Top all-time · #139
Kris De Decker
Personal blog · lowtechmagazine.comsystemsscienceculture
Kris De Decker writes LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, a personal blog at lowtechmagazine.com about systems, science and culture. Since 2007, 282 different Hacker News readers have linked it 449 times, most often “Low-Tech Magazine”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Low Tech Magazine's articles on solar power, energy storage, wind, coppicing, and food and transport history as sources, and point others to specific pieces.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Commenters call specific articles excellent, a favorite, and one they really liked, and point readers to more of them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline
Most-linked posts?
- Low-Tech Magazine11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-02-21
- Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-04-16
- Low Tech Magazine: The Chinese Wheelbarrow9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-07-24
- How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-06-03
- Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s (2015)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-11-18
- How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-07-15
- Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-10-17
- How and why I stopped buying new laptops6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-12-21
- Human-powered cranes and lifting devices (2010)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-05-04
- Reinventing the Greenhouse (2015)5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-07-27
What Hacker News says?
When the server is down you can get the offline version of it. AKA the Printed Website. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/12/printed-website-thir...
Comment linking /2021/12/printed-website-third-volume.html
on “This website has 81% battery power remaining”Submitted Heat Your House with a Water Brake Windmill as a story · 328 points
HN discussionHeat people, not places: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not-s...
Comment linking /2015/02/heating-people-not-spaces.html
on “Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could cure Covid-19”Submitted How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware as a story · 319 points
HN discussionInteresting, reminds me of several articles on this site. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not-s...
Comment linking /2015/02/heating-people-not-spaces.html
on “Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors”Submitted Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage as a story · 312 points
HN discussionCompressed air has been around for centuries, but: """ While pumped hydropower storage has a charge/discharge efficiency of 70-85%, and chemical batteries reach 65-90%, the CAES plants in operation in Germany and the US have an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-42% and 51-54%, respectively """ http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of...
Comment linking /2018/05/history-and-future-of-the-compressed-air-economy.html
on “Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy”Submitted Vertical farming does not save space as a story · 277 points
HN discussionIt's definitely feasible IMHO: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-o...
Comment linking /2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html
on “Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy”Submitted Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures as a story · 264 points
HN discussionAnd the European wheelbarrow is vastly inferior to the Chinese one (see https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar... )
Comment linking /2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html
on “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”Submitted Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011) as a story · 261 points
HN discussionThat's an interesting piece, which reminded me of another interesting article on the wheelbarrow that surfaced on HN as well some time ago: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...
Comment linking /2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html
on “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”Submitted The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle as a story · 242 points
HN discussionLow Tech magazine has a solar powered website... that would cover the hosting - https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowte... After that all you need to do is figure out how to have the domain name registered annually. Not going to lie ... thats a pretty tough problem. You might be able to become a domain name registrar and have a trust administer any fees to ICANN... but that is still fraught with…
Comment linking /2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html
on “Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?”Submitted High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network as a story · 230 points
HN discussionEveryone here is mentioning coppicing, so I suspect there will be some interest in the Low Tech Magazine articles on the subject: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/coppicing/ And since we're talking about doing cool things with trees, I just wanted to mention that LTM has more interesting articles slightly "adjacent" to this topic, like this one about a half-forgotten technique for growing citrus trees in climates wit…
Comment linking /2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html
on “Japanese have been producing wood for 700 years without cutting down trees”Submitted How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website? as a story · 204 points
HN discussion(Pardon the incredulous-sounding intro but...) Actually you can pay for it. Exactly because any regular ordinary person can pay for it. Exactly because abundance is inherently free. (For the rest of the comment I'll redefine the label "you" to be one single ordinary person who wants to make a basic income happen IRL.) [0] Abundance is free because it defeats the fundamental condition required for a scarcity-allocati…
Comment linking /2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html
on “A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing”Submitted How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid as a story · 201 points
HN discussionNot exactly what you’re after, but https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
Comment linking /
on “Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined”Submitted Reinventing the Small Wind Turbine as a story · 167 points
HN discussionLow-Tech Magazine had a nice article about the trouble with the European rail network: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/trains/
Comment linking /trains/
on “Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains”Submitted Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, Not Places as a story · 146 points
HN discussionbecause traditional methods of food preservation deserved to be abandoned? Your argument assumes refrigeration is a universal good, and other alternatives were not. Likewise, that the highly centralized food distribution system which became the defacto due to refrigeration is a universal good, while decentralized systems are not. such as the rich and varied food of Vietnam. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vi…
Comment linking /2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html
on “Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)”Submitted Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank as a story · 144 points
HN discussionHi, I responded to your great comment over at lowtechmagazine[0]. I'm not sure if you check the thread there regularly so I'm also pinging you here [0]: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtec...
Comment linking /2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html?cid=6a00e0099229e88833022ad36e595d200c
on “How to Build a Low-Tech Website”Submitted Photovoltaic Solar Panels (1905) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionIf you look at the non-solarpowered website, it turns out that TypeKit is serving a 830,8 KiB fullcolour PNG file . AAARGH. No wonder that they think they need to use dithering and such if that is their baseline. I tried testing some variants and made a static HTML gallery on neocieties[1]. TL;DR: - cleaning up the photo before filtering it makes a huge difference in image quality and compression. - quality 80 JPG i…
Comment linking /2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html
on “How to Build a Low-Tech Website”Submitted The Curse of the Modern Office as a story · 142 points
HN discussion
