31–40 of 184 posts
It was good to see that Air conditioning has only improved the world and has no side-effects.
Unless you have lived in the tropical humid heat, you wont be able to relate to this. Moving to NYC recently and living without an AC or even a fan feels so glorious. I bet 10% of my brain was constantly fighting the heat back when I was in south of India.
Funny, I remember coming to NYC from Scandinavia thinking it was so humid and warm and impossible to get anything done during the summer months. Guess it really depends on what you are used to. Then, in the winter, the old NYC apartments were so dry and warm because of the central heat that typically couldn't be regulated from the radiators in the apartments. They just blasted on all winter and the only way to adjust…
During the summer, it was hot and humid. Unfortunately, centra AC wasn't a thing, and the wall units would only do so much. Now I live in LA and the weather is mostly perfect.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...
"What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading."
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Better have it too cold and people where extra clothing than have people sweating themselves. You can always put more clothes on, you can't take off your skin.
Decreasing the AC doesn't mean people will start sweating themselves. 75 - 78 F is perfect but most buildings for some reason turn their ACs all the way down to the 60s. For athletic centers, of course it makes sense. But in big open libraries, lecture halls, places with little activity in general, it's awful. It's especially bad for your health if you live in a hot region like southern California since your body has…
Like hell it is. I sweat like a pig at 78.
In places like Brazil were AC is everywhere but isolation and heating is limited, it gets really cold in the winter even if its only 15 degrees outside. In places like germany where home isolation and heating is generally very good, you really have to suffer in the summer because rarely any place apart from some offices have AC. Even more so, many don't like AC at home because it consumes a lot of power and can make…
We live in Berlin and the insulation and generally high ceilings make most apartments pretty cool even in the hotter summer days (which are rare and rarely much hotter than 30c). There are maybe 2-3 weeks per year when I wish we had air conditioning, at most.
Unless you have lived in the tropical humid heat, you wont be able to relate to this. Moving to NYC recently and living without an AC or even a fan feels so glorious. I bet 10% of my brain was constantly fighting the heat back when I was in south of India.
Every summer, I see a couple of posts on HN about some supposedly groundbreaking scheme to cool a building by a few degrees without using an traditional A/C. Usually it's a combination of ventilation and evaporation, resulting in somewhat cooler but much more humid air. I guess it might work in the Bay Area. But as someone who lives where I regularly see temperatures higher than the human body temperature with humidi…
Swamp coolers don't work in the tropics, obviously. They are great in the desert though (except during monsoon season). In the tropics, you cool by extracting humidity, not injecting it. And extracting humidity might not work very well in a very dry desert...so...
The ice block thing worked perfectly fine in Iran, at least.
In places like Brazil were AC is everywhere but isolation and heating is limited, it gets really cold in the winter even if its only 15 degrees outside. In places like germany where home isolation and heating is generally very good, you really have to suffer in the summer because rarely any place apart from some offices have AC. Even more so, many don't like AC at home because it consumes a lot of power and can make…
In HK, a few hundred people always die when it dips below 10C.
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Decreasing the AC doesn't mean people will start sweating themselves. 75 - 78 F is perfect but most buildings for some reason turn their ACs all the way down to the 60s. For athletic centers, of course it makes sense. But in big open libraries, lecture halls, places with little activity in general, it's awful. It's especially bad for your health if you live in a hot region like southern California since your body has…
> 75 - 78 F is perfect Like hell it is. I sweat like a pig at 78.
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24-25 Celsius on lowest fan settings should be cold enough for practically everyone.
My office space in china would keep the temperature around 24-26C in the summer. My arms would literally sweat to the desk when typing (I'm not a completely in the air tyoer, as a programmer I don't need to be). I had to hit a cooler Starbucks with a laptop to get things done it was so annoying. I much would have preferred it being a bit colder, around 20C is best, even if I would wear a light jacket at that temp...a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better have it too cold and people where extra clothing than have people sweating themselves. You can always put more clothes on, you can't take off your skin.
Decreasing the AC doesn't mean people will start sweating themselves. 75 - 78 F is perfect but most buildings for some reason turn their ACs all the way down to the 60s. For athletic centers, of course it makes sense. But in big open libraries, lecture halls, places with little activity in general, it's awful. It's especially bad for your health if you live in a hot region like southern California since your body has…
It's really silly that we have the technology of AC but cannot control the temperature accurately enough.