thedays

This is true - without Chinese manufacturing of solar cells and panels, solar energy would not be as cheap as it is today.

Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.

Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...

The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.

Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.

It wasn’t $40-50 billion. It was estimated to cost $116-$600 billion to build 7 nuclear reactors https://smartenergy.org.au/nuclear-fallout-116-600-billion-t...

I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.

This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity.

This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia. https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer

Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.

The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.

Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.

This page on the Energy Consumers Australia website has more details about the Solar Sharer Offer and a similar Victorian Government scheme which starts on 1 October. https://energyconsumersaustralia.com.au/news/solar-sharer-of...

This seems like a very complicated way to maintain a menu on a static website. Have you considered using old school server side includes? It’s what they were designed for.

The 30% battery discount in Australia is only available to households that also have solar systems. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/cheaper-home-batte...

Nice work! This is very impressive and you’ve shown real resilience and perseverance to work through the challenges you encountered while building this.

The Economist recently ran an excellent podcast series on the scam industry called Scam Inc. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

The author of this article appears to be unaware that very high electricity prices have been the other key driver behind Pakistan’s solar boom along with the massive reduction in the cost of solar panels.

This was covered recently in a great interview with two Pakistani renewable energy experts on the Volts podcast: https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom

dabbledb was awesome. Simple but powerful. I still miss it and haven’t found anything like it to replace it at a reasonable price.

I am not a lawyer but this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP”.

This Executive Order states in part: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

… Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;

(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; …

Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech. (a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/rest...

https://archive.md/1w5k1

Is Autotab able to scrape data from multiple websites with different structures and combine this data into structured data in one CSV or JSON file? Example: scrape interest rates offered on savings accounts from multiple bank websites and extract the name of the bank, bank logo, product name and interest rate for each account and run this saved query on a regular schedule (daily, weekly etc)?

Is Skyvern able to scrape data from multiple websites with different structures and combine this data into structured data in one CSV or JSON file? Example: scrape interest rates offered on savings accounts from multiple bank websites and extract the name of the bank, bank logo, product name and interest rate for each account and run this saved query on a regular schedule (daily, weekly etc)?

This sounds like a good solution.

Can you provide an example or two of how you format the events in your calendar to allow them to be sent at a scheduled time by the Shortcuts app?

This HN headline is misleading.

The article makes it clear that sales of EVs in the US are still increasing but the rate of increase has slowed.

It says “…sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric — but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed”.

@dang - This headline should be changed to the article headline “What happened to EVs?”

Many people underestimate the risks from asbestos as the disease can take 20-40 years to develop after exposure but it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Asbestosis killed over 3,600 people in 2015. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis

Asbestos has affected all sorts or people, not just in the Navy. A close relative of mine who was a plumber has been diagnosed with it and it is an awful disease.

This woman is dying from cancer caused by inhaling asbestos dust while washing her husband's work clothes. https://www.thompsonstradeunion.law/news/news-releases/asbes...

I find eSIMs are less convenient as:

- there are far less providers that support eSIM and the ones that do generally charge more than providers that also support a standard SIM

- it’s often not possible to create a new account using an eSIM. I’ve had to buy a physical SIM and then go through a complicated transfer process and have to either wait on hold for a long time or go into a store to swap over to an eSIM with two different providers.

Most physical SIM cards these days come as a 3-in-1 that fits standard, micro and nano sizes so the size incompatibility issues seem to be mostly fixed in my country at least.

eSIMs are less convenient and less flexible than regular SIM cards - will iSIMs be any different?

How many iSIMs will a phone support? Will they support dual iSIMs or triple iSIMs so I can use one mobile number for work, another for my personal life and a third to use when I'm travelling overseas and want to avoid expensive roaming charges?

dang - this article on this same decision seems more informative and substantive and is also not paywalled. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/18/klamath-river-dam-rem...

Storage and transmission costs were included in this study as you could have easily found out yourself by reading down to the fourth sentence of this media release which says:

“The 2021-22 report confirms past years’ findings that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity generation and storage in Australia, even when considering additional integration costs arising due to the variable output of renewables, such as energy storage and transmission.”

The only workaround I’ve found for this annoyance is to put my phone into airplane mode after selecting my navigation route. GPS and navigation still works after doing this.

This way it doesn’t update the route with a ‘timesaving’ route or to an expensive toll route. It’s crazy I have to do this and far from ideal as I would like it to update if there really is a major timesaving route, eg if an accident occurs, but I don’t trust Google Maps now to not update now with a screen only navigation alert.

What it should do is alert me to this change with an audible alert and wait for me to actively approve this route change.

This is a ridiculous accusation. He was born in Brazil in 1922, got his first job in Brazil in 1938 and seems to have lived in Brazil his entire life. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.

https://archive.ph/wnW75

How would a Tweet get traction if it’s not live until the editing window is over?

Yes - but most of these are only issues if you allow Tweets to be editable forever. If they’re only editable for a few mins after posting and are not live and able to be retweeted and embedded until the editing window has closed, then most of these issues can be avoided.

How long can a Twitter edit button take to develop, test, implement and rollout? Twitter claims to have been working on this since last year and it’s now April so they’ve already been working on this for 3+ months. It’s hard to understand how such a simple feature can take so long to implement for a company like Twitter which has 7,500 staff. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/numbe...

A feature like this has three main variables to figure out and any functional PM or company should be able to answer these questions and test the preferred options with users in a few weeks at most.

1) period of time a Tweet is editable for: a few mins or forever? As Tweets are retweeted by others and embeddable, making them editable for only a few minutes after they’re first posted seems like the best approach as users who are retweeting don’t want a Tweet to be able to be edited to have a very different meaning.

2) is the Tweet ‘live’ and able to be retweeted while it’s editable or is it only live after the Tweet is no longer able to be edited? I prefer the latter approach as it makes the implementation a lot easier and essentially maintains Twitter as it currently works.

3) how to indicate a Tweet has been edited - adding an “edit history” link to Tweets only if they’ve been edited and linking these to a page showing the edit history of the page URL in simple coloured diffs seems to answer this question.

Hi, I wouldn’t want to have to upload the latest version every time. For it to be a livedoc, I would expect your system to be able to automatically update from an Excel file saved online in OneDrive for Business. This is what the apps integrated with Excel on Zapier seem to do as well - see https://zapier.com/apps/excel/integrations

Looks great! Integration with Excel seems to be missing and is what I’d need to use it. Do you have any plans to integrate Excel soonish?

Beyond that, integrations with CRMs like Salesforce could also be really powerful for a too like this.

Also, have you considered integrating with a tool like Zapier rather than integrating directly with each app to accelerate the number of apps you’re integrated with?

I think they’re unlikely to have grounds. Calendar is a standard dictionary word and so they can hardly claim ownership of it or any misspellings of it like calenday