How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux? - <AUTHOR> http://pedrocr.net/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux <comment><USER2> FSF's insistence on "GNU/Linux" has always been childish, but now it's just silly really. For years the proportion of GNU software that actually gets run has been dwarfed by the code from Mozilla, KDE and/or GNOME, and other major desktop software vendors. The GNU/Linux argument has never been persuasive and I'd say it's high time they let it go.

<comment><USER3> I looked at the article and it seems to strengthen the argument for calling it a GNU/Linux distribution. The top contributors as per the chart.

1\. kernel 9% 2\. gnu 8% 3\. kde 8% 4,5 java, mozilla 6% 6\. gnome 3%

If you combine gnu with gnome, we have 1\. gnu 13% 2\. kernel 9%

Also considering that java/mozilla are platform agnostic, the candidate names we have are

linux-gnu-kde OR gnu-linux(-kde)

If you are not running KDE, then gnu-linux seems like a very strong candidate for the name. The argument for calling it linux would revolve around the availability of GNU software on other non-linux distributions in some form or the other, thus making GNU a not very distinctive moniker. But MacOS/BSD doesn't really carry as much GNU as Linux distros do.

But the kernel is running all the time when booted up. A better argument would be that only a fraction of GNU software is active at any moment, so by percentage of GNU v/s kernel code executed in any given time interval, the kernel should win handily. This pie chart, as it stands, actually makes a case for calling it GNU\Linux.

<comment><USER4> Warning: angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument ahead.

It's true that the kernel is loaded all the time (though not usually _running_ more than a small fraction of the time), but so is glibc. It's far from obvious that more cycles are spent in the kernel than are spent in glibc (though of course in both cases the goal is to run as _little_ as possible, allowing more application code to run).

It's also worth considering that only a fraction of the kernel's LOC are even compiled in the average distribution's kernel (are the LOC dedicated to Itanium, Alpha and PA-RISC support really useful to Ubuntu?).

<comment><USER5> _It's also worth considering that only a fraction of the kernel's LOC are even compiled in the average distribution's kernel (are the LOC dedicated to Itanium, Alpha and PA-RISC support really useful to Ubuntu?)._

Does the kernel spend more lines of code on platform support or on drivers? I was under the impression that drivers made up the vast majority of the kernel, most of which are enabled in distribution kernels.

Sloccount seems to confirm this on kernel 2.6.35:

      4796735 drivers           ansic=4791978,yacc=1688,asm=1428,perl=792,lex=779,
                              sh=57,awk=13
      1677610 arch              ansic=1449312,asm=226905,sh=674,awk=470,pascal=116,
                              perl=58,python=45,sed=30

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, ... and am considering only the "main" repository, supposedly the core of the distribution, actually packaged by Ubuntu and not repackaged from Debian."

I'm not sure I understand Ubuntu's "main," or what's "packaged by Ubuntu and not repackaged from Debian." Does this mean the author is _not_ counting code that appears in both Debian and Ubuntu? Because I would expect a lot of that code to be GNU, and I would expect GNU code to make up a small proportion of the Ubuntu-only code.

But that must not be what it means, right? I thought nearly all of Ubuntu's "main" was just repackaged from Debian, in which case the remainder would be a very strange sample to draw on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much everything that is in Ubuntu is also in Debian. What Ubuntu "main" means is those packages are actually built by Ubuntu with their own patches and quality control. Wheres "universe" has everything that is not in main and is repackaged from debian to Ubuntu by the community without official support.

The assumption is that the "main" archive is a fairer representation of the important stuff in the distribution than including "universe" as well. You actually have to manually enable universe on an Ubuntu install to be able to use it.

See <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu> for more details

<comment><USER6> "What Ubuntu "main" means is those packages are actually built by Ubuntu with their own patches and quality control."

I guess this is where I was confused. My understanding is that the packages in main still originate as .debs from Debian (i.e., they are _not_ directly packaged from upstream sources), even if Ubuntu applies their own patches and such, so it sounds strange to say that these are not "repackaged." (I can't find an Ubuntu page confirming this, but Wikipedia says, "Ubuntu packages are based on packages from Debian's unstable branch..." [1])

So, I think the mapping from your terminology to mine is:

"built by Ubuntu" => "repackaged by Canonical from Debian"

"repackaged from Debian" => "repackaged by Ubuntu community from Debian"

[1] [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ubuntu_%28ope...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay, how about this: build a Linux distribution using no GNU software.

If you don't think it's critical, try to get by without it.

RMS is a good guy, and I think that his effort to make foundational efforts remembered is equally laudable.

<comment><USER8> I wanted to say that Haiku OS has done it but then again...I'm sure they use _some_ GNU code somewhere.

<comment><USER9> Haiku OS is not based on linux kernel

<comment><USER8> No, but it does rely on GNU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember back in the early 90s, I often had the choice of using the local tools or the GNU tools. I went for the GNU versions every time: they were stable, predictable and worked the same everywhere I went. It felt like they'd built their own Unix then, despite the fact that Hurd was still not much more than some really ambitious design documents.

My point is, I fully appreciate the importance of the GNU work to the development of free and open-source software, especially Linux. That said, I can't see that most of the arguments being put forward here make any sense. I mean, should everything compiled in gcc have a gnu prefix? (GNU/Google, anyone?)

</comment><comment><USER11> If the point is supposed to be "why insist on calling it GNU/Linux when xx% of it isn't even produced by GNU?", it's an ill-made point. Most of the userland (and certainly what we could call the "core" userland, especially in terms of development tools) is GNU software. The system would be pretty unusable libc, gcc, ld, make, etc.

<comment><USER12> BSD libc and BSD make are pretty much drop in replacements for glibc and GNU make. LLVM is a drop-in replacement for gcc.

It seems like it would be pretty straightforward to build a Linux userland without GNU.

<comment><USER13> I don't think bsd libc supports linux specifics such as fanotify and such, the libc is usually tied to a kernel. (I haven't looked at bsd libc so I may be wrong)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some friends of mine were working on a project to make a non-GNU linux distribution (well maybe not actually for distribution) just to see if they could: <https://github.com/burke/non-gnu-linux/wiki>

I don't think much has happened with it recently, but they were working to build the kernel with icc (the Intel C compiler).

<comment><USER15> As of a few weeks ago, Gentoo-Bionic is up at <https://gitorious.org/gentoo- bionic> which is as far as I know the first attempt at a Linux system built with a BSD licensed libc, Bionic being the Andoid libc. All the other glibc alternatives like uclibc tend to also be GPL licensed.

Bionic is missing a fair amount of stuff, as it only has to run a limited subset on Android, but has enough to run much software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author didn't consider the extensions gcc introduces? or all the userland gnuisms that Linux relies on? LOC is not a measurement of use.

</comment><comment><USER16> Lines of code is a poor way to measure contribution.

<comment><USER2> The whole argument around the "GNU/Linux" terminology is that the FSF deserved part of the glory because they contributed the userspace to Linux's system code. I think the persistence of those pushing this point of view is a projection of their disappointment over Hurd and demands for subsequent glory "because we deserve it!" This is a really childish stance from the start.

A kernel is of course useless without userspace. However, almost since its inception the percentage and importance of the GNU contribution has been steadily dwindling; in the course of a normal day, my wife, who is a KDE user, uses much more software provided by KDE e.V. than software provided by GNU/FSF. Should we call all of her Linux installs KDE/Linux?

<comment><USER17> That she 'uses more software provided by KDE' is an unsubstantiated claim that people make way to fast. Is it possible to build KDE without GNU tools? If not, every use of KDE is an indirect use of GNU tools. While running, how many times are glibc and related foundational components called?

The problem of GNU tools is their invisibility. But by that metric (what users see), your wife should call the system KDE, since the kernel is entirely invisible to her. Surely no one here suggest dropping Linux as the appropriate name for the system? But if so, doesn't GNU deserve to be mentioned as well, for making Linux actually usable by things such as KDE? The foundation is Linux + GNU tools. Neither can do without the other, but nothing can do anything without the two of them. That's as foundational as you can get in a GNU/Linux system, which is why people call it that.

<comment><USER18> Isn't the "you couldn't build it without GNU tools" argument somewhat silly, as no other OS out there includes the toolchain as part of the name? I doubt the folks over at Microsoft would seriously consider renaming Windows "Visual Studio/Windows" or "TFS/Windows", yet they would be hard pressed to build Windows without it. I'm also fairly sure Linux isn't the only OS out there that can be built with GNU tools (I thought Solaris was using it, at least during the brief period of time that they were open), yet it does seem to be the main target of the "GNU's contribution should be specially recognized" crowd - it's hard to see this as anything but sour grapes over Linux pretty much taking over the GPL licensed Unix-like kernel market away from Hurd.

"Surely no one here suggest dropping Linux as the appropriate name for the system?"

Linux based Android doesn't use Linux. Arguably the distro name is now the "primary" name (though this would still leave the FSF people feeling unloved). Thinking about it, I mostly say I use Ubuntu on the Desktop and Android on the phone and tablet and barely ever mention I run Linux nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. I would be quite interested what the chart looks like if it is restricted to the packages that are part of the default install.

<comment><AUTHOR> That should be an easy change. Do you happen to know how where to look up the list of default packages?

I'd assume the percentage of GNU would go down as gcc and gdb are probably not in the default install. The interpretation is a little more dubious though as gcc and gdb are definitely used to _produce_ the software in the default install.

<comment><USER19> You could look at a [http://ftp-stud.hs- esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/releases.ubuntu....](http://ftp-stud.hs- esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/releases.ubuntu.com/natty/ubuntu-11.04-desktop- amd64.manifest) or something of the kind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I asked on IRC and apparently the livecd manifest is a good list to use. Stay tuned

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Comparing the size of Ubuntu 'main' isn't interesting.

A more thoughtful assessment would have examined what packages were installed & used rather than which ones existed. That data is really easy to find: <http://popcon.ubuntu.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I do have that data and have been using it in these kinds of analysis. There are two big problems with it. The first is that it's not given out in any kind of time-series or by distro-version so some analysis are very hard to do (this one would work though). The second is that the data gathering is opt-in so the sample will have a bias, probably towards power users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> No expert, but I always thought Ubuntu was probably the distro least likely to have a large % of GNU thanks to all the extra stuff that comes with it. Would be interested to see this for Debian or etc.

<comment><USER22> I think in terms of a standard desktop user's install, a Debian machine configured for usual use is not going to differ all that greatly from an Ubuntu machine. A server config forsaking much of the user-friendly stuff, maybe.

I think my point there is that I don't think actual distribution "names" matter so much as what their intended purposes are for varying the "what" that is measured for this metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ubuntu doesn't even call itself Ubuntu Linux let alone Ubuntu GNU/Linux."Ubuntu is a fast, secure and easy-to-use operating system used by millions of people around the world."

</comment><comment><USER24> Yet another case of pie charts being a poor choice for presenting data.

Besides, GNU mainly shows up because lines-of-code is the metric. If cat -v is considered harmful, what is cat --verbose? ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> Try not installing glibc someday.

<comment><USER26> There are viable alternatives. Debian for instance uses eglibc, which is LGPL but AFAIK not part of GNU. The BSDs use their own libc as well.

<comment><USER27> Protip: eglibc is a fork of glibc, considers glibc an upstream, and communicates patches with glibc, requiring copyright reassignment for contributed code. This makes them roughly as GNU as glibc itself, which is maintained by a Redhat employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think when Other is the majority, it makes it less meaningful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Things in other are basically all individual projects. So they're not included in any overarching project or grouping. And I actually find that very interesting as it means that development is highly fragmented and distributions do an essential job in putting it all together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why wasn't the kernel part separated from the support stuff?

It would seem the correct division (based on article) is

6% kernel

3% kernel support (i guess it would fall in "other")

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a line there somewhere. Clearly udev is very tightly linked to the kernel and it was built to replace devfs which _was_ inside the kernel. On the other extreme maybe the filesystem programs (e.g., reiserfsprogs or xfsprogs) aren't as tight a coupling and would make sense outside. I put the split into the footnote to make that clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't quite think it makes sense to say that _all_ of the software in a Ubuntu distribution should fall under the label of "GNU/Linux". Just because it runs on it doesn't mean it IS that thing.

That said, it is somewhat interesting to see the proportion of software.

<comment><USER31> I'm not the author or the submitter, but it seems to me that this article is more or less in response to FSF's "We developed most of the central components, forming the largest single contribution to the whole system."[1]

[1] <http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#why>

<comment> mkr-hn I think it's more useful to look at the impact of a contribution. Apache, KDE, and GNOME are a bigger deal than GNU by that metric. But I also think it's a bad idea to try and put one over another when they all do their part.

<comment><USER6> I don't know how you measure "impact," but this doesn't sound right to me. If you took away all the GNU code from a GNU/Linux system, my guess is that you would no longer have a working Unix system. I don't think that can be said of the other organizations you mention.

And if you mean social impact, I think it would be hard to overstate the role of GNU in getting the free software movement going. Yes, there is an ecosystem of self-sustaining projects and organizations now; but I have my doubts whether any of that would be there without the initial efforts of GNU.

<comment> mkr-hn Why does GNU need to be in the title? That's the purpose of the CREDITS file. No one is trying to diminish GNU's contribution.

<comment><USER6> By that line of thinking, why call it "Linux" (or anything else) either? I agree that "GNU/Linux" sounds kind of dumb, if that's what you're driving at -- but I'd be happy to call the operating system "GNU".

<comment> mkr-hn Why do we call it aspirin instead of acetylsalicylic acid? It's familiar, easy to spell, and easy to remember. It's an accident of history. What would be accomplished by renaming it?

<comment><USER32> Most people in the world don't call it Aspirin, as that's a registered trademark of Bayer AG. The trademark was voided in the U.S. during WWI and never re-granted.

Here in Canada, we call it ASA.

<comment><USER33> Umm.. what?

Bayer holds the trademark for Aspirin (Capital A) in Canada (and others). The trademark is void in the US (and others)

When Canadians that I know (incluidng me) say "aspirin" we mean very deliberately "Any kind of ASA - and if it's not the generic stuff you're some kind of weirdo who likes to waste money" - but we still call it aspirin. Brand names don't, of course - they list ASA as an ingredient... but I've never in my life heard someone ask if I had any ASA.

<comment><USER32> Different experiences. The first time I had someone ask me for some, I was confused: I didn't know what it was (I had just immigrated from the US). But I've had more than a few people refer to it as ASA in the thirteen years I've been here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> LinesOfCode to determine how much "GNU" there is is like counting number of screws in a car to determine how much "car" it is.

Without GCC to compile the kernel and all the other tools, there would be no kernel. A free open source compiler which has existed for decades now, and its competition, Clang, is it even stable yet?

<comment><USER35> Is clang stable? Well, it can build the Linux kernel as of last October: [http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe- dev/2010-October/0117...](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe- dev/2010-October/011711.html)

And, seeing as Clang is the default compiler in Xcode 4, and can also build FreeBSD[1], yes, I believe it's stable.

[1] [http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2010-04-2010-06.ht...](http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2010-04-2010-06.html#Clang- Replacing-GCC-in-the-Base-System)

<comment><USER15> It still cant build a fully working out of the box Linux kernel for x86, eg no 16 bit early boot stuff, patches for various stuff, some things not working.

It is stable though. Linux is just a hard target...

<comment><USER36> why is linux a hard target? Don't know much about compilers/how kernel compilation goes but still would appreciate some basic explanation.

<comment><USER15> 1\. It has always been targetted at gcc, so no serious portability work has been done, more of a co-development thing. Linux will only compile correctly on a few recent versions of gcc, you cant compile old kernels on new gcc or vice versa. 2\. There is a lot of inline assembler (including oddities like x86 16 bit code) that has to work exactly as specified, such as for creating memory barriers say, or other low level constructs. Inline assembler is non standard, although clang does now implement the gcc stuff. 3\. You are making an ABI, so everything must be laid out exactly the same way. Portable C does not give you exact control of padding, again there are gcc extensions. 4\. Testing is hard - there are a huge number of optional modules, as well as SMP and non SMP builds, so even if you build the code with a new compiler without a lot of people using it it is hard to be sure it really works. There is no test suite...

Probably some more reasons too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think that the GNU+Linux attribution is accurate and deserved. The author of this page thought it fair to use SLOC as his unit of measurement; I think that "fundamentality" is a far fairer unit.

Anyone that thinks that "GNU" should be dropped from the "GNU/LINUX" should be using alternate cp, rm, ln, etc. Or just use NetBSD (do this anyway).

<comment><USER38> The biggest GNU contributions are gcc, gdb and emacs.

Command line stuff is trivial. GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have. The same cannot be said for gcc, gdb and emacs.

<comment><USER39> > GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have.

Chnage that to "GNU re-packaged or re-wrote versions of utilities that had existed for quite a while in the BSD world, but if they hadn't, someone would have just used the BSD version" and you would be closer to reality. GCC is really the only lingering semi-dependency and as clang improves to the point where it takes fewer patches to build around GCC-specific bits of the kernel the remaining contributions will become nice to have but not essential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?[...]

[...]I picked Ubuntu natty as a reference[...]

Ridiculous. If you want to give a minimum of credibility to the article, analyze other distros too!</comment>


Announcing a New Ebook, Docker for Java Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/ebook-docker-for-java-developers/ <comment><USER2> I was writing desktop apps and (later) Python during the J2EE boom, so I may be really badly understanding things, but: if you're in a pure-Java workshop, isn't something like a J2EE container the equivalent of Docker? My understanding was that it provided security isolation and containment, while allowing a much richer API, and that it also provided a trivial ability to deploy new versions just by submitting a new .war, similar to how you just upload a new Docker image. Is that not what was going on there? Or maybe it proved insufficient?

<comment><USER3> Java containers are better viewed as the forerunners to general-purpose PaaSes. They load and health-check the app, route traffic, capture logs, inject services and the like.

Containers are a great building block for PaaSes. Red Hat have built their latest OpenShift on Kubernetes, for example. My own employers, Pivotal, are the majority contributor to Cloud Foundry, another containerising PaaS using a different container system.

Even in Java, folk are moving towards apps that bundle their own container. Spring Boot does with Tomcat by default. It turns out that the giant Java app servers were great, but eventually wound up with the same problem as previous generations of highly shared services: without strong isolation guarantees, it becomes necessary to heavily gateway production to prevent outages or degradations. That backpressure creates de facto waterfall.

<comment><USER4> > It turns out that the giant Java app servers were great, but eventually > wound up with the same problem as previous generations of highly shared > services: without strong isolation guarantees, it becomes necessary to > heavily gateway production to prevent outages or degradations.

Are you talking about app isolation on an app server? I.e. running multiple WARs/EARs on a single server and not having one app destabilize the whole thing?

<comment><USER3> Essentially this. In theory it could be done, but I've only seen placs where they wound up with a app-container-per-production-WAR rule.

OS containers are a similar pattern for a similar reason. Stronger isolation simplifies production deployment and management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only download these if you want to get harassed by Nginx sales reps. I sent the link to the Docker/Microservices one from a while ago to my entire team and they called all of us several times.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a paradox to see announcement of the book with the title "Docker for Java Developers" from nginx people.

</comment><comment><USER7> Out of interest, why is it 'for Java Developers'? Is it just that it has examples of moving Java apps to Docker, or are there some specifics that need to be considered for Java in Docker vs anything else in Docker?

</comment><comment><USER4> Anybody have a hard link to the book?

<comment><USER8> It's sent as an attachment, but I've uploaded it to TinyUpload: [http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=824213354083530...](http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=82421335408353012518)

<comment><USER9> Removed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks!</comment>


Java faster than C - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/java-is-faster-than-c.html <comment><USER2> That's been my experience too, for heavy numeric computation. Hotspot can optimize the hell out of plain Java SE.

Something to keep in mind though: architectural considerations matter a whole lot more than the particular programming language you use to implement them. If you keep your programs simple and use tools like Java NIO when appropriate, you can write _really_ fast code in Java. If you pile on framework after framework, of course it's going to be slow, because it's doing a whole lot more work.

It's very easy to write a screamingly-fast Java backend and then lose all your speed gains by sticking it behind Hibernate, JSF, and a half-dozen JavaScript libraries.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's nice to see SBCL Common Lisp tying for top speed honors with C :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=26136>

</comment><comment><USER4> With contrived benchmarks you can prove anything.

Pick something with weird bit twiddling where C is better. I pick some business computing task involving lots of systems integration or some shit where Java is better. And on and on.

Garbage collection is a megawin and you have to be retarded or working on microdevices with 168 bytes of RAM to use C over Java. And that's really where anything on the JVM wins.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's my experience with Java as well. Also, Java is much faster tan C++. C++ is slower than C.

Here's an interesting link: <http://kano.net/javabench/>

"JVM startup time was included in these results. That means even with JVM startup time, Java is still faster than C++ in many of these tests."

<comment><USER6> No, C++ is not slower than C. Both C and C++ are effectively macro assembler languages, and if you know what the 'macro' expands to, you can gauge the performance. You could implement everything that's in C++ using just pure C and get the same effect, but I surely do not want to manually lay out my vtables nor do I want to replace my C++ templates with C preprocessor macros. :-)

It should also be no surprise that Java, with its _runtime_ dynamic optimization, is able to more strongly optimize code based on _runtime_ performance characteristics than _compile time_ optimizations performed by traditional C and C++ compilers. This is just a guess, but it's also possible that the Java JIT compiler is able to more aggressively optimize the generated code by having more insight into pointer aliasing, whereas you'd need to do whole program compilation to get the same effect with C++. (Plug: LLVM can do whole program compilation. <http://www.llvm.org> )

As tx said in a sibling post: _Because good (performance-minded) C++ programmer has very good idea what kind of assembly instructions his code will turn to. This is why performance-critical code is still written in C++._

<comment><USER5> Yes, C++ is unquestionably slower than C when you use it to the full potential and when you program the C++ way! A lot of people still program in C++ using the C style. I've used C++ for 7 yeas and have plenty of experience with it and I've seen its slowness in many instances. Main thing to avoid with C++ is virtual methods. Once you understand how they're implemented, you will understand why (hint: vtables).

<comment><USER6> _Main thing to avoid with C++ is virtual methods. Once you understand how they're implemented, you will understand why (hint: vtables)._

Why? Are you concerned by the additional pointer dereference? In a tight loop (or other performance critical repetetive code), the vtables for all the derived types and the target piece of code would be sitting in cache already, and the code pointed to by the vtable entry would also be in cache. You have to fetch the object/class/struct instance that you're operating on regardless of whether or not it has a vtable, so that's an unavoidable cost. So I don't see how it's all that expensive. It's just a freaking pointer dereference. I do agree that it can matter in some instances, but I generally have a long list of things to improve before I would try to minimize pointer dereferences on vtables. If you really are having to optimize on such a low level, you'd probably do better to worry about cache hits/misses and data layout in-memory first.

<comment><USER7> A pointer dereference can make all the difference in an inner loop. As usual, the answer is to profile, then to optimize.

No other dogma really applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting but Mandelbrot is a specific math process. I'd be more impressed if a large application with network I/O, disk I/O, threading, etc was proven to be faster in Java than in C.</comment>


I Bought a House with Solar Panels - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-sunrun-solar-panels/ <comment><USER3> >One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It's called "Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun." (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers' emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. When reviewing a customer's traditional utility bill, the trainee is told, "amplify the pain significantly." Among "components of success": "creating pain and fear." Among the "five fatal flaws" to avoid: "failing to build pain or fear."

Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with.

<comment><USER4> It is funny because we get cold called by these folks probably twice a year, and once a rep came up to our house and wanted to tell us about solar, so I gave them a short tour of the 5KW system we installed 15 years ago. The one that has literally paid for itself (about half way through year 11) based on actual generation and power consumption statistics. It would have paid for itself sooner except that PG&E has twice updated the grid tie rules which have incrementally reduced the benefit of rooftop solar.

The TPO systems as described are a boon to PG&E who, if you can believe their actions, is really concerned that people will just drop off the grid altogether.

<comment><USER5> Even without explicit subsidies, it seems like rooftop solar is still getting hidden subsidies? If homeowners were paid wholesale rates for the power they provide, with prices based on the spot market, would any of it make sense financially?

<comment><USER6> No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid.

A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

<comment><USER4> I like this argument but I disagree with it.

I will stipulate that PG&E qualifies as a 'poorly run, centralized utility' and based on its billing it cannot provide power to residential homes for less money than a locally installed solar system can.

The reasons for this are worth considering.

PG&E has to maintain a power transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure has a high inspection cost, land use cost, equipment costs, and insurance risk cost (witness that the threat of the being found liable that their transmission line maintenance (or lack thereof) contributed to the most expensive wild fire in CA history).

Then there are the externalities which we don't account for as much in either scenario. Whether it is the cost of scrubbers on a coal plant, the waste storage costs of nuclear, or the gas pipeline infrastructure for natural gas plants that leaks methane into the air.

What solar does it centralizes the manufacture of the energy production equipment with finite externalitie. It provides highly granular capacity that can be deployed without large step wise changes in capacity (this is the 'nearly unused plant' problem where you have to run a plant because the instantaneous need occasionally exceeds your current generate capacity while the average need is staying below that level (this is where Teslas battery farms help energy companies cut costs).

So when comparing systems dollars to systems dollars, Solar with the current economics of about $3.25/watt installed is actually cheaper than poorly run centralized power plants.

<comment><USER6> Oh, don't get me wrong - solar power generation is _fantastic_ in areas that can support it (Which is most of the world.)

 _Rooftop_ solar power generation is what I have an issue with. Utility-scale solar has all the advantage that you cited, without the disadvantages of being incredibly labour-intensive, overcomplicating the electric grid, and offloading long-term maintenance to non-experts.

If you are going 100% off-the grid, then yes, local installations may be cheaper (Because they don't include the cost of maintaining the grid.)

However, you'll still have to maintain a national grid - because not all buildings or businesses have the rooftop capacity, or the hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital to install enormous battery blocks.

So, what ends up happening, is that a few people drop off the system, and raise prices for everyone else - including people who don't have the option to drop off the grid. My building, for instance, houses 40 units. It has four times the rooftop capacity of an average home. No amount of battery storage is ever going to let it be grid-independent. Other residences dropping off the grid, completely, just shift costs around - they wont reduce overall costs.

<comment><USER5> It requires a grid, but maybe not a national grid?

There has been a lot of talk about how we need more long-distance power lines for load-balancing solar and wind. However, the PG&E bankruptcy seems to show that we've been underestimating what it takes to properly maintain a grid. Are long-distance power lines more expensive than we thought?

Or maybe rural, fire-prone areas would do better with more local solutions that reduce the amount of low-usage power lines that need to be maintained?

<comment><USER7> PG&E is a pretty poor strawman for anti-grid arguments. CA pays 2x what neighboring states do for electricity, and despite having mild weather and high population density have unreasonably high levels of safety and reliability issues.

It's probably second only to Puerto Rico on that front, at least in the US.

Having said that, I'm eagerly awaiting the day I can disconnect my house from the grid, and close my account with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When you get down into the meat of how the tax credits and Sunrun's financing work it's astonishing.

Essentially it sounds like Sunrun's investors are paying to install solar panels on your house so they can claim the tax credit to offset their own income. Meanwhile you are paying Sunrun for the electricity generated by the solar panels.

There doesn't seem to be much benefit for the homeowner. You're better off buying the system up front if possible or even financing it and claiming the tax credit yourself. Then you'd only have to pay the utility for the electricity you don't generate.

"The American way" anymore seems to be to take a good idea, overcomplicate it with financial engineering, and funnel the profits to a small minority of people who actually understand what's going on.

<comment><USER9>
      You're better off buying the system up front if possible

When I looked into it in my country, the payback time for a solar system was 10+ years, and estate agents were reportedly estimated they added nothing to the value of the house.

Buying is all very well if you're sure to stay in the same place for 10+ years - but if you move in that time, better hope you place a high value on feeling you've helped the environment.

Not that having a mandatory loan you try to get prospective buyers to pay for is a better decision, of course...

<comment><USER10> You don't want it to add value to your house because then you will end up paying higher property taxes on a higher appraised value. The benefit of solar can be stated to a prospective buyer as X dollars less on utility bills each year.

<comment><USER11> Huh??

I buy a house for $100k. I put $15k of solar panels on it. I go to sell it a year later, and sell it for $100k. That is what it means for solar panels not to add value - I just lost my $15k investment.

Incidentally, that appears to be the case for residential solar in CA. It doesn't factor in appreciably to the price of a home.

<comment><USER10> Your neighbor buys a house for $100k, doesn't install solar and then sells their house a year later for $85k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We bought a house with TPO panels from SolarCity. It's been ... ok. Our monthly payment never goes up for the life of the lease and SolarCity sends us a check if the panels ever don't produce enough. They provide 100% of our electricity and we generate excess that the power company pays us a tiny amount for.

If I could do it again I'd get a house without TPO panels. If for nothing else, just one less variable and thing to consider. You can always get panels later.

But I gotta say, SolarCity themselves were an absolute nightmare to work with. The person who got the panel deal on our house (two owners ago), has two other panel deals with SolarCity on two other houses. When we took over the lease SolarCity basically just munged all of the account details together. A major red flag went off when they asked if I'd like to pay my bill with my Wells Fargo account. I don't have a Wells Fargo account. For over a year I had to fight these morons to get everything squared away and to finally get my account onto their online portal so I could pay online. Every single month they tried to either charge me for the other systems, or have the other guy pay for ours, and with each other's bank accounts. They told me to not make any payments until this was resolved, but also told me they'd send me to collections for non-payment. It was an absolute nightmare. Don't ever work with SolarCity.

<comment><USER13> 1\. (Edit: In most cases) Never pay for premium PV panels. The 10-20% premium only nets you an additional 1-2% in generation output.

2\. Always get at least three quotes, using energysage: [https://www.energysage.com](https://www.energysage.com)

3\. As a residential customer, never sign a PPA. Either pay cash or get a loan

4\. Tesla solar customer service is wildly inconsistent. Even as a Tesla investor, I do not recommend them for solar.

Sorry for your poor Solar City experience.

<comment><USER14> Premium PV panels can be worth it if they look better. My parents paid a bit extra for black rather than blue solar panels (said panels also have higher output), and the house really does look a lot better for it. This can matter come sale time; curbside appearance is very important in real estate.

<comment><USER15> Also a good value if you're launching them into space

<comment><USER16> Launching a rooftop residential installation into space is kind of a niche use case, though.

<comment><USER15> Elon Musk needs one up there to charge his Roadster

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An important take away from this article is simply the perils of home buying. People usually only do it once or twice in their life (I have done it twice so far) and it's really easy to make a very expensive mistake. Imagine this article with another property problem instead of Sun Run: a mother-in-law unit with a tenant, a disputed property line, a requirement to retrofit the house to make it earthquake proof, illegal additions to the house.. etc. All those things can be pitfalls in a house purchase that a buyer will not know much about.

The realtor sounds extremely negligent to not correctly inform the buyer about the true situation until after offer is made. That should be a flag. Realtors understand loss aversion and that you can get very fixated on a particular house. Better to get you to start thinking the house will be yours then break the bad news to you. People just don't buy houses often enough, and they get too emotionally attached, to make rational decisions. Listen to the author talk about how this is the place where he might raise a child. That sounds so portentous, but really wherever you live is where you might raise a child.

Owning a house can be great, but the best way to do it is to think about it like buying a used car. Realize the people you are working with are nicer, smarter used car salesmen. Check everything out with true third parties and be ready to back out.

<comment><USER18> >The realtor sounds extremely negligent to not correctly inform the buyer about the true situation until after offer is made.

Its par for the course - realtors rarely know anything at all about the property they are selling other than what the MLS says (and the MLS is often inaccurate and/or missing information). I was looking at a house and asked if the fireplace was functional and the seller's agent answered with "I don't live here, so I don't know." Another time, back when I was looking to rent, I asked about laundry facilities in the building, she was like "idk." Neither even offered to get an answer for me.

<comment><USER17> I agree. My point is that people go into it thinking the realtor knows what they are doing. And they probably do in general. But there are a lot of blind spots.

Also, an earlier poster said that inspectors are highly motivated to protect you. I can only offer anecdotes, but my experience was that realtors liked some inspectors more than others. All inspectors probably know they have to tell you about big problems. Some are really thorough about all issues including small ones. Realtors, who want to get the deal done, hate the nitpicky inspectors. But nitpicky is good for negotiating. I am no expert, I am just sharing my impression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn't my idea of the right place to do it.

That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a for-profit company in an attractive way. This appears to have been crafted as a payment schedule that's slightly back-heavy. Seems to me that the author just didn't want to be left holding the bag, but still wanted to pay lip service and feel like a good environmentalist.

<comment><USER20> Seems like one thing to make the payment schedule back-heavy and be honest about it, another thing to use unrealistic assumptions about utility price increases to disguise this payment schedule as a lifetime cost savings.

<comment><USER21> And the huge issue is that if it's a back-heavy payment scheme: A future buyer will only see the heavier portion. Which makes your house less attractive to a buyer, and devalues your home, which also hurts any potential cost savings.

<comment><USER19> The growth rate of the payment is 2.9%. This is only very slightly higher than inflation, on average.

Also, assuming that the lower home value came true, the original purchaser of the solar installation did put his money where his mouth is, and paid a financial cost to his environmental interests, which is the moral thing to do, regardless of whether he was "tricked" by the negative cash flows showing up in later years (and in this case, when he was dead).

I guess my main point from my multiple posts is that there is no free lunch. If the fully amortized cost of solar is higher than grid power, someone will have to pay. Someone with buyer's remorse, who fully understood the cash flow implications at the time of purchase, can still feel like they were tricked. And maybe, the pessimistic projections of grid power costs made by sunrun should be taken with a grain of salt, and it should also be acknowledged that this deceptive practice is helping the planet.

Maybe a game theory perspective is valuable here- assuming cooperation is possible, people place an irrationally small cost to global warming, and discount future costs (in this case, of their power bill) to an irrationally large degree. The way to get people to cooperate is to trade one irrational impulse for another.

<comment><USER21> Sure, someone is going to have to pay for greener power. But the problem is that Sunrun is claiming it's cheaper, even though it isn't, and that the owner ends up paying both Sunrun's expenses _and_ their profit margin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >It's far more common for home sellers to transfer the lease to the buyer—Sunrun says 94 percent of customers do this—or to prepay the lease and leave the hardware on the roof for the next owner to use. I've been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000 and allowed us to support solar and get "free" electricity, even as Sunrun remained responsible for maintenance and repairs.

I'm not surprised Sunrun chose not to tell them about that option as it seems like a losing situation for them. They claim that Sunrun would have been covered, but that merely means they fail to lose money. They stood to make money on that system, and no sane solar panel buyer is going to have heavily used panels put in.

>Aided by a local attorney and my father-in-law, a retired contract attorney, I drafted a letter to Jug's trust accusing the listing agents of failing to deliver title to the property free of any third-party claims as the agents had said they could. I threatened legal action. It was a last-ditch effort that none of us expected to work. Then it did.

I'm not surprised this worked. Their whole job is to present the actual situation during the sale and they failed at it. There are probably a lot of legal issues with what they did and I bet the agent was quaking in their boots at the thought of that going to trial.

<comment><USER23> regarding the legal action: based on my recollection from real estate class in law school, failing to provide a free and clear title on a general warranty deed is a pretty straight forward victory. if i remember anything from that class, always get a general warranty deed (ie a deed with all the covenants) when buying a house.

<comment><USER13> Your class was correct (I just had to go through this very scenario this week, albeit not for solar, with a local title company transferring some property).

Never take action that is going to jeopardize free and clear title on your real estate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a cautionary tale of purchasing a home with solar panels, even if they're not leased from a third party.

We bought a house with solar panels in 2016. The seller had purchased the system less than a year before the house went on the market, and one of the key selling points was that there was no lease to deal with; by purchasing the home, we would 100% own the solar panels and would reap all the benefits of what they generated.

Six months after the sale was finalized, we changed Internet providers and soon after that, we were forwarded an email by the seller from an organization we had never heard of, asking us to reconnect the solar panels to the Internet as a condition of their contract.

Um ... what contract?

It turns out that when the seller purchased the panels, they made a deal with this green-energy company, which was sort of a joint venture between our state's biggest utility and the state itself. The organization paid the seller $6K up front. The seller, in turn, agreed that for the next 20 years, any Solar Renewable Energy Credits generated by the panels would belong to the organization.

The existence of this contract, which included a lien on the SRECS, was never disclosed to us. And it never showed up on the title search because the lien was on this abstract credit, not on any physical property. The lawyer who did the closing had never heard of anything like it!

We ended up having to get a different lawyer involved, and it was a big production, because not only had the organization dealt with relatively few transfers of ownership, it had never dealt with a case where the SRECS contract was not transferred as part of the home sale, and undoing the mess the seller had caused by not disclosing it took a lot of legal legwork.

In the end, the organization agreed to remove the lien, rather than continue a legal battle, and I assume it then went after the seller for whatever portion of the $6K advance payment it could recoup.

The lesson I learned from all of this is that when it comes to solar panels, not even the people in the industry have much experience with the edge cases. And although installations are starting to become routine, transfers of ownership are not yet routine.

(By the way, the solar panels work well, and our energy bills are very low, but I wish someone would have told me that squirrels love to build nests under the panels and chew through wires, because yeah, that's happened, and it's not covered under the warranty.)

<comment><USER6> I am amazed that a company in the business of putting up solar panels on residential homes considers selling the home to be a weird _edge_ case in their business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A friend was a salesman for SunRun back in 2011 and at the time I was growing pot so I was looking to reduce my energy costs. I got an 8.8kW system(a bit large for my house). I spent probably $1k/year extra for electricity during the first year. Over time, the system started to actually save me money, but it took about 5 years. I also had a bunch of power I was obligated to buy, so I lost the incentive to conserve and ran my central A/C nearly all the time. When I had to sell my house after a divorce, I realized what a pain in the ass it would be. I had to convince the buyer that it was a good idea to assume the lease. I found out things like the requirement to pay thousands to remove the system if the roof needed replacement(one SunRun rep, not my friend, hinted during sign-up that they maintained the roof). The system only saved money if you consumed a lot of electricity. If you didn't need the power, you're stuck paying for it anyway. Fortunately the buyer went for it and I escaped the lease.

Another annoyance was the inverter box that SunRun installed right outside my bedroom. Every morning and night, the system would turn on and off several times as the light levels were close to the threshold. This meant some rather large relays were clicking repeatedly, waking me up at dawn a lot of the time. On the plus side, I got a new breaker panel and had my service rating upgraded from 100A to 150A.

If I had to sum it up, I'd say that SunRun isn't absolutely evil, but if I ever do it again I would buy the system outright, assuming it was economically viable. My personal opinion is that residential solar is a misallocation of resources as long as there are commercial rooftops without solar.

</comment><comment><USER26> FYI, this has nothing to do with solar panels and everything to do with a buying a house that has stuff with transferable contracts. Save up and buy your solar outright, companies don't lease things to you unless there is profit in it.

<comment><USER14> It has to do with solar panels to the extent that there's very little else that anyone would put on their house that uses a transferable contract. Solar panels are the most common instance in which anyone would run into this situation. I'm struggling to think of anything else, actually.

<comment><USER27> When we toured our home, the water softener system said rental on it. We inquired and the home owner confirmed the unit was purchased out right. So water softener systems is another potential example.

<comment><USER28> A water well was the first thing I thought of as a possible transferable lease, I could see septic systems possibly being leased too.

Edit- Some houses are also still heated by oil that has to be delivered on a routine basis and I could see that having a lease as well.

<comment><USER18> How do you lease oil delivery? Or do you mean the tank itself?

If you have an agreement for an oil company to come fill your oil when it gets low, you just terminate your agreement when you sell your house.

<comment><USER28> Tank installation + piping + maintenance + exclusive oil supplier, all wrapped up in a 10 year contract attached to the property. I'm not saying there are companies that do that, but I could see it being a possible business model.

<comment><USER18> Oil tanks + installation are cheap enough I'm not sure it would make financial sense for this to be a business model (we were quoted a ballpark figure of $1,500 to replace ours). Oil tanks require no maintenance whatsoever, just replacement every 15-30 years.

I have an agreement from a company that they deliver oil automatically when I need it, but I don't pay anything extra vs just calling them for a one time delivery and I can terminate the agreement at any time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _It appeared that if we bought Jug's place, we'd have to assume his lease > arrangement with Sunrun._

The whole article is worth reading but this headache is specifically related to leased panels. Though, leasing makes going solar easier, it is a terrible idea because of issues like these.

Also, every local power company has different arrangements for residents. I live in Suffolk county, Long Island, New York. Our power company arrangement is amazing. We get to sell back any excess power at the same rate we buy it from them. Meaning, they act like a free battery.

I have a 20 years term that started from the day I installed my panels to use up any excess energy they're holding for me. After that 20 years term is over, they pay me the wholesale rate for any leftover power, which is next to nothing.

I don't pay extra fees for net metering but we do have the highest rates in the nation. It's roughly $0.20/kwh, including delivery, taxes and other fees.

If I end up having any extra power and Crypto is still a thing, I'd just plug in a miner and drain it all. It'd be a bonus if I did it during winter and use the heat to warm the house.

Regarding the purchase, I financed the purchase. Got 0% loan on the expected tax credit portion and 6.5% on the rest for 15 years. Even with the interest rates, I'll be cash-flow positive on the monthly payments.

I also essentially locked in my utility costs. My local power company is expected to raise rates 3-5% a year. If I pay my loan off early, I get to avoid those rate increases for the portion of electricity that my panels cover.

Anyway, if you're thinking about going solar, check your local utility rules and go for the purchase option. Leases are not worth the baggage they come with.

</comment><comment><USER30> The tax credit thing as designed by legislation is nutty. It lets companies buy your tax credit and use it to offset their own income. Leading to all this zero value financial engineering.

But from a homeowner's point of view and Sunrun's point of view it makes sense. Lots of people might not be able use the tax credit because they already owe have low income tax (moderate income + mortgage interest deduction, or retired with a nice nest egg will get you to very low income tax).

(If you pay enough income tax to use the credit you should just get a loan and avoid this.)

This was legislated poorly, probably in order to call it a "tax credit" instead of "subsidy". A subsidy would be much cleaner, have the same economics and they should just do it that way. This whole mess and industry was created just for this one talking point. The government giving you $2000 off an installation is the same as getting a $2000 tax credit from the Treasury's point of view.

Sunrun sounds like not the best business to be involved with. Like "new buyer doesn't want the system" is an obvious thing for the customer service manual. (Referring to "...prepay the lease and leave the hardware ... I've been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000").

Also they are clearly selling this to a bunch of people who could easily use the tax credit and could easily get a homeowner's loan. Super dodgy. I'll bet a lot of the sales nonsense is to hide this fact.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not trying to discredit or de-emphasize the conclusion, but the ironic thing here is that the utility cost escalation rates that Sunrun had initially calculated were likely based off of pre-solar boom tariff increases.

As renewables have started becoming competitive (both utility-scale and distributed), utilities have been able to avoid building more expensive fossil-based power plants and transmission lines as quickly and thus rates haven't increased as much as before. So basically the solar industry partially created their own financial situation where the utility costs they are offsetting are lower because of their own participation in the market. Ha.

Anyway, I'm glad this in-the-weeds analysis is getting some coverage. As more and more "Distributed Energy Resources" (DERs) are installed in homes ($300 smart thermostats, $1k demand response water heaters, $5k batteries, $10k solar, etc.), people should be aware they need to do utility bill cost analysis earlier in the home buying process. Also, realtors need to get more savvy on utility bill cost impact of all these new DERs so they know how to adjust pricing based on what's installed in a home or building.

Disclaimer: I have a software company that many solar companies use to request utility bill history from customers for financial analysis.

<comment><USER32> I'm curious how solar could have put a dent in overall power production needs as peek energy usage comes around 6-8pm when solar panels are producing almost no power. And since utilities need to plan their production around peak usage far more than around overall usage, has solar really done that much to lower utility production requirements?

<comment><USER31> Yes, there is just that much solar being installed. The grid demand curve used to look like a bell curve (peaks mid-day, goes down in the evening). Nowadays, in California there's so much solar that it basically decapitates the curve half way down. Here's today's CAISO demand curve:

[http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx)

The industry term for this is called the "Duck Curve", where you install so much solar that you mostly reduce daytime electricity demand, but have peaks in the morning and evening.

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

<comment><USER32> I know it breaks HN protocol to leave a comment just saying thanks, but thanks. Those were very interesting/educational links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I evaluated solar cells for my home, and ultimately decided against because I probably get more total energy saving from the current passive solar of having huge south-facing windows and an oak tree in front of my house - free heat in the winter, shaded in the summer. For solar electric to work, the oak tree would have to go.

That said, central issue mentioned in this article aside (which is legit concerning), cost wasn't really an issue I spent much time worrying about. Am I the only person more interested in giving the middle finger to my corrupt utility provider and their coal-centered power generation strategy than whether I came out a few bucks ahead or behind in 20 years? I suspect a lot of people who install solar have similar motivations.

But that in itself can be a problem, too. The thing that concerns me about household solar is that it's a bit like owning a Prius - it becomes a status symbol for people more interested in _appearing_ green and assuaging their guilt than actual concern about their total carbon footprint. Take a vacation to Hawaii once a year and you'll probably knock off every single bit of good you did for the planet.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ahh yes Sunrun. We bought a house and our realtor had the foresight to investigate the situation before we closed on the home. We got a letter disclosing the system was owned free and clear. We setup the online tracking portal only to notice that they transferred the account like thousands of dollars in owed monies from the previous owner. After getting a call from the company trying to strongarm us for the debt we essentially told them to kick rocks.

They should've just demanded that money as part of escrow and now they're left with a debt in someone else's name that is never going to be paid and likely a headache for us in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> My parents have a large solar installation on their roof that they own outright. They paid for it cash, but if they hadn't had that much available, then a HELOC would have sufficed and not produced any of this kind of drama at sale time.

Don't lease anything on your house; it's a huge hassle. Get a loan/HELOC for it if necessary and the numbers work out, but don't enter into a long leasing agreement that can cause transferral problems down the road.

<comment><USER18> Not all leases are terrible, though most probably are. I have a leased propane tank, it's not a hassle or anything, I don't pay anything to lease it, I just pay the company for the propane when it need filling. It only needs filling like every 3-4 years because it's only used for the stove. I'm not really sure why its leased, but it could probably be replaced easily if need be.

I think the people these sorts of things appeal to are the people who have poor credit and/or very little equity in their house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> >Accounting for all these things, taking on Jug's lease would translate to us paying at least $30 a month more. We'd lose money from Day 1

I'm unsure how I feel about this. $30 is a significant % of the electric bill, but is a very small % of the cost of owning a home.

Didn't solar start as economically viable due to heavy government tax incentives? I'm ignorant of the data, but I thought solar was not fit for public deployment has only edge use cases.

<comment><USER36> Take that $30, stick it in a savings or investment. When solar prices go down, or utility prices go up, take the money you've saved up and then put it towards the purchase.

There's no point in throwing away money on a losing proposition, since in this case the homeowner wouldn't be the one to get the credit. As an additional bonus, your home will have newer, more efficient panels with a longer remaining estimated lifetime, so if you do end selling the house they'll add more value.

A solar install in a reasonably sunny climate can pay for itself over its lifespan, but you need to actually stay there the whole time, or hope that the added value to your house makes up for whatever your investment was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm closing on a new house tomorrow. The builder has a business arrangement with Sunstreet Solar and they have a ~4KW plant on the roof. While researching the details of the sale, I discovered that Sunstreet owns the panels and has an easement. They get 80% of the generated power and give me 20%. This did not seem like a good deal to me. I negotiated the purchase of the system from Sunstreet as part of the sale, and I got the home builder to reduce the price. This way I can claim the federal tax credit, and I get 100% of the generated power instead of 20%.

</comment><comment><USER38> DIY array with 17 panels should cost $5000 today with inverters and grid tie - thought I would forgo the grid tie and just get a shit fuck ton of lead acids (probably 30 for another $3000) and have energy for at least a day.

Stop paying these racket companies and their dumbass contracts. The DIY is totally easy.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's a couple things wrong with this article and I have a decent understanding of why Jug (RIP) did what he did. (I worked at Sunrun and created this fake account to hide identity; I worked in finance). Not to bash the sales reps or trainers, but they are so far removed from the financing of the product they don't know what's going on.

First, at the end the sales rep who provided the #s is bullshit. The sales reps are notorious for inputting whatever #s they want into the internal SFDC system so the average monthly bill isn't accurate. This isn't an exception, it's their own rule to accelerate sales (management does not tell them to do this. To be specific)

The 2.9% escalator is an aggressive and risky product, but requires zero upfront and an incredibly low initial $/kWh. He more than likely was saving money and would have been for at least several years. I don't know his intentions but you can read between the lines and I don't want to talk about the dead.

Also, I forget if Conedison does tier pricing, but if it did with all his gadgets, his bill would have been through the roof.

Lastly, Sunrun does offer cash/loan/0%/1.9%/prepaid products, and if I were to go for a cash deal, I would use Sunrun/Vivint/SolarCity because it's a huge headache to coordinate with developers and file all the correct paperwork.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is almost entirely for people with solar leases, and not solar loans or paid-off panels.

For panels that are paid off it's a great deal to pay a little more for the house. It just becomes a tax-deductible loan even though it saves you money each month.

</comment><comment> nappy-doo A couple years ago, we purchased and had installed a solar system. In MA, there is an incentive program called SRECs, which is a program where the utilities have to buy MWH of produced electricity, and I can sell my MWH of produced electricity -- that's tracked as an SREC. I can sell SRECs for 10 years, I make about 5-6 a year, and they go for 200-300$. It makes the payoff on the system about 4 years, and ROIC about 17%. If, when I go to sell, the 10 year window on the SRECs haven't finished the buyer and I will have to come to an arrangement for the remaining credits.

IMO, solar generally complicates all housing related transactions, but it's worth it.

<comment><USER41> As far as I know, the SREC is a one-time lump sum for the 10 year period, so you're looking at one payment of $1,000-$1,800 right?

<comment><USER42> SRECs are generated and auctioned quarterly. After an initial lag I get a check for SREC sales every 3 months.

There are schemes where you can get fixed price SRECs by signing them over to a 3rd-party. The third-party then give you a fixed amount monthly or quarterly or whatever but it's a significant discount on the auction price.

There are also companies that will give you a lump sum for your 10-years of SRECs up front but like all 'need cash now' schemes there is a significant discount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's not strictly a per-company problem. The incentives are for per-watt i.e. bigger system = bigger commission for the company instead of maximizing customer savings with Solar. The incentives don't align customers, sales, utilities, and financial providers.

Authority (City, Utility, etc.) typically push and constrain the installation at least 3-6 weeks and they rarely actually know Solar well enough to be a real 'Authority'. Lots of poorly implemented review procedures from untrained city officials and inspectors. Many unnecessary revisions, nitpicks, and expensive truck rolls surface here.

Then we also have Sales and Financing Providers who have the most leverage out of the stakeholders. High leverage also means they tend to get the biggest cut for a given Solar contract. High commissions and high fees or they leave the installation company who has to fulfill a 2-6 month-payout-delay pipeline. The fulfillment team also has the most people to retain, train, and coordinate over what is typically a multi-state field operation problem.

Not at all easy. Still, it boils my blood seeing some of these organizations fall prey to these pressures and turn to customer exploitation. What it amounts to is some deep-rooted systemic issues with the government-enforced monopolies of our utility companies, overly-simplistic incentives, and a market moving faster than the training and organizational development.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's sad that the resolution of the contractual dispute involved removing the solar panels. That's a lose-lose for everyone -- the company because they have to spend additional labor, the new owner because they would've preferred them to stay at a reasonable price, and of course the environment.

It's too bad the company couldn't come to terms somehow; surely accepting less money in a buy-out offer would have been better for them than having to come out and collect all of their equipment?

</comment><comment><USER44> I had a very similar experience when selling my house but with vivint solar. I had panels installed less than a year before and soon found out all these issues. Should have read the contract more thoroughly of course, but I am pretty sure the sales people mislead or even lied to me when I asked them questions about what happens if we move etc. Luckily the buyer agreed to take over the lease. If/when I get panels on my new house, I will almost certainly buy them outright.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know enough about Sunrun or the author here, but I will say that - <USER2> a general principle - when you see a human interest piece about a multi- billion dollar company with close to 15% of their shares sold short ([https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUN/key- statistics](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUN/key-statistics)) then I would take it with a grain of salt and question what is being presented.

edit: and you have to get more than halfway through to see the author managed to take the path of maximal pain: _" Sunrun calls our insistence that Jug's trust buy out and remove the system "incredibly unique and rare." It's far more common for home sellers to transfer the lease to the buyer—Sunrun says 94 percent of customers do this—or to prepay the lease and leave the hardware on the roof for the next owner to use. I've been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000 and allowed us to support solar and get "free" electricity, even as Sunrun remained responsible for maintenance and repairs."_

edit 2: _" On consumer review sites and in local news reports, rueful customers warn others to stay away from TPO solar offered by Sunrun and other companies"_ \- is that true of everything, and none cited? What if this was an article about car dealership?

edit 3: Having finished the article (and having never heard of Sunrun prior to this) it has the feel of a hit-piece. I don't think it is necessarily (author seems to have a solid investigative journalism track record), but it cherry picks very small sets of data without context and it frames things in what seems like a maximally negative way. Not sure if their experience with their specific bad experience and Bloomberg's comp based on moving markets had anything to do with it.

</comment><comment><USER45> > If Southern California Edison's residential rates continue to rise annually > by 2.2 percent, as they have on average over the last decade, Jug's total > electricity outlay having gone solar would have cost about $6,000 more over > 20 years.

Isn't the math that came to that conclusion completely fucked up?

$115 _(1.022 ^ 20) = $177

$75_(1.029 ^ 20) + $17 * (1.022 ^ 20) = $159

In fact, I'm about 100% sure that that $6000 figure is the amount of additional money that is payed to sunrun due to the increase costs (difference between $75/month for 20 years and the cost with 2.9% increase). It looks like the journalist then went and misinterpreted that data and made up a completely fake chart below it to fit their interpretation of the data. In that chart, clearly the socal edison side should start with a higher cost than the sunrun side and the socal edison cost at 20 years should actually be above the $2k line.

<comment><USER45> Okay... way at the end of the article they say that $115 isn't the real amount he was paying, he was only really paying $79. Making that change gets a lot closer to their -6000/+4000 for 2.2%/4.75% electricity increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I bought a house in CA a few years ago and had to assume the previous owner's SunRun lease. I didn't really want to but even if it ends up costing me slightly more in the long term (for now it's unclear) it's very minor in the land of $1.5 million housing. This article seems to be making a huge deal over a minor $30/month cost.

<comment><USER9> The article says the payments to buy out the contract totalled $27,300.

I wish I had the kind of income that made me call that a 'minor cost' !

<comment><USER47> That's about a third of what the realtors get on a $1.5M sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's always seemed so obvious to me: electronics depreciate at a rapid rate, solar panels are electronics, do not finance electronics over 20 years and think it's going to work.

For a 20 year lease, do you really want to be using a 19 year old system stuck on your roof ? Big clunky, weathered with spiderwebs. What does that look like?

<comment><USER49> Solar panels don't depreciate in the same way as most silicon. 20 years later, panels will still be producing power just fine, albeit with some degradation.

Source: my house has 23 year old solar panels, my garage has 10 year old panels, they all still produce plenty of electricity.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid dealing with these companies, but this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER50> Out of curiosity, how much do your 23 year old solar panels produce compared to when they were new? 90%? 85%?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Hugh Bromley, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF, says Sunrun and its > competitors offer solar, sure, but can be better understood as having > created "one of the most sophisticated financial engineering industries of > any sector of the U.S. economy."

While this is just a prejudice and their financial engineering _may_ be totally sound, this makes me think of CDOs and the mortgage crisis and all that.

The fact that the deal may not actually be all that good for the consumer -- and may complicate sales of their house since it's effectively a lien forcing future buyers to take a deal which may be _more apparent as bad_ in the future -- only makes me again think of the financial hijinx that led to the mortgage bubble/crisis.

</comment><comment><USER52> The article says Sunrun's shares rose when California decided to mandate solar panels on new constructions starting 2020. This doesn't really make sense to me. The reason stated was that developers don't like to install solar because it inflates the sticker price, but if you're taking out a mortgage, then you're probably looking at a payback timeline similar to the 20 year lease Sunrun offers. I don't really see how it makes sense not to take on the 5-10% (depending on installation size and house price of course) extra mortgage for what should be a cheaper overall cost over a similar timespan.

<comment><USER53> People don't buy houses, they buy payments. Specifically, whatever their lender will give them. Any additional principal balance is more they have to qualify for and more money required for down payment.

If you're thinking "Wow, that's nuts that people would spend 100% of what a lender will qualify them for," then, I say to you "Welcome to America."

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Saving $24 a month with solar panels seems hardly worth the effort. Why not just build nuclear plants and dispense with the tedium of house installed solar? Dealing with solar panels seems like such a such a pain.

</comment><comment><USER55> The savings that Sunrun advertises seem rather... meager. $2000 over 20 years?

</comment><comment><USER56> I spent considerable time evaluating solar installation, in of all places, Tucson. The perfect place, right? I viewed it as replacing a fixed income investment. (1) The internal rate of return was 1% (2) It was obvious that any government subsidy was swallowed up by price increases. This was very sobering to a leftist like me. (3) Grid connection and resell are critical, but there is no way to guarantee the terms of this into the future.

After all that, my wife's intuition was still crucial in nixing the panels.

</comment><comment><USER57> Ugh, I do wish there were more neutral sources to learn more about residential solar. Everything seems like such a con. I've got plenty of roof and reasonable capital to purchase gear but nowhere near the time to ferret out what's legit, what's a pie-eyed-pile-of-crap and what's an outright scam.

</comment><comment><USER58> This reminded me of a casual conversation with an acquaintance about how they sold their home, with (older) solar panels and had some sort of agreement where they still got paid for the money generated by the panels.

It sounded odd, as in; who would buy a house where something on the roof was generating income for the previous owner? - Wouldn't you (the buyer) just buy them out? No idea how this was structured - anyone have any background?

<comment><USER59> Sounds like either an agreement with the new owner that involved a price reduction on the home in exchange for the continued income. Or something totally shady!

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> " _...or to prepay the lease and leave the hardware on the roof for the next owner to use. I've been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000 and allowed us to support solar and get "free" electricity, even as Sunrun remained responsible for maintenance and repairs._ "

Wouldn't the author have been able to take the price of buying out the lease off their taxes?

<comment><USER13> No. The federal tax credit was already realized by Sunrun, with the savings passed along as part of the lease payments. No different then buying out a lease on an EV, where the federal tax credit was realized by the leasing company; no tax benefit.

In scenarios like this, the seller eats the remaining lease cost when the property is sold (think of it as a reduction in sales price).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I just built a house with solar panels. I had a bit of trouble with the bank, because the appraiser refused include the panels when appraising the home.

Ultimately, my state offered better financing than a traditional mortgage. I just wonder what's going to happen if I ask a buyer in 5, 10, or 20 years to pay for the panels. They clearly reduce the home's energy consumption, and thus have a clear demonstrated value.

</comment><comment><USER62> I get 3rd party solar sales calls nearly every day. I cut to the point and tell them my all-LED house plus new refrigerator averages 85 kwh month. That stops them cold because they require 1000 kwh to make a profit. Maybe if I got an EV I could crank up the usage a good deal.

I still dont know why they have called me several hundred times.

</comment><comment><USER63> At end of the day all this is US taxation system at work which does all it can to help corporations and screw individuals.

</comment><comment><USER64> Reading the article, the problem is that they used one of those companies with annoying business models to finance the solar panels somehow and you get some, but not all, of the benefits. People in the community I live in are pushing those models pretty hard.

Running the numbers, if you are privileged enough to have the money to just buy the damn panels and get them installed outright, you're way, way better off. I don't know if there's still good tax credits, but when I looked, they got you a good chunk of change right there. After that, solar panels pay for themselves in a pretty short amount of time if your electricity usage is high enough to take full advantage of them (eg: if you have a central hvac system or something), or have someone who will buy the surplus from you.

In my building, our power usage is way higher than we can get even if we covered the entire roof with panels, so it's pretty easy: put panels, reduce electricity cost, make up the money in a couple of years, don't deal with any third party aside for the installation.

</comment><comment><USER65> Maybe it is because it is getting near lunch time but this article seemed really rambling and disjointed. Is it about Sunrun or is it about the industry? Or is it just the author's experience? It seems to be all three cut and pasted together haphazardly.

</comment><comment><USER66> The fact that this is about solar is diminishing the actual lessons here - don't sign contracts that are tied to your home's title. And if you find a home you love that has a contract on its title, just walk away before getting attached.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'd rather give excess power to my neighbors for free or just waste it on a giant spinning pinwheel than "sell" it back to the power company. No mention of local battery storage by the reporter or the "reported/reportee".

<comment><USER68> Local battery storage is nice in a power outage, but right now it isn't remotely competitive with net metering.

I pay US$7.94 a month to my utility to "store" megawatt-hours of electricity over the course of a year. Brand-name home battery storage is still well over $500 per kilowatt-hour installed.

So yeah, I'll engage in shameless commerce with the evil corporate utility if they'll loan me a $2.5-million-dollar "battery" for less than 8 bucks a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Why would anyone do this? You should either save up and buy PV infrastructure outright, or not have it at all. Being tied to some sketchy company via contract sounds horrid. I would automatically exclude any homes with this setup from my search.

</comment><comment><USER70> I know we change titles to avoid click-baitiness, but surely "What happened when I bought a house with solar panels" is not so sensational as to require truncating to "I bought a house with solar panels"?

</comment><comment><USER71> While this company is doing some pretty shady shit, it's actually not worse than what traditional electric companies do.

Talk about corruption and dishonest practices.

In Florida, FPL, the electric provider for half of Florida, complained for about a decade (from 2004-2014) on how how they needed to keep raising rates so that they could continue to "upgrade the infrastructure" so that they could be prepared for the hurricanes that inevitably would hit the coast.

Some estimates that FPL made a few extra billion dollars on the price increases that went beyond normal inflation.

What do you think happened when south Florida got hit with the next major hurricane in 2014? Yup. same outages that we saw in 2004.

And the hurricanes weren't even worse.

10 years and billions of dollars in "upgrades" resulted in the same exact problems.

FPL took our money and didn't do anything with it.

AND they have been vehemently against people owning solar panels, even going as far as blocking legislation that would allow people to install them on their own homes without special permission from "FPL approved" companies.

And you can guess how many "approved" companies they would actually approve.

I have yet to see any major utility company operate with any decency, so while this solar panel company is doing some shady shit with their salespeople and leasing terms, it at least didn't scam millions of people for billions of dollars like FPL.

Florida should have the cleanest electricity in the world. Sunshine almost every day, but we don't have it because:

A) We don't price in the environmental impact of non-solar producing coal and natural gas plants, thus keeping solar "more expensive" than fossil fuel electricity.

B) FPL actively blocks the widespread adoption of solar panels on people's homes.

C) Politicians are happy to take money from FPL and other interest groups that don't want to adopt solar.

</comment><comment><USER72> That buyout price is insane. It's more than we paid outright to have the same number of panels installed in the bay area.

</comment><comment><USER73> I suppose if we ever sell our house we will need to remember to advertise that the solar panels are totally paid for.

</comment><comment><USER74> My view on solar is if you want to do it go completely off grid. Use small wind turbines lots of solar panels a Tesla power wall and have a backup generator

Problem with this is its not cheap. Not to mention many localities want to make this option simply illegal.

</comment><comment><USER75> i think the next time the costco sunrun person tries to say hello to me, I'm going to ask him how well he's been doing amplifying the pain

</comment><comment><USER76> What happened to the ones Tesla was coming out with?

<comment><USER77> They recently (Dec) sent emails that they are scheduling appointments to those who signed up on the list. Says only one of the several tile options available though.

<comment><USER78> I had such high hopes for the Dow Solar shingles. Maybe the Tesla ones will work out better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> > _" amplify the pain significantly"_

Wow, this __is __violence! With such extremisms being legit, one must not be surprised, if extremism rises on all fronts!

Who likes business (wo)men?

</comment><comment><USER75> is there any company that hasn't gotten big by lying, cheating, overpromising, stealing a dollar here and there, etc?

</comment><comment><USER80> It was news to me that California actually voted in a law requiring all new houses built after Jan 1, 2020 to have solar panels.

</comment><comment><USER81> Do you also crave acknowledgement for your Prius, too?

</comment><comment><USER82> A few points this person probably didn't think about:

•Nobody knows what California electricity prices are going to do in the next 20 years. By terminating the system, they just traded certainty for volatility. With that attitude I hope they financed using an ARM loan.

•They whined about how expensive it was, but also expressed a desire to have one or two kids someday. When you have kids, your electric bills tend to go up, and they did their math based on their "expected" usage today.

•Santa Barbara has a very mild climate, but I expect in the coming years it will get hotter and muggier much more of the year, and for health reasons they'll have to put a room A/C on. Whoa, now you're using as much juice as Jug did.

•PV rooftop panels in California nowadays don't quite "help the planet" to the extent their owners believe they do. The duck curve continues to get worse.

•A silent majority of people think PV panels are ugly. Like, hideously ugly. They're afraid to speak out, but not to act out and point the finger at a different reason.

The end result of this whole thing reminds me of one of those people 10 years ago who bought a top-end $500 cellphone locked in to a carrier on a 3-year- plan but only $50 a month, let the payments lapse 3 months in, and then tried to sell it on eBay, angry at the cellphone company for financially hobbling them when it wouldn't sell or it got returned.

<comment><USER83> > Nobody knows what California electricity prices are going to do in the next > 20 years.

That's true but with the way most utility costs have been dropping, the rates are probably not going to skyrocket.

> using more power

The problem is the rate being too high. More use doesn't help the problem.

> duck curve

Sure, but not very important to this choice.

> A silent majority of people think PV panels are ugly. Like, hideously ugly.

Do you have evidence of how common that is? Does that include installations that are well-integrated into the roof?

> cell plan

A typical cell phone contract breaking fee is $350, with some pro-rating. This roughly covers the cost of a phone discount. They don't try to charge you $1400 for the entire remaining contract term.

<comment><USER84> > That's true but with the way most utility costs have been dropping, the > rates are probably not going to skyrocket.

With strict liability for wildfires, 'green deals', cap-and-trade or Pigovian tax proposals, California's classic policy insanities, grids potentially struggling with renewables and load sharing, you certainly cannot be >99% confident that there will be no large increases in the offing.

<comment><USER83> We'll see, sure.

Though when you're looking at a 20 year term it's easy to get solar panels reactively instead of proactively.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


African Scribes: Manuscript Culture of Ethiopia - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/02/african-scribes-manuscript-culture-of-ethiopia.html <comment><USER2> The liturgical language is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez) although the most widely-spoken language currently there is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic)</comment>


Show HN: YDML – YAML DOM Markup Language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/haikuginger/ydml <comment><AUTHOR> TL; DR: HTML is edited like plaintext, even though it eventually forms a very structured tree-like DOM. Why not write it in a format that enforces that DOM structure in the first place?</comment>


What is the page/blog where people introduce what equipment they use - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I remember site where people from all kinds of art/tech areas introduced what hardware they use for their work. I forget the name of the site. <comment><USER2> [http://usesthis.com](http://usesthis.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>