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astanway

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@abestanway CTO Amperon

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Google ostensibly offers this as well. However - I’m in the middle of moving us to Azure and I have more details on the Google deal: you only have 60 days to complete the migration and then you must terminate your billing account. It’s a total window dressing of an offer and completely unrealistic for any reasonably large organization to use. Malicious compliance at its finest and I hope they get sued by the EU for it until they make it a more reasonable offer.

Feels like this would make a total mess of a cap table. It’s effectively equity in all the ways that matter for minority preferred shareholders, except that it isn’t represented on the cap table and it’s got baked in pari passu treatment, which growth investors (rightfully so) won’t like. Even convertible notes mess with cap tables in ways I’d rather not repeat, as it prevents accurately valuing employee equity grants. Also, none of this would be eligible for QSBS, which is a knock against it for the investor.

Additionally - what is the purpose of repurchases if they don't also reduce the exposure the company has to claims on liquidation? Noting that "repurchase" is probably dangerous nomenclature - if these were to actually be interpreted as equity repurchases by the IRS, it could endanger QSBS status for all shareholders.

For wholesale players: yes. If you're a retailer and you buy an electricity future and then only use half of it across your customer base, you sell the remainder at real time prices. And for generator, selling real time power is the entire business model.

For consumers: no, not generally. Some markets have schemes to sell leftover solar power at real time prices, but I believe these are being phased out. Both grids and markets are by and large not set up yet for full two-way markets between consumers and producers.

$1M for a six week “EM plus two” engagement is on the high side, but it’s about par for the course for most McKinsey contracts. The standard is usually $500k-$1M for that kind of engagement. I think this is kind of a non-story for anyone who is actually familiar with the consulting business model. The brand is all McKinsey really has, and they are very quick to offer free engagements to protect the brand if true value isn’t being delivered.

Realistically a price higher than that wouldn't really have any effect on incentivizing generators any more, since there is a limit to how fast they can ramp up, how much spinning reserve capacity they have etc. So, it mostly just serves to protect the market from falling off the rails. The grid operation itself is actually largely disconnected from the market - the ISO primarily calls the shots with scheduling regardless of what the market is doing.

Utility scale batteries are not yet a proven and deployed technology. Not to say there aren’t successes - Aliso Canyon and the AEMO installation in Australia have both been very well received by their respective system operators. But there’s a very long way to go before batteries will exist as a viable, general alternative to natural gas peaker plants.

Wholesale price is definitely not “zero”. It fluctuates wildly, and if a retailer is exposed to the real time market at the flow date, they can expect to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. RTM prices can easily spike from $50/MW to $8000/MW in an instant if a generator trips. So, retailers buy hedges to cover this risk, at price premiums that reflect the inherent exposure insurance.

Amperon | Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack) and Machine Learning Engineer | NYC, New York | Full-time | Onsite preferred, remote friendly | https://amperon.co

We are a decade into the smart meter deployment era. There over 70M smart meters currently installed in the country, collecting 15 minute resolution electricity data for every type of ratepayer (including residential, commercial, and industrial). The data has been relatively untapped for the past decade, and Amperon is leveraging it to charge forward and bring AI to the energy world to usher in the smart grid of the future.

We raised our pre-seed earlier this year from some excellent investors, including Notation and SV Angel, and we've got a number of pilots with energy suppliers well underway. You'll be joining a small, dynamic team of data engineers, data scientists, and former energy traders.

Job listings: https://angel.co/amperon/jobs

More info: https://medium.com/@astanway/introducing-amperon-2cded368284...

Contact: abe@amperon.co

You severely need to check your bias if, after years of extremely similar incidences, it took a white death instead of a black death to convince you.

Yeah, this scenario is a million times more plausible. ML that augments human capabilities to empower bad people to do even more evil things.

Almost no one who actually works or has done serious research in ML is genuinely concerned about "malevolent AI". We are so, so, so far away from anything remotely close to that. Please stop trying to gin up fear and listen to the experts, who uniformly agree that this is not something to be concerned about.

Detectica | NYC | Data Engineer + Senior Front End Engineer

http://detectica.com

Email: abe@detectica.com

We build insider trading detection + other fintech compliance related products for large banks, making heavy use of ML in our offerings. Our team of 12 currently has 5 PhDs - we are very serious about data science.

We're looking for more data engineers to help us build our data systems that catch bad guys through massive amounts of email and trade data, and we're also looking for a front end engineer to help us architect our front end through modern best practices. Bonus points for having an eye for data visualization design and implementation!

We offer market salaries + equity. We are unfunded and profitable!