Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/billions-were-wasted-on-hadoop-startups-and-the-same-will-eventually-be-true-of-docker <comment><USER2> I am very much a fan of hot-takes, but this one is trash --

> The money was wasted on hype. The same will eventually be said of Docker. > I've yet to hear a single benefit attributed to Docker that isn't also true > of other VMs, but standard VMs allow the use of standard operating systems > that solved all the hard problems decades ago, whereas Docker is struggling > to solve those problems today.

Linux containerization (using the word "docker" for everything isn't right either) is an isolation + sandboxing mechanism, NOT a virtual machine. Even if you talk about things like LXC (orchestrated by LXD), that's basically just the addition of the user namespacing feature. A docker container is _not_ a VM, it is a regular process, isolated with the use of cgroups and namespaces, possibly protected (like any other process) with selinux/apparmor/etc.

Containerization is almost objectively a better way of running applications -- there's only one question, do you want your process to be isolated, or not. All the other stuff (using Dockerfiles, pulling images, the ease of running languages that require their own interpreters since you package the filesystem) is on top of this basic value propostion.

An easy way to tell that someone doesn't know what they're talking about when speaking about containerization is if they call it a VM (and don't qualify/note that they're being fast and loose with terminology).

All this said -- I do think Docker will die, and it _should_ die because Docker is no longer the only game in town for reasonably managing (see: podman,crictl) and running containers (see: containerd/cri-o, libcontainer which turned into runc) .

[EDIT] - I want to point out that I do _not_ mean the Docker the company or Docker the project will "die" \-- they have done amazing things for the community and development as a whole that will literally go down in history as a paradigm shift. What I should have written was that "docker <x>" where x is "image", "container", "registry", etc should be replaced by "container <x>".

<comment><USER3> I'm not going to support the general thesis of this article, but I want to address something you said.

You're right that containers are not VMs, but that's only really relevant as pedantry of technical details.

I think that what the author was trying to say (without really understanding it) was a comparison of containers to VMs as units of software deployment.

I don't think anyone is credibly using containers as a security measure on Linux, because if they think they are, they are in for several large surprises.

Rather, we're seeing the unbundling of software - it used to be that you deployed software to a physical machine with a full OS, then you could deploy it to a virtual machine with a full OS, then you could deploy the process, its dependencies and a minimal OS into a container.

I agree that Docker doesn't have a huge and profitable future ahead of it, because it's providing commodity infrastructure. Rather I think it's interesting to think about what the next level of software deployment decomposition will be, and I'd wager that it's FaaS (ie serverless).

<comment><USER4> > You're right that containers are not VMs, but that's only really relevant as > pedantry of technical details.

That isn't pedantry, it is an extremely critical point and the one most people miss when figuring out Docker. Both from a security context (docker doesn't provide vm level promises about isolation) and from a resource management side (docker is really close to no overhead).

It is not uncommon to deploy containers on VMs in the real world...

<comment><USER2> This is precisely why I said the fact that someone would gloss over this is a red flag. The point is _super critical_.

VMs are literally so hard to do correctly and in a performant fashion that parts of CPU instruction sets[0], and kernel subsystems (KVM[1]) were created to make them easier to run. Containers, in contrast are literally a few flags and a bunch of in-kernel antics.

A few people, notably Liz Rice and Jessie Frazelle have given talks on how to make containers from scratch that are _very_ illuminating for those that are interested:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYsVvV1aVss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYsVvV1aVss)

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel- based_Virtual_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel- based_Virtual_Machine)

<comment><USER5> Containers are "easy" because they are backed by tons of kennel code (cgroups, namespaces and basically a small part of many other subsystems). You can actually create containers from the shell!

VMs are "hard" because you start with nothing save some very low-level help from the hardware.

<comment><USER2> Also, I want to be clear that I'm using "simple" and "easy" in the rick hickey sense of the words, as in "simple" has more to do with what a thing is made of, and "easy" has more to do with ease of use, taking available tooling/familiarity and context into mind.

What I should have made clearer was that I think containers are both easier _and_ simpler than VMs. There are both less moving parts (I haven't looked, but I assume less code), _and_ containers are easier to get started with than VMs (set some flags on some syscalls versus make sure you buy the right CPU).

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, but don't forget there are some extremely simple hypervisor implementations out there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand how these are comparable. Hadoop solved a hard problem that nobody had. Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has. It would make sense if you're talking about kubernetes and using it to build hundreds of microservices because it's currently in fashion. Whether you're using Docker, Packer, Ansible or whatever doesn't matter. They are all a solution to the same problem and saying one is better basically boils down to saying which brand of hammer is better.

<comment><USER7> >Docker solves a simple problem that everyone has.

Docker provides an (IMHO pretty buggy) isolation layer that lies between "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate folders" and "keeping things that need to be kept separate in separate virtual machines".

I actually don't have the need for the level of isolation below VM and above folder very often. IMHO this level only really makes sense when containing and deploying somewhat badly written applications that have weirdly specific, non- standard system level dependencies (e.g. oracle) that you don't want polluting other applications' dependencies.

I've compiled and installed postgres in separate folders lots of times (super easy) and I've lost count of the number of times people have said "why don't you just dockerize that?" as if that was simpler and/or necessary in some way. That's the effect of "docker hype" talking.

<comment><USER8> 90% of the time Docker is used to solve the problem of "how do I upload this bucket of Python crud to a production server?" (Replace 'Python' with any other language to taste.)

A slightly smarter .tar.gz would have solved the problem just as well.

<comment><USER9> > A slightly smarter .tar.gz would have solved the problem just as well.

It's called "OS package" ;) and can provide more strict sandboxing using a systemd unit file: unit files provide seccomp, cgroups and more.

<comment><USER10> docker solves 2 problems. first is you have no control over your devs and allow them to install any software from anywhere. and second is you want to sell cpu time from the cloud in an efficient way (for the seller).

<comment><USER11> Disagree with both statements.

1) is not a containerisation problem. It's a team problem. I can jam in a load of npm and pip installs in to a shell install script. Maybe even delete /usr/ for the hell of it. Because the script isn't isolated from the OS I can cause more damage.

This problem is actually solved by doing code reviews properly and team discussions.

2) errr no. Containers != infrastructure. If you want to deploy on bare metal, you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The same will eventually be said of Docker. I've yet to hear a single > benefit attributed to Docker that isn't also true of other VMs,

I bought a Raspberry Pi and using a few commands, installed pre-configured Docker ARM images for 8-9 different media applications that would've taken me days to setup and manage individually. I didn't have to worry about dependencies or compilations. It just worked.

<comment><USER13> Properly packaged Debian/raspbian apps are still an "apt install" away. Your use case, which is common, tells me that packaging / distributing may need some love, not that there's a fundamental difference.

And the convenience does not come free - a random docker is almost as bad as a random executable.

<comment><USER14> Packaged and configured are two different things. The fun begins, when you need several applications, which each have different ideas about configuring services, that would be otherwise shared.

Then, as a matter of convenience, you get packages, that either bundle everything preconfigured to their liking (i.e. gitlab omnibus) or packages, that configure shared services how they need it, and running them shared is not supported (i.e. freeipa, which will configure httpd as it needs and forget having anything else served on the same machine).

Docker provides a way to isolate these, so you can still use the same resources you have to run applications, that would not cooperate with each other on a single machine, without having to run separate OS instances in separate VMs.

<comment><USER13> I mostly Ubuntu these days, have been for 15 years, and I cannot recall a time installing a package like Freeipa disabled a website installed by other packages. Obviously YMMv and I might have just been lucky.

<comment><USER14> With freeipa I meant server, not client. Installing is not enough, configuring it into usable state is needed too (i.e. running freeipa-server-install or freeipa-replica-install).

It is possible to run other services of such configured httpd, but you need to be careful. When freeipa wanted mod_nss, you had to use mod_nss, not mod_ssl (though they switched it); when freeipa wants to use gssproxy, you are going to use gssproxy too. These changes can happen during upgrades, and it is up to you to fix everything after such change.

The project doesn't recommend to run anything else with the same server; you are free to try though.

The point was, that with docker or another container system, any such problems are irrelevant, and it allows you to have separate service instances without having to run separate VMs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cloudera earnt $145m last quarter and grew by 37% over the previous quarter. Other Hadoop startups like Databricks are doing well and Docker has gone from a 2 digit revenue to a 3 digit revenue company from 2017-2018. How has billions been wasted when we have successful companies doing well against the toughest competitors ever i.e. Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

<comment><USER16> Well that include revenues from Hortonworks also. With revenue rise losses are also rising to $85.5M. I feel in couple of year they will fold up or brought by some big cloud vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can't really compare VM with Docker. Managing containers with Docker + Kubernetes is far easier then managing VMs. Docker might be replaced with something else in future (i.e. rkt), but basic concept IMHO is here to stay.

<comment><USER18> What about setup and maintenance of the infrastructure that hosts either VMs or containers?

Given a mediocre number of physical machines (say, 40), which is easier, install, setup and maintain a VMWare cluster or a Kubernetes cluster?

If someone has any insight, preferably backed by actual experience, it'll be most appreciated.

<comment><USER19> Assuming unlimited budget for hardware and licenses, then building a team that can deploy and manage VMWare on 40 nodes will be much easier - however raw VM is not really comparable to what k8s is giving you, so you'll be also solving reproducible deployments, load balancing traffic to your cluster etc. Still, with enough money those can be solved by purchasing more hardware&software, and you'll have easier time finding people who can maintain that over on- premise kubernetes.

<comment><USER18> Many thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this the way it normally works though, a bunch of investments don't work out - those are wasted - those that do work out, the people who did the investing get more money back.

Or to put it another way: There must have been some few Hadoop investments that worked out, the same will eventually be true of Docker.

<comment><USER21> I think what they've noticed is a similar arc where both products got initially sold as being universally required and applicable and generational which justified enough investment to spawn a whole industry.

And instead of fulfilling such dramatic hype they're both just good tools that are far from universally needed, not objectively superior to all other options, and there's nothing special about them that will keep them from getting supplanted by newer tools, which is the norm for even the industry even if the tools are good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _...but standard VMs allow the use of standard operating systems that solved > all the hard problems decades ago, whereas Docker is struggling to solve > those problems today._

What are these supposed "hard problems" the author speaks of?

<comment><USER23> Sandboxed, consistent environments to run code in?

<comment><USER24> All this money should have been spent on developing new, improving existing or switching to better (operating) systems which solve the resource and communication security problems, instead of creating another inner-platform effect.

I hope WebAssembly goes in this direction, instead of trying to adapt to current programming language paradigms.

<comment><USER25> >All this money should have been spent on developing new, improving existing or switching to better (operating) systems which solve the resource and communication security problems

But this isn't the problem Docker is trying to solve. It's just a problem that Docker needed to solve in order for their product to be useful, this is completely transparent to Docker users. Docker abstracts away a whole bunch of work you'd otherwise have to do to implement repeatable builds, it makes those builds widely distributable, and (depending on how you choose to use containers) can also simplify some capacity planning problems.

<comment><USER26> I thought Docker builds are not generally repeatable, since they often `apt- get update && apt-get install`, which depends on the current state of external package management?

They are definitely not reproducible in the sense of building bit-for-bit identical containers, unless you use Bazel.

That being said, I've found Dockerfiles to be a much more reliable build process than most others (recently struggled to get through LogDevice's cmake- based build.. ugh).

<comment><USER25> You're correct, but how reproducible you're builds end up being depends on how you use it, and how reproducible you need them to be depends on your use case. Maybe a particular use case wouldn't fit in very well, maybe it would be better served by using something like packer, maybe your dependency management requirements mean you should use something like artifactory. No technology is going to be suitable for everybody's needs, but Docker provides enough value to enough people that it's found a place in the market. If it Docker dies, I'd imagine it would be because it was replaced by something better, not because people suddenly realized that they weren't getting any value out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seriously, who reads this kind of garbage? It's painfully clear to anyone with any experience with Docker that the author hasn't even skimmed the wikipedia page. Reminds me of the idiots blasting out blog posts about how BITCOIN IS THE FUTURE one month, then BITCOIN IS A SCAM the next.

</comment><comment><USER28> > I've yet to hear a single benefit attributed to Docker that isn't also true > of other VMs

Oh boy

</comment><comment><USER29> Who is this commenter?

Containerised applications are commonly used. At this point it's a proven technology with clear use cases.

</comment><comment><USER30> The difference being that people actually use Docker

</comment><comment><USER31> The article just quotes the news about MapR and then asserts the same will happen with Docker. That may be true, but there's no evidence here.

</comment><comment><USER32> I suppose I haven't worked in environments scary enough that Docker was a necessity.

As a result I find it difficult understand the hype.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have come across quite a few articles that mention that for 99% of 'big' data problems, Hadoop and the like are an overkill. Simple tools, with a beefy machine is just as sufficient for the task.

Is that the reality of today?

Personally I too feel that distributed computing is an overkill for most 'big' data problems.

<comment><USER34> Yes. Very very very few people have data as big as "the internet" and the need for speed (which was the reason Google developed a look of their distributed tooling) that you get with these frameworks.

And it really only makes sense to have permanent infrastructure for distributed computing if you're constantly using it. Like if you're constantly rebuilding an index of the internet. Which most people aren't.

For occasional reindexing jobs, I've personally had success with Kubernetes. Our customer facing services were deployed with it, so it was trivial to bump up the number of nodes, and then schedule a bunch of workers containers, then roll everything down when the job is complete. No need to learn the ins-and- outs of Hadoop.

<comment><USER15> It is very, very, very common for companies to have enough data to need a distributed approach to ETL and especially common if they are doing any machine learning which is most of them.

In telcos you have network telemetry data. In supermarkets and retail you have purchase data and often credit card gateway data. In banking and finance you obviously have transaction data.

And with Kubernetes you still need a compute framework. Like I don't know the standard in the industry the Hadoop Spark framework.

<comment><USER34> A lot of companies think they need machine learning because the management consultants tell them they do (and hey, we can set it up for you!). And those that are "doing machine learning", often aren't doing it very well and have trouble applying it to the business.

Note I'm not saying _all._ Just 99%, like the parents comment referred to. That leftover 1% are the companies you can name off the top of your head. ExxonMobil, Target, Chase, Visa, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My beef with Hadoop, and other big data tools, is that for pretty much any task other than outlier detection, sampling works as good, and is cheaper and easy to manage and reason about.

Even Google, the king of big data, will sample your hits on Google Analytics if your site gets too much traffic.

</comment><comment><USER36> > and number three – well it's not even worth staying in business because > there's no money to be made,

I guess tell that to the 10s of companies doing PaaS. Or another 10s doing app monitoring / logging. They're successful companies, far from just "breaking even".

</comment><comment><USER37> Billions are "wasted" on startups in every industry. That's the point. The rich guys gamble and some of their gambles pay off. Most of them fail.

</comment><comment><USER38> What is a "Hadoop business"? Hadoop is a tool not an industry or product. Can someone explain what the author might be trying to say?

<comment><USER11> Businesses that based their SaaS data analysis products on Hadoop.

Preconfigured clusters, integration with your existing AWS deployments. All that sort of jazz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yup. Tech faabionabilism is akin to Big4/MBB FUD flavor of the quarter... populism/marketing doesn't a necessity make. Docker, Kubernetes, gulp, Hadoop, mosh, Nix, SmartOS, serverless, cloud, virtualization, [insert tech fashion hype > utility here].

Speaking of Hadoop: my vehicle is parked outside one of the HQ's of another top 10 Hadoop startup. It's one of the most expensive, nearly empty buildings in the highest rent areas of the Valley. (Money flushing sound here.)

Fun fact: one of the enterprise Hadoop CTOs is a broney.

<comment><USER15> I love how the "cloud" is a tech fad in your eyes as well as technologies like Kubernetes which are core to Google and virtualisation which is core to every VPS/cloud provider in existence.

Be a pretty awful world if everyone took your advice.

<comment><USER25> Isn't it obvious? Everybody who doesn't operate their own datacenters are mindless technology hipsters.

Whenever a new big piece of tech comes out, most of the detractors seem to either a) find a use case that isn't fit for purpose or b) try to use it without bothering to learn how, and the proceed to say 'see, it's not all it's cracked up to be'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So I've never used Docker, but it sounds an awful lot like FreeBSD Jails. How is it unique?

<comment><USER41> Much more userfriendly. Works on all major platforms. Big public repository (dockerhub). Extensive tooling for everything. Graphical and CLI tools for all kinds of users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What is even a Docker startup? Docker the tool is a relief in every way & so is Kubernetes.

</comment><comment><USER43> How about "service mesh"?</comment>


Ask HN: Idea validation on a tight budget? - <AUTHOR>

How do you go about validating an idea without spending a fortune? The idea I have has no implementations (only one that is similar in only a small part, and is successful).
Are there any guides for this? Like how do you phrase your questions when asking people if they will like the idea or not.
Any help is appreciated. <comment><USER2> Make a user story and see if anyone close to you, friend or family, can identify with the user story. If not, ask around on the Internet. People on HN are generally helpful when looking to validate an idea.

Honestly the best thing to do is build it though. The worst thing that happens is that you have another thing you can add onto your resume.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I'm not sure how much in detail should I reveal the idea publicly over the internet before the product is ready. Could you explain a little, how user stories are written? Or maybe a link to something?</comment></comment>


Military Procurement is Not a Jobs Program - <AUTHOR> http://disruptivethinkers.blogspot.com/2012/02/military-procurement-should-not-be-jobs.html

<comment><USER2> The last sentence in the article makes a lot of sense.

The article also explains the ridiculous secrecy surrounding almost anything "defense" related. The US citizens don't get value for their dollar. The B-1, B-2 and JSF are only the latest examples of Giant Pork. If we knew about the costs before hand and during, we'd freak out. We get ripped off by the defense contractors.</comment>


Up against the paywall - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678799-many-publishers-still-see-little-alternative-continual-cutbacks-up-against-paywall <comment><USER2> They're not making it easy for those who are willing to pay for journalism. I used to be a subscriber to The Economist. They kept showing me unstoppable video adverts right in the middle an article.

I told them if they didn't stop doing that I would cancel my subscription. There was no response to my complaint. I cancelled. They didn't even ask why (and that's in the age of incessant customer satisfaction surveys).

The Wall St. Journal, another paper that I might be willing to pay for, makes it so difficult to unsubscribe that I hesitate to even get the promotional short term subscription. Also, they have a reputation for overcharging in the most egregious ways.

The Financial Times is extremely expensive especially if you need offline (ePaper) access.

So here you have someone who is willing to spend hundereds of pounds per year for news and isn't spending a single penny right now (other than for the mandatory BBC license fee)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this some kind of subtle self-referential joke? I can't read the article without subscribing...

In case you hit the same issue:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vua- bfQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vua- bfQgHkAJ:http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678799-many-publishers- still-see-little-alternative-continual-cutbacks-up-against- paywall%2BUp+against+the+paywall&gws_rd=cr&hl=en&&ct=clnk)

<comment><USER4> That's odd - I was able to click the link, go to the article, and simply click the X in the upper right hand corner of the pop up that first appeared and was able to view it.

<comment><USER3> It seems stuck in something reading 'mandatory cookie consent'. But through the google cache I get the page and then it is just another small step to remove the overlay.

<comment><USER5> A lot of sites use some kind of geo IP lookup to only show the Euro cookie prompt to European users, which is probably what you were running into, and why it didn't show to other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Downvote me/report me if this is against etiquette, but I'm working on a project around this very problem: supporting the government-independent press and reclaiming consumer power (by not using an ad-subsidised business model).

I cannot pass up this perfect opportunity to ask people who care about/consume news:

Information is a commodity (especially in english-speaking countries), yet independent news & information is critical to society. Would you be willing to donate (not pay) for news? Or what future for independent news/information sources do you hope/expect?

<comment><USER7> > Would you be willing to donate (not pay) for news?

Yes, but I believe people like myself are an outlier. I gave a substantial sum (<$1000) to Muckrock for their private prison investigation when it looked like their crowdfunding campaign might not fully fund.

People will want to contribute to causes they're passionate about. Can you find enough people who are passionate about independent, unbiased journalism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one alarmed that buzzfeed is being considered a reputable news source? The content teeters between tabloid and comedy.

<comment><USER9> they do the fluffy content to support the reputable content. having that as an explicit business model has actually helped them structure and retain the dividing line very nicely, as opposed to newspapers who have tried to make their content more and more clickbaity in order to vie for readers' attention, but have not formulated an explicit two-bin policy for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Few things (strictly my opinion):

1\. Old advertising offered really a little in term of tracking, conversion and analysis. Advertisers had to spend without having much knowledge of what's going on.

2\. New advertising probably optimized spending. New mediums (Google, Facebook, etc...) are now taking your attention (time) and thus not only the TV/Newspaper is.

3\. People are used to the free lunch in the digital screen. They are very likely to buy the paper then to subscribe.

4\. Newspapers moved online. But they messed it up. Instead of figuring out how to properly monetize, they become aggressive. They spam you with infinite amounts of ads.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Axel Springer's boss, Matthias Döpfner, said recently that on the website of > Bild, the group's biggest title, the proportion of readers using ad-blockers > fell from around a quarter to less than one in ten when it started forcing > them to choose between viewing ads or paying for the articles.

Interesting data point.

<comment><USER12> And how much did overall traffic rise or fall as a result?

That is, how many visitors, forced to unblock but having other alternative sites, will go elsewhere?

<comment><USER13> And, perhaps more interesting, what was the effect on revenues? Did the ad exposures pay as much, more, or less than paying visitors, I wonder?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude Blendle ( [https://blendle.com](https://blendle.com) ) is actually mentioned, wow. What a lame argument to dismiss it. It is quite popular here in NL.

edit: read the article.</comment>


Don't Overinvest in Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://www.burakkanber.com/blog/startup-advice-dont-overinvest-in-engineering/ <comment><USER2> As the author says there are definite counterexamples. If what you're selling is technology itself (like Docker) you should invest heavily in it.

I know a startup operating right now with 10 engineers and not a single salesperson. I have no idea how they're going to survive.

Aside: are you going to continue your ML in JS series?

<comment><AUTHOR> The next article I have planned is neural networks -- but I have no idea when I'll actually be able to write it! Thanks for reading!</comment></comment>


Could driverless cars cause more congestion in urban cores? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/could-driverless-cars-cause-more-congestion-in-urban-cores/2018/07/02/13f544dc-7aee-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2518dafc25a4 <comment><USER2> Driverless cars are overrated.</comment>


Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/giant-batteries-and-cheap-solar-power-are-shoving-fossil-fuels-grid <comment><USER3> I've always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out:

a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise.

But here's my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on your roof, wouldn't it be greatly more financially advantageous (given the main cost for solar installation is the labor) for energy companies to install solar at scale? And if that's the case, wouldn't the energy companies eventually do this, which, given macro market laws of supply and demand, would eventually cause the price of electricity to go dramatically down for their end consumer, thus eliminating the financial benefit of privately installed roof top solar for homeowners?

I live in the southwest, and based on online calculators it "makes sense" from a 10 year outlook to pay the money now and install solar on my home, but that's only if the energy prices don't fall. But nobody seems to even think that's a possibility.

<comment><USER4> Can't believe all the comments so far and no one feels the need to justify their opinion with numbers. Drives me nuts.

You are correct, according to National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), rooftop solar is over twice as expensive as utility scale solar[0]. The NREL estimate is helpful in that it details the components of the cost. And, as you would expect, the hardware and labor costs are lower for utility scale because of, well, scale, but the dominating difference is soft costs (land, marketing, profit, overhead, etc). Its worth noting, soft costs for residential solar are significantly lower elsewhere in the developed world (DE, AU) mainly because permitting and marketing are much easier.

[0] [https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/costs-continue-to- dec...](https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/costs-continue-to-decline-for- residential-and-commercial-photovoltaics-in-2018.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm a big fan of that study.

It suggests there may be an opportunity for a company to push rooftop solar for big strip malls and other large footprint single owner buildings - <USER2> aren't utility scale, but the install efficiencies make them pretty competitive.

The incentives would be tricky, since the owners are less likely to be paying for utilities than the leaseholders...

<comment><USER6> [https://www.wundercapital.com](https://www.wundercapital.com)

The problem with commercial solar is the cost of the financing. Home solar is on par with a car loan, banks know how to do that with personal credit scores. Utility scale solar is the realm of private equity.

Something like a strip mall is a weird in-between that requires enough manual review that the cost to do all of the risk analysis that financing requires kinda outweighs the potential returns. Will that KMart or Costco keep that store open for the duration of the project? What happens when the tenancy changes?

I don't have any relation with Wunder, but from my understanding of them, they built some stuff to streamline all the financing and permitting required of commercial-scale to make those projects pencil out.

<comment><USER7> On the contrary, personal loans from banks routinely charge much higher interest rates than commercial paper. Think about the interest rate on a money market account, which consists of bonds. That's the rate PG&E is going to pay if they float a bond issue to build a solar power station. Large companies, particularly including electric generation utilities, can also get loans from banks at similarly low interest rates.

This is precisely the genius of SolarCity: they were able to use the low interest rates banks would charge them to install solar power on people's houses at a much lower cost of capital than the same banks would have charged the same homeowners without SolarCity's intermediation.

<comment><USER8> > This is precisely the genius of SolarCity: they were able to use the low > interest rates banks would charge them to install solar power on people's > houses at a much lower cost of capital than the same banks would have > charged the same homeowners without SolarCity's intermediation.

That sounds like a pretty interesting pitch as a business model.

But if I recall correctly, SolarCity failed and had to be bailed out by, um, Tesla. Why? Was the free money just not enough?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> $0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good.

A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California.

Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas and doesn't match load at all.

<comment><USER10> There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, especially of windows. My parents had a lot of big windows too and recently have started upgrading them to insulated windows and it makes a huge difference. The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, it's good for everyone.

<comment><USER12> > The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, > it's good for everyone.

Is it though? I imagine your landlord doesn't think it's good for them. It's not _bad_ for them, but why would they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars improving your apartments insulation when it costs them nothing to keep the poor thermal in place.

I too lived in rentals that had terrible thermal protection. It was awful to heat and cool. Yet, my landlords wouldn't have spent a dime to improve that.

Not sure what can be done here, but with seemingly more and more homes becoming rentals this perhaps needs a solution.

<comment><USER13> They can potentially raise the rent (for the next renter if there's rent control) by advertising "modern double pane windows" which offer sound insulation from outside noise, in addition to the thermal benefits.

<comment><USER11> They definitely could raise rents if offering thermal and noise insulated living environment. The quality of living goes up drastically with that, so it would make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion

They make this sound like a lot but that strikes me as actually pretty cheap. I don't think that number can be right.

Edit: I mean seriously think. The F-35 has cost us 1.45 trillion dollars so far.

That's roughly 1/3 of the price they're asserting here. Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits. I mean way beyond the simple evolutionary next step of one piece of military equipment.

It seems like every dollar we spend on energy sovereignity is doing like 10 or even 100 times the work 1 dollar of weapons development is doing to secure our country.

<comment><USER15> >Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits

It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't.

Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.

I think the much more likely, less rough path is to continue renewable research until it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels in almost all cases. At which point the market will do the rest. The vast majority of fossil fuel users _do not actually care that they use fossil fuel_ \- they just care about energy generation. If you can give them a cheaper means to achieve that, they will go for it.

<comment><USER16> I've got some bad news for you about what's going to happen to the economy when we have 3° C of warming because we didn't do this fast enough.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention how many people will no longer need jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meanwhile in Iowa, Mid American Energy is well on their way to 100% renewal by 2021 with an endless array of wind farms.

Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment.

Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January.

[https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields- wind...](https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind-energy- continues-expand-iowa#stream/0)

<comment><USER19> I wonder how people would feel about ethanol plants fired by wind farms.

The one built near my family home is coal fired and the idea of growing crops to be turned into car fuel is ... less appealing.

But if you had electric or ethanol powered tractors growing biomass to ferment and distill into more ethanol with a plant fired with wind, maybe there are some different environmental considerations there.

For one it would be carbon negative or neutral if you considered that the fuel is all going to be returned to the atmosphere.

<comment><USER20> Ethanol is highly corrosive, damages engines and fuel lines, is hydroscopic which exacerbates above and more problems, has even short term storage problems let alone long term, thats why its only ever used blended and is very toxic, in fact it is a nightmare fuel really.. bio diesel on the other hand has none of these problems.

[https://www.government-fleet.com/157454/storing- dispensing-u...](https://www.government-fleet.com/157454/storing-dispensing- using-ethanol-gasoline-blends)

[https://www.cfact.org/2014/07/21/killing-marine-life-with- et...](https://www.cfact.org/2014/07/21/killing-marine-life-with-ethanol/)

<comment><USER7> Almost everything you said is precisely opposite from the truth.

Ethanol is less corrosive to metals than even pure water, although (like gasoline) there are some plastics that it can dissolve; some of these plastics were used decades ago in some cars, including in their fuel systems, when blending ethanol with gasoline was uncommon. Its hygroscopic (not "hydroscopic") nature is a reason that people have been adding it to their gas tanks for many decades, to safely get the water out ("HEET" is a common brand name in the US), although it's true that each teaspoon of ethanol can only dissolve a small amount of water before becoming immiscible with gasoline. It's very chemically stable, unlike gasoline, which can polymerize into "varnish," and it's easier and safer to store than gasoline, although it does need to be stored without access to too much air so it doesn't absorb water. It's so nontoxic that people drink it recreationally, which is a major industry in most countries, although this doesn't seem appealing to me. And, unlike gasoline, diesel fuel, or biodiesel, you can put out ethanol files with water. These are some of the reasons it's been used as a fuel alone, as well as blended, for centuries, and many cars in countries like Brazil are able to run on pure ethanol, despite its lower energy density.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know someone who has gone fully off the grid via sailboat and is currently on his way around the world. He converted his sailboat to a hybrid setup (electric engines powered by the same batteries that power his stovetop, refrigerator, etc.). His power sources keeping those batteries charged are solar (1200W) and sail regeneration [0]. He has an 18kw diesel generator as a safety measure.

His story is particularly interesting to me because he doesn't give a shit about climate change. His views are best described by George Carlin [1]. And yet, he has the lowest carbon lifestyle of anybody I know. In the 15,000 nautical miles he's sailed, he has burned a grand total of 5 gallons of diesel. And that was only because he stayed for a few weeks in Palau without sailing around, and there was a stint of a few days where there was little solar energy due to storms. He now thinks his decision to buy a diesel backup generator was just a waste of money. If you ask him why he did it, these are his answers: It's cheaper, it's quieter, it's less smelly, and it's more reliable. Not a single mention of carbon emissions or resource depletion or pollution.

At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia. The costs and performance of renewables+batteries has come so far in the last 5-10 years, and I think we're finally at the point where the intrinsic costs will guarantee adoption.

[0] [https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro- generator/](https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4)

<comment><USER15> >At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia

Solar might work for boats and trains, but can it work for a plane? What about drones?

No renewable energy source can beat gasoline, sans nuclear power (which I think we should be transitioning to, along with the rest of the renewables). MIT built a gas powered drone that lasts 5 days (not minutes!) in the air[1] - that's simply impossible with today's battery tech. I know there are electric planes in development, maybe in production - but none of them match the passenger capacity or cargo volume of a Boeing 747. Until they do, there will always be a place for gas guzzling airliners.

Solar _can_ work for households, skyscrapers, and apartments, and like you said, I think the advantages do outweigh the advantages of traditional coal plants so I'm excited to see that become more mainstream.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/mits-gas-powered-drone- is-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/mits-gas-powered-drone-is-able-to- stay-in-the-air-for-five-days-at-a-time/)

<comment><USER22> You might be interested in the sun seeker duo. It's in the ballpark for personal air travel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBA4XeMddMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBA4XeMddMY)

In flight charging (refueling) could be a possibility too.

The drone based solar planes can stay up longer than 5 days. I think the defense companies can keep them up for months.

<comment><USER23> Also cool, the adventure of circumnavigation on solar:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse)

Captured on this Nova special: [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the- impossible-flight/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the-impossible- flight/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg > New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion > batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 > months, to $187 per MWh.

I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles that's $374,000 per MWh of storage.

<comment><USER25> They are comparing it with building a new power plant costs for which are calculated similarly for 20-30 year life cycle. Same is for Solar and wind power plants. Many people assume that prices of grid scale solar and wind power are coming down because of technology improvements that is partly true but another reason for the price decreases is that the investors are finding out the calculated life of these is actually 50-100% more than their previous assumptions.

<comment><USER26> The other thing that is happening is that solar wind and battery are naturally working forward through cost-reduction manufacturing S-curve, while fossil fuel plant tech has already hit the mature-flat portion of that curve. Renewables are basically at the point where there are easy & dramatic improvements in cost reduction by "just" volume scale up and financing, while fossil fuel plants have long explored those options and have more or less hit costs that are much more difficult to improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good news: non-carbon energy sources will, faster than most of the world currently thinks, force carbon energy sources off the market. This has already started to happen with coal.

Bad news: Well the Left may lament the fact that it will not be due to any change of heart or international cooperation, it will just be due to mercenary calculations of cost, and technology. But all of us have to consider what will (not may, will) happen to places with very oil-dependent economies, when oil goes the way of coal. Imagine Saudi Arabia in the state that Venezuela is in right now.

<comment><USER28> Cynically: to first approximation no one lives in Saudi Arabia. Even if it devolves to a Venezuela style anarchy, we'd still be more worried about Venezuela.

Practically: Saudia Arabia is an oil source. Petroleum fuels are going to be with us forever. It's coal (first) and gas (eventually) which are being displaced by better electrical generation options. But if you want to fly an airplane, you really can't replace the savings you get from not having to carry 2/3 of the reaction mass on the vehicle. Oil wealth will be the very last to go, likely well after they're tapped out anyway.

And politically: "the Left" you postulate doesn't really exist anyway. You can be a raving socialist and still be pleased that technology solves your problem. You can be a market centrist and still believe that carbon regulation is a good idea.

<comment><USER27> You _can_, certainly. But I still have the suspicion that a good chunk of the political Left will be dissatisfied that the carbon emissions will plummet without any changes in political beliefs or policies being involved.

As for Saudi Arabia: there's a lot more people living there, than did before there was oil. Yes, we will still use _some_ oil for many years, but if the oil revenue drops to, say, 50% of current levels, I think that there will be problems sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER28> > But I still have the suspicion that a good chunk of the political Left will > be dissatisfied

Only in the somewhat specious sense that a good chunk of the political X is continually dissatisfied, for all values of X.

I'm on that mythical "Left" you're talking about. No one would be happier to see carbon emissions plumet than I, and for any reason. That doesn't mean that I don't think some kind of regulation is inappropriate or unnecessary, in particular because I don't see the revolution in the linked article as inevitable as we might hope.

<comment><USER27> Well you make a good point, it may just be the noisiest part of the left that will be dissatisfied, not necessarily the biggest part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've done a bit of research on batteries and I haven't seen too many people mention vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB) for grid storage. While lithium ion batteries have great energy density (necessary when you need to carry your energy) they deteriorate over time leading to continual capital expenditures. From what I've read, it seems like the VRFBs can basically run forever with minimal maintenance. If I were betting on large scale grid battery storage technologies I think this is where I would be interested in putting my money. While they are less energy dense, it doesn't really matter since most houses are stationary.

<comment><USER30> Apparently the vanadium stuff is expensive. Guy here arguing for Zinc. [https://youtu.be/UCwJqMOiLs0?t=275](https://youtu.be/UCwJqMOiLs0?t=275)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder what the wider economic effect will be if the price of solar continues to improve and the fossil fuel industry can't find a way to remain competitive. Since some places are far more suitable for solar power generation than others, will those areas end up with a significant advantage in the cost of living? Could that in turn lead to a major migration of people and economic activity to those areas?

<comment><USER32> If you are talking about countries, cost of energy stopped being an important differential ages ago (except for some very specific niches, like aluminum refining).

If you are talking about cities, people will just build transmission lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is the battery storage only $0.013 per kWh? Is that a misprint and they meant $0.13 per kWh? Or is there some fancy accounting where they're storing only a small percentage of the total energy output and giving a diluted price with the partial storage cost spread over the total output? Or is it truly possible with massive scale to achieve battery costs this low? I can't see how this adds up without some sleight of hand, as the gigafactory production cost isn't even nearly this low yet?

<comment><USER34> It's the marginal price of storing a kWh of energy. Not the price of the battery capacity itself

<comment><USER33> Right, I get that—but still don't get the math. Let's say they're buying this capacity at $300 per kWh of capacity, that the batteries last six years on average with a daily cycle, for a total of 2190 cycles. Amortizing that $300 kWh cost over 2190 cycles is $0.137 per kWh. In other words, holding the other constants the same, this company is suggesting $30 kWh batteries, which is just not yet possible as far as I'm aware. That makes me suspect they're actually only storing like 10% capacity then amortizing the cost of storage across total output, as I can't understand how else the numbers add up. Any ideas?

<comment><USER35> The mythical $100/kWh figure for car batteries is for the pack cost, not the cells. Much of that cost is focused on a compact, lightweight solution for cell cooling, voltage balancing for ~100 batteries in series, etc.

Utility installations have much cheaper solutions for cooling, the balancing is much easier with lots of parallel cells, and even the chemistry benefits from smaller charge/discharge currents.

We're not down to $30/kWh yet, but we're not that far off. Certainly well below $300.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> (Los Angeles deal) would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery.

So 3.297 cents per kwh. That's on par with large hydro like Tacoma Power Park. I'm getting 11 cents per kwh for my solar currently in the midwest.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why lithium ion batteries — are they much cheaper to make than new gravitational potential (i.e. hydroelectric) storage systems?

<comment><USER38> Hydro can be extremely disruptive to ecosystems, and you also need a suitable site for it. It's very situational, from what I understand.

<comment><USER9> _very situational_

Yes. You need a mountain lake and a low level lake close to each other, and the lakes aren't useful for much else because the water level goes way up and down every day. The US has 10 pumped storage plants bigger than a gigawatt, and few attractive sites for more.

<comment><USER39> I've hear the Hoover Dam proposed, and theoretically any existing dam could be converted? Just need to pump some water back upstream when there's excess load in the system.

Here in Canada a lot of our energy is hydroelectric and I know there's a lot of talk about this sort of solution in Quebec.

<comment><USER35> > Just need to pump some water back upstream

In this situation, you'd simply never let the water flow through in the first place. This amounts to releasing water while generating energy, only to pump it back. The net result is just a lot of wasted energy.

Pumped hydro _requires_ two reservoirs. There's no way around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Maybe we don't need the batteries if the synthetic fuel tech becomes good enough (there are companies working on this such as Prometheus and Carbon Engineering). Could it be possible for California to become a major oil producer state with extremely cheap solar? Cover the Mojave desert with solar and convert the excess power into oil? It seems definitely possible if there was a carbon tax (which should exclude such synthetic fuel from the tax since it's carbon neutral when it's burned). Without such a tax, maybe it's possible but much more difficult to compete with fossil oil.

<comment><USER41> >should exclude such synthetic fuel from the tax since it's carbon neutral when it's burned

I hope not. Let the plants remove the CO2 from the air instead. That would be much better than burning it again. How can your process be called neutral if nature has a "more neutral" solution than yours? Let the biomass do its job and just stop burning oil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Much better than batteries or gravity storage mechanisms is liquid air storage. It is not for small scale sites, but the bigger, the more economical, it becomes. As an OTS (off the shelf) solution i do not know why it is not used more...

Liquid air storage offers cheapest route to 24 hour wind and solar

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20424313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20424313)

<comment><USER30> It's often not very efficient in terms of getting back the energy you put in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#Effic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#Efficiency)

<comment><USER42> Great review! Yes both the review and the recent article i cited mention the use of hot and/or/both cold sources to boost efficiency. with high grades of both one can approach 100% Even low grade (AKA heat pump type) sources boost well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this like a future dated article or something? Seems it is discussing events that may happen in 2023.

</comment><comment><USER44> Seriously! I'm an old time R/C enthusiast who romps frequently and still buys a toy here and there. I got out of R/C for a little bit so the last pack I bought was a 4,200mah 7.4 volt LiPo from a tiny mom+pop manufacturer. The pack is well taken care of and probably 7 or 8 years old. It's time for a new one.

I just looked up a replacement battery by the same manufacturer and their 7.4v LiPo's are up to 22,000 mah! That's almost 525% bigger than my last pack! That kind of capacity was only a dream back then, and 20 years ago when NiMH was the only game in town we were racing 30mph with 3,300!

I thought it was a typo. But other manufacturers are offering similar products.

<comment><USER45> Is there a theoretical limit to (current generation) battery capacity, like there is with solar panel power output?

<comment><USER44> Also, it's important to note that batteries don't _generate_ power. They _store_ power.

Literally. You pump electrons into them and they hold onto them internally until they can be released again. Think of it as a water balloon for electrons.

You create a vessel which is capable of efficiently containing electrons. Then you pump electrons into it and hope enough of them stick to be worthwhile. This is battery technology.

Different battery technologies have different characteristics. Nickel batteries usually have some form of "cell memory" where the cell will store "stale" electrons indefinately, and lose the ability to release them. These electrons can become "trapped" inside the battery and reduce it's capacity.

Likewise the chemical composition of lithium batteries makes them extremely volatile. This means that if you were to completely remove _all_ electrons from the cell it would _forget_ that it is a battery and refuse to store future electrons you try to pump into it. You also have to balance each cell in a lithium pack, else they will become uneven and one could possibly become completely empty (killing the cell).

Likewise, when a nickel cell loses all it's electrons it is still possible to "zap" the cell back to life with a large jolt of electrons. Some of which stick, some do not. Sometimes this results in the battery "waking up" to accept more electrons. Sometimes it doesn't, and a 6 cell (7.2v) nickel battery will have to be dissected to replace the bad cells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm curious about the Mark Jacobson quote.

Is getting rid of coal & natural gas possible without nuclear?

I don't see how solar & wind can do it by themselves, even if you take the battery part out of the equation.

<comment><USER47> Why not? We have enough sunshine and wind to power the Earth many times over. If you take the battery part out of the equation there is no advantage left for nuclear and many many disadvantages,

\- is hugely expensive to design, build and run (requiring eye watering government guarantees that encourage builders/operators to cut corners).

\- takes longer than the climate can tolerate to build

\- needs water for cooling that access to will be problematic once construction is finally complete (France is struggling to run it's reactors already, Britains will be under water in 50 years)

\- byproducts we cannot deal with and haven't even figured out how to safely bury.

\- insane de-commissioning costs that everyone pretends don't exist

\- small risk that there will be an accident and Hollywood will make a shockingly inaccurate hit tv series about it

\- huge geo-political risk that constrains use to countries that are not going to be de-stablised by global warming in 60 year life time of plant (name one...)

\- build more than a few and we will struggle to supply the uranium (it's surprisingly hard to find in high enough concentrations for economic strip- mining)

And now that batteries are becoming affordable the last argument left for Nuclear is evaporating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023.

This seems a bit slow to me. 5 years in California time usually ends up being at least 10 years if you are lucky. By then the 7% will probably be closer to 3-5%. I think California is going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Solar and battery if they are going to reach their climate goals...

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder why we're not seeing such precipitous drops in the cost of personal solar installations? It still takes a couple of decades for a home panel installation to pay for itself, and that's if you're in a good area for sunlight.

Regardless, it's excellent news. Coal is godawful stuff and we'll be much better off leaving it in the ground where it belongs.

</comment><comment><USER50> > .. addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines.

This never fails to frustrate me. Solar cells / PVC won't work absent sunshine, but solar thermal / CSP produces power for many hours after the sun goes down.

</comment><comment><USER51> > Last month, the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated the cost to > decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion

So 20% of the US military budget for 40 years. Doesn't sound impossible.

<comment><USER52> How independent are they? This number sounds ridiculously high. The right question to ask would be how expensive it would be to keep coal/gas going when it is clearly more expensive than just about anything else, even right now. It's a reason coal plants have been closing for several years now; and even some gas plants are shutting down way ahead of their projected end of life. They're just not viable anymore. It's not about the cost of decarbonizing but the cost of not doing that. There's a point where putting enough solar and batteries in your house gets cheaper than consuming coal produced electricity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> > Wood Mackenzie estimated the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would > be $4.5 trillion

The 2017 tax cut cost $1.5 trillion. I'm starting to suspect that priorities are being misplaced.

<comment><USER7> The tax cut cost _the government_ $1.5 trillion, but provided that same $1.5 trillion directly to the taxpayers. It was a pure transfer, not a cost in the sense that we're talking about here, which involves the consumption of natural resources and human labor, for which the dollars are merely a numerical representation. A better comparison would be the cost of some boondoggle defense program, or the prison system, or unemployment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Maybe this isn't a problem, but I am curious about how and where all those solar cells and batteries will be disposed at the end of their usefulness?

<comment><USER52> It's pretty much a non issue. Battery recycling is going to be a great business once currently produced batteries start reaching their rather long end of life. We're in a weird situation right now where we are producing vastly more than just a few years ago so the recycling market is lagging the production market by about 10-15 years or so. However, lithium is easily recovered and the incentives for recovering it are very high given how scarce and expensive this stuff is.

Solar recycling is much less of an issue since we're mostly talking about silicon. There's probably enough precious metals involved that recycling them after a few decades is going to be a thing. But compared to the extremely dirty business that is coal mining this is a complete non issue.

</comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz Are these being produced using renewable materials and how will they be disposed of after their lifetime (up to 10 years iirc)?

</comment><comment><USER55> Good. Could not have happened soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER56> In case anybody knows, what will happen to those batteries? Can they be recycled in any way?

<comment><USER41> We already recycle 50% of them: [https://www.pv- magazine.com/2019/07/12/lithium-ion-recycling...](https://www.pv- magazine.com/2019/07/12/lithium-ion-recycling-rates-far-higher-than-some- statistics-suggest/). And we can recycle them 100% [https://www.scribd.com/document/406401162/Tesla-Impact- Repor...](https://www.scribd.com/document/406401162/Tesla-Impact-Report-2019) (p. 26)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Contrarian buy signal on natural gas from this article. Currently hovering just under 2.5

</comment><comment><USER58> I love the move to clean energy, but the pragmatist within me can't help but wonder: what's the downside to solar from an environmental perspective (if any)? Has anyone conducted any studies on the environmental impact of a large solar farm in a given area (to wildlife, weather, etc)?

</comment><comment><USER59> Looks like the so-called "carbon bubble" is starting to pop!

</comment><comment><USER60> An alternative perspecrive from a physicist/enginner/venture capitalist who was named Energy Writer of the Year" in 2016 by the American Energy Society.

This paper highlights the physics of energy to illustrate why there is no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a "new energy economy."

Among the reasons:

        Scientists have yet to discover, and entrepreneurs have yet to invent, anything as remarkable as hydrocarbons in terms of the combination of low-cost, high-energy density, stability, safety, and portability. In practical terms, this means that spending $1 million on utility-scale wind turbines, or solar panels will each, over 30 years of operation, produce about 50 million kilowatt-hours (kWh)—while an equivalent $1 million spent on a shale rig produces enough natural gas over 30 years to generate over 300 million kWh.
        Solar technologies have improved greatly and will continue to become cheaper and more efficient. But the era of 10-fold gains is over. The physics boundary for silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells, the Shockley-Queisser Limit, is a maximum conversion of 34% of photons into electrons; the best commercial PV technology today exceeds 26%.
        Wind power technology has also improved greatly, but here, too, no 10-fold gains are left. The physics boundary for a wind turbine, the Betz Limit, is a maximum capture of 60% of kinetic energy in moving air; commercial turbines today exceed 40%.
        The annual output of Tesla's Gigafactory, the world's largest battery factory, could store three minutes' worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days' worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.

Heres's a link to his full paper: [https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green- energy-revolution-...](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy- revolution-near-impossible)

Whose argument holds up to serious critical analysis, Mills or Science Mag's?

</comment><comment><USER61> Thanks to the most essential ingredient: taxpayer 'subsidies'

</comment><comment><USER62> Lithium ion batteries have limited lifecycles so they aren't sustainable. We need to be building massive pumped hydro.

<comment><USER41> Newly produced Lithium-Ion batteries last longer than the average car life expectancy. They are also fully recyclable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Imagine our energy is solar 90%, don't we lose some risks diversification here just in the case if the state of affairs with the global sunlight conditions will change drastically?

<comment><USER64> If global sunlight conditions change drastically, we're probably screwed regardless of how we're generating our power. Think crop failures, ecosystem collapse etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> So, that's cool and all. I love green tech. And I hate fossil fuels. Buuuuuuut, aren't we going to have the same issue with supplies of lithium that we are having with fossil fuels? Unless we have a dramatic shift in renewable battery tech, we're still painting ourselves into a corner with the giant battery trent.

<comment><USER66> The big difference is that fossil fuels are burnt, lithium is not. Lithium can also be recycled once batteries hit end of life.

But lithium is just one of many possible battery chemistries. And you're not even limited to chemical batteries; potential energy ones work at grid scale too; all you need to do is pump water uphill.</comment></comment>


TypeScript and JSX - <AUTHOR> http://www.jbrantly.com/typescript-and-jsx/ <comment><USER2> I'm still yet to be convinced that JSX is a good idea, why break existing tooling and significantly complicate parsers for what appears to only be a minor convenience at the surface level?

Mithril manages similar functionality without any modifications to syntax.

[https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/](https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/)

<comment><USER3> Mithril appears harder to read than equivalent JSX.

const links = ctrl.pages().map(page => {page.title});

return
 {links} <button onClick={ctrl.rotate}> Rotate Links </button>
;

Compared to

    		m("div", [
    			ctrl.pages().map(function(page) {
    				return m("a", {href: page.url}, page.title);
    			}),
    			m("button", {onclick: ctrl.rotate}, "Rotate links")
    		]);

I can see what the UI will be with JSX at a glance with Mithril I have to parse the code.

edit: Mind you both look awful due to HNs poor formatting ability. Honestly how did this website become so popular with tech people?

<comment><USER4> With proper indenting and similar formatting:

React:

        const links = ctrl.pages().map(page => {page.title});

        return
 {links} <button onClick={ctrl.rotate}> Rotate Links </button>
;

Mithril:

        const links = ctrl.pages().map(page => m("a", {href: page.url}, page.title));

        return m("div", [links, m("button", {onclick: ctrl.rotate}, "Rotate links")]);

There are JSX equivalents for Mithril too (for both Babel and standalone JSX).

Mithril templates look also very good in CoffeeScript and similar languages.

<comment><USER5> I don't use either framework, but for whatever reason I find the Mithril example markedly easier to read. This is simply a matter of taste.

<comment><USER6> It's only easier to read because it meets your expectations since it looks "javascripty", but absolutely not as easy to reason about.

Both of those snippets are intended to generate HTML. In that sense there's no question which one is easier to reason about/read.

<comment><USER7> Not easier to reason about?

I would argue the opposite — it is _immediately_ easier to reason about, since I see what functions are called, and I can go look up the documentations for those functions without having to go through a precompile-step.

<comment><USER8> Yes and additionally (with Chrome's DevTools) you get out-of-the-box functionality like the ability to set a break point, live edit your code right at the breakpoint, and save your change right back to the filesystem. With transpiled languages this kind of workflow is generally less streamlined -- I don't know why more people don't complain about it. The best alternatives I've seen are when people completely reengineer the workflow - I'm thinking about the Elm debugger as an example.

<comment><USER5> Thanks - I hadn't even thought about that aspect, but it's definitely a problem I would run into. As popular as React is though, I'd assume there is a browser extension or something to support the workflow.

<comment><USER9> Indeed there is: [http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/09/02/new-react- de...](http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/09/02/new-react-developer- tools.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's cool. I'm trying to use it right now. What I don't like so far is :

1\. Lack of definition files for some isomorphic flux implementations ( like yahoo/fluxible ) ;

2\. Lack of big projects written with TSX to learn from ;

3\. No support in WebStorm ( even 11 EAP, dated 09.09.2015 ) for TSX files ;

With No. 1. as most annoying I would recommend for anyone trying to do isomorphic NodeJS + TypeScript app to be really patient and to expect writing commits to DefinitelyType repo.

Kudos for TypeScript team for implementing TSX it would be great when it's out of beta.

<comment><USER11> Note that you don't _need_ the declaration files. They are entirely optional. You can get started right now and add them gradually as they get written by the community.

<comment><USER10> I usually write the declaration files that I need and submit to the repo. It's not that hard :) and your app feels kinda 'complete'.

I would take the opportunity to address the DefinitelyType repository issues.

Actually if anyone from TypeScript team reads this, they should know people there are struggling with that.

There are multiple flaws in gathering so much development code under one roof and a lot of discussion that goes nowhere [1][2][3]. What would be great if there is some sort of "native" support / recommendation of definition files.

1 : [https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/5040](https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/5040) 2 : [https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/2150](https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/2150) 3 : [https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/4513](https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped/issues/4513)

<comment><USER12> FWIW, there is better support[1] in 1.6 for definition files for node modules. TypeScript can now read definitions directly out of node_modules. As library authors include those in the package there will be less of a dependency on getting definitions from DefinitelyTyped. This obviously doesn't solve all problems but I think the point is the TS team is aware of some of the issues and is taking steps to address.

1\. [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/pull/4352](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/pull/4352)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for that, I didn't notice this is coming :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see two problems with the basic idea of JSX:

\- Parsing is a mess, it is not even obviously unambiguous.

\- HTML syntax is horrible, and all templating language attempts building on it are verbose and clumsy.

That is the negative argument ("That is crap"), but there is also a positive argument ("Here is a much better alternative"):

You can express HTML structure in a concise and relatively readable manner in plain JavaScript, and you do not need a 400 kb interpreter nor a separate compilation step for it!

        ['div', {'class': 'foo'},
          'some text',
          ['span', {}, 'yay']]

You also can embed "directives" or "components" in a rather obvious and unambiguous way:

        ['div', {'class': 'container'},
          [MyConstructor, {'arg': foo()}]]

Implementing a robust interpreter for this is a matter of perhaps 50 to 100 lines of plain JavaScript.

<comment><USER14> The big advantage of JSX to my company is that our design team, which does design in the browser, has a much shorter leap to understanding it than plain JavaScript. These suggestions of "JSX sucks, you can express this in plain JS" always leave people with those skill sets behind. Sure it would be really awesome if the designers were also serious JS programmers, but that's not why we hired them, and with JSX they don't need to be.

<comment><USER15> I honestly do not see how much effort would it take to get from <foo bar="baz">Quux</foo> syntax to ["foo", {bar: "baz"}, "Quux"] syntax. I believe someone already working with code (HTML, CSS) should be perfectly capable to learn this transformation in well under 15 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would be interested to know about the difference with TypeScript and Flow, which can do the most ES6/7 things, which has the most expressive type system.

<comment><USER17> > which has the most expressive type system.

Elm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great news without a doubt, Does anyone know what is the direction Typescript is headed now that ES6 is becoming increasingly supported?

<comment><USER19> It's just going to keep getting more features from ES6 and ES7. Some of the features in ES6/7 were taken from TypeScript, I reckon.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Roadmap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> wow, that, plus the VS2015 support for JSX syntax amount to great tooling.

Being able to use JSX in Typescript is a big deal, if only for the compile- time checking you get for free.

</comment><comment><USER21> I may just use it for compile time prop validation! Amazing. I was looking for that feature alone using eslint and so on but couldn't find anything like that. Since the compile speed improvements I'm running out of excuses not to use TypeScript in my projects now.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is pretty awesome. React and typescript have independently improved my opinion of javascript - now we get to use them together.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome! TypeScript has been tremendously useful to us and it's great to finally be able to use React properly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great news. I've been avoiding JSX at work in order to get TypeScript support, and it will be a nice option to have in the future. Now we just need to upgrade from VS2012 (that version is still on TypeScript 1.0, so a lot of the DefinitelyTyped definitions don't work out of the box).</comment>


Curl | shell Considered Harmful?  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amateurtopologist.com/post/curl-shell

<comment><USER2> Is it a terrible idea? Yes. Do I do it anyway? Yes. Do I do it with non- mainstream projects I've never heard of? Nope. Does that make it ok? No, of course not, but that's the level of risk I'm willing to accept.

It's not really any different than downloading and installing/executing something like Sublime Text or Alfred.

<comment><USER3> Amen to that. Everybody boasts about open-source and security but in the end, we just can't just check up every single line of code we get from the internet. There is a line of security people are willing to give up: piping RVM install to shell is okay. Downloading a binary from a shady site just to get a youtube downloader, nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is dangerous... but how often do people verify gpg signatures or less secure yet, sha1 hashes of the download tarballs?

The curl piped into a shell is a bit tooo close to the edge for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this totally makes sense. Better safe than sorry!</comment>


Irmin: A distributed database written in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://irmin.org/ <comment><USER2> I wish the presentation page were not using lwt. I'm afraid many onlookers will think: "I can see what's going on in the exemple that's 4 lines of shell but those various sequencing operators in the OCaml source variant baffle me".

<comment><USER3> I think it would look better if they used OCaml's let-operators. Of course Lwt already has a monadic syntax sugar PPX so they could have used that anyway if they wanted to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lately I've been thinking similar thoughts about how git ought to be at the foundation of a lot more of the apps we use.

This is a nice try. Imo it doesn't offer enough functionality above git to justify wide usage. I don't think custom storage backends is a good feature since one of those backends is going to be storing it's data as a file anyway.

It would be nice if the custom merge function api was boiled down to it's essentials and implemented in a few different languages for app coders who want to write distributed version control aware apps. It's easy enough to do with git natively but everyone loves a nice api.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very cool stuff. I really think that versioned, functional-ish databases are the future.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is great for a certain kind of dataset. I love the idea, and I think the idea to make it a KV store was a great design choice to make the implementation simpler.

I'll be hunting for a reason to use this in the future~

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if LMDB [1] would be a good storage backend for this.

[1]: [https://symas.com/lmdb/](https://symas.com/lmdb/)

<comment><USER8> Probably. AIUI, LMDB is the backend for Arakoon, another distributed DB written in ocaml.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been using SQLite as a decentralized metadata store (with hand-written merges).

Would SQLite + git provide functionality overlapping with Irmin?</comment>


iOS14 and macOS Big Sur intercepting news site traffic, sending to Apple News - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/arctictony/status/1292822064139841536 <comment><USER2> Despite the alarmist tone, this only applies to paying Apple News+ subscribers, and specifically to allow users to automatically read the full article that they've already paid to read rather than hit the publishers paywall. It can also be disabled in settings.

This is a nice feature for those that want it. I have disabled it, however, because I found it jarring to end up in Apple News without expecting to. It should probably require opting in.</comment>


Ask HN: Which tech is recommended to write P2P mobile apps? - <AUTHOR> The "task list" app is a common example app for many web-frameworks, but I haven't seen a P2P mobile app out there. F-Droid ( https://search.f-droid.org/?q=p2p+task ) and the playstore ( https://play.google.com/store/search?q=p2p%20task&c=apps ) don't have any results.
I have no experience writing mobile apps, because GUIs aren't my thing and the android emulator is way too heavy. I won't shy away from Java or Javascript if they make my life easier, but my major problem is I have no idea how to write P2P apps.
So, what can I use to write a simple, lightweight, P2P, mobile task-list/todo-list app? <comment><USER2> PeerJS</comment>


The Disconnected Bedroom - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/disconnected-bedroom.html

<comment><USER2> Kind of off topic but I did some thing years ago that worked great for sleep.

I had a tropical fish tank, kinda large few metres long. I can sleep quite soundly to the sound of running water, intact I find it relaxing. I have bad tinitus from being in rocks bands and concerts when I was younger, so they water masks the ringing.

Anyway I decided to black out my room similar to the article, took everything out, replaced my curtains so no light got in my room at all. I then created an artificial sunrise.

At 6:30am every morning the sun would rise in my room, over the course of 30 minutes it would get brighter and brighter. The sun of cause was the UV lights on the fish tank, but instead of just switching on I set them to slowly increase in brightness over 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes a room lamp came on, and then music started playing on my radio, 15 minutes later the dreaded alarm went off.

Before I set this up I couldn't wake unto even to my alarm, I would literally sleep through it. After I set up the artificial sun rise I started waking before the radio started playing.

<comment><USER3> How did you automate all of this? Would love to know!

<comment><USER4> I bought a sunrise alarm clock [1] to do something similar to this. It's not nearly as fancy as rjd's setup, but it works really well for me. I put blackout curtains on the windows in my room. I usually wake up at 7, so I'll set the clock to reach full brightness at 6:50, and then the alarm on my cell phone goes off at 7. It works really well, especially in winter.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00196LFGW/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00196LFGW/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo- top- stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000T3Y2RA&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=11T1K443CJSQH4HE4SZ7)

<comment><USER5> Does that clock get pretty "bright"? Does it light up the whole room? For comparison - my bedroom is about 170 sq ft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> buff-a If there's one thing that is guaranteed to keep me awake its a good book. Screw checking email... just one more chapter.

<comment><USER6> I just burned through The girl with dragon tattoo trilogy and I'm more than halfway through the 2nd book in the Hunger games trilogy (started on the first one on Saturday). Reading on the Nook Color has been fantastic and I only stop once the battery is too low and needs a charge. Like you, just one more chapter...

<comment><USER7> One thing that I noticed (and backed by circadian rhythm research) is that using electronic bright devices at night disrupts the sleep pattern, making it more difficult to fall asleep, and so I keep on reading.

For this reason, I prefer to read with a nook e-ink, illuminated by a nightstand lamp with a switch off timer, say 1 or 2 hours, to "force" me to go to sleep in a timely manner. This way the lighting is not right in front of my eyes but shining somewhere from the back.

<comment><USER6> At night I have the brightness set to its lowest level, 10%. And then in the e-reader app, Aldiko, I set it to nightmode (black background/off white text). It's actually quite comfortable to read, but going from the ebook to a website was like setting my retinas on fire. It does stop me from being distracted and lets me focus on the book.

<comment><USER8> I do something very similar with my iPhone/Kindle reading setup. Turn the brightness on the phone down to a really low setting.

A nice side benefit is that it lets my wife sleep as there doesn't need to be a light on to read at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Author needs to do some more research into what's already possible with Android. I use "Llama" on my Android phone:

[https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kebab.Llama&fe...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kebab.Llama&feature=search_result)

I've configured it to detect when I'm at home and put the phone into silent mode if it's between 11pm and 8am.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is actually something I thought about last night. There's a television in my bedroom, and depending on how tired I am, I'll also have my laptop and a cell phone. Although I use my phone primarily for an alarm clock, I do find times where I wake up and can't fall back asleep, so I pick up my phone and play with a few apps. It's strange because my body feels like it should be asleep, but I force it to stay awake to read a blog post or a few more tweets. Obviously not good. I do like the idea of a "limitation app" that would prevent things like certain phone numbers calling or limiting emails till the morning, but without a jailbreak I'm guessing that's fairly impossible. If not, though, that's something I'd buy in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tasker for Android can do all of the things mentioned in the post to create a "bedroom mode", plus much, much more: <http://tasker.dinglisch.net/index.html> (on Android market too but the direct version is cheaper)

It's like a GUI scripting engine for your phone. Very similar to Locale, but you don't have to pony up for extra plugins to do fancy stuff. Well worth the asking price.

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally I find books are just as capable of engagement as TV or the internet, and I actually have an iPad in my bedroom for the same logic as jgc has a kindle.

On it I have TV shows that I've seen many times (a few favourites such as The West Wing), to the point that I still enjoy watching them, but at the same time know what is about to happen. These are great for getting me to sleep, and because I'm not having to actively concentrate on what I'm reading, I can fall asleep as soon as I'm ready to, while the iPad plays on in the background - unlike a book, where I have to actively decide when to make the switch from reading to sleeping.

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent post. I did this recently when I redecorated my room. It used to be filled with all manner of electronic gadgetry - there was a computer, an FM radio, a DAB radio, mobile phone chargers protruding from every wall, it was like sleeping in a Best Buy. The only thing I've never had in there is a TV.

Since I redecorated, there's been just one clock radio by my bedside, with an auto-dimming soft blue display (Pure Siesta[1], if anyone's interested, highly recommended) and a charger for my Android phone, plugged in out of reach of my bed to avoid the temptation to check emails, websites, Twitter etc in bed. (Incidentally, I've also self-banned the radio station I work for from my bedroom. Too much temptation to tune in, check what's being broadcast, and being woken up by the voice of a co-worker is vaguely creepy. I always listen to other stations in bed.)

I'd highly recommend doing it, if you have another room to put your electronics. Lots of things on standby can create noise, flashing lights, glowing LEDs, mains hum, and it's not conducive to a good sleeping environment. A quiet space, disconnected from the distractions of the outside world, is essential for relaxation.

[1] [http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-60907...](http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-60907&Category=Bedroom)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've had a strict disconnected bedroom policy for a long time. I even make sure the digital clock which wakes me up is the soft red LDC type, not the green or blue types, the light of their displays is so bright you can almost read by it.

But I've recently put something next to my bed which has ruined my sleep schedule. What? Books. Plain paper books. I blame it all on George R. R. Martin.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it, why not shut turn off the phone? Why keep it turned on all night? I've never had an Android (nor iPhone), but on my S60 I just set the alarm and turn it off. Checking the emails before sleeping would require turning it on, inputting the PIN, connecting, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> A picky point (I like a lot of what the author had to say) is:

The idea of a TV, as we understood it in the 70s - 90s, is kinda dead. Now, to say there is no TV in the house is the same as saying there is no internet (used only for entertainment) in the house.

<comment><USER5> I've got a TV, and watch it occasionally (Movies/Netflix/Vido Games). No OTA programming and I don't have cable/satellite.

I'll never have a TV or computer screen in the bedroom. My cell phone is in there because I use it as an alarm (Wakemate).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> On my Android phone I use that:

[https://market.android.com/details?id=net.geekherd.bedsidepr...](https://market.android.com/details?id=net.geekherd.bedsidepro2)

It let you disable all notifications, dim the screen and customize the alarm clock style.

You can also set a white list for incoming SMS and/or phone call.

It's a replacement for the "docking" application, so it is enabled as soon as I put it on the docking station next to my bed.</comment>


Show HN: Interest Groups Around Places - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys, I have recently released an iphone app (old app but pivoted to a different idea). The app has a limited set of features and also limited feature set website (http://www.findero.us), but would like to test it out if users like the idea. The idea is to fulfill the need to create your own location specific interest groups. You can create your open/closed groups around a location or join other such groups. The app is available for download at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/finderous/id520384764?mt=8
The app can be easily used for the following cases:
1. Weekend cycling group.
2. Residential community group.
3. Local Gym group.
4. Car pool group.
and many more such groups.
I would appreciate some feedback.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I took a look, but how do you compare yourself to existing players like meetup.com ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the idea took shape when a few people at my work place wanted to form a private group of marathon training group, but didn't want to use work emails or meetup.com as it was too expensive for such a casual group. That's when I realize that there is an audience for casual interest groups where people just want to communicate through threads in a conversation and not worry too much about maintaining it.</comment></comment>


Space May Soon Become a War Zone - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/space-could-become-war-zone-soon.html <comment><USER2> Space became a war zone the second Sputnik reached orbit.

It is inevitable.

Nothing can be done about it.</comment>


CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou's Open Letter to Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/07/02/cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakous-open-letter-to-edward-snowden/

<comment><USER2> Lots of flags on this article judging by the age and upvotes compared to other articles on the front page.

Kiriakou's and other whistleblowers statements of support for Snowden are a lot more informative than some of the articles on this subject and it's sad that due to 'Snowden fatigue' important bits like this are pushed out of sight.

</comment><comment><USER3> So being unable to legally kill him the government tried to set it up so he'd get himself killed? classy. Really gross.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't think they're out to get you, read this article.</comment>


Ask HN: How can anyone afford $42K/year for health insurance? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer in my early thirties. I do a lot of free lance and my employee doesn't provide health insurance. For good coverage post-Obamacare, I'm looking at $42K per year.
https://i.imgur.com/d8IezmJ.png
How does anyone afford health insurance? <comment><USER2> This is evidence of the crime the USA commits against it's people to give $$ to Big Medicine (The AMA), Big Pharma, Big Hospo, and big insuro. These people have made the US death rate curve down, for poor or Afro-Americans or Mex- Americans. Cuba has better health care than the upper 15% of US people. Nothing is worse than Cuba being higher than the USA on this chart. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

</comment><comment><USER3> My good friend also is paying $44k a year for himself and a family of 4. This situation is truly a damper for those whom want to start a business.

</comment><comment><USER4> Buy an insurance in another country. If you have a big health problem (meaning many $$$), go there, make some tourism, get treated, and everything will be cheaper than what you would pay in the US.

Better yet, find the way to not have any disease. Physical diseases are the last consequence of energy imbalances in your being, be them emotional or spiritual.

<comment><USER5> [facepalm]</comment></comment>


Fast Internet Service Speeds Business Development in Chattanooga - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/technology/fast-internet-service-speeds-business-development-in-chattanooga.html

<comment><USER2> We founded our company in Chattanooga. Happy to talk to anyone curious about what's happening in the city.

<comment><USER3> I really have to wonder if non-tech companies are seeing the benefits that you are. I once tried to start a "Save the NBN" group here in Australia (the NBN was our ill-fated fibre-to-the-home project). One of the problems is communicating how important fast, reliable broadband is to non-techies.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a website to connect you with speakers of different languages - <AUTHOR> https://trypol.ly <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, I made this site because I wanted to find pen pals to practice French with. While HelloTalk exists, I didn't really like how it worked and it lacked a web interface which I really wanted.

This web app won't be very useful if you know nothing about a language, but if you have even a beginner level it's incredibly useful to chat with fluent speakers.

I'd appreciate any feedback, as this is the first real website I've launched :)

<comment><USER2> I love the idea, design, name, and logo (perhaps not the domain name that much).

I'm trying Eng > Pol but I can't seem to be able to connect.

No Poles?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've read trypol.ly as "Tripoli", capital of Libya :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't work here (Luxembourg)

"trypol.ly's server DNS address could not be found."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the heads up! My domain was being pointed to some stale nameservers in Libya (the .ly extension) which I guess responded to you before the ones in North America :)

I got rid of them but it will take a while for the changes to propagate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I speak a bit French, English, and Russian. Chatting is not learning!

<comment><USER6> what do you mean?</comment></comment>