Hacker News Reader

Game_Enderon 18-month $220k Powerwall solar energy installation nightmare

Summary: Tesla's Powerwall controller cannot handle 10 off grid batteries and sales should not of sold this system.

He is running beyond the scale of that Tesla's controller unit can really handle:

> Tesla soon worked out that the system was being overloaded due to having too many Powerwalls connected at once ... The gateway is being overloaded, reaching 100 per cent CPU and RAM usage. There’s too much info when they are all online.

He is doing something very uncommon among customers, and Tesla apparently doesn't even try to make it work:

> But while Tesla claims it can do off-grid 10-Powerwall setups, there are only a handful around the world – most are backed up by grid electricity, papering over any outages. ... “At the beginning there were actually only three 10-Powerwall installs in the world that were off-grid,”

They also apparently have poor support for off grid firmware updates, possibly related to the lack of CPU and memory to both keep the lights on and upgrade at once:

> “During these upgrade cycles, the system goes into this chaotic state that takes between four and eight hours, turning off and on 50 times,”

Game_Enderon How the US can stop wasting billions of dollars on each transit project

They built their factory in China in less than a year [0]. Tesla pushes equally hard everywhere which you can see in Germany where they pulled out every stop they could to build quickly and still took about 2 years [1].

0 - https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2020/50-most-i...

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Berlin-Brandenbu...

Game_Enderon US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

The average person is not someone who moves the needle in society and it's not what you would target if you were a parent pushing to give you child the best achieving something remarkable. You want to give your child an outsized chance to end up the very top top of the band: successful founder a large business, national level politician, C-level executive, high successful doctor, well compensated finance professional, managing partner at a law firm. Or more crucially to be know those people and get opportunities the average person does not through their network.

If both places produce the same average outcome, then you would be crazy to not pick the place that is several times more likely to have an amazing outcome.

Game_Enderon asdf banned_commands

It's interesting they banned the "echo" command but then use it in the tests [0].

0 - https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/blob/master/test/banned_comm...

Game_Enderon Apple says iPhones will switch to USB-C chargers to comply with new EU law

USB-C exists because apple didn't "play ball" and use USB-mini or USB-micro like the rest of the industry and developed the lightning port [0] (see comments on this article).

0 - https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/

Game_Enderon A primer to nuclear fusion and First Light Fusion

Lots of interesting fusion startups. This group is using a gun type design that reminds of the Fat Man atomic bomb [0]. Except here it's a fusion target hit by high speed slug causing is to rapidly compression and undergo fusion. The key things is that unlike the NIF they have a clear path to power extraction. In production they are planning to use a chamber with circular sheets of falling liquid lithium to capture the fusion neutrons then transfer the heat [1]. Breeding some tritium along the way.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

1 - https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plan

Game_Enderon Stable Diffusion is a big deal

This why we have the fair use defense for ignoring copyright [0]. It’s more efficient for society to limit the control copyright allows authors of works so they can be leveraged to enable something even greater. While many in the media community ask permission for almost any use, to maintain good relationship, and limit liability you don’t have to for many uses.

“Copyright” and fair use are human defined not absolutes, so the real debate is whether AI models should be allowed to learn from copyright works like a human does. This use case is also close to people who use clips or samples snippets of works in other bits of art which they then profit off of. It is way more efficient at this process than previous methods (having an artist study and practice a style then reproduce it), so that is where the debate is.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Game_Enderon Tell HN: Salesforce has globally revoked Slack's holiday shutdown benefit

That leave is essentially everyone collectively sacrificing to allow humanity to continue on. It’s not really anything close to a vacation for the new parents, and their colleagues still have to pick up any slack. The end result is more humans to keep the world moving.

An equivalent for someone not having kids would be taking time off to volunteer somewhere.

Game_Enderon Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

Machine learning packages like Tensorflow can result in GB size package directories.

Game_Enderon Sex is going out of fashion?

Yes. A popular way to see what shows reviewers and audiences like most.

If you Google “rt <name of movie>” you will get the rating too.

Game_Enderon Mundane chores are all the rage in gaming

The foldit [0] game has players solving protein folding problems that have real world implications. More ideas in this angle would be data labeling type situations to power machine learning systems. These are currently done through MechanicalTurk or large offices in low cost areas of the world dedicated to the task.

The tools are not usually that polished or that pleasant to use, and don't have the same gamified and reward angle. So if you could figure out how to package the work, add some whimsy, and cross validate results you might have something.

0 - https://fold.it/

Game_Enderon EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

USB-C was developed partly because lightning should how much better a reversible multipurpose cable could be. The argument is that without the ability for one player to innovate with a new port we not have the same quality of USB-C port we have now.

Game_Enderon LeekWars, program your AI to destroy your leek enemies

I have loved playing around with this!

Two quick things:

- The documentation about classes in LeekScript v2/v3 has no English translation so it's not clear from that tutorial you can use them.

- Do you have a recommended way to handle version control and editing? Some way to sync from GitHub, or maybe an API to use?

Game_Enderon Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached

So two options I am curious about:

- If it's a normal configuration partitioning a single large node with multiple instances using Redis cluster

- A cost equivalent cluster of machines with a similar memory size running on Redis cluster

Game_Enderon Python 3.11 beta vs. 3.10 benchmark

This comes from the following enhancements:

- Cheaper, lazy Python frames: 3-7%

- Inlined Python function calls: 1-3%

- PEP 659: Specializing Adaptive Interpreter: variable

The interpreter changes work by generating specialized code so this might have a memory impact which they are working to offset and expect to cap at 20% more.

See the in progress release notes for details: https://docs.python.org/3.11/whatsnew/3.11.html#faster-cpyth...

Game_Enderon Tax the Land

The answer is that he could still afford to live there just no longer as an owner of that much land. In a city with a land value tax the rental or condo market would be much more dynamic so he would be able to find and affordable option their.

Game_Enderon One gemini battery nearly doubles Tesla Model S range

Production though is 4 years away in 2026. What capacity will stock manufacturer and Tesla packs be at then? Especially since Tesla is not sitting still and has new designs also under development.

Game_Enderon Stray bullet kills English astrophysicist visiting United States

The funny thing is, that in the United States we give up the day to day security of living in a society with fewer guns and much less gun violence because of the freedom citizens have to own guns.

I am not saying it really feasible to change the approach in the United States, but it's not really honest to claim that widespread firearms ownership does not have costs. The simple way to think about it is that it decreases the marginal cost, and increases the impact, of many things like suicides, and senseless rampages.

Game_Enderon John Deere unveils fully autonomous 8R tractor

It could be increased standard of food as the world develops. More meat for consumption would increase the amount of food grown to raise the animals we slaughter for meat even with a static population.

Game_Enderon James Webb Space Telescope launch [video]

It’s referring to the Christmas Eve broadcast of Apollo 8, the first manned mission in orbit around the moon, another large milestone in spaceflight and for humanity overall [0]. The American space program likes to refer to its past accomplishments and this is the biggest and most complex space telescope ever launched. It’s also tradition to use “big” and inspiring language, so calling back to that era makes for a more compelling message.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

Game_Enderon How to Set Low Expectations at Your Two Remote Jobs

The poster above is inflating by about 15-25%. The “junior”/L4/E4 , level (one above entry level and one below senior) makes ~$270k at Google/Facebook according to levels.fyi [0]. Senior comp can vary more because the band is wide but $500k year would be possible with some stock appreciation.

0 - https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook&track=Softwa...

Game_Enderon Science upside for Starship

It really does. Brings me back to when I was kid and would pour over every issue and to learn about what the FUTURE would bring. Very impressive thoughts about the what the power of cheap scale can do: “Quantity has a quality all of its ow “ really hits home.

Game_Enderon OpenTelemetry

Does this section here help? It’s below the fold on Mobile, but it is on the front page of the site.

> OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior.

Game_Enderon OpenTelemetry

Do you have an insight on the timeline for stabilizing the metrics and logging specs?

Game_Enderon Unified Shader Programming in C++

https://magnum.graphics

Supports WASM and WebGL too!

Game_Enderon Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code

Is there an example of using the C++ indexer? I saw hack and JS on your site but missed C++ (Python would also be amazing!).

Game_Enderon Why observability requires a distributed column store

Their column store is really fast, but I am disappointed they did not mention what you lose: complex queries. You cannot do joins or combine data from separate events. For example if want to measure errors per active worker, as fraction of total load, all those fields have to be sent in same event to Honeycomb from the same service. This kind of question is answerable with promql, and other systems I have used.

It really like using Honeycomb vs Grafana + Prometheus for figuring out what is broken. I cannot wait until their dash boarding and alert/slo management mature enough that I don’t have to use separate products for it.

Game_Enderon OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

They are not inflated numbers they are what you can get working for a set of top companies with deep pockets competing over the same talent. It varies but 150k is entry level comp pretty much anywhere they hire in the United States [0].

It’s not “fair” but it’s worth your time to look into getting into the US tech sector. Your skills have the most market value their.

0 - http://levels.fyi

Game_Enderon AlphaFold 2 is here: what’s behind the structure prediction miracle

To me the most interesting part of the article is the cometary on where basic research is going to happen in the future. The fear is that if it only happens in large companies, then the unbiased pool of experts society relies on will be smaller and less informed. Along with the issue of nobody being around for the slog of defining a field, setting up databases, competitions and standards. These are what allow well funded corporate labs to apply their skills and compute and blow a problem out of the water. The problem is, would they do the work to define an unknown problem in the first place?

Game_Enderon What Went Wrong?

It’s common, a friend almost got expelled for reporting a flaw in the universities ID card system. That friend did not brake anything, they did not sneak into any protected spaces. Just discovered and validated a flaw and then reported it.