Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
Hi Paul - I'm a big fan of Quilt from Vancouver Island.
It seems to me that you're helping to close the loop on some of the quality concerns that the parent commenter has. Inappropriate sizing/installation and poor product selection seem like common issues from HVAC installers that aren't particularly well versed on heat pumps.
Wishing you continued success, and that hopefully it'll be available in Canada at some point! And also I remember you from the Scala meetup in Vancouver :)
Also sorry I missed this, not only are we in Canada, we just signed our first partner on Vancouver Island – in Victoria, Pacific Heat Pumps: https://www.pacificheatpumps.ca/
We'll have a partner in Nanaimo very soon as well.
We account for duct losses at Electric Air when sizing. It’s baked into industry standard Manual J sizing calculators and other methods. ManJ isn’t perfect find for this purpose.
In this case, contractor should have advised the heat pump would not keep up and recommended a different solution.
When we had our ducted heat pump installed, we also had the ducts in the attic covered with extra insulation, as well as spray foam at the top of the foundation to seal that completely. This all really helped.
The latter was a surprising (to me) source of heat leakage. As part of the whole effort we had the house examined in detail for heat and air leakage, including using IR imaging and one of those things with a fan that replaces an exterior door to change the internal pressure to find/quantify air leaks.
That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.
I'm no expert but the difference in the real world is more than that (though am doubtful about 3x the price) . The delta-T between heating and cooling is significantly greater in most places so you need a bigger system. You also need things like the ability to de-ice.
Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.
The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.
Hey Paul! Good to see ya on here. I'm in a Facebook group of small HVAC contractors, and recently there was a conversation about who is installing heat pumps vs traditional ACs and furnaces. I was thrilled to see that most were saying that they are moving a lot of their business toward heat pumps. Of course, there were a few that were stuck in their ways and were "gas or die" type people, but it's exciting to see the ship slowly starting to turn. There are more and more heat pump forward contractors coming online every day, and it's great that we can team up with folks like you pushing the hardware forward. There is so much work to deploy these systems, and winning is going to look like all of us working together!
Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spending as children age through different phases are quite predictable and the spending is huge and touches almost every aspect of the person's life.
The article is a mess, mixing everything up in a single issue, without saying anything about scale or frequency of them happening:
- Targeted advertising.
- Job prospects and workplace monitoring.
- Insurance discrimination.
- Abortion-related issues.
- Cyberstalking.
Targeted advertising is weird thing, but I believe it's not the particularly important issue here. At least I fail to see the severity of seeing more ads for cosmetics (or sweets or home loans or whatever children stuff) correlated with one's hormonal cycle. I'm not saying it's certainly not an issue (or is an issue), but I don't think it's particularly high on most people list of ethical questions to ponder about. Could be considered benign, could be mildly unethical, but most likely not a huge deal. The way I understand it, much worse problems are in the rest of the list.
It seems that - according to the research linked by the article - some people seem to try to step around the legal barriers on discrimination. While those folks can't (legally) directly discriminate on pregnancy status, they use statistical models to discriminate on a probability of such status, based on the data they can currently buy from app developers. Or maybe not the models but a self-reported goal of becoming pregnant - as it's not a pregnancy per se, so I guess they consider it' s a fair game until a lawmaker or a court says otherwise.
Plus there's also an issue, that some governments have different ideas on personhood, and try to equate abortions (and even miscarriages) with homicide, then try to detect "crime" based on this data, is certainly a major concern.
And there's also something about cyberstalking. I can't say I entirely get it, but a distressed mind can do really weird shit.
Summarized:
1. Menstrual cycle data is sold publicly and is not currently considered a PHI.
2. Some people use this data in ways other people could consider unethical.
3. The article doesn't mention how much of it is arguably harmless or less harmful (such as targeting ads based on predicted hormonal changes) and how much of it is severe abuse. It merely mentions the potential of such abuse, but I haven't found anything about its scale.
I could be, of course, wrong about it all. This is just my current understanding of it after reading for a bit. (My initial understanding was much less than this, like GP I just wondered "there are millions of menstruating people, how is data when they have their periods could be possibly so much valuable to be compared to a gold mine?" as IIRC individual demographic and behavioral data is generally of a very limited value.)
This is true in mid and late career, but not early. Lots of mathematically and engineering minded college students consider both CS and mech/aerospace as majors. Of course career prospects are a major influence.
Also fwiw my wife left a 10 year aerospace career, moving from NASA to Google, largely for comp reasons. She was a structural aerospace engineer, now she’s a data scientist.
Nice work! The most surprising part for me was that your websites says you are 20 years old – so I gotta ask, what was the motivation?
I'm 39, born in 1983, so I have serious nostalgia around Windows 95. I was 12 when it came out, my parents bought a Dell when it was new and those years were very formative for me. I assumed that nostalgia would be the only driver to do this... But you weren't born until ~8 years after it was released. I'm genuinely curious (and impressed!)
Can't speak for them, but I'm 25 and have a massive amount of nostalgia for windows 2000, for the weird reason that the first computer I ever got free-reign over was a give-away machine from the IT department from my mother's job at the time. Maybe around 2007-8? I'd have to bet it's something like that for GP too!
+1, came here to ask this same question. Interestingly, even though I started with DOS and Windows 3.1, I have no nostalgia whatsoever for the latter. I often very much miss the simplicity of DOS and still enjoy the aesthetics of DOS programs, but not so with Win 3.1.
Looking back, Win95-2000 was indeed an excellent UI. Looks as though ReactOS has recently moved away from having that look as its default, though: https://reactos.org/gallery/
Well, for some context, I had a website prior to this that was pretty bare-bones - the whole thing was basically just a terminal prompt. Realized pretty quickly that was a terrible idea for mobile & general UX, so I wanted to stick with something that still felt ... retro, and that integrated well with the web stack (React/Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Vercel) that I've been using at work. I'm also a huge retro hardware enthusiast, so finding this library checked every box.
Also some nostalgia from that time! My dad was an early adopter of technology (as part of his work - he was head of R&D for a large corporation), so he'd bring home all sorts of cool computers that would be handed down to me. First laptop I ever remember using (when I was 5 or so?) was a ThinkPad (before Lenovo ruined the brand) running Windows XP. I was raised fending for myself in SMF / phpBB forums & IRC chatrooms, so I still hold an appreciation for the times pre-iPhone :P
BTW, it is quite enjoyable how the linked Wikipedia article illustrates the evolution of BSOD into the polished, polite and careful error screen of current Windows. "We're always getting everything ready for you" vs "Dude, your data is surely gone; maybe get a different job? Error code for your brain: BFF9B3D4".
I still prefer the brutality, though. Like a bucket of cold water.
I thought that was odd, since I’m much younger and they were formative for me too. Then I realized I’m 36 xD
Anyway, I think it’s probably something like how the brutalist architecture was all built before I was born, but it’s still something I can appreciate now.
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The anti-Google frothing here has gotten so extreme it's crossed into comedy. Maybe instead of assuming incompetence and malevolence you should consider how hard it is to do this perfectly.
You don't have to like them, but the fact is the there are many many smart and competent people working on these systems trying to do the best for all users of Gmail and Google Accounts. Every day there are hundreds of very bad people around the world trying to gain access to Gmail accounts to do very bad things using that access. All the worst parts of humanity have found their way to leverage it. Balancing security and user-friendliness is one of the hardest problems in tech and it's impossible to do perfectly.
It seems from this thread that the OP did regain access and it didn't take that long.
Edit: I worked at Google for a few years, including on Gmail, and know that the people there really do care about all these things. But I left in the summer, no longer their employee.
if this happened to you I'm sure you wouldn't be thinking "gee they really are just trying their hardest let me cut them some slack". you maybe be right but that doesn't solve anyone's problems like this one
You're at the wrong company. I've worked at a startup, at Twitter, and at Google and each time there was notable "raising of the bar" in the talent I was around. I know there's a lot of Google hate on HN, and it's such a big company it is true not every team is mind blowing, but... I've been there 5 years and I still have serious imposter syndrome and am constantly amazed by my colleagues. I get to work with some crazy smart and productive people. The suggestion isn't "go work for Google" (but maybe you should) but find a group of people that push you and amaze you and make you want to improve. They definitely are out there.
I think it's totally this. In my experience there is variance in how effective the top percentile of developers are at their work, but not nearly as great as the variance at the bottom. There are MANY teams out there where even the best developer on the team could hardly answer any question on leetcode, and some where everyone on the team could rip through every question like a bag of chips. People who call themselves 10X developers have generally not spent much time on the latter kind of team.
Agreed. If there is a lack of engineering culture, it's easy to feel like you're the only one pushing the envelope, and feel like you're the most productive. I've definitely experienced that, working for large enterprise and/or financial companies.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)