In the Netherlands around 30% of people cycle to their work. [1]
In Belgium around 32% cycle to their work. [2]
I would think that is a significant amount no?
I cycle to my work every day. It is around 9 KM and takes me around 20 minutes. For rain you have a rain suite, for winter you have a jacket. The amount of times I took the car in rainy Belgium is 4 times in 2023 because of storm conditions.
As more and more people are starting to see the hassle free transportation method of cycling, they also start taking the bike and infrastructure keeps improving.
People are sticking to Chrome and clones as they got an advertising budget that is higher than the whole Mozilla foundation cash flow and are installed as default browser on the OS.
Combine that with aggressive approaches that try to persuade users from switching when trying to change the default browser on an OS.
The features most people on HN are complaining about are very gimmicky and not even widely used in the developer market.
The current trend in Belgium is to build houses like cubes and drap a variation of white plaster on it [1]. While this looks great the first couple of years, the outside gets dirty and not a lot of people pay for it to get cleaned/repainted.
The houses are also always... the same. The variations in it are where the rectangle windows are and the length / width / height. But that is it.
I predict that in 20-30 years these houses will be seen as one of the ugly architectural trends of my time.
While houses that were built a century or even more ago (and that still stand) are lush with these ornaments and still retain a sort of beauty. [2]
I've lived in one of these type of houses and while they have some impracticalities because they have been built in a different century the outside stays a thing of beauty and you could guide people to your house purely because of how it looks.
Currently my wife and I are looking to build a new house and one of the requirements that we have for our architect is to build it with small details on the outside and a bit more classical than the current trend is.
I feel we should bring back Georgian architecture [1]: on the one hand it is quite plain and so it fits well with modern sensibilities (and modern budgets that don't allow for a lot of faff, and the lack of skilled labor), but because of its strong emphasis on symmetry and a modest amount of ornament on doors, windows and railings, it looks vastly better than the lime rendered boxes of today. It also looks great with flat roofs, and flat roofs are here to stay -- why bother with nice roof tiles when you have to cover them with solar panels anyway.
I live in a city that has a bunch of it; in practice, it's incredibly impractical, and the few modern attempts to imitate it while providing an actually usable building tend to end up looking absurd.
https://www.pjhegarty.ie/projects/esb-head-office/ - Replacing a distinctly un-Georgian Brutalist thing which itself replaced a row of Georgian houses back in the day. Again, looks silly, but if they'd played it completely straight they'd be left with a pretty impractical office building.
Not sure what's impractical about a four story building? Without lifts/elevators, four stories hits the sweet spot in terms of density vs accessibility.
Of course, if you consider any building older than 100 years to be "impractical", then maybe living in the historic centre of a city isn't for you? There are plenty of modern (and soulless) places to live in the more modern fringes of the city.
And I disagree - the new ESB headquarters on Fitzwilliam St doesn't look "silly" at all - it actually looks very well to my eye from the street. Unfortunately https://maps.app.goo.gl/NL2qtasuMNM89Nqg8 doesn't have enough detail to show it but certainly the materials and brickwork is of a high quality. It doesn't aim to be pastiche or fake as you call it, but it does respect the materials and elevation of the historic streetscape.
> Not sure what's impractical about a four story building?
Nothing impractical about a four story building as such. The (normally five story) Georgian terraces are normally very long and narrow, though. This makes them difficult to turn into practical housing; you're looking at either awkwardly long narrow rooms, or rooms without natural light, if you turn them into apartments (and as single unit housing they're far too big for practical purposes). They also make for awkward offices (I've worked in one, back in the day).
You could... maybe make wider faux-Georgian terraces, I suppose, but at that point you're getting into the weird-looking anyway.
At first glance, these look nice to me? Perhaps they look silly up close. I'm not sure what you mean by impractical though, I don't consider tall and narrow to be essential to the style, though many of the 18th and 19th century townhouses in the style surely were.
> I live in a city that has a bunch of it; in practice, it's incredibly impractical, and the few modern attempts to imitate it while providing an actually usable building tend to end up looking absurd.
Probably because a lot of folks don't understand the 'old' styles and how they work. Brent Hull specializes in restoring pre-WW2 buildings, and designing new ones that follow the design rules:
Why is a 4 storey house impractical? And the only thing that looks ridiculous to my eye is the top floor which, for some reason, abandons the classical look and slaps some hideous modern handrails and flashing on top.
It's 4 floors per family. An elevator or do a lot of stairs everyday. In both cases more time to move around than an equivalent 1 or 2 floors house. But if they do the stairs it keeps them fit.
My parents have a 3-floor townhouse and it's far, far more practical than the goofy sprawling "open floorplan" designs. Plus not having neighbors above/below you is a great tradeoff. I don't think this is as impractical as it would appear to someone not living in one (that's been my experience at least).
The floor space of an actual Dublin Georgian townhouse is frankly enormous - the houses seem narrow but they’re very deep. We’re talking 5000 square feet between the 4 floors in a country where the average house is 1000 square feet. And that’s in the densest part of a dense, old city.
These things weren’t built for mom, dad and 2.4 kids, but much larger families (6? 8 kids?) who were rich enough to have their own staff living alongside. Many were eventually subdivided into tenements and by the 20th century one street managed to fit 835 people between 15 houses.
There’s a reason well maintained Georgian houses sell for approaching €2 million euro. These new Georgian-style builds are targeting the very wealthy rather than trying to be practical city centre housing, in Ireland at least.
> There’s a reason well maintained Georgian houses sell for approaching €2 million euro.
Which is still a good bit less than you'd expect for the square footage (that would work out to 4-500eur/sqft, which would def. be on the low end for the areas they're most found in), reflecting the awkwardness of the layout.
That’s a problem with the square footage, not the number of stories. It is well within the realm of possibility to have a reasonably sized 3 or 4 story townhouse. It can even have Georgian design elements while being reasonably sized.
You can get a new home built in Georgian Revival style but it’s going to be expensive. Home builders rely on easy to source, mass produced, standard parts. In my experience the cost goes way up. For instance, a truss can’t be used for the roof and windows are custom, etc. and there’s going to be a lot of windows.
It’s why many homes today are built off existing models. But you see it in higher-end homes.
Now, of course the required parts could become mass produced if there were the demand. And I agree it’s a simpler and beautiful style. But you can’t put a flat roof on them.
I dunno, I'm not a stickler for details. For example, I know that windows with many small panes ("muntins") are not cost-effective today and partially defeat the benefits of double and triple glazing, and the alternatives (fake bars that are glued on or between the glass) look shockingly bad... but any kind of partition at all (casement, fixed pane + tilt-turn pane, etc.) already adds visual interest and does not look out of place, as e.g. is evident in this photo of Georgian architecture with windows that I'm guessing are not historically accurate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Baggot_S...
My home has muntins, and I have to say they are incredibly convenient. If a ball goes through a window or something, it's extremely easy to replace; and very cheap. Highly recommend.
As for glazing... I'm not 100% sure. I've heard there are ways to get glass panes that are better insulated. My other guess is that, had muntins continued to be popular, the market would have found something. There's nothing inherently inefficient about them.
For example, one option a local window company gave to me was to simple add some plastic covering on the inside of the window. It would not reduce the outward appearance at all, but would provide some insulation. As it is, our house is quite efficient and we don't actually have any insulation. The way they used to build houses (not open floor plan, multiple stories, etc) actually make them more pleasant to live in, in my opinion. Our only issue was that, when adding AC, the original forced air venting leads to a noticeable temperature differential due to the lack of an intake on the second floor, but we'll be fixing this soon. Plus, ceiling fans have basically eliminated the worst of the problem.
Nowadays the window that was broken would just be replaced. Luckily they pop out easily!
For your old windows (I have many still, mainly in the front) I recommend ensuring you have good weather stripping and that you have storm windows installed. That helps a lot. Mine are double hung sashes though so the pulley boxes are massive leaks but nothing I can do about that.
I guess I could just seal the windows shut and put insulation in the pulley boxes but they are still functional even though we rarely open them.
I think some of the higher-end window grills (a "stuck on the outside muntin" for a short-hand description) look fine from any distance that they're typically seen.
Having a higher end window where the mutton/grill is dominated on both sides is best imo. It looks awful from the outside when it’s an interior stick-on as there’s no dimension and line you mentioned lack of shadow lines. You generally have to go to the higher end though, like a Marvin Ultimate. 30 of those on a house, installed, just set you back $60k+. But they look great.
I had windows like those. The glued cross shaped frame was not actually glued and it was on both sides. It looked beautiful but it was a nightmare to clean. Four small glasses instead of a large one. It was wood, single layer glass. I replaced them with something that reduced the heat flow.
I live in a British Georgian rendered building (think South Kensington London [1]).
I find render is classic and beautiful but yes they are an ongoing maintenance issue to regularly repaint every decade or so and once the render has become damaged, rerendering the whole thing is eye-wateringly expensive. The main challenge is the right materials and expertise (lime render and porous mineral paint) which is expensive so people flipping a house will just bodge it with cement render and waterproof paints that will barely last a decade before it cracks, traps water, causes damp and starts coming way from the wall.
(Note that exposed stone also weathers and requires replacement which can make render/paint maintenance look very cheap).
A key part of the longevity of render is the design of other features e.g. you need correct channelling of water so it doesn't pour from roofs/windows down the render causing stains. This requires true skill and subtle architectural features like drip grooves carved under overhanging coping stones and subtle curves in the render itself (bell cast beading I think?). I am maddened by hokey designs that e.g. add a section of wooden facade above render which grossly stains the render below within months. It's just so careless and predictable. Any staining is a design fault that past experts knew how to avoid. There shouldn't be any "sources of colour" above render.
One of the joys of render is that you can personalise it with your own colours [2] which will stain less easily than white (grey is quite trendy) or even go for full graphic design [3] (I can't recall if those specific buildings were rendered - we have a tradition of drawing stone lines onto render so that it resembles limestone construction).
Regarding [1], I cannot understand for the life of me how come people located in places where it rains comparatively a lot (which is the case of Belgium) choose that solution with flat roofs for their individual houses, it doesn't make any utilitarian sense, you're just inviting rain water into your house at one moment or another.
I think it makes perfect sense. Modern EPDM or fiber-reinforced bitumen roofs are very unlikely to leak before it's time to replace or renovate them after 25 years or so. They provide ample space for solar panels and for a heat pump, all out of sight. No need for gutters. They are easier to insulate. You don't end up with a bunch of barely usable attic space you don't need (even worse if we're talking about a hip roof instead of a gable roof.) It just takes a bit of effort to not make them look like a cheap cardboard box, whereas a house with a nice sloped roof has instant appeal.
Belgian houses are exceptionally ugly. Very badly proportioned. Belgium has the most beautiful cities in the world, but what that really means is that all the attractive areas predate the 30s. Once outside, it's a shockingly ugly country. Architects cannot seem to balance anything, weirdly positioned windows everywhere (e.g. https://www.a2o-architecten.be/work/vaartkom, this is so typical of all the dreck I saw going up there). Sad to see you use Leuven as an example. When I lived there some decade ago, all new buildings going up were unfathomably ugly. The old core was perfection though.
Kudos to Belgium to preserving its heritage so well, big thumbs down to being a black hole for architecture today.
I like traditional houses very much, but there are two things you to consider: cost and regulations.
When you pay a fortune for the land and building materials you can't really build something nice.
When you have to comply with a million regulations, costs go even higher if you want an individualized house. If you keep it blocky and without decorations you can keep it affordable.
You would never get permission to build the Parthenon because it's simply not energy efficient.
Personally I think you should be able to build your own house without regulations, but not to sell it (i.e. you have to demolish it to sell the land). It's the perfect compromise between safety and freedom.
I don't agree at all. The kinds of regulations that define how buildings are made are all pretty compatible with traditional building techniques. Obviously modern houses need to have insulation and air tightness, but that's not incompatible with block and timber construction used in old houses.
The cost of complying with regulations when building a house isn't even particularly high. It's stuff like "use x thickness of insulation" and "design it with a protected fire escape route". It doesn't cost much at the design stage to take those into account. The dominating cost is materials and labour.
What regulations stop people putting ornamentation on their house?
It is not just regulations.
It is because land + regulations are expensive, cutting costs is important. Now we also could count high interest rates.
So, building as cheap and fast as possible is important to stay afloat. Example: making house from prefabs is cheaper and faster comparing to building using bricks + pro brick laying technics (i.e. what you can call ornamentation).
Besides, we should also consider that while saying that ornamentation is good to have, it does not mean it would fit all the people.
Good idea is to have regulations limiting what exactly you can build in historical centers of european cities.
> I predict that in 20-30 years these houses will be seen as one of the ugly architectural trends of my time.
Isn't that always the case? I seem to recall that all architectural styles have been considered ugly 30-40 years after they were first in fashion. And then eventually they start to become appreciated.
History goes quite far back. The extremely rapid change of pace is quite recent. Architectural fast fashion if you will. Rather environmentally unfriendly i'd say since it allows for easy updating to modern specs that still almost never outmatches the carbon bomb that is the actual construction/materials.
It looks like everywhere modern architecture, that's the problem. There is no real culture behind it, only the insular culture of professional architects seeking out approval from other professional architects. There is no locality to it, no local materials or methods.
Christopher Alexander's dissertation, "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" lays out a very compelling sociological explanation of how this happens.
TLDR: People initially create things (like houses) to solve local problems, usually their own problems, with the materials and methods they have locally available. As the craft develops, its practitioners start to compete directly with each other and the craft becomes "self-conscious." This competition finds increasingly esoteric "dimensions" to compete on, at the expense of solving the real-world problems the craft initially set out to solve. So consider e.g. early designers of chairs. They were looking for good places to sit that looked nice in their homes. Now, if you want acclaim as a chair designer, you have to design the most garish, over-the-top, wildly uncomfortable "chair" (sculpture) that you can.
Yeah architecture in this country is real bottom of the barrel stuff, bar a few specific buildings (the new UTS and Central Park buildings in Sydney come to mind).
Our residential house design is even worse, they’re uniformay the most bland, cookie-cutter-McMansion-trash that’s built in a way that’s almost actively hostile to its environmental conditions.
I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].
Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].
Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?
In Europe heat-pump-dryers are the normal way dryers work and the clothes coming out of them are also crisp and dry. Are you sure there is nothing defective with your dryer?
No, there isn’t. Miele even has notes for its US models to make sure buyers understand they work differently. I just won’t run my dryer long enough to get them that crisp and dry; as I said we mostly hang dry. I can run the dryer half as long and they are 80-90% dry, then hang for the finish.
Gas-stoves are easier to scale that is mostly the reason why most restaurants still use them. 15 fires on full throttle is much easier to achieve than on induction purely of how our current electricity network has been built.
But for a normal household? It really doesn't matter. My father had his own restaurant and at home he used induction because it was much faster for one family dishes.
No, you did not get it from BMW themselves. What you did get from them is that they produce 65k EVs, not cars in general. They produce twice as many cars as Tesla.
Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing.
It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.
I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.
12 months notice is too short for big non-tech enterprises. They plan their infrastructure needs in 5-year terms. Changing to a new environment takes re-educating a lot of people, going through a lot of legal and audit meetings, finding enough manpower to do the transfer, putting things on hold purely for the migration,...
12 months is the time for the contracts to settle between these enterprises and cloud-vendors.
If your company is that big and unwieldy that a tiny chance of needing to do a migration in 12 months is unacceptable, you can stick to the key services which offer 36 months of notice. For all I know at that point you can negotiate your own guarantee if you're so big.
If you work at a company that can't do a cloud infra migration in 36 months, I don't have any good advice for you, but I doubt most commenters on here fall into that bucket. Frankly, I would expect companies that large to be in all the clouds so that you could negotiate them against each other, but I doubt that impacts many people here, and the chance of any of these worst case scenarios happening is vanishingly small.
This isn't a tiny change, if GCloud says "we quit in a year". That is a huge change. Applications using GCloud SDK for services suddenly need to be reworked and redrawn. That alone is a huge change for non-tech companies.
Some companies even need to check with the laws they reside in if the new cloud vendor can even be used.
Just work in any financial, medical, pharmaceutical, government-related... company and you'll understand that a year is nothing for these companies.
Made the same comment yesterday on another submission but it still fits this discussion.
I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.
I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.
The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.
Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.
I stopped following the news sometime in 2017 I think, it wasn’t really a conscious decision, I just felt annoyed or saddened by it.
A few years later I was talking to my dad and he was in a state, going on about current events and how bad things are so I told him I stopped following the news years ago and felt better for it.
About six months later he called me to tell me he also stopped after our call and realised he felt much better too.
A big part for me was that it was just a barrage of sad or scary topics which left me feeling helpless, mixed in with some celebrity antics which I didn’t care about.
I keep up with what’s going on in my industry, and science and technology through sites like this, newsletter subscriptions, podcasts, etc. But in general I’m mostly clueless to what is currently happening in the news.
It makes me feel somehow ignorant, but it works for me. If someone brings up a topic from the news I normally just say “Oh I hadn’t heard about that!” rather than explain I don’t follow the news.
He actually talks about this in his book, democracy already existed before newspapers became big (or even existed). People got informed through books, pamphlets, essays, debates and public gatherings. Now, some articles do inform the people more, one of the big examples is Watergate. But the difference in quality and research between the Watergate articles and the daily news is immense. Most political news-articles are nothing more than copy-pastes from what a politician sends to the writer and newspapers aren't the only medium where investigative journalism can exist. In my home-country a one-man journalist published some big scandals on his blog which showcased some unsavory corruption in one of our cities, all the big newspapers could only report what he already said, they had zero investigation themselves.
The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation?
Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.
I probably should have followed up on the sibling comment rather than this.
I think that following a Twitter or TicToc channel is getting much less information than from mass media. Most do even less follow up or question what the source politician says.
Yes books pamphlets discussions are better but social media in general is none of these it is worse than mass media. Yes there are some blogs that do more but that is rare but that is blogs where you write a thousand words which is not normal social media.
In Belgium around 32% cycle to their work. [2]
I would think that is a significant amount no?
I cycle to my work every day. It is around 9 KM and takes me around 20 minutes. For rain you have a rain suite, for winter you have a jacket. The amount of times I took the car in rainy Belgium is 4 times in 2023 because of storm conditions.
As more and more people are starting to see the hassle free transportation method of cycling, they also start taking the bike and infrastructure keeps improving.
[1] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
[2] https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2024/04/15/ongeveer-32-procent-...