digital_ins

You should look up the NTPC chairman's explanation for why average PLF runs below 75%.

Apparently, the transmission & distribution network for evacuation is overburdened already. This results in plants running below their rated capacities.

Also, you're absolutely wrong about imported coal plants being rare. I don't know of any critical or super critical plants that could use 100% domestic coal without having to blatantly lie on their EIA study about ash disposal. It's just not viable.

This is incorrect. Local, domestic coal has significantly worse project economics, which is why local plants prefer the imported variety.

That's not true. As anyone in the power industry will tell you, Indian coal, tho voluminous in availability, has a relatively very low calorific content and relatively much higher Ash content. As a result, disposal of ash is far more expensive than project economics can sustain. As a result, imported coal IS the standard, domestic coal may be used as a supplement, and long term supply contracts from local traders who import from sites in Indonesia, et al. is commonplace.

But Parse was acquired by Facebook. So this clause wouldn't apply.

Dell's focus on selling cheaper laptops has resulted in treating the consumer as fungible; and that's the reason for their absolutely appalling customer service.

You're starting to see this across industries where their products and services are commoditized. Quite surprisingly, when the service / product turns into a commodity (due to competition), so does the customer (due to budgetary constraints)

This, for travel, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_kw_vlCpcw

Disclosure: I work at the co that builds this

kinda describes what's going on in developing countries too. The lack of innovation in developing country might have almost nothing to do with the previously popular and highly peddled concept of "inferior races"

I started off disagreeing with your statement but as I read further, I became a believer. In fact, "gotcha" and other trick questions are the worst, but understanding CS fundamentals shows that you were paying attention in class and are probably interested (if not passionate) about CS.

If not, there are hundreds of other openings that the candidate can apply to.

Nice! What's the thought process behind the recommendation? Are you using spelling similarities, or something like that?

I loved this article. Not just the term "AI", I've seen startups abuse the terms "machine learning" and "big data" to such an extent that it literally makes me cringe when I hear them.

How many times have you seen a TechCrunch article where the writer parrots the buzzwords the founder has thrown at them such as "x uses machine learning to sync your contacts with the cloud".

I see your "Tom and Jerry" and I raise you.... chinese food http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Haryana-khap-blames...

There's never a shortage of people blaming other people for their own evil

This is awesome. Thank you for sharing!

isn't that the argument that a lot of people use about religion too?

it's quite possible that mosquitoes that don't require a male to procreate will take dominance. I think there are wasps like that...

We definitely should. I'm sure there are factors in the ecosystem that rely (but maybe not depend) on mosquito presence.

That's why I love the idea of being able to genetically modify them to produce only male offspring. It provides a nice, asymptotic curve way of culling the population without dramatically changing their ecosystem overnight

I think that irrespective of the title and the benefits of conservation of the ecosystem, letting mosquitoes stay alive needs a far more compelling argument than "it might take away some other animal's snack"

can i recommend resizing and compressing your pictures on the site? Those pics could be ~20kB but they're around 400kB

Hahahahahaha, this is awesome. I'm gonna share it with everyone I know on FB. How do I turn off the alert sound (without muting the tab)?

wow. as someone who spends a LOTTTT of time with CSS, this just blew me away. The amount of work, the CSS skill plus the ability to mentally envision and model a three dimensional, living creature. Outstanding.

I use the word 'zany' as an euphemism for 'scary'. As someone who's advertised on Facebook using video (hindsight:20/20), to think that I got charged for a video view while someone read the post above / below mine on their Full HD monitor, is kinda gross

We also built this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIy8ddJfUs with the Leova API.

We plan on releasing the food-ordering API in a couple of months. We would super super value comments / thoughts

what've we come to if a rubber duck with a digital thermometer and a wireless speaker and light is now being featured on CES

And this: http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/

A whole lot of comments here assume that the rating agencies are doing this because they're totally driven by greed. I think what people neglect to mention is understand is that rating agencies are overwhelmed by complex securities partly because they're made up of B-players.

In b-school, it's very common to see all the finance A-players gravitate towards PE, banks, HF and prop shops. Then the student sub-layer below them go to boutique versions of the aforementioned entities and it's usually Group B.

Believe it or not, this has a harsh impact on the culture there. Ask anyone you know who works at a lower level bank about how pointlessly harsh the culture is. My hypothesis is that: being made up of B and sub-B professionals, rating agencies just don't have the in-house intellectual capacity to do the levels of diligence they'd be expected to do to prevent the A-players in banks from cheating the market

LOL I would double-like this comment if I could

Kinda surprising that: (a) Nest, the multi-billion dollar company could not build in a secure localized redundancy that comes online when the main service goes down (b) That they are comfortable not updating users AS SOON AS their service is down. They should have a sorta emergency beacon when this happens.

Home automation may seem trivial, but as we come to rely on it for more and more things, I shudder to think that an outage in the future may cause the stove to stay on even when the smart-recipe/smart-thermostat indicates that it should no longer do so

I think you might be onto something - better negotiated content deals would are actually key to acquiring more customers and scaling up. I've previously worked on film financing deals where everything hinged on being able to get cheaper financing for money for content creation.

That's a pretty interesting Chrome extension. Any chance there's a video I could watch which demos functionality?

Also, wow - that's a LOTTTT of users! How'd you manage that?

This looks a lot like HBO's really getting pressured to go for growth, in stark comparison to the classical model of a cable company (which is typically a cash (dividend) cow rather than being a growth engine). I suspect that the whole 'cord-cutter' paranoia is getting to HBO.

On the other hand, investing heavily in upcoming technology is a good idea, as is being the person to cannibalize yourself rather than let anyone else do that.