5 ms·

I can't believe a group of engineers are so afraid of residential power. It is not expensive, nor is it highly technical. It's not like we're factoring in late

by tcdent 2y ago

I can't believe a group of engineers are so afraid of residential power. It is not expensive, nor is it highly technical. It's not like we're factoring in latency and crosstalk... Read a quick howto, cruise into Home Depot and grab some legos off the shelf. Far easier to figure out than executing "hello world" without domain expertise.

3eb7988a1663 2y ago
People can and do die from misuses of electricity. Not a move-fast-and-break things kind of domain.
- varispeed 2y ago
  You only "break" once...
  - lbotos 2y ago
    I've been learning Japanese and a favorite of mine is: 一体 Which is used as "what the heck" but it's direct kanji translation is one body. https://jisho.org/word/%E4%B8%80%E4%BD%93 https://jisho.org/word/%E4%B8%80%E4%BD%93
    - varispeed 2y ago
      Fun fact as a kid I stuck my fingers in the loose mains wires as we were playing at unfinished building. The wires were live and I still remember it felt like it's going to break my arm. Fortunately I only got a slight burn. This got me interested in electronics which I started studying later in my life.
gizmo686 2y ago
A good engineer knows the difference between safe and dangerous. Setting up an AI computer is safe. Maybe you trip a circut. Maybe you interfere with something else running on your hobby computer. But nothing bad can really happen. Residential electrical is dangerous. Maybe you electrocute yourself. Maybe you cause a fire 5 years down the line. Maybe you cause a fire for the next owner because you didn't know to protect the wire with a metal plate so they drill into it. Having said that, 2 4090s will run you aroud $5,000, not counting any of the surrounding system. At that cost point, hireing an electritian would not be that big of an expense relativly speaking. Also, if you are at the point where you need to add a circut for power, you might need to seriously consider cooling, which could potentially be another side quest.
- tjoff 2y ago
  Add to that is that it is likely illegal to do yourself. Which of course has implications for insurance etc.
  - m-s-y 2y ago
    In the US, it’s fully legal to perform electric/plumbing/whatever work on your own home. If you screw it up and need to file a claim, insurance can’t deny the claim based solely on the fact that you performed the work yourself, even if you’re not a certified electrician/plumber/whatever. What you don't want to do is have an unlicensed friend work on your home, and vice versa. There are no legal protections, and the insurance companies absolutely will go after you/your friend for damages. Edit: sorry this applies to owned property, not if you’re renting
    - scubbo 2y ago
      Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
      - zamadatix 2y ago
        As with most regulations in the "US" I have a feeling the answer is really something like "Depending on the city and state you live in the answer lies somewhere between 'go nuts' and 'that could lead to criminal charges and you being liable for everything that happens to the house and your neighbors kitchen sink'".
        defrost 2y ago
        It's like that in Australia, liability and insurance hinge on licenced work by trade qualified professionals. What is common here, in the handy crowd at least, is to do your own electrical, plumbing, gas work and leave it open and accessable for a licenced professional to check and sign off on. You're still paying for an hour or two of their time and a surcharge for "taking on the responsibility" but it's often not an issue if the work is clean, to current code, and sanity tests correct (correct wiring, correct angles on plumbing, pressure testing on gas pipes).
lolinder 2y ago
> I can't believe a group of engineers are so afraid of residential power. ... Read a quick howto, cruise into Home Depot and grab some legos off the shelf. Far easier to figure out than executing "hello world" without domain expertise. The instinct to not touch something that you don't yet deeply understand is very much an engineer's instinct. Any engineer worthy of the title has often spent weeks carefully designing a system to take care of the hundreds of edge cases that weren't apparent at a quick glance. Once you've done that once (much less dozens of times) you have a healthy respect for the complexity that usually lurks below the surface, and you're loathe to confidently insert yourself confidently into an unfamiliar domain that has a whole engineering discipline dedicated to it. You understand that those engineers are employed full time for a reason. The attitude you describe is one that's useful in a lot of cases and may even be correct for this particular application (though I'm personally leery of it), but if confidently injecting yourself into territory you don't know well is what being an "engineer" means to you, that's a sad commentary on the state of software engineering today.
- tcdent 2y ago
  Sir, this is "Hacker News".
  - lolinder 2y ago
    So did you mean "I can't believe a group of hackers are so afraid of residential power"?
fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
You’re forgetting many people have landlords who aren’t exactly keen on tenants doing diy electrical work.
wpietri 2y ago
Ah yes, the "move fast and burn your house down" school of "engineering".
- phil21 2y ago
  Adding a bog-standard breaker and a short conduit run is about as simple as it gets for electric work. It’s rather low risk if you simply read the code and follow it. If you know nothing about basic electric work or principles, sure - spend the $500 to have an electrician add a 30 or 50A 220V outlet near your electric service panel. Totally reasonable to do as it is indeed dangerous to touch things you don’t understand. It’s far less complex and less dangerous than adding an EV charge point to your garage which seems to be quite common for this crowd. This is the same (less, since you typically have a lot more flexibility on where to locate the outlet and likely don’t need to pull through walls) complexity as adding a drop for an electric stove. Where the “home electric hackers” typically tend to get in trouble is doing stuff like adding their own generator connection points and not properly doing interlocks and all that fun stuff. If you can replace your own light switches and wall receptacles you are just one step away from adding an additional branch circuit. Lots of good learning material out there on the subject these days as well!
  - wpietri 2y ago
    I'm not saying people shouldn't add breakers. I'm saying your talking like people are scaredy-cats and comparing it to working with toys or hello world is exactly the kind of of macho nonsense that leads people to do shoddy engineering. As a hobby, I restore pinball machines. A modern one is extremely careful about how it uses power, limiting wall current to a small, normally-sealed section of the machine. And even so, it automatically disables the lower-voltage internals the moment you open the coin door. A 1960s machine, by contrast, may not have a ground at all. It may have an unpolarized plug, and it will run wall current all over the place, including the coin door, one of the flippers, and a mess of relays. In the pinball community, you'll find two basic attitudes toward this. One is people treating electrical safety about as seriously as the people who design the modern machines. The others is people who think anybody who worries about a little wall current are all pussies who don't have the balls to work on anything and should just man up and not worry about a little 120V jolt. The truth is that most people here are not engineers of any sort. We're software developers. We're used to working in situations where safety and rigor basically don't matter, where you have to just cowboy ahead and try shit. And that's fine, because control-z is right there. I've met people who bring that attitude to household electrical work, and they're fucking dangerous. I know one guy, quite a smart one, who did a lot of his own electrical work based on manliness and arrogance, and once the inspector caught up with him, he immediately pulled the guy's meter and wouldn't let him connect up to the grid again until a real electrician had straightened it all out. It's true that this stuff is not that hard to learn if you study it. But an architect friend likes to say that the building code is written in blood, meaning that much of it is there because confident dumbasses managed to kill enough people that they had to add a new rule. If people are prepared to learn the rules and appreciate why they're there, I'm all for it. But if they do it coming from a place of proving that they're not "so afraid of residential power", that's a terrible way to approach it.
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
I’m hardly surprised, this is primarily a programming discussion website, and the highest voltage read on an average day here is in mV. It’s natural to be leery of things you have no experience in.
- fragmede 2y ago
  your car is 12 volts, and USB is 5 volts; 12 or up to 20 these days for laptop charging. My computer's CPU is probably 1.8 volts but I can't remember the last time I had my multimeter on that, but that's still more than millivolts.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    That's technically correct, but irrelevant: you cannot kill yourself with 12 or 20V any more than with 10mV. 120V or 230V is another story. That being said, it's still very easy not to kill yourself with 120/230V: just shut down the power before touching anything.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Probably meant milliampere, specifically 1 milliampere. But yes, usually lightweight engineers are familiar with TTL and limit themselves to 5V. 12V+ is another arcane realm you don't want to touch. Some old serial ports had 12V and a high max current. The DIY things you attached here were prone to kill your mainboard. Voltage/current is either 0 or 1. Anything higher kills software developers instantly.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      In telecoms 48V dc is very common and not always even connectorised! It's "safe-ish" but DC makes me more nervous than 240v, big thick 400A cables into a rack are quite intimidating to see but the main issue is DC is sticky and doesn't have the safety protections of RCDs etc. Indeed you are lucky to get a working isolator.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by tcdent 2y ago

3eb7988a1663 2y ago

People can and do die from misuses of electricity. Not a move-fast-and-break things kind of domain.

varispeed 2y ago
You only "break" once...
- lbotos 2y ago
  I've been learning Japanese and a favorite of mine is: 一体 Which is used as "what the heck" but it's direct kanji translation is one body. https://jisho.org/word/%E4%B8%80%E4%BD%93 https://jisho.org/word/%E4%B8%80%E4%BD%93
  - varispeed 2y ago
    Fun fact as a kid I stuck my fingers in the loose mains wires as we were playing at unfinished building. The wires were live and I still remember it felt like it's going to break my arm. Fortunately I only got a slight burn. This got me interested in electronics which I started studying later in my life.

gizmo686 2y ago

A good engineer knows the difference between safe and dangerous. Setting up an AI computer is safe. Maybe you trip a circut. Maybe you interfere with something else running on your hobby computer. But nothing bad can really happen. Residential electrical is dangerous. Maybe you electrocute yourself. Maybe you cause a fire 5 years down the line. Maybe you cause a fire for the next owner because you didn't know to protect the wire with a metal plate so they drill into it. Having said that, 2 4090s will run you aroud $5,000, not counting any of the surrounding system. At that cost point, hireing an electritian would not be that big of an expense relativly speaking. Also, if you are at the point where you need to add a circut for power, you might need to seriously consider cooling, which could potentially be another side quest.

tjoff 2y ago
Add to that is that it is likely illegal to do yourself. Which of course has implications for insurance etc.
- m-s-y 2y ago
  In the US, it’s fully legal to perform electric/plumbing/whatever work on your own home. If you screw it up and need to file a claim, insurance can’t deny the claim based solely on the fact that you performed the work yourself, even if you’re not a certified electrician/plumber/whatever. What you don't want to do is have an unlicensed friend work on your home, and vice versa. There are no legal protections, and the insurance companies absolutely will go after you/your friend for damages. Edit: sorry this applies to owned property, not if you’re renting
  - scubbo 2y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      As with most regulations in the "US" I have a feeling the answer is really something like "Depending on the city and state you live in the answer lies somewhere between 'go nuts' and 'that could lead to criminal charges and you being liable for everything that happens to the house and your neighbors kitchen sink'".
      - defrost 2y ago
        It's like that in Australia, liability and insurance hinge on licenced work by trade qualified professionals. What is common here, in the handy crowd at least, is to do your own electrical, plumbing, gas work and leave it open and accessable for a licenced professional to check and sign off on. You're still paying for an hour or two of their time and a surcharge for "taking on the responsibility" but it's often not an issue if the work is clean, to current code, and sanity tests correct (correct wiring, correct angles on plumbing, pressure testing on gas pipes).

lolinder 2y ago

> I can't believe a group of engineers are so afraid of residential power. ... Read a quick howto, cruise into Home Depot and grab some legos off the shelf. Far easier to figure out than executing "hello world" without domain expertise. The instinct to not touch something that you don't yet deeply understand is very much an engineer's instinct. Any engineer worthy of the title has often spent weeks carefully designing a system to take care of the hundreds of edge cases that weren't apparent at a quick glance. Once you've done that once (much less dozens of times) you have a healthy respect for the complexity that usually lurks below the surface, and you're loathe to confidently insert yourself confidently into an unfamiliar domain that has a whole engineering discipline dedicated to it. You understand that those engineers are employed full time for a reason. The attitude you describe is one that's useful in a lot of cases and may even be correct for this particular application (though I'm personally leery of it), but if confidently injecting yourself into territory you don't know well is what being an "engineer" means to you, that's a sad commentary on the state of software engineering today.

tcdent 2y ago
Sir, this is "Hacker News".
- lolinder 2y ago
  So did you mean "I can't believe a group of hackers are so afraid of residential power"?

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago

You’re forgetting many people have landlords who aren’t exactly keen on tenants doing diy electrical work.

wpietri 2y ago

Ah yes, the "move fast and burn your house down" school of "engineering".

phil21 2y ago
Adding a bog-standard breaker and a short conduit run is about as simple as it gets for electric work. It’s rather low risk if you simply read the code and follow it. If you know nothing about basic electric work or principles, sure - spend the $500 to have an electrician add a 30 or 50A 220V outlet near your electric service panel. Totally reasonable to do as it is indeed dangerous to touch things you don’t understand. It’s far less complex and less dangerous than adding an EV charge point to your garage which seems to be quite common for this crowd. This is the same (less, since you typically have a lot more flexibility on where to locate the outlet and likely don’t need to pull through walls) complexity as adding a drop for an electric stove. Where the “home electric hackers” typically tend to get in trouble is doing stuff like adding their own generator connection points and not properly doing interlocks and all that fun stuff. If you can replace your own light switches and wall receptacles you are just one step away from adding an additional branch circuit. Lots of good learning material out there on the subject these days as well!
- wpietri 2y ago
  I'm not saying people shouldn't add breakers. I'm saying your talking like people are scaredy-cats and comparing it to working with toys or hello world is exactly the kind of of macho nonsense that leads people to do shoddy engineering. As a hobby, I restore pinball machines. A modern one is extremely careful about how it uses power, limiting wall current to a small, normally-sealed section of the machine. And even so, it automatically disables the lower-voltage internals the moment you open the coin door. A 1960s machine, by contrast, may not have a ground at all. It may have an unpolarized plug, and it will run wall current all over the place, including the coin door, one of the flippers, and a mess of relays. In the pinball community, you'll find two basic attitudes toward this. One is people treating electrical safety about as seriously as the people who design the modern machines. The others is people who think anybody who worries about a little wall current are all pussies who don't have the balls to work on anything and should just man up and not worry about a little 120V jolt. The truth is that most people here are not engineers of any sort. We're software developers. We're used to working in situations where safety and rigor basically don't matter, where you have to just cowboy ahead and try shit. And that's fine, because control-z is right there. I've met people who bring that attitude to household electrical work, and they're fucking dangerous. I know one guy, quite a smart one, who did a lot of his own electrical work based on manliness and arrogance, and once the inspector caught up with him, he immediately pulled the guy's meter and wouldn't let him connect up to the grid again until a real electrician had straightened it all out. It's true that this stuff is not that hard to learn if you study it. But an architect friend likes to say that the building code is written in blood, meaning that much of it is there because confident dumbasses managed to kill enough people that they had to add a new rule. If people are prepared to learn the rules and appreciate why they're there, I'm all for it. But if they do it coming from a place of proving that they're not "so afraid of residential power", that's a terrible way to approach it.

tourmalinetaco 2y ago

I’m hardly surprised, this is primarily a programming discussion website, and the highest voltage read on an average day here is in mV. It’s natural to be leery of things you have no experience in.

fragmede 2y ago
your car is 12 volts, and USB is 5 volts; 12 or up to 20 these days for laptop charging. My computer's CPU is probably 1.8 volts but I can't remember the last time I had my multimeter on that, but that's still more than millivolts.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  That's technically correct, but irrelevant: you cannot kill yourself with 12 or 20V any more than with 10mV. 120V or 230V is another story. That being said, it's still very easy not to kill yourself with 120/230V: just shut down the power before touching anything.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Probably meant milliampere, specifically 1 milliampere. But yes, usually lightweight engineers are familiar with TTL and limit themselves to 5V. 12V+ is another arcane realm you don't want to touch. Some old serial ports had 12V and a high max current. The DIY things you attached here were prone to kill your mainboard. Voltage/current is either 0 or 1. Anything higher kills software developers instantly.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    In telecoms 48V dc is very common and not always even connectorised! It's "safe-ish" but DC makes me more nervous than 240v, big thick 400A cables into a rack are quite intimidating to see but the main issue is DC is sticky and doesn't have the safety protections of RCDs etc. Indeed you are lucky to get a working isolator.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]