New ask Hacker News story: Living Without Electricity in Kyiv

Living Without Electricity in Kyiv
2 by Max-Ganz-II | 0 comments on Hacker News.
So, rolling power cuts probably begin today, power company says four hours or less. The attacks on power generation are awkward. To my eye, if Putin can keep up the attacks and inflict damage more quickly than it can be repaired, Ukraine ends up with increasingly long blackouts each day, and then maybe days of blackouts. Cities do not work without power, in ways we can hardly imagine - for example, you can’t buy anything, because the tills no longer work. You could in theory use cash, with the shops keeping a pile of ready cash at each till for this, but how do you as a customer get cash when the ATMs are not working because the power is out? The metro shuts down, of course. So do the traffic lights. How do you get into the city, or from A to B? you can walk, but only so far, and when you get to your destination, if it’s an office block, the elevators are not working. Automatic sliding doors are okay, you can force them open - but then you can’t really shut them, I think, so it gets cold. How do you work from home, when the power is out - your laptop may be working, but you have no Internet. Also when power is out, I think water goes out too, after a little while. I need to buy some of those large containers of water, for home, in case needed. I’ve been laying in some non-perishable foods, but most of what I eat is fresh and is in the fridge - fine for 24 hours, but after that, mmm. I will need to adapt my diet, and my life, to getting stuff done while electricity is available, and… getting other stuff done, which does not need power, when it’s not. Needless to say, heating and lighting are off the menu. That’s fine so far, I’m in a well insulated apartment and it’s not yet cold (4C today, but sitting in a quilt is just fine), and lighting isn’t needed when you work at a laptop. Thinking swimming might be off the menu today too - I guess the pool is closed when the power is out, and also the air raid warning is currently active, and I expect more attacks on power generation; worst thing is if you’re in the pool, and the warning kicks off. You have to leave! only happened once, fortunately - I’ve been very lucky, as every time apart from that the warning has kicked off just as I rolled up to the pool, so I just got on with something else and came back later. Well, in any event, back to coding :-) I’ve an AWS Redshift instance up right now, for dev work; if the power abruptly fails, I’ll be paying for until the power comes back - I could run an EC2 instance, and heartbeat to it, and when the heartbeat dies, it shuts down the cluster and itself… but that’s a lot of work and debugging and testing. I’d rather just wait the four hours :-)