6thaccount2

Yea. His discussions on HN (user arcfide) are well worth reading.

Some users thought his compiler was a farce before he posted the stats. Yea it's just a few pages, but the magic is getting to just a few pages. It apparently took 4M loc of added and then deleted code to get there (iirc it was a huge number).

"the noise should be audible from the ground only as a car door slamming shut"

That still sounds awful, and I imagine it isn't good for wildlife.

Also, I'm betting this would still be very expensive, but it is cool to see passenger supersonic possibly making a comeback.

On the otherhand...I wonder if this is mainly to kick Boeing while they're down.

I'm here too. Niche languages are great when you're a solo developer or own your own company.

If you have to work in a large company, you have to deal with other technologies and people you'd normally avoid. That usually necessitates a larger ecosystem.

Are you thinking Quake III Rocket Arena?

Makes me tempted to buy a Mazda. I like the AWD and reliability of a Suburu, but their touch screens are absolute garbage and going from my analog 6-disc changing Honda Accord to driving the much newer Subaru is painful.

Can confirm. This is one of THE best references out there for explaining a lot of key power systems topics. I didn't think it was publically available though?

Technically there is a last step you didn't mention. At some point after your island is ready, you'll want to reconnect with other islands. I've never done it in real life, but have done so in many simulations.

I forget the exact calculations involved (it's been years and I'm no longer involved with that area of operations), but you want to make sure your frequency matches the grid you're connecting with to within a certain amount. I think the stations which connect neighboring areas usually have extra monitoring equipment for a variety of energy accounting reasons, but also to measure the frequency on each side to see if it's a go or no go. I believe they use synchroscopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope) to do this.

Edit: it looks like y'all started talking about this below and I missed it, but the information is good, so I'm leaving it up.

If he's doing grid protection he's probably in distribution engineering and they would be pretty involved with a black start drill from as in they or the line crews with their boots on the ground as not all of that procedure can be initiated remotely I'd imagine.

The transmission level engineers and operators will call the shots as far as how the high level stuff goes down. In other words they'll issue a directive to get unit x online and then close in breaker b and clear a path to unit y while picking up load at z. The actual process from the end of the people doing that work is likely to be significantly more detailed.

Will doing a where clause (ex: where column_x > 3) actually work if column_x is now all strings? I recall my query executing and returning incorrect results. I figured out it would work if I explicitly caste the where clause as ( where float(column_x) > 3) or something like that (this was a few years ago).

Edit: I assume most databases like Oracle (it's SQL packages looked bizzare to me until I started learning Ada and figured out it has the same syntax) use static typing for performance, query optimization, and error checking? Note that although I use SQL almost daily, I am no expert on the innards. SQLite has a different use case. It seems to be for embedded and ad-hoc analysis where dynamic typing makes more sense. This is just a guess though.

Doesn't this convert all data to strings? I think that makes some queries wonky.

Or does it search through each row and see that one element out of 1000 integers was a float, so the whole column should be floats?

I'm not sure you fully understand, or maybe it's me that misunderstands what you're saying :)

Each utility generally has its own black-start procedures. One utility might start two diesel generators (only really used for black-start) and then slowly start energizing the path to various loads and other generators. That utility and it's parent RTO/ISO train on that scenario several times a year and have the procedure printed in a binder within reach.

Something I've found interesting is that many of these plans are ~35 years old and we're created before computers were super common place for these kinds of things. The point being people weren't doing graph and optimization algorithms to determine the optimal paths. There has been a little university research and national lab research into this recently and I've heard they've helped certain utilities that they worked with determine some improvements, which is always exciting.

It depends on what time of the year it is. During Winter Peak on the East Coast (ISO-NE/PJM/NYISO) or Summer Peak in the ERCOT/SPP regions, you might not have a huge amount of reserves left. The shoulder months would be much nicer, but that is when many generators go on outage for repairs, so you have other problems.

One of the biggest issues is that traditional resources (coal, nuclear, gas) can run for long periods of time and in many places have a pretty reliable fuel supply. Renewables are great, but you could be generating lots of power one minute and then it's all gone the next hour. This causes a lot of stress on traditional resources which need to be ready to counteract this. Coal plants and gas plants were never designed for that either and it's causing issues.

The user is probably a transmission level grid operator. These exist at most decent sized utilities (Entergy, AEP, Duke), although it is possible there is a TOP (transmission operator company) that is not the same as the utility.

There are also organizations like the RTO/ISO that also act like air traffic controllers for the grid by keeping it reliable. They also are usually responsible for committing and dispatching generation for dozens of utilities collectively to save money (by banding together, you need to carry less reserves or backup power and can leverage economies of scale). In North America these organizations are (CAISO, SPP, ERCOT, MISO, PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE). All of these organizations practice black-start drills (I used to help run them) and have NERC certified operators.