sunshinesnacks

The required super wide field of view for the camera could be tricky, without making the box really deep. Or am I not thinking about it right?

I’m a few days late, but not sure why I got all the downvotes on this.

Many regions/markets have relatively stable retail rate structures, i.e., residential and most commercial customers don’t pay day-to-day and hour-to-hour electricity market prices. Their per-kWh and per-kW rates are adjusted on much longer time scales, like once a year.

So, big base load customers sign contracts in one year, resulting in better utilization of grid assets, so prices stay lower in the next year(s). But if those customers are not flexible (or are not on a rate structure that encourages them to be flexible), they could contribute to short-term capacity shortages this year. And that will have no impact on many rate payers’ bills, ant least not before rates get adjusted later.

Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.

In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.

Great article! Paul Gipe’s website is also a great resource for anyone interested in the history of wind energy.

https://wind-works.org/wind/history-of-wind-power/

True. But in terms of kids being able to explore computers, I think it’s a pretty good platform. What’s a better alternative?

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down

Raspberry Pi is a nice exception. I know there are other good examples, but it was the first thing I thought of…

AWD doesn't help you stop in bad weather

I frequently think about this when weather gets bad! I already have AWB (all wheel braking?). Seems like AWD could make it too easy to get in a situation where my AWB isn’t sufficient to stop

EGS has been around for at least 15 years. See AltaRock Energy as an example (I’m sure there are others). They started almost 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaRock_Energy

Maybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”.

There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.

Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.

They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.

That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.

None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.

You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.

That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.

Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.

Good point. It was all locally roasted beans at that point, so maybe that was what made the difference. Or at least contributed a lot.

I cut coffee for a year or so 10 years ago due to stomach issues, then slowly added fancy espresso drinks back, figuring that if I was only having coffee once a week, it might as well be fancy. I don’t seem to have stomach issues now with 1-2 lattes/cappuccinos a day.

Maybe it’s unrelated, all in my head, better beans, or the 3-4 oz of whole milk, but maybe give espresso drinks a try if you haven’t?

The goal of using CRPS is to produce an ensemble that is a good probabilistic forecast without needing calibration/post processing.

[edit: "without", not "with"]

From the Raspberry Pi blog post on taking over Blockly:

Platforms like Scratch, MakeCode, and MIT’s App Inventor are all built with Blockly. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of young people have learnt the fundamentals of computer science using software that is built with Blockly.

See also: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-home-for-blockly/

Voc is just the open circuit voltage measured at the terminals (plugs). “Nameplate” Voc is at standard test conditions (STC) of 1000 W/m^2, 25 deg C cell temperature, and a standard are mass/spectrum. The combo of 1000 W/m^2 and 25 C cell temp is not common in the real world in most climates, but still happens. Even relatively hot climates can have times in winter that exceed nameplate Voc if inverters turn off (making the panels go to open circuit).

Hey! That’s exciting! Open-meteo is great.

Open-meteo does have ECMWF data and forecasts. Free for non-commercial use. I think the person behind open-meteo is on HN.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but ECMWF provides a lot of data and forecasts for free [1]. And they are increasing the amount of data that is free [2].

[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data

[2] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-...

Like from coal ash ponds that might leak heavy metals into drinking water?

https://alabamareflector.com/2025/08/02/capped-alabama-coal-...

https://alabamarivers.org/coal-ash/

I don’t watch my local PBS over antenna much anymore, but it is great, just like you describe. Amazing what you can watch for free OTA, when you think about it.

This NOAA National Blend of Models (NBM) viewer lets you enable observations and then roll back the forecast initialization date to see forecasts and observations at the same time.

It’s experimental, and selecting weather stations is a little clunky, but it has some really cool info that’s hard to find other places.

https://apps.gsl.noaa.gov/nbmviewer/?col=2&hgt=1&obs=true&fo...

Edit:

This GEFS plume viewer is cool, too.

https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gefs_plumes/index.ht...

You can check a box to plot observations and then pick an older “cycle”.

Both are limited to the US.

I think it’s replacing data assimilation. Ingesting observation data from lots of sources. Not replacing observations themselves.

The Nature preprint references this zenodo archive with data and code in a big 13GB .tar file: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13158382

I haven’t downloaded it to see what’s in it.

The service that many private weather services provide is to aggregate and weigh all of the publicly available datasets

Yes, and more people need to understand this. Too many people seem to think that commercial services won’t be impacted if NOAA stops doing what they do.

Are you suggesting that NIH isn’t valuable to society? Or that the people fired with no justification deserve it because not enough scientists protested DEI grant requirements?

Just because scientists want to be paid doesn’t mean they aren’t worth having around.

Yeah, you’re right. Something like civil twilight, as you mentioned above, should get it closer to what is being discussed here.

I think the section “Atmospheric refraction and the solar limb” near the end of the article addresses this.