amatecha's comments | Hacker News

Pretty boneheaded move. Yeah I'll download your app (???) so I can listen to critical weather information on my phone that can't even stay powered on an entire day without charging... Cool, guess I'll just take a wild guess as to how this extreme weather is going to proceed. The whole point of these services is their resilience and the fact you can depend on them. Some fragile-ass mobile phone shit is not a suitable replacement for that whatsoever. Totally inexcusable.

It's pretty good for backcountry hiking/camping (or offroading in general) where you are potentially hours away from any kind of cellular service. Some of these weather radio stations have (had?) pretty good coverage. A cheapo radio that can receive weather radio frequencies could last weeks on a single battery charge. It's great to know if my planned hike for the next day is possible or if we should make alternate plans, or if a giant storm is due later in the day, that kind of thing. Once you've been out for a day or two, all the forecasts you had ahead of time are obsolete and incorrect, particularly in the mountains.

Yeah, forecasts are definitely pretty worthless past day 2 or 3, and I can see how someone could find it useful... but part of the charm with camping to me is definitely the decision making process being based on "look at the sky" and not "ask the technology". Definitely a personal taste sort of thing.

Yeah, super disappointing. Not only do many of my amateur radio transceivers tune to the weather FM frequencies, I just picked up a cheap low-power receiver for the purpose of having something that can last a long time during extended power outages, if necessary -- with the idea of being able to keep up with local radio and weather radio during those times. I assumed Canada of all places will keep these kind of services going indefinitely, because they are pretty important when all else fails.

yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).

But we care about the kids. It's not about whether or not the kids are having a good time, but whether or not groggy people on their way to work can see them.

Would the better thing to do be to vary school hours by season? Add an hour in summer and remove an hour in winter?.

No school in summer.

When we start getting more sun, it’s fine in the morning even with the spring forward.

We go back to standard time in winter because otherwise it stays dark too long.

And all of this ignores the core fact that time zones are way more politically determined than geographically. And that’s a whole other problem

yeah! I've done some geocaching (or even just walking around exploring) while on my travels, and have very often encountered these "leave one, take one" type of free libraries along the way. It's really interesting to find different types of books depending on the area - the small town on an island of course has all these books on marine travel, sailing, that sort of stuff, for example. Nice way to get a little extra idea of the area and its culture, sometimes.

Some libraries require membership. Also some people have private libraries. Universities often have libraries which, at least, don’t offer all of their services to the general public.

I’d argue it is paid for by the students’ tuition, but money is fungible so I’m not sure how exactly we could nail that down.