It still makes me do mental arithmetic when someone gives post 2000 as a birthdate. Shit, my nephew was born post 2010 and he’s twelve which is weird because 2010 was like, three years ago.
I bet peaches are expensive in that area too, because there are no peach trees.
Concrete costs about $160 USD per cubic meter both in the USA and in Zaire (first African country I cound find a price), that works out to $4 USD a 35 kg bag, but in this case it's mixed and ready to pour.
If concrete factories were more common there there, I'm sure the price would be comparable for a material that is easier to work with, requires far less labor, etc etc. But they don't, and their traditional techniques work well for the area they're in. The moral to this story is, use what's local and does the job, and I feel like the only thing I got out of the video is some cool visuals of dudes building with bricks.
Of course, clay has a lot of benefits over concrete. It's lighter, insulates better, they can dig it out of the ground!
> The moral to this story is, use what's local and does the job
The content of the video is specifically directed at people of the developing world:
> this is the catastrophic reality I say in developing countries we have to go back to using natural building materials. historically we have a very rich examples of vernacular architecture that still stands we have to go back to our
traditions to learn from but in the same time keeping up with the immense
scientific progress so that a person from the 21st century can enjoy modern
life commodities examples from South of France and Germany
I guess titles for any documentary are going to be at least a bit intriguing, which could be the same as clickbait? But the full YouTube video title does specify it's talking about/to Africa:
"i'd rather build my house with my own earth than go into debt, Green Architecture, Africa"
I think a bag of cement would go a very long way for making mortar for a rock wall. Why make bricks when you can just use rocks and stick them together with a little bit of cement.
Bricks were made for uniformity so you could have it as a known quantity and spit them out of an assembly line. If you're making bricks, you've already lost this game.
The video at 6:11 briefly touches on making mortar and stone construction (along with visuals):
> binding material or mortar should be of the same constituency as the brick
or stone white gypsum and sand mortar go well with sandstone mortar made of lime
clay and sand is suitable for our newly developed mud bricks
Very favorably. Think of how big a bag of cement is. Using a timber mold like the one used in the video you can leave 100s (if not 1000s) of bricks to dry in one day. You need some materials like clay soil, straw and sand, some which might be sourced on-site. It might take a day or two in hot sun for the bricks to dry, but this can be done in large batches with enough space. They also can be fired in a kiln for extra strength, but that would forgo some CO2 benefits.
a lot of that would be transport costs. So unless there are to produce the brick locally (and w/o a kiln - which would require something to burn), they are to experience similar issue with costs of the bricks.
In the video they are building the bricks on-site. I've done this before. And also built a kiln on-site with mud bricks (with a small team), though it takes a good design to get it to the high temperature required. Rammed earth is another natural building alternative where a formwork is built in-situ, infilled, and tamped down, once again with on-site materials. And from what I've seen it's absurdly strong, and can be polished such that it reflects like marble.
You need a temperature of about 1000°C to fire bricks, but more is better to get the moisture out. From cursory googling around it seems that a solar kiln wouldn't cut it, unless perhaps a very large solar collector was used... which upon further cursory googling yielded this:
this is exactly what I want from the Types as Comments proposal[0] as I think it's the only way that types can feasibly become part of the language. It's hard to imagine how all of the concepts TS introduces via special syntax can be covered otherwise.
That proposal aims to allow type annotations as part of JS, but to do that the parser needs to know when a type annotation starts (easy) and ends (hard), the only realistic ways that can be done at the moment is explicitly supporting all of the syntax TS introduces (which is bad for other type checkers) or restricting to a limited subset which would mean a lot of what TS supports would not be allowed, negating the usefulness of the proposal.
What I'm saying is that if instead we said that all type annotations must follow existing JS grammar rules, with perhaps a couple of small additions, then we'd be able to support all sorts of complex type annotations in JS directly, using existing syntax. This would mean that TS's grammar would end up changing a bit, but that's a small price to pay for ongoing interoperability.
For example, instead of
type UserProperties = keyof typeof User;
which is tied to TS's arbitrary syntax, and not supported in Flow, use
That is a great idea. It also crystalizes the syntax so organisations other than MS can invest in building tooling as the target wont be as fast moving.
users tend to be quite good at flagging most highly political stories, so they disappear off the front page pretty quickly but can still be found by those who really want to engage. The status quo is good imo
Certain high profile stories get flag protection, which seems controversial to me, especially when used silently and only admitted to after the fact. I can't remember the specific one but it was one in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. It ranked highly despite the flags it was getting, according to dang.
Sure, we sometimes turn off user flags when the article contains significant new information and the topic seems intellectually interesting.
Most of what we do is "done silently and only admitted to after the fact". HN is a curated/moderated site; it always has been. We don't publish a moderation log but it's always possible to get an answer to a question—you just have to ask.
I welcome the curation and moderating of this site! I'm more imagining that those stories got posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dang, with some time delay, so years from now, amateur historians can see what articles were deemed noteworthy in such a fashion.
On top of that, it's easy to click the "hide" link under a story title, and that leaves more room on the front page for stories I might actually want to read, without having to dig deep into successive pages of stories.
