wyattk

A great and free option are Colab notebooks from Google: https://colab.research.google.com/

You can attach a GPU for free, and, if I recall, even a TPU. See https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/gpu.ipynb

Well stated. Until I saw it, I did not realize how many people went from rich (interpretations vary based on your experience, so "comfortable") suburbs and homes to "good" schools to "good" companies and professions. This is my experience, but that tends to be a common path and results in little diversity of "thought" (meaning ideas and experience).

It's become apparent to me that diversity is an ambiguous terms and its interpretation can vary a lot over many factors and time. I am not discounting any definition of it. When it comes up, it feels like people are on different pages with it. It could more prudent to state the definition when it is said.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but this is like comparing apples to pitbulls. Both of these goals are big milestones, but fundamentally different.

With space, everything that was created and invested was brand new. There was not too much worrying about existing infrasture. Often, there would be thousands of people working to make 1 individual mission happen. Energy in the US is a lot different. For instance, you have to keep the massive machine that is the electricity transmission and distribution grids running.

Here's a scope of the challenges of 100% renewables, for anyone without a background in this (one should view challenges as opportunities):

First, there's a lot of existing generation that would need to be sunsetted and even more that would need to be created. In fact, given the intermittency of renewables, there would need to be a multiple more of capacity than there is now given the capacity factor, usually divide 1/CapacityFactor (see more on that here: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf). So, 4 GW of installed wind capacity is really only expected to output ~1 GW at any point in time, given the intermittencies.

Second, there will have to be a lot of upgrades made to the transmission grid (sending power long distances from large scale renewable generators to population centers), and the distribution grid (sends power to all the buildings and homes in a city). The distribution grid upgrades to be made will have to help it handle a lot more rooftop solar, home batteries, and electric vehicles.

Third, there will have to be a lot more storage installed. Electric vehicles can have a large impact here, but there will still be a need for in-home and grid-scale batteries. Batteries are also just getting to the point where they're economically-feasible in some uses. There is still a ways to go for batteries to be economical enough to be widespread, especially grid-scale. Physical storage of electricity will likely have to grow too (think: pump to a higher lake when prices are low, and let it flow back down and turn a turbine when it's needed).

Fourth, and this is definitely my opinion (and what I'm working on), is that we are going to have to make everything work together more. We can't have all these batteries, solar panels, and other connected appliances and thermostats do whatever they want at the distribution level. We will have to change to time-varying rate structures for end-consumers, but this won't be enough either. Communication and coordination will yield the best results.

I tried to be brief. If anyone has any more questions or thoughts about this, I would love to hear them!

So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?

Besides work flexibility, culture, purpose, and equity, how is a new venture supposed to compete with an entrenched monopolist that is essentially printing money (see: Alphabet)? Sure, equity is a multiplier that can return a huge amount of money with huge risk, but even equity+salary can't come near total comp offered by these juggernauts. I mean, these companies generate mountains of profits after paying crazy salaries and perks.

How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

I get the point you're tryin to make, but, then again, who are we to judge what is and is not worthy, especially this early? A lot of "unworthy" things have been extremely value to us as a society in hindsight, let alone things that have stemmed from them.

> countless B2B products truly worth it?

"B2B" is a very vague and extremely overarching term. Computers, internet, and cell phones were all, at one point, very much "B2B".

> Who could possibly, genuinely want to work at such places?

For starters, I can imagine some people would fancy having a large impact on the world and the subsequent 10-12 figures attached to their name from all the value they created. Microsoft was "B2B", Amazon was an online bookstore (some people would imagine "instant food" in a category close to that), etc. It can be hard for many to see the value of something at its origin and not be able to see how that would shape a society, let alone an exponentially changing one. I think Peter Thiel would call some of these things "secrets".

Look, I don't much care for Facebook as a company or as a product. FAIR is a bit separate and does a lot of pure research. FAIR has put out a lot of good work, tools (it supports PyTorch), and has a lot of good people working there with good intentions.

Not everyone that works for a company that a given person dislikes is "evil" or acting malevolently. No company is homogeneous.

I'm from the rural Midwest. It may seem pedantic, but _no one_ from the Midwest uses a space in the name. That and the spelling errors reinforce that this is just an inflammatory bait comment.

With all due respect, but it seems apparent that you are not familiar with how electric distribution utilities work, especially in a deregulated state like California, how CAISO and its market mechanisms work, or how CPUC works.

If you are a reader that is not well-versed in how the grid works, please disregard the parent's comment.

I work in this space. I view this noisemaking as harmful to the public as they likely do not fully understand how the electricity delivery system (the grid) works, and this only serves to infuriate them and increase distrust.

A related question to the community, if you have ~5 years of experience, is it okay to have a resume that is more than one page? This includes other sections besides experience (i.e. skills).

What are the communities' thoughts on length of resume?

Edit: clarified question.

A piece of advice, two of the words in the large graphic are spelled wrong (explanation and experience).

Jeremy,

I'm having trouble finding the (old) 2017 material. I would like to see it for my reference. Do you know where this is located?

Does anyone have a different link to this? It's insecure and Cisco keeps blocking it, so I can't just proceed from Chrome.

Not quite. We're talking about something that is publicly-owned (roads) to something that is (besides certain municipal projects) privately-owned (last-mile internet access). Compounding this difference, there is monopolistic tendencies that arise with internet as it's rarely competitive. We're talking apples to cows here.

No net benefit of the local population. I forgot to include that one word, net. I admit it does make a difference, but perhaps not to the point where people will fixate on that and ignore everything else.

I understand what you are saying, but these things can be quantified and accounted for in economic models. We can wave hands all day about "I think the economy would do this" but that is often the enemy of applied economics (heavily mathematical) and progress. There is a point when the incentives for the company can turn negative for the community. There is also the consideration in the community that those taxpayers (and voters) do not want to subsidize a massive corporation's shareholders.

Politicians can be aware of this point, but with a massive corporation trying to pit them all against each other for its own gain, competition will erode those profits to or even past the point of neutral cost-benefit to the community. As Peter Thiel likes to point out "Competition is for losers."

Something about this just makes my stomach sick... A massive corporation is pitting governments against each other for its own gain, often to no benefit of the local population.

I'm scared to see the numbers of "incentives" that local politicians try and hand out to Amazon. There's little evidence that the public money used/lost will ever be recouped. One of the worst cases of this happening so far is the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin that will cost taxpayers around $4.5B [1], and I feel that numbers for Amazon will dwarf those Foxconn numbers.

The US is far removed from the days of trust busting [2], and keeping massive corporations (monopolies and oligopolies) and their market distorting effects in check, for the long-term benefit of the entire economy and the people. There seems to be a lot of similarities between now and the late 1800s and early 1900s. We live in a strange time. I get the feeling there will be a strong resurgence of antitrust cases and similar progressive policies. I'm curious to see where the near future takes us.

1: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/mem... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Theodore_Rooseve...

I agree but it's unsurprising. Hinton has a bit of "star power" in the ML community. He's done a lot of pioneering work on neural networks, and stated that he's been working on this capsule concept for years.

I get why the focus is on him but they could have at least mentioned the others.

I want to take a moment to reflect on what a great community HN has. It never ceases to amaze me.

The link is from the CS department at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, IA. It sounds obscure, but that's my hometown. I grew up a couple blocks away from it. I sat in on classes there. I even know the author's family. That's small town Iowa, for ya.

I never thought I would see anything related to that on here. This is truly a place for all.

Why does Facebook not use something like an MIT license? I am honestly curious.

Many of the comments seem to be focusing on the initial install costs and missing a big point here. Solar can save a lot of money and even make a nontrivial amount of money for the owner.

As you would expect, there a lot of factors that go into how much an array would save/produce (generation, storage, etc.), but a regulatory factor that changes everything is rate structures. Rate structures are far from a standard thing, pretty much wherever you go, there's something different, it varies by state and even at a smaller, city level for municipally-owned utilities (about 15% of the US is served by these, including parts of Bay Area, LA area, Phoenix, Seattle, etc.).

For consuming energy, there is usually a flat-rate or a time-of-use rate (many varieties) but there are more and more capacity fees and fixed charges taking over. For producing energy, it gets much stranger. Many cities and states use versions net metering [0], some will pay you the wholesale power rate and others will pay you the retail rate (retail is ~3x wholesale), some will use a Feed-In Tariff [1], some will factor in a more time-based rate (like time-of-use above), and some others too. If you want to know more about rate structures in general, check this out [2]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariff [2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Rate structures are heavily regulated, for good reason. Their design is a very difficult task and is pretty murky. On one hand are the consumers and their desire to connect solar and other DERs [3] like storage to lower costs. On the other hand are utilities, usually not acting malevolent, wanting to maintain reliability, and, at all costs, avoiding the death spiral [4], which basically means that more people connecting solar and even leaving the grid will skyrocket costs and tank reliability. Though sometimes, the generators will desperately lobby against them. Depending on where you are, the utilities can be the generators too, another matter. [3] http://www2.epri.com/Our-Work/Pages/Distributed-Electricity-... [4] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-th...

Rate structures are arguably the largest factor in installing solar. Initial costs are important, but the rate structures will affect them over their 30+ year life. In some places, like North Carolina, it can lead to solar flourishing. In other places, hostile rate structures and other regulations can severely harm solar's adoption, like Florida which should be the best place in the US for photovoltaics.

Even more complicating is the ability of the grid to handle a lot of solar, let alone other DERs. The energy grid in the near future can be highly distributed, 100% renewable, and even more reliable than it is today, but there are some big system levels problems to solve before than (these rarely get any attention, most attention goes to node-level problems like sheer generation). I am fully engulfed in this field and am working on these things now. I thought I would present an important point and give y'all some information on this field that I find absolutely riveting. :)

I agree. 8-12x ARR seems to be the standard multiplier for valuation of a SaaS startup. This is also growing ~100% YoY at this scale. That being said, 25x seems very bullish. Even 20x kind of jumps off the page to me. Keep in mind, it's also the SaaS darling in the valley right now, so it's gonna get a bump.

I view this like much of the rest of communications software (or even software in general). Over time, it tends to go to zero. It can be useful to compare it to video services or even personal messaging. In personal messaging, you have an insane amount of services like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, GroupMe, Allo, Hangouts, iMessage, Signal, etc...

I could see something similar to Slack as a free, open source project. It could possibly develop out of something like Signal [https://signal.org/]. Making and supporting an open source solution can be a viable business too (e.g. CoreOS, Docker). I doubt that it would kill Slack either. It should be interesting to watch, and will benefit the end users as a whole through an improved Slack and/or a similar free option.

This seems like it is Google preparing itself for a future where it will almost certainly be hit with the antitrust hammer here in the US. Google has been getting increasing pressure from the EU [1]. It, at least in the public's eye, has been showing more monopolistic behavior and getting more attention, like discussed here [2]. There has been talk of Amazon and Facebook facing similar antitrust issues in the future too, but those seem to be quieter.

The future is uncertain, but this will sure be interesting.

1: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/technology/business/google-e... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...

The problem of defencemen getting plastered was not just the trapezoid. A lot of it had to do with the way icing worked. It used to be the d-man had to "touch" the puck for it to be icing, this always resulted in d-men and forwards going nearly full speed after the puck to either get the icing call or to beat it out.

The NHL has done away with this and has "no touch icing" where the d-man only has to skate to the hash marks (middle of the circles), that's removed a considerable amount of the high-speed collisions