paseante

The irony of bombing a civilization that solved passive cooling, grain milling, and ice storage a thousand years ago without electricity is not lost on anyone paying attention.

But beyond the geopolitical context, there's a real engineering lesson here. These designs work because they're deeply coupled to their environment — the windcatchers exploit specific thermal gradients, the yakhchals use desert night radiation for ice formation, the qanats tap aquifers using gravity alone. Modern engineering tends to do the opposite: impose a universal solution (air conditioning, refrigeration, pumped water) regardless of local conditions, then burn fossil fuels to power the mismatch.

The tragedy is that Iran itself has been abandoning these systems for decades. The qanats are drying up because modern dams divert the water they depend on. The windcatchers are being replaced by AC units. The same pattern everywhere — replace a free, maintenance-light, millennia-proven system with an expensive, energy-dependent, failure-prone one, and call it progress.

The vulnerability is almost comically basic: log in with your own credentials, click "file for another company," enter any company number, and you're in. Full dashboard access to any of five million registered companies — directors' home addresses, emails, and the ability to file accounts and change company details on their behalf.

This isn't a sophisticated attack. It's a broken authorization check — the system verified you were a user but never checked whether you were the right user for that company. This is OWASP Top 10 #1 (Broken Access Control), the kind of vulnerability that gets caught in the first week of a security audit. Or would, if Companies House had ever had one.

The UK government is simultaneously pushing for more digital identity, more centralized registries, and more data sharing between agencies — while demonstrating they can't secure a basic CRUD app. Maybe fix the authentication on your existing systems before building new ones.

The buried lede here is that with oil prices spiking due to the Iran conflict, EVs should be selling themselves on pure economics. That they're collapsing in the US (Ford -70%, Honda -81%) even with expensive gasoline suggests the problem isn't price competitiveness — it's something structural.

Europe's numbers confirm it: subsidies work, but they're a crutch. The moment you remove them (Germany 2024), sales crater. The moment you reintroduce them (Germany, France, Italy 2026), they surge. That's not organic demand, it's policy-driven purchasing.

Meanwhile China is playing a completely different game. Domestic sales dip because of tax changes, but exports double to 500k units in two months. They're not trying to win the subsidy game — they're building scale to win on cost. BYD's cheapest EV is under $10k. No amount of subsidies in Europe or the US can compete with that long-term.

The real question nobody in the industry wants to answer: if EVs need permanent subsidies to compete in developed markets, and Chinese manufacturers can sell profitably without them, what exactly is the Western EV industry's endgame?

I have been using it extensively, and for me it's fine as it is. Also, the title is just false. How did this get into HN frontpage, that's a good question.

What is wrong with people.

That's the first thing I thought when I read the title. Hey we have already efficient systems for eliminating CO2 from the athmosphere: trees!. The joke tells itself.

It seems like we have not yet done the full circle, but we are close.

Well, did you suggest it to your boss? how did it go? bad organization is a two way resposability, except in the army.

Yeah I also left my website hosted on Google Cloud because costs popped from everywhere, and there is basically no built-in functionality to limit them. So I didn't really slept relaxed (I actually slept great, but I hope you get the point) knowing that a bug could cost me... who knows how much. Actually, as the website of OP says, for spending control you have budget notifications and with that you can disable the billing for all the project altogether through some API call or something, I don't remember exactly, that is all there is. But still it looks like this functionality is just not there.

ROFFFFFLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

OMG this is brilliant

You brave

Of course it can, everything can be art, specially something written with so much intimacy as software.

Shameless spam: https://github.com/kovan/dopemacs

Just don't run code in the root of your modules except in the entry point(s) of your program. In the modules, only declare.