a_square_peg

9 ms·

31.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
The United States has a policy about government data - including weather (e.g. NOAA) and GPS, to be made freely available to the public. Your property data, collected at the county level, falls under this category so they are accessible to
32.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
Awesome job! Here's a similar tool specific to a location, based on ERA5 data ( https://explorer.oikolab.com ) so going back only to 1940. Been thinking it'd be great to show both global & local context somehow.
33.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
Solar I sort of get since I don't think anyone does it the scale like Google Sunroof, but not sure what the added value is for Google to create the APIs for Air Quality and Pollen? There are service providers and models that do these a
34.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
I think regardless of the job market situation, the time-to-hire has become unreasonably long and I'm not optimistic that this will change for the better anytime soon. The trouble with job-hunting these days via web is that the signal-
35.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
If you need to look up any particular location: https://explorer.oikolab.com/explorer (Data from ECMWF)
36.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
It's not just software - it's engineering design in general. The hardest part of engineering design to know what needs to be built. This is akin to knowing the right problem to solve but engineers are trained poorly for that. For
37.
by a_square_peg 3y ago
Also a rule to make laptops be completely off when powered off... not just in some 'sleep' state that turns on and overheats while in a bag. I can't imagine how much laptop battery life is wasted away due to this.
38.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Building software is like building a house - a 10x general labourer, who can lift 10x the weight and do things without a break is great, but it really won't get the house built much quicker. For any project that's sufficiently lar
39.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
BoM actually makes it quite difficult to obtain data. I looked into it once and thought it wasn't worth the trouble. Some agencies make it easier than others to obtain the raw data as it's sort of part of their mandates.
40.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I find a lot of developers don't actually have an understanding of how things work at fundamental level - what they do know amounts to "type this, and do that, and you'll get this" and can't really explain why one t
41.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Interesting thing here is that natural gas is about 1/3 the cost of electricity per energy unit, so when the COP is above 3, it's cheaper to heat home using heat pump. The reason why natural gas is about 1/3 of the cost of el
42.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I'm Canadian myself. Heat Pump is actually very popular in the eastern maritime provinces and is gaining in popularity elsewhere also.
43.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
We need heat pump that work below -20F like we need an electric car that can go 1000 miles in a single charge - which is we really don't for the 99% of the use case. What's needed is a heat pump that's cheaper to install than
44.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I'm wondering if you're in an environment where you're not sufficiently challenged?
45.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Sounds good - can you sign up for the free tier and send me an email to support@oikolab.com? This comes to me so I'll know which account belongs to you and we can take it from there.
46.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
+1 for Pangeo. We use these toolsets heavily (Xarray, Zarr, Dask) to run our service, which is essentially what you described as taking the larger gridded datasest to ARCO format. I think this is still a bit too heavy for casual Excel/
47.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Certainly - take a look ( https://oikolab.com ) and let me know your use case. There is a free tier but we've also given free access to a quite a few number of researchers, non-profits and university students for their proje
48.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Out of curiosity, is accessing & working with large datasets a problem in your areas of work? I run a weather/climate site that makes some of this less painful, taking datasets such as GFS or ERA5/ERA5-Land much faster to acce
49.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Fantastic - thanks!
50.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Also another very, very happy Hetzner user - we've migrated all of our servers to Hetzner over the last year and couldn't be happier with the service. Along with Wasabi cloud for object storage, the set up has allowed me to run a
51.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I think the same but about people. The wasted potential of a product is probably capped to just the price of the product so at the end of the day, it's probably not much. The wasted potential of people on the other hand, due to either
52.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
Yeah - I can't remember where I read it but the notion seems to be that corruption and bribery in China and US is actually quite comparable except that in the US, bribery in the form of political donation is legalized. For companies su
53.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
htts://oikolab.com - it's essentially a weather data api but catering more to anlaysts who need historical data for planning and evaluation. We provided 30+ years of hourly historical weather data for more than 16,000 locatio
54.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
So in this case, the project cost rise is born by MTR, rather than the government (aka tax payer) which would often be the case in North America. I think it would be much easier for public to back transit projects with setup such as this.
55.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
This is correct - I think it's called R+P (Rail + Property). The government doesn't pay for the project at all and grants exclusive development right to the transit operator, which in case for Hong Kong is MTR. They then negotiate
56.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I really would have liked to work with someone like that. Funny enough, this also (over-regimented documentation and too many requirements) also happens in small organizations when they don't have the expertise to know doing systems en
57.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
That's not entirely true. There is a SW / mechanical/ test & integration team somewhere who was employed due to this feature that I'm sure very much appreciated this feature. There is a product manager who got to add
58.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I think about this a lot and one thought experiment would be to imagine yourself time travelling 10 years into the future and question if you would know how to use email or phone without being confused. I’m pretty sure everyone on HN is co
59.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I wonder if this is a sign of a system that's no longer salvageable.
60.
by a_square_peg 4y ago
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gould is a good inspiration. Wayne Gould was a retired judge from Hong Kong and learned to program and eventually launch the modern Sudoku craze. My wife is an acquaintance o

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