triplepoint217

I think Renewables (especially solar) tend to be fairly easy to cutail (stop generating) and can probably avoid generating much during negative prices. I'd guess the negative prices will probably mostly hit legacy assets that don't have that ability.

Gas plants can't really change how much they are generating in seconds. What they actually do is use the inertia of the spinning machinery, when the grid frequency drops (which is usually one of the first symptoms of load exceeding demand) the big spinning generators don't change speed instantaneously, they instead come under higher load and and convert more of their kinetic energy into electrical energy and help prop up the grid frequency. This starts the generators slowing down which then causes the control software to do whatever it is they do to feed in more gas and generate more power to try to keep them running at the same speed (I don't know exactly, I worked in grid batteries not gas plants).

But yes, the batteries can respond much faster and are way better at this kind of support. It does lead to some situations that felt slightly weird to me where a battery will be selling a "spinning" reserve product. Luckily the weird linguistic artifact did not require us to actually rotate multi-ton batteries ;).

There are a few active in the US already (though it does look like the US is lagging)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

I like that analogy.

Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system: - Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM - Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram - UPS and similar are cache - Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;)

It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.

The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables.

When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).

Glad to see this finally happening. This goal was definitely part of the appeal when I was working on the Autobidder team at Tesla!

The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.

Sorry it took me a few days to see this. Right now we have trust per person, and a separate "preference" by topic. Our end goal is to do trust per person per topic.

Sift (https://sift.quest/) is working hard on doing exactly that. We don't have enough users to actually show it off yet, but at our core we're building around a user reputation/relevance graph that we think will let people curate streams like that.

In our model, as soon as anyone you trust in our graph says "this is a 101 type post/comment" we can realize you are not interested in seeing it and de prioritize it in your feeds/comments while still showing it to other newbies or to people who have expressed an interest in engaging with that kind of topic.

We don't have a community yet, but sift (https://sift.quest/) is aiming to be a comprehensive alternative.

We've got some new ideas around dealing with cross posts: * posts can have multiple tags and be findable from any of them * all posts to the same url map to the same backend node (so you don't get as many duplicates)

I'm actually most excited about what we're trying to do with regards to the low effort content and degradation of communities aspects.

At our core we're actually a reputation/trust/"how much do I want to see things from this person" graph that has recently pivoted to being a Reddit alternative. This means that (once we get the community going and our algorithms tuned up), we should be able to offer you much more ergonomic ability to choose how much of what kind of content you want to see (people who like memes can post them, but you can choose not to see them.

We're still in alpha and don't have much of a community yet, but we're adding features fast and will be very friendly and responsive to any feature requests you have.

Thanks the feedback!

* Yes, we are working on comments sections for posts. Hoping to deploy this week.

* Usernames on posts are coming soon. They interact a bit with some things we are doing differently at Sift, so there's some complexity: * Sift tries not to to show you duplicates (the same url maps to the same node in our database for all submissions), and we don't actually privileged "submission" relative to any other person saying it is good. * We trying out a different privacy model where posts don't have to be publicly attributed. Right now we are effectively in the everything is anonymous world, we will be adding the option for public attribution (hopefully this week, maybe next) and at that point we will begin showing usernames of people who are willing to be shown.

* I've deleted the ellipsis. It was an artifact of us trying to communicate that you can click on posts to expand ui interactions, that looks like it was doing more harm than good.

* The integers next to the post are a score. * They should be in descending order in the Explore tab. * In the library tab things are time ordered by when you saved/preferenced them * in the tag tab things are time ordered by their first submission. We'll add more sorting options eventually but it's further down the roadmap. If given that understanding things still look out of order, that's probably a bug, please report it with the feedback button (which captures information about what you are seeing).

We've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit from people wanting a more modern interface, so we're going to have to make someone unhappy. We're planning on integrating tailwind css soon and doing a bit of ui uplift.

However, we're also racing forward on implementing our trust/reputation/"probability that this user will want to see that user's stuff" model that we are really hoping will allow you to keep your good community even as 'unwashed masses' descend. We'll likely post more about that before too long on sift and/or https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/

We're still pretty alpha, but Sift is aiming to hit what you are looking for https://sift.quest/about

We ended up launching sooner than we really planned after a reddit post last friday got more attention than we expected, so things are not polished and we are missing features, but we are developing quickly.

We're actually targeting something a bit different than reddit longer term with a more tag based curation system and a (medium term) reputation graph that we are hoping will give some new solutions to seeing things that are more trustworthy/relevant (helping with the eternal September problem, shills, and whatnot).

Check us out and tell us about post something good, let us know if you have requests or comments, we're actively integrating things people ask us for as fast as we can.

Light actually has momentum but not mass. Calling it effective mass isn't far off, but sometimes my pedantic physicist kicks in.

Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or worse)

I use spacemacs and want to play with the vim part more, but I type dvorak, so I wanted to do a similar remapping and remap hjkl to htns so I would also be curious to hear if anyone has a good way to do that.

Bayesian Logical Data Analysis for physical scientists by Phil Gregory is pretty good, particularly if you are some kind of scientist.

source: I TA'd a course in Data analysis, primarily bayesian, that used that as the textbook.

Looks like pypy for python 3 is back on track. This ameliorates one of my concerns about migrating to python 3 since I think/hope that pypy is going to be an important part of future python.

I have been thinking about building something to implement something fairly similar to what you described there. If you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.

The work is being done by my labmates, so I can answer questions.

The killer application here is color e-ink displays, since these structures are purely reflective, they should let you make an apparently brighter display by sending back all of the light of a relevant color.

Also on Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-the-key-to-making-pai...

HuffPo definitely has original reporters, my friend is one of them:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/betsy-isaacson/

She writes good articles for the general public about tech in general and things like net neutrality and aaron swartz

Yes, we do have some pretty good theories for designing metamaterials. From what I can remember (and quickly look up on the net), one of the leading theories is called transformation optics, and finding a coordinate transform to a coordinate system where the path you want light to take is a straight line. You can work out what your metamaterial has to look like from that coordinate transform.

I probably have some of the details of the technique wrong, I am trying to remember a talk from a year ago. If you want more detail, look at John Pendry's papers (he is probably the leading theorist in metamaterials). http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.pendry

Yes, I would be more likely to play in Python, though I guess I do need to bite the bullet and learn javascript at some point.

If you can integrate haste or fay and let people play in Haskell that would be indeed be epic, and I would definitely use it (as haskell is my learning project at the moment)

You might also think about putting it on the arXiv (arxiv.org). I think they take articles that haven't been submitted to journals, and it is a bit of a recognized source of articles (there are citation guidelines for arxiv articles for example).

Awesome!. As a, alibet very small, mailgun customer, I am happy to see them pushing a big chunk of their code open source.

Amusing anecdote: I was at a pg talk last week, and afterwards someone in the audience came up and asked if SR being gone meant there was a market niche for a new startup.

pg's answer was that it was in no way worth the risk, there are lots of other things you can try without the large risk of ending up in jail.

I don't buy books to look good for my peers. I buy books because I like reading them, lending them, etc. The social signalling is just a side benefit.

Plus, walking into someone's house and seeing a bookshelf full of awesome books is a good way to know that I am probably going to like said person.

A less centralized version of that would just be to make it really frictionless to resell things. So when I need the drill for once in a year, I pop uberlocalbuy, buy a drill from someone near me and either pick it up or pay for delivery. After I am done with it, there is an easy way to immediately relist the drill (possibly with an automatically computed depreciation of its value), and then the next person buys it from me.

Wow, I didn't realize they went that high. Then yes, with the current output of a battery pack, I can see why people are worried.

Does anyone know what the actual voltages are?

Just because it is high relative to the usual 12V of cars does not mean it is terrifically fatal.

An anecdote to give you a picture of things: Electric arc welders operate at around 60V with a very large amount of current. However the electricity is not particularly the dangerous thing about them, it is the 9000F arc you are making and the molten steel. So to demonstrate that we shouldn't freak out about the electric danger and worry more about the heat, my instructor had someone touch the business end with one hand and the ground electrode with the other. Bit of a tingle but certainly didn't stop their heart or anything. Welders are kept at low voltage for this reason.

I assume that it must be somewhat dangerous because of the responder guides warning, but I would want to know the actual voltage before drawing conclusions. If the voltage is 112 or less (or even 220 or less), it should be possible to be pretty safe with some fairly manageable precautions.

Maybe one of the big oil companies that wants to show they are forward looking could build it? The already have expertise building tubes from pipelines.

If Texas were to do that, I might even consider moving there.