HN user
I like this “scaling” thought experiment technique very much in a variety of problems I face. It often makes things clearer to think in those terms.
However, I think the 100, 1k, 100M approach might have drawbacks to finding the _best_ solution because the final iteration carries forward assumptions from the previous iterations. In CS terms, we may arrive at a local maximum this way, instead of the global max.
Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky
Awesome to see more and more folks putting their energy into, well, energy.
Have you considered how much good individuals can do by making better choices for the environment versus how much good we can do as a society by implementing things like a carbon tax? Many (most?) of the barriers to dealing with anthropogenic climate change can only be overcome with sufficient political will. It might be better long-term to urge people to vote for the "right" policies than to fall into the trap that individuals can fix the world's climate through lifestyle changes alone.
Bill Gates outlines the problem here: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
Learned a lot, hopefully Martin's curiosity leads him to follow through with the same codebase refactored in a functional style.