beat

31 ms·

271.
by beat 7y ago
A wind-based grid, at scale, is actually a reliable baseline. We have over a decade of solid data on it now, from Iowa and Texas. Wind is much more reliable than you think.
272.
by beat 7y ago
The book Fully Automated Luxury Communism gets into this as well.
273.
by beat 7y ago
Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There&#
274.
by beat 7y ago
An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they&#
275.
by beat 7y ago
They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them. Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed manag
276.
by beat 7y ago
I really hope so! I think we need to see wind/solar at half the cost of gas to really break gas as an energy source. And battery storage is quite expensive for now - hundreds of dollars per mwh. Of course, there are other interesting a
277.
by beat 7y ago
I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $6
278.
by beat 7y ago
The original discussion is about working in regulated environments like health care and banking, not youtubeforcats.com. BDD frameworks and four hour test pipelines can start sounding pretty good after things reach a certain level of comple
279.
by beat 7y ago
Most of that sounds like things that can be tested for, rather than just tossing code over the wall and waiting to see if it catches fire.
280.
by beat 7y ago
Do you test timeouts? Connection drops? REST itself may be stateless, but it exists in a complex and failure-prone environment with numerous moving parts. What's the routing like between interfaces? Are there proxies? Do you control th
281.
by beat 7y ago
Laws. Traditions. Elections have always been managed on a state-by-state basis in the US, which is why my nice competent Minnesota that runs excellent elections is held hostage on a national level by borderline banana republics like Ohio
282.
by beat 7y ago
NO SHIT.
283.
by beat 7y ago
Or you're showing them to technical management, architects, etc, who are quite capable of understanding their importance and see how those lines benefit them, the ones on the front lines for compliance issues.
284.
Light Phone 2 “dumb phone”(businessinsider.com)
1 points by beat 7y ago|0 comments
285.
by beat 7y ago
I wouldn't say simple reductionist valuation models are inadequate... just incomplete. Most of the time, a deeper analysis should be in line with rule-of-thumb tools like P/E. This is even more true for large companies that value
286.
by beat 7y ago
I love being able to show the lines of code that say "This code cannot advance to a prod-deployable state if the tests haven't passed, because here's where it gets rejected".
287.
by beat 7y ago
Right. Which begs a question... are the large-cap stocks that dominate the index funds overvalued relative to their fundamentals? That should be easy enough to determine, and we should see a lot of "hold" or "sell" from
288.
by beat 7y ago
I suspect most of HN hasn't ever worked in a compliance-driven, regulatory environment. They've never had to deal with the possibility of audits by government, insurance, or financial regulators. This is the world I live in - buil
289.
by beat 7y ago
Unit tests are hardly the only kind of testing needed. First, they're completely decontextualized (hopefully), so they don't show the code working in any sort of broader context. Second, they only show the code is consistent with
290.
by beat 7y ago
A community consisting of people patting each other on the back for being so much more clever than everyone else is rarely boring to the participants. The fact that this explains a majority of self-selecting communities is purely coincident
291.
by beat 7y ago
The more interesting question is, if there is an index fund crash, will the actively managed funds benefit from it, or crash right alongside the index funds? How much are actively managed funds contaminated by stocks that are in index funds
292.
by beat 7y ago
More people wanted HRC, though. That's how elections work. It doesn't mean the loser is unpopular or broadly disliked. It means there's another candidate voters like better (or dislike less).
293.
by beat 7y ago
It takes multiple generations for this to cause an impact. What matters isn't the people living longer who are born today - it's the ones living longer who were born in the 1950s-1970s. And it's taken additional decades for m
294.
by beat 7y ago
The primary cause of population growth today is not birth rate, but rather death rate - people benefiting from modern society are living 10-20 years longer (or more) than their ancestors did just a generation or three earlier. The birth rat
295.
by beat 7y ago
Yes, in this day and age, famine is basically obsolete. It's not just advances in food tech. Changes in transportation (locally and globally), communication, refrigeration and other preservation techniques, sanitation, and a host of ot
296.
by beat 7y ago
Unfortunately, in the world we live in, externalized costs are considered independently from financial costs. Now, it's just a matter of time before fossil fuels are no longer an issue - we are rapidly moving to renewable energy. And t
297.
by beat 7y ago
And that's a totally legitimate point - but does it support your contention? You seem to be arguing that it is too expensive to raise meat. But food is driven largely by economics. Replacing the integrated farm with the sort of separ
298.
by beat 7y ago
If we didn't have cattle, would we have buffalo? Large wild herbivores in general? (Hmm, results of a quick google... there were 30-60m buffalo in the 19th century, and there are 94m cows in the US today. Given relative size, methane o
299.
by beat 7y ago
Trends in agriculture are driven heavily by cost. This is where the vegan fundamentalists go wrong, arguing that meat is "more expensive". But in the days before modern agriculture, people raised animals and had meat - it was econ
300.
by beat 7y ago
Not all grasses are equally edible. Most aren't, in fact.

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