ms512

https://xkcd.com/1053/ (to make a link available)

Up front: I agree that there's generally too much posturing and too little focus on the data and how to actually solve our energy challenges.

With that said, it's worth considering the aspect of what it takes to ensure energy is available when it is needed. With fossil fuels, plant generation capacity has been historically built to ensure satisfaction of peak loads. Fuel was stored nearby to allow meeting rated capacity whenever that capacity was needed. Renewables' generation is slightly more complex, since we have less control for making rated generation happen when we need it to meet demand.

Of course, there are many options with making renewables work. Storage is one approach, overbuilding renewables to ensure a minimum actual generation in adverse conditions is another. As we work to reduce the costs of renewables (and storage), various renewable based options become increasingly economically advantageous. We shouldn't ignore the downsides; we should seek to understand what can be done about them.

As far as data goes, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) provides power generation/consumption data for the US grid, including breakouts by generation source [1]. The data for the Texas grid (ERCO) is interesting to explore.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... (you can expand the graphs and view hourly data for up to 30 days and daily data for a much longer period of time).

Jane's News [1] is a decent source for defense information.

[1] https://www.janes.com/defence-news/

The US Energy Information Administration publishes a variety of energy related information, including US Oil Extraction. In Dec 2021, 11,567,000 barrels per day were extracted, compared to a 12,966,000 bbl/day peak in Nov 2019 [1].

Of course, this aggregate number doesn't disambiguate the cause of the decrease in production.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

tl;dr: BLM Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) hasn't disclosed where donations have been going and is out of compliance with various state's rules for non-profits. Amazon suspended donations to BLMGNF until the compliance issue is resolved.

Recent HN post of a science.org article on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29972342

That is what it looks like. This news post appears to mostly restate another post Amazon made describing the free tier changes a few days ago [1] which was already discussed on HN [2].

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332207

Prime Contractor.

It is a company that is responsible for the final integration of a system, but often fans out subcomponents to a large assortment of other companies.

While that is also true, the parent post was pointing out that the landlord has a cash flow issue without rent coming in.

If they can't pay the mortgage without a renter paying, they may have the property repossessed by the bank.

It looks like it was a specific post on the page.

The direct link is https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/coronavirus-2020-04-06/card...

It'd be nice to update the HN link to the direct link.

> I today saw the number ... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Note that the number for the current day isn't yet necessarily complete. For example, as of this writing, Washington and Illinois were not yet in the table [1].

Washington numbers get released at 3pm PST [1] and Illinois numbers don't specifiy an update time [2]. It looks like the number should end up around 8.5k today, so better than yesterday's 14k.

Of course, with all the back-and-forth on test availability, comparing numbers day-to-day is challenging, since more testing is likely to reveal a higher absolute number of cases.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[2] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus

[3] https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19

An earlier news post gives some more detail about the projects being simulated [1]. That link was previously submitted on HN twice, but not discussed [2] [3].

[1] https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22575200

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22579834

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is a classic.

Graham's approach shaped Buffett's. Personally, I found The Intelligent Investor to be more clearly written than Buffett's letters. It more clearly left me with a framework for how to approach value investing.

The Roosevelts was my intro to Ken Burns and it was the only TV show ever that I could not stop watching. Since then, I've also been very impressed by the quality of all the other Ken Burns documentaries.

Likely referring to the February 28th, 2017 S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region, for which Amazon published a postmortem at https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

Prior HN post that included some discussion on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863

Recent HN discussion on a different article about the same exploit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18362905

While I agree with setting up an email server not being a trivial endeavor, I managed to learn a lot and complete setup within a few hours by following one of the many available tutorials ([1], [2]) and the ongoing maintenance has been minimal.

I took the plunge about 4 years ago after being uncomfortable with the possibility of losing my main Gmail account. Ultimately, I decided that if I didn't own my email address, I was at the mercy of Gmail if anything went wrong. I came to the conclusion that losing my main email account would be more painful and time consuming than running my own server. At the time, I considered an alternative of owning my own domain and doing mail forwarding to Gmail or using a smaller email hosting provider, but decided there was value in learning more about how email worked.

[1] http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ [2] https://www.linode.com/docs/email/running-a-mail-server/

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane makes the case of the evolution of life from the vantage point of energy transfer.

I found the book accessible and compelling.

I recently read Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza and found his discussion about how to use temperature and time to produce good bread and pizza enlightening.

Intel's ISA-L ended up implementing this method. Their implementation is interesting because they took this further and took advantage of knowledge of the instruction latency to pipeline multiple iterations of this method to achieve some really amazing throughput.

For reference, see https://01.org/intel%C2%AE-storage-acceleration-library-open... and the source code at https://github.com/01org/isa-l (see the erasure code folder for details).

In general, I've found Prof. Plank's other papers and presentations very interesting, innovative, and accessible.