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Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

jewjewjew.com

181–190 of 233 posts

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#182
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, is there a usage of the word 'kosher' that isn't safe at work? Are you worried that they may think you're Jewish and discriminate against you? p.s. You may know this, but from the religious POV, you are either Jewish or not, there's no 1/8th Jewish. If your mother was Jewish, you are too, all the way up your family tree. Either that or if you converted. :)

Just to get pedantic, aren't we all relatives if you go back 1000+ years?

As I understand it, the strict definition of Jewish descent is purely. You have to go back around 100-200k years to reach the most recent common matrilineal ancestor, and I'm reasonably confident she was not Jewish.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did my degree in Photography and spent money I don't care to sum up at that store both online and in person the few times I was in the City. I always found their stance to be one of integrity instead of self-righteousness. They are situated in a little enclave - see HN articles about the Eruv, etc. - and are quite genuine and not exclusive to their Jewishness, but simply have a community and a point of view. The no…

> The no-shabbat-order-processing feels less like "we don't make the machines make money for us" than it feels like "Look, you can shop online, but we're not gonna load it and ship it until we get back from our families." That interpretation doesn't make much sense to me. Unless there's a human actually validating each order individually right as you checkout, you could just have a note saying there won't be any ship…

As someone who works at a 24/7 retail company, I can say that if the orders stop flowing, somebody gets called to fix it (even if nobody's boxing it right then and there). B&H has it set up so that no outage will trigger a pager and I'm betting that if the site went down on Sabbath it would stay down.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#184
post #41

hmm, and here i was thinking that the Shabbat is to disconnect and unwind... you know get away from the constant notifications and such.

Ok. A serious question here: Can some HN Jews, enlighten me (a 100%-proof agnostic) on what they actually do on Shabbat? Are you allowed to use the internet? If something in your house breaks, are you not allowed to fix it? Do you just sit around gazing into space just in case something you do is classed as 'work'? I find the whole concept quite interesting.

For a different view from the rest of the replies: our family takes a more relaxed view of things. Shabbat is for food, family, and taking time off from the hustle and bustle. This may include things like:

* Scrabble and other board games

* Cycling and other outdoor activities

* Reading

* Gardening

* Picnicking with friends (though not so much nowadays)

We don't really subscribe to the very strict definition of "work", and I don't think the rest of our synagogue community does either. But phones, internet, and computing are largely discouraged.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#185

Obviously a joke/satire site. "This server is powered by 4 car batteries that are charged every Tuesday. This website does not use new electricity created during Shabbat." Shouldn't it have ran out of electricity by now? How many requests can a home server running on four car batteries serve?

Low-tech Magazine[1] runs off of a 168 W-h lead-acid battery and has pretty good uptime. An average sized car battery has ~600 W-h. Four of them is 2400 W-h. They might have enough power to run for a week between charges.

168 W/h gives you about 12 hours between charges.

2400 W-h / 168 W-h = about 14.28x the size of LTM's

12 hours * 14.28 = 7.14 days.

1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#186
post #67

> New search results are calculated on Tuesday of each week. Nothing new is created during Shabbat. You are served static cached data. I've been interested in the idea of having a user-facing website that generates static copies of its dynamic content on a set schedule. Do any of you have more examples of this? About this particular search engine, though, the search results I received from it either were not very rel…

Frozen-Flask freezes a dynamic Flask app into a static site. https://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/

Thanks! It looks like django-bakery also does something similar for Django: https://github.com/datadesk/django-bakery

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#187

Neat. This might not be satire though. To those wondering why it needs to be passively cooled: Jews and other folks that keep Torah do not kindle a flame on the Shabbat. For those who are very strict about keeping God's commandments (basically orthodox Jews), they avoid anything that would create a spark. This spark is like a very tiny, short lived flame. Any time physical electronic contacts join together (like when…

then every keystroke would be a spark, no?

I've often wondered if "spark" is only considered in the electromechanical sense. Driving a tesla might be ok, since it uses brushless motors that are electronically commutated and has no electromechanical switches or brushes to speak of.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#188

I don't get it: the potential user has to use some kind of computer/smartphone/non-kosher device to make use of this server. Not to mention all the network infrastructure in-between! Is there a rabbi here to enlighten us?

Not a rabbi, but I am Jewish. A specific segment of Jews (namely Ultra-Orthodox) have quite a complicated relationship with the internet. On one hand, that community has experienced the positives of this technology, but they also VERY much discuss the fears and downsides. So this site can be a seen as trying to wiggle into that tough space of getting use out of it, but in an "acceptable" way. Here's another example I…

Interestingly, all ISPs and phone companies in Israel are required to offer server-side filtered internet for all customers who request it, at no extra cost.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if I came across as apopleptic - I'm mostly not at all confident that most gentiles or secular Jews would readily identify it as satire - when I clicked on the link, I expected to see something real.

I'm hoping that it is something more warmer than satire, that the author is willingly embracing self aware absurdity. The whole thing, from the choice of domain name jewjewjew.com, with the ridiculous triple repetition, to me suggests a person with a wonderful and kind sense of humour. If that's not what this is, then it's something so strange I don't think I'm going to get my head around it.

The hacker community has a tradition of pet projects that take an arbitrary requirement to the logical extreme just to see what's possible.

I don't really see this as any different from the people trying to browse the web from a Commodore 64, or implement a web server entirely in Bash.

Re: Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server

#190
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Sabbath observing Jews, “work” is defined as a certain set of 39 (?) activities that are defined in the bible and relating to building the “Mishkan”. Generations of Talmudic rabbis then added new interpretations and requirements on these rules to adapt for new technology. eg, the prohibition against using electricity is because it relates to igniting a spark, which is one of the 39 prohibited activities (Or “mala…

FTFYriday night: synagogue (for the men) then big ceremonious dinner (that the women have been cooking)

There's no cooking allowed on the Sabbath, and women can and frequently do go to synagogue with the men. (But if they stayed home, they were probably setting the table while the men were in the synagogue.)
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