things too. The ultimate goal is to re-establish a culture where gay people are unable to be out in public, especially in places where there are children. This means no gay teachers. No gay characters in media. Websites with LGBT content being treated as pornographic and requiring age verification.
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
At this point it's extremely clear - objectively, by counting criminal convictions - which demographic is a real danger to kids, not just sexually but in many other ways.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
Not sure what your point is. 1984 is available at my middle school, high school and public libraries and every book store. Not available at elementary schools because it is generally above grade level.
The purpose of the ministry of truth was to redact and rewrite history. Shape peoples thoughts, their vocabulary and show them how good they have it compared to their primitive ancestors. (Those naked bare foot people who build all those megalithic structures, castles and cathedrals) History should of course have a carefully engineered list of banned books.
The work is never done, after removing the books with practical tutorials, blue prints and historical revisionism you always continue to have a candidate at the top of the list. The work that remains now are all fictional books that portray an uncomfortable reality.
After those are all gone the new reality will again have a most terrible book. The work is never done.
Obviously after 10-15 years of experience working as a developer AI will be a senior dev. Probably will get promoted to management with all that experience.
Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer.
I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible.
I'm also a fan of leadership without management. Those experienced engineers should absolutely be taking on leadership responsibilities - helping guide the organization, helping coach others, helping build better processes. But they shouldn't be stuck in management tasks like running 1-1s and looking after direct reports and spending a month every year on the annual review process.
This is a general problem that corporations have trouble with with: The struggle to separate leadership and people management. Why does the person who tells you what to do also need to be the same person who does your annual review, who also has to be the same person who leads the technical design of the project, approves your vacation, assists with your career development, and gives feedback or disciplinary correction when you mess up? Why do we always seem to bundle all these distinct roles together under "Manager"?
This is exactly where I find myself. I've been asked several times to take on management, but I have no interest in it. I got to be a principal after 18 years of experience by being good at engineering, not management. Like you said, I can and do help with leadership through mentorship, offering guidance and advice, giving presentations on technical topics, and leading technical projects.
Absolutely agree. Regardless, my org keeps trying to get me to take a management role after 15 years dev experience. I love my job and don't like managing people. You couldn't pay me enough to become a manager.
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