dangjc

Rooftop solar has lower distribution costs. A solar farm needs new transmission and upgraded capacity distribution lines to get the power from far away to the users. Generating solar right next to your neighbors lets them access your surplus cheap power with existing slack capacity in the distribution lines. Our current monopoly utilities don’t have a mechanism to recognize that value created, and they would prefer to keep building more infrastructure as that’s what increases profits for them.

This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.

Then Tesla should pay for back up drivers until their safety record meets the bar.

I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.

There are horrible consequences and people are suffering, totally. So then what? How do we get others to understand the impacts and start to change their mind?

We often reach for black and white thinking which makes political discussions difficult. Both sides do it, and it stunts our empathy for why people vote the way they do.

We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.

This weakens the US against China. Europeans have no stake in a big Pacific conflict and will be much less interested to back US war mongering now. It’s short sighted for us to forego alliances that were helping us build a world order and a trading bloc that isolated China.

China will benefit the most from this. Europe has zero interest in backing up the US in a fight for Pacific dominance. Good luck trying to form a trading block that excludes China now.

I think most Americans value freedom and reject tyranny.

We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.

Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.

We have a product analytics team where people have transitioned from being fully PM focused to being deeply data analysis oriented. It starts with using code-lite tools like Tableau and SQL queries then easily opens up into running data transform jobs with Python scheduled on a cluster. It would probably be easier and more financially remunerative to be at a company where you provide value in a product role, and continue providing that value as you slowly transition to a more engineering role.

One other issue with the Sahara is that you still have to transport that energy to where it will be used. It's been difficult already to build transmission within the US between a few states. Crossing the Mediterranean and getting the energy across southern Europe (which is sunny and doesn't need it) to cloudier northern Europe would be a lot of permitting. If they can convert the Sahara electricity to liquid fuels, it might actually fit with trade patterns better.

We’re getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI generated content.

I can for example look at the HTML of a document and if it has too many ads or if it has too many tracking elements I can downrank the website for example. Or enable a user to have a check box to say I don’t want to many ads. I prefer content that does not have ads, for example. It is hard to get it perfectly right, but even to remove 75% of the ads that’s still a huge improvement.

That's a pretty big opening for a search engine that Google basically cannot fight since it is against their core interests.

DBUs are about +50% the underlying compute cost.

We use Databricks in production extensively.

Some nuggets of wisdom from the article when managing an engineering org:

- “if the only reason an engineer wants to work for you is because of your tech stack, that may be a warning sign. Culture Amp therefore avoids hiring engineers who are purely technology-focused. As a product company, we seek to hire people who are mostly excited about our product and its mission, and who are happy to learn new things when necessary to progress that. When someone tells us in an interview they’re excited about working here because they like functional programming (say), we count that as an indication they might not be a good fit.”

- “Perhaps the greatest challenge for engineers as they reach more senior levels in their career is to make decisions that balance the moment-to-moment joy (or frustration) that a given tool affords them, and the costs (or benefits) that same tool might create for their team, company or client over time and at scale”

That’s reassuring we are in steady state. If perennial rice takes over, we will gradually drop atmospheric methane to a lower steady state.

They decided not to hedge on purpose, take the risk, hoping to earn the extra profits. Slate money did a good episode on this last week. SVB has high touch relationships with their clients, and they need money to pay for all that client service. This was a bet that went bad (in a very foreseeable way).

It’s not walking on egg shells. It’s very clear directions to avoid anti competitive behavior. Maybe it’s harder without a moral compass telling them to not be evil.

People kept asking me why I was still using Atom, and Hydrogen was it. It doesn't seem like there's an exact equivalent in VSCode. For now, I'm just relying on sending blocks of code to the interactive Python terminal. Or using the Jupyter extension. But the former might not work with other languages and the latter requires .ipynb files which maybe you don't want to check into git.

You might want to gravitate more in the machine learning engineer direction. So much of ML is building the data, training pipelines, the serving environment, model tracking, evaluation, promotion, and other general infra around modeling. Many data scientists are more analyst-plus, and don’t have strong engineering skills. But large scale ML needs more of the latter. As long as you can AB test, you don’t need strong statistical skills to tease apart effects.

A huge portion of electric bills are paying for wildfire damage/hardening and for expensive transmission lines. Rooftop solar reduces both, but is not being credited for it in NEM 3.0.

When electricity is generated and consumed locally, it doesn't need to be transmitted across huge distances using expensive transmission infrastructure. There's also less wires that can trigger fires. But infra is the only way regulated utilities are allowed to make a profit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/energy-environme...

These increased costs being passed to California consumers could kill electric cars. We're paying $0.30-$0.40 / kwh to PG&E, which pencils out to over $9 / gallon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35152087/tesla-model-3-ch...

He stole intellectual property and deserves to be prosecuted. With abundant streaming options these days and threat of being cut off from your ISP, few people pirate films anymore in the US. This is not normal, tolerable practice anymore. People’s livelihoods depend on these industries. A lot of the people here on hacker news make a living from producing intellectual property.

Bezos leaned very hard away from work life balance. He’s extremely wealthy and divorced.

This might be a short term hit to publishers, but maybe readers will eventually retrain to visit news sites directly rather than relying on Facebook and friends to select articles for them. This is very much a fight over who controls the entrance to the web and it's probably better it not get centralized into Google and Facebook. It didn't work out well for AOL and Yahoo.

The eyeball is not “just” too long. It elongates as a response to the stimuli from the lens projecting an image at a focal length behind the retina. Most kids are not born nearsighted. It develops over time. This is how.

This is similar to the “active focus” method: https://endmyopia.org/

I’ve been in this Facebook group for a while and lots of people have great personal anecdata about their improvements. It’s really interesting to see a medical device come out and if they have clinical trials to back it up.

There’s a good chance to get decent commissioners approved by a Democratic Senate. They can start a process to make new rules. Federal agencies have a rule making process which requires evidence and findings, especially to change prior rules. Hopefully there will be mounting evidence that many of these changes were harmful.