A hacker's guide to college - <AUTHOR> http://dave.is/college.html <comment><USER3> I work at Facebook on Cache infrastructure doing super low level C stuff that gets deployed to lots and lots of machines in a massive distributed system. At best, half of the knowledge I needed could have been gained hacking around on my own in my free time. The other half came directly from Systems courses at Carnegie Mellon and research I did there as an undergrad.

This is also true of my close friends from school (housemates my junior and senior year) who work at Apple on the jscore Javascript engine, at Pure Storage[1] on hardcore storage stuff, and at SpaceX on control systems.

Maybe the average coder doesn't _really_ need a college degree, but if you want to be a badass and get there as quickly as possible, four years at a top CS University is about the quickest shortcut you can take[2].

[1] [http://www.storagereview.com/pure_storage_comes_out_allflash...](http://www.storagereview.com/pure_storage_comes_out_allflash_storage_array)

[2] You still have to go WAY above and beyond, but the exposure to people in that realm is invaluable, and it's hard to get that exposure outside of these places.

<comment><USER4> As a reference point:

I have an nontraditional CS degree (DigiPen). I learned a lot of math in school, and programmed a ton. There was emphasis on data structures / algorithms, but not as much as you'd find in a traditional CS degree.

Part of my job is to hack around on JSCore in a Webkit port. I do this without much problem. I wouldn't say I understand the whole thing, but if I needed to I could.

In my experience, you learn as you go. As long as you're good at problem solving and using Google/Reading/Asking People Who Know, you'll figure it out. With or without a traditional CS degree.

There's nothing magical about JSCore, or hardcore storage, or spaceship control systems. It's just domain specific knowledge that you pick up if you spend time solving those kinds of problems.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a CS person, but I have learned that eventually Google can't help you anymore, and People Who Know become your most important resource.

The trouble is once Google is no longer helpful, finding People Who Know can get tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> \- "College is expensive": Pretty US-centric point. It's very affordable in Canada and most other countries.

\- "I know many great programmers who didn't study Computer Science and some who didn't go to college at all": I know far more great programmers who did study Computer Science. :)

I'd say undergrad is more about learning how to learn and the discipline required. "Take only classes you're interested in" may be very counterproductive to that, depending on your interests.

In the end, it depends on what kind of "hacker" you want to be. If "hacking" together WordPress blogs with a bunch of plugins is your cup of tea, you're probably better off not even having a Highschool diploma. If you want to build a graphics engine, a hugely scaleable system, or the next generation JIT programming language, you'll probably need a solid Computer Science education (whether you acquire it self-taught or otherwise).

<comment><USER7> Even in the US college isn't necessarily expensive if your parents can't afford it. I received extremely generous financial aid at MIT, so it was essentially free.

<comment><USER8> Yep, I'm sure every school is like MIT.

<comment><USER9> Many of the really good ones have the same policy - I know Harvard definitely does.

<comment><USER10> The fact that one can even get into Harvard or MIT puts said individual leaps and bounds above the average student.

Saying that some 1% of kids can get an affordable education at top schools is really quite irrelevant.

<comment><USER11> Among the top-tier CS schools, there's a mix of private and public. Several of those private schools (MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) have extremely large endowments that help make college affordable for those that get in.

If you fall in the dreaded "middle-ground" for financial aid, your options for an affordable education are somewhat more limited, but nonetheless existent.

A rough estimate for the United States could be that ~30 states have good to excellent public universities.

The group that seems to be in the toughest spot are the students from states without excellent public universities and in a bad financial position for aid or grant money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of the broad strokes in this post are reasonable, but the idea that you should only take a class because you want to is misguided. It seems like solid advice on its face, but there is not a always a direct mapping between enjoyment and benefit. Indeed, thinking back on my own time as an undergraduate (CS@UIUC 2011), several of the most beneficial classes for my career were ones that I did not enjoy at the time. Degree requirements are designed to capture these high pain/high reward classes. Of course that is only if you decide to go the college route. I'm all for people who want to enter industries like programming or security forgoing it. But if you are going to front the time and money, I think you should stick relatively close to the curriculum. Not only is an 18 year old freshman is unlikely to get curriculum right, but if you're going to design it all yourself you shouldn't be paying for it.

<comment><USER13> Forgive the nitpicking, but I think you misread him slightly. He wrote "Take only classes you're interested in", not classes you enjoy. I did many of the things that Dave suggested (BA in Math, very few required classes for that one), and definitely lived by that policy. A prime example was that I never took a class just because it was a pre-req for another class that I wanted to take. There were some really hard classes that I did not enjoy doing the work for, but I had signed up because they covered interesting topics, and for the most part I was glad to have completed them.

As I said, I pretty much followed Dave's advice on course selection, not because I didn't think CS was necessary, but because I didn't yet know I wanted to do development. There are some things I feel I missed (like learning how a computer actually works), but on the whole the most useful programming skills I've gained are ones I've learned on the job or hacking on my own projects in the middle of the night.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was exactly what I was getting at. I found that I didn't learn a lot in the classes that I wasn't interested in.

<comment><USER12> Ah, fair enough! Sorry for the misread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I regret that I did not complete college and jumped early into programming nearly a decade ago. Financially, I'm as well off as my college grad counterparts but I feel like I'm always playing catchup in my general education (e.g. philosophy, biology, general arts, etc).

College is not solely about the raw skills used in your trade. It is also about exposure to several topics intended to round out the character of an individual.

If your good at hacking, maybe you could skip college entirely. But your also increasing your chances of being profoundly naive in life.

<comment><USER9> Khan academy? Not sure if they're up to college level material yet, though. MIT OCW is also generally quite good, if there's something you're interested in exploring.

<comment><USER15> The issue also is that, while technical skills are often a checklist of things which can be acquired through various methods (lectures? books? websites?), much of the value of classes in liberal arts/humanities/etc. comes from the other students in the class, and discussion/interactions between them.

Learning to perform a technical skill is far more achievable on ones own than discussion, communication, and analysis of, say, history or philosophy, which is most easily practiced in the company of others performing the same task.

<comment><USER9> You might be right. Most of the ancillary subjects that I've been interested in have been science (psychology, sociology, some physics), and I haven't gone into the depth I would with them if I was still in school. It might not even be very feasible to get as solid an understanding without having my classmates there to bounce around ideas with. For my purposes, though, I'm looking to get a broad base of knowledge in a lot of fields and see what's worth exploring further, so it works pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dangerous advice IMO. I interview folks regularly at a top tier firm and a good school/track record is perceived as a strong indicator of future performance. We can debate if that's really true till eternity but that's what lot of folks do today and I don't see that changing for quite a while. I interned at Google long time back (+ had an offer from them) and school performance factored in pretty strongly (along with my transcript).

We do coding tests of course but that would be too limited on its own.

Personally, I would be not where I am without college and ton of courses in CS. Topics like Database normalization, query optimization, ton of OS concepts, discrete math, algorithms/data structures are important for any CS career and could be read on their own but why not just take courses and study them in college instead of trying to rely one's self discipline to cover all of that.

If you are starting your own company, maybe it matters less but even there I am not sure.

<comment><USER17> What about the value of actual projects? I have a high GPA, but I'd be pretty disappointed if a company didn't stop to look at any of my github projects before they considered me. Those repos show off my creativity and my desire to build interesting projects with interesting techniques.

My high GPA comes from doing what I'm asked, not from being innovative, interesting, or overachieving. I like to think of it as GPA hacking, maximum results for minimum work.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately a lot of the decision making comes from the interviewing part of it. I agree companies should look more at actual past projects (and I had plenty to boot), but I didn't find folks looking at that too much as I would have liked.

But if the projects have significant value and are well known, that's a different thing altogether, that comes off as a big plus IMO. They just need to presented well - just a code repository somewhere is less likely to get attention than working stuff people are using actively.

But apart from that, projects make you a better CS/hacker and it shows - <USER2> shouldn't be done for getting a job but just because you are passionate and want to contribute - and trust me it will show if you do try to leverage that for getting hired later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In this thread: people take their personal experiences and try to extrapolate to all programmers everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> >You might want to consider a BA rather than a BS because BAs generally have less requirements.

A BA is worth far less than a BS in the technical world for precisely this reason. I honestly can't believe they even offer BAs in Computer Science.

<comment><USER20> I'm convinced a BA in CS is the perfect balance between what the article is espousing and those in favor of a more rigorous technical background, at least for those who veer towards the programmer side of the computer scientist <\-----> programmer scale. Getting a BA gave me a solid foundation in comp sci while also letting me get a true liberal arts education. Studying music, literature, philosophy, etc helped me become a much more well-rounded person than had I gotten a BS, but still gave me what I felt to be proper exposure to CS as a field within a formal academic context.

<comment><USER19> See I never got this argument. I studied history, music, and political science on the way to a BS; most schools have liberal arts requirements for all students. The main difference between BS and BA programs in most cases (in addition to a few more required math/science generals) is the number of required upper-level electives in the CS department, 3 vs 8 courses in my case. For me, I learned significantly more in the last 6 or so CS courses I took, things that give me a competitive edge in the industry. It takes you past the basics without sacrificing a well-rounded education.

<comment><USER21> I would say your university is non-normative in this respect. There is usually no difference in the _CS_ education. The difference is whether the full engineering core is required. If you don't intend to "be a engineer" the engineering core is of questionable benefit. If you intend to work on embedded systems it can be helpful.

To re-iterate. I have yet to meet anyone who cared that I have a BA. That list included employers, recruiters, and the admissions department for my graduate school (I am a PhD. student). It doesn't matter. Ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just as youth is wasted on the young, uni/college is wasted on (most) undergrads. I include myself in that group, although I did make the mistake of going to law school (available at undergrad level in the UK) which is something I've been trying to make up for ever since...

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a self taught programmer with no degree who came to it late in life(past 30.) I love programming and I like to think that I'm fairly good at it and I think I can justify that belief with the 6 figure income I earn and architect title I have.

And after 10 years of doing this, I am going back to school to get my CS degree. I believe you can be successful without a degree but there's a wall that you will eventually hit where you're natural talent can't take you farther without some assistance. Unfortunately all the classes I would like to take to satisfy my craving for knowledge are graduate level courses. So I'm going back to school so I can get my degree so I can finally learn the stuff that I want to, and need to know.

<comment><USER24> I took an awful lot of graduate level courses as an undergrad. Most of the time there was some sort of additional vetting where the prof had to sign off on your involvement in advance.

You don't have to get very far in the undergrad before they'll start letting you take the interesting stuff, especially if it looks like you know what you're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In my experience, you could make a similar argument about going to college for business vs. actually understanding anything about business. A lot of recent grads I've encountered don't know much beyond buzzwords and overly abstract theory. College also seems to frequently have the unfortunate effect of instilling overconfidence and a sense of entitlement. That said, if the goal is simply to get a job, college is clearly the path of least resistance.

Personally, I'm glad I didn't get a degree, or at least that I didn't follow the common path of high school-college-entry level job, even though it has made life more difficult at times. It cut me off from the easy route of getting some comfortable, dull job at a big company and becoming stagnant. Instead I've had to carve out my own path and I think the experience and confidence I've gained from that are worth a lot more than a degree. Frankly, not one of the clients I've worked with has even asked me about a degree. When you have solid work you can point to and enthusiastic references, whether/where you went to college becomes completely irrelevant. If a company won't hire me for a job I'm qualified for because I don't have a piece of paper, it seems to follow that they _are_ likely to hire unqualified people who do have that piece of paper, so it turns out that their filter actually works out a lot better for me than it does for them, and I'm happy to be filtered.

I also don't buy the notion that without college you won't be 'well-rounded' or 'generally educated'. When I was in school, I always felt like I had a lot _less_ time to devote to reading and really learning because my days were filled by tedious work and usually dull classes. Going to college isn't what makes you well-rounded and educated, it's a thirst for knowledge and the time to fulfill it.

<comment><USER26> It's about demand. There is a high demand for skilled workers who are lacking. The employer has to take unskilled workers, and thus a college degree is a good base to start with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I believe that the people who succeed most at becoming great programmers are practically pre-programmed to be programmers. People like "hackers" that are interested in learning how things tick from young ages, who are constantly trying to learn new things, who have that thirst for knowledge. I've met people throughout my short career who have asked how they can do what I do. The easiest answer is you can't, if you don't have the inherent ability to search out the answer to that question on your own, and figure it out on your own, you aren't fit to be a programmer, or..a hacker...

Also this may be off topic but colleges are businesses, and a business has one goal - to make money. I do not believe in the higher education system that the U.S. has. I believe that higher education should be a not-for-profit industry and that our current system is highly corrupt and is quickly becoming unnecessary. The amount of $$$ that will be spent to go to college is rising while the amount of $$$ you will make after college is going down. The end result will be college costs too much to be a viable option.

</comment><comment><USER28> A hacker will be great for organizations looking for a pool of employees to exploit. You will rarely become management, you will rarely be assigned new tasks outside of your skill set, and you will eventually get frustrated and angry. Frustration and anger will lead to you screwing around or even getting into legal trouble.

Hackers are like programmers with ADHD and autism. They are superior at what they can do, they are probably some of the hardest "work hard, play hard" employees, but if it does not interest them, they aren't always effective.

One thing a degree will do, is teach you a rounded set of skill and how to focus on problems that may currently be outside your box. Advanced math and statistics, literal and verbal comprehension and grammar, let alone the social aspects that many hacker types can lack - plus, while you are taking the general education courses, you are expanding your mind to new concepts and may even find something to specialize in - ie social statistics, informatics, bioNLP...maybe even philosophy like myself.

If it comes to getting a degree or certificates, get the degree, if it comes to getting certificates or nothing, get the certificates...but having no formal education just makes a person look lazy on a resume, and if your resume actually does get looked at with no formal training, you are either exceptional or lucky. I was turned down for very high paying jobs and Network Admin and VP of Technology at corporations that everyone knows world-wide. I had exceptional references, proven track record, and when it came down to two people...I was not chosen because of no degree. In BOTH positions, the person who was hired was fired after one year because they did not have the skills necessary. So, getting a degree will not let you keep the job, but the education is enough to get you in the door and prove you are worth that six figures.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting topic! I am just now completing a college degree at 39. I've been a software & database developer for 16 years with very little formal education. I did three correspondence workbooks through NRI (paper) that showed me a do/while, if/then, etc. Nowdays, you can get that sort of information by googling. There were only bulletin boards back then.

I exited the Military after 5 years of service as an MP (did NOT want to continue in that career) so did construction work. Asked around about which language I should learn, bought FoxPro 2.6 and read the book about three times before it sunk in. I poked around looking for interesting projects at businesses for free, not asking for money. Six months later I was hired. I explored some fascinating concepts in linked lists, or hierarchies if you prefer, while at my first job... working with bills of materials, assemblies and subassemblies. I did a lot of interesting things. From there I moved again, and have since learned Delphi, VB, .net, html, javascript and SQL. I write software for offices in the US, UK and NZ. I started getting BORED & frustrated. Instead of divorcing my wife and family of 20+ years (we got married and dropped out of high school), I sought fulfillment through the sense of self-worth you get when you reach out and help other people. The world seems a lot brighter.

Whadya know... I'm now finishing an absolutely fascinating pursuit of a bachelor of science in human resource development with a 4.0. I'm doing an intervention at Kiwanis, plan on becoming a MCT to help teach at the local community college, and will even be doing some ESL instructing next year. Yes, I already make as much money as my professors, but it's been an unusual ride. Instead of worrying about being able to provide for my family, I have a lot more flexibility, choices, and a brighter outlook. Now... do I want my kids to finish college? Of course!

</comment><comment><USER30> I call bull on this shit // pardon my french.

But CS teaches you fundamentally what is going on with a computer, good CS programs will teach you 1's and 0's, levels of abstraction, all sorts of stuff from the very low level to the very high level. As an engineer you need to understand the low level stuff, you need to know about garbage collection, you need to know how to manage memory, you need all this low level stuff; it's not un-important shit or magic in a box.

It leads to better efficiencies in your code such as (PHP) var len = array.length(); for(int = i; i < len; i++) {} vs for(int i; i < array.length(); i++) {}

To be fair, all programmers are computer scientists. Some are really decent and some are really bad. CS people solve problems with algorithms (Def.: Finite set of instructions or steps), guess what programmers do? CS is the study of the science behind computers, everything from data structures to: algorithms, program correctness, math induction, recursion, OOP, Agile Techniques etc...

</comment><comment><USER31> You may not need an education to write code. Sure, you can get something to work. I wrote code when I was 5 years old.

Just because I wrote code doesn't mean a thing. Also, just because it worked doesn't mean a thing. The point is that anyone can write code and maybe they can do it bug free.

Let's assume you are targeting one specific type of machine.

What will seperate you from the others is your understanding of the machine you are targeting. You need to understand many many things about this machine when your code becomes very involved. You will need to understand the cache structure, L1, L2, etc. You need to understand how those caches are designed. You need to know about paging and TLB. You probably wont learn these by 'haacking' code together. Grant it, there are some indivuduals who want to know everything and will go out and learn it all.

Asside from the architecture, you also need to understand applied mathematics which is where Computer Science came from. You need to understand logic and electrical engineering, at least the basics. You should understand how registers work and how bits get added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, etc. This is all very important.

Once you learn all these fundamental things you will see things in code entirely different.

Remember, a high level language is just a syntax for you to apply your knowledge. It really is nothing more. Programmers should be able to switch languages very easily and still know what they are doing.

Let me tell you a short story about my first job after college. I ended up getting hired to a group where maybe half the people there had degrees. There were a few, lead, people who had taught themselves with VB. They asked me to write a script for them. In all their glory they wanted to tell me about this neat system they came up with. Two hours later when they finished I just replied, "You recreated a finite state machine". The two hours they spent explaining themselves to me really was a waste of time. All they really needed to tell me was, "Here is our finite state machine and here is the drawing showing the states. This is what we have implemented. Use this for your script."

Now, in college I wondered why I was being taught about finite state machines and whether I would ever use it. Well, my first job I did. I continue to use my education every day. It is very helpful to figure out what is going on. It isn't just about memorizing things but learning how to think and applying what you know.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been the CTO of a couple of software companies and am a hacker myself. I find it very hard to recruit good staff, as the article says, having a degree doesn't mean you're a good programmer. I expect any developer to have a degree, ideally a technical one. (I've taken a chance on self motivated people without this and have usually regretted it.) So that gets you in the door. What then drives my decision is your attitude. If you clearly love coding, learning how things work, can solve problems, aren't dogmatic over languages / OSs, etc. then you're down to the short list. If you can talk with enthusiasm about something you've done, be it professionally or as a hobby then you're likely to get an offer.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think college is place to see opportunities and learn how take them. I really didn't enjoy college because was kind of lame (lame on learning some new languages and technology). But on basic programming, algorithms, math, physics, software design and logic were pretty good, sometimes boring as hell. But the thing is that you need to be patient. Languages comes and go but the principals are still the same. Also college is a great place to go to internships, student exchange, job/research, new ideas,innovation opportunities. Why? Because all those things are right in front of you. I wasted all that when I was in college and I'm working porting games (that is cool but I'd rather be creating them).

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd have to say I agree entirely with dave.is. The only point I would add is; college is for those who know what they are using it for. Most people are just funneled in for whatever reason and really have no solid understanding of why they are there let alone which classes are the best for absorbing knowledge.

People funneled in could be the definition of a slacker.. they don't know why they're there - so why care or try?

Studying on your own is definitely the answer if you have the passion and drive to stick with one thing. If you find yourself competing with a lot of random "passions" (like me) understand every aspect of how college will benefit you (career, socially, etc.) before jumping blind into the stream.

</comment><comment><USER35> Consider going to college to get an undergraduate business degree, which will be valuable throughout your career. Perhaps study computer science as electives or find a good business school that also offers a computer science minor.

I left college in the U.S. owing $24,000 (I then paid $150 per month for 12 years and just recently paid off the remainder of the loan with a $5,000 check). And I really would pay that amount for the rest of my life... College was a blast. It changed my life completely. I really can't overstate that.

</comment><comment><USER36> College graduation is also a good indicator that you can choose a path for yourself, stick to it for multiple years, and complete a goal.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like this article. You've confirmed an idea I've had for quite some time now and that is you don't need to go to college to become a great programmer. I was introduced to programming in university and this sparked my interest so I'm grateful for that. I'm glad that I read your article because it has inspired me to work even harder at programming on my own.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's true you can learn to code on your own but a good college education is about more than career training. It can give you an introduction to things you'd never come across otherwise, teach you critical thinking, the scientific method, academic discourse, writing skills and life skills. It also teaches you to jump through hoops, which is no fun but an essential part of life these days, and gives you a safe environment to experiment, fail and try again.

I took the author's tack and took classes I was interested in and hacked in my free time. It worked out wonderfully for me as now I have a job at one of the top game development studios in the country. College + hacking broadened my horizons and gave me the career skills I needed. I've been surprised many times how things I've learned in completely unrelated classes have been come back to help me.

It's been especially fruitful when coworkers who are much better programmers than me want to write good code on top of poor decisions based on a lack of inter-disciplinary knowledge. Being able to adjust the course upfront has saved many hours and resources.

If you can go to college, but like the author said, if you're not engaged in your learning you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER39> While all of this is true, if you're looking to get a job somewhere then just look at where they are recruiting. The big guys in the valley recruit from top tier schools. It is possible to stand out from the crowd as a degreeless hacker, but its much harder to be "discovered."

</comment><comment><USER40> If you're purely interested in the pursuit of understanding for understanding's sake, college is not a cost-effective use of 4 years of a hacker's life.

<comment><USER41> It depends crucially on what you're trying to study.

Universities haven't had a monopoly on books for centuries. Their monopoly on good lecturers is getting smaller by the second, thanks to e.g. Open Courseware.

They're still the place to run into professors, grad students, etc. outside of class. That can be very important. Serendipity is a nice thing.

They still offer a critical mass of fellow students. That's often a big deal for your education, and it's certainly most of the fun. Plus, as many have pointed out on HN over the years, there are precious few places in the world where you can literally live next door to a bunch of fellow hackers, all of whom are young and nearly unemployed and used to living cheaply and ready to embark on a project with you on a whim. (Trust me: After you turn thirty, _this never happens again._ Everyone has these tedious families and jobs and lives that intrude on their hacking time, and they're all _out of sync_ , such that when you are free they are always busy. ;)

Finally, universities have infrastructure. Laboratories. Lots of laboratories. Those you really _won't_ ever get your hands on again. College, and even much of grad school for that matter, were worth it for me just for the labs and shops alone. I built _hundreds of tiny lasers_!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just started a question on Quora about this: <http://qr.ae/7sZUS>

</comment><comment><USER43> I am a B.Tech 2011 passout Graduate with less marks and High Technical skills...</comment>


Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-prices-in-power-market-as-wind-solar-cut-electricity <comment><USER2> I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially.

However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy).

Allow me to give an example: currently we have a drought in Belgium (or at least Flanders). We are not landlocked, there is plenty of water in the sea. Desalination is energy intensive. Instead of only looking at energy storage, why can't we increase the processing capacity (more desalination sites capable of working in parallel), and desalinate say sea water during the energy flood? I don't expect this to be an ideal real world example, only a pattern for identifying such examples: any product (could be composite parts, or bulk material) which is relatively compact and has some high energy per product volume processinng step. Just do the process (desalination, welding some part to another part...) when the sun shines, and store them for later.

Products with very high _step energy density_ are good candidates for storing, and could help flatten daily variations, and perhaps even seasonal variations!

Now some companies would prefer avoiding risk if they don't have guaranteed orders far enough into the future, then perhaps there should be a market for insurance or loans, so that the company is encouraged to take the risk, instead of wasting the cheap energy...

<comment><USER3> Capital costs vs. marginal costs.

You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs.

(This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle)

Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.

<comment><USER4> Desalinization isn't a good example for the reasons you say, but theptip writes below that heating water in residential and commercial settings might be better. Since water once heated stays hot for a good while in the insulated storage tank. Also buildings can be heated with hot water instead of forced air, typically through pipes in the floor. Which is nicer because it keeps your feet toasty and doesn't dry out the room so badly.

A freezer is possibly another such use case, if it keeps the temperature to within +/\- X degrees of the set temperature, it can delay kicking in during periods of expensive electricity, and over-cool during periods of cheap electricity.

I could load the washer or dryer and program it to run it when it's cheapest if I'm not in a hurry.

Charging an electric car could work the same way.

Air conditioners are a huge deal, my single biggest electricity consumer. In a world where things were smarter they would chill coolant/water/ice during times of cheap electricity, and that would be used to cool during the hot evenings.

The problem is I have no way to take advantage of any of that. The electric grid isn't giving me feedback on the spot price of electricity (and in many places they don't even break it down on the bill, showing just one value for $/kwH for the entire month - that's what my bill looks like.)

Even if that problem is resolved, my appliances are too dumb to take advantage of that information to optimize my costs.

The grid needs to convey the realtime pricing information to customers, and then smarter appliances will be developed to take advantage of that information. The market may be able to do a surprisingly effective job of moderating demand itself if both the information and the means to apply it are available.

<comment><USER5> This is insightful. The solution is probably to have a spot market for electricity that is accessible via an API so that smart AC or fridge or electric car charger can make use of it.

This will encourage market for devices that can utilize the lower spot prices dynamically and keep the things more efficient overall (in steady state).

<comment><USER6> We've got these in New Zealand - once you have a "smart meter" (which I believe most homes now have), then you can pick an electricity retailer like [https://www.flickelectric.co.nz](https://www.flickelectric.co.nz) that bills you according to the current price. Flick provides an API to allow you to turn on/off loads when you see fit.

<comment><USER7> Even before smart metres, NZ has had a ripple control system since the 1950s which sends signals over the electric lines to your circuit breaker so the utility could remotely turn domestic hot water heaters off during periods of high demand. The technology is pretty simple, you could reverse it to turn appliances on when power is below cost.

[http://www.oriongroup.co.nz/customers/load-management-and- ho...](http://www.oriongroup.co.nz/customers/load-management-and-hot-water- control)

<comment><USER6> Yes, in my house that is implemented as a ripple control "receiver", which switches on a circuit that has its own meter. The receiver is a rather simple thing I think; basically a high pass filter connected to the mains, with the filter output driving the coil in a relay. It audibly hums when ripple is on. Every couple months, the meter reader comes by and records the total amp*hours consumed at "night rate" and "normal rate".

So, it's important to note that the old system doesn't allow one to run the heat pump both whenever it's wanted, and also on the lower price ripple- controlled power. Similarly in the other direction, it doesn't make sense to use ripple control to decide when to feed back in to the grid if you have generating capacity from PV or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's left the utilities complaining that they can't earn the returns they > expected for their investment in generation capacity.

Good. That's a well functioning market economy. Those who make poor investment choices need to feel the sting of losses else the market fails to work correctly.

<comment><USER9> I think that negative prices are prima facie evidence of a market economy not functioning "well".

Negative prices seem to me to be to be equivalent to fines for doing things that aren't socially useful. If they proliferate, that's a suggestion something is out of whack.

<comment><USER10> It's certainly not a free market economy because almost every electricity utility is a state monopoly.

<comment><USER11> When markets get "out of whack" it's almost certainly due to government regulation. In this case, it's the government setting fixed electric rates for consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll suggest again that the solution to this is to charge variable prices to the consumer based on the supply. For example, I pay exactly the same rate, 24/7\. Of course this will result in a mismatch of supply and demand.

A _lot_ of electricity demand can be shifted to when the supply is cheapest.

When the supply varies wildly, like solar and wind do, there's a giant impedance mismatch when demand is charged a fixed price.

<comment><USER12> Night rates are a thing in some countries. I'm not sure it's implemented anywhere in the US, though.

<comment><USER13> Time of use metering is an available option in some parts of the US, and I think mandatory in some places as well. I've also seen some tarriffs residences can opt into with a lower base rate, and a much higher peak rate, with some sort of real time indication that a peak will be coming in the next hour or day, depending on the system.

Of course, commercial/institutional energy users have had demand adjustment programs in return for lower base rates for a lot longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like an opportunity for all that currently-useless "smart home" tech that companies are so eager to sell. I don't need smartphone notifications from my internet connected washing machine to tell me when the laundry is done, because i know when i started it. But if i could load the washing machine and tell it to switch on when the cost of electricity dropped below a certain threshold, and it would actually save me money, then suddenly the smart home would actually be providing some value.

unfortunately, as far as i know not only is there no consumer tech that does this, but energy companies don't make real-time pricing available to all but the largest consumers.

<comment><USER15> At least for the specific case of washing you can get most of the benefit by moving to a time-of-use tariff and scheduling the washing machine to run during the off peak time.

(Washing machines do seem to use a surprisingly large amount of energy, particularly the ones that heat the water internally).

<comment><USER16> With a quick search I can't find any energy company in my area offering time- of-use tariffs. I remember in the 90s it used to be standard to have a cheaper night tariff. But there's nothing that actually does impedance matching through financial incentives.

By the second spot rates might be slightly too volatile for the average consumer to use, but what you could have is smart pricing mechanisms where you can e.g. lock in a rate for the next 1 or 2h and then your washing machine waits for the expected best rate in the day and with maybe a timeout when it starts anyway (if you need it).

That way you could usually get good rates when you start your washing machine in the morning and it waits a few hours, depending on price history.

This is just a case of simple enough statistics that they can be calculated on the smalles microcontrollers available. Those are already in most home appliances. If you now add Wifi capabilities (which also a lot of home appliances have), you could get the communication done.

For any smart appliance the marginal cost to implement this is zero. The investment cost is only the software.

You'd still need a company offering this.

<comment><USER15> If your energy retailers aren't offering a simple TOU tariff, I feel like an automatic auction system is going to be several bridges too far for them.

You should try writing to them and asking if they have any plans for TOU - they might not realise there's any demand for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it funny that there is an ongoing discussion of how much electricity bitcoin mining wastes and another ongoing discussion of how to store free electricity.

The answer is simple! Mine bitcoins when electricity is free and use the bitcoins to buy power when prices go up! I call the scheme cryprographic energy storage. I am current looking into creating an ICO at $10 billion valuation. /s

<comment><USER18> You've added a /s but some mad man is already pitching this somewhere in the valley and it probably being taken seriously

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Price signals that go negative seem to really freak people out, but the real transition point is when the price dips below the marginal cost.

If you're burning 1 dollar of fuel to generate one dollar worth of electricity then anything less is a signal to switch off. If your boiler has physical reasons for not turning off and on sharply then you can find yourself eating a loss in the short term to make money on average even with positive prices. Which puts a monetary price on flexibility or integrated storage.

<comment><USER15> There is another transition point at zero price, though - that's where it starts to make sense to vent the steam to the atmosphere instead of running it through the turbine.

<comment><USER20> Is there zero cost involved in safely venting the steam? I wouldn't think so. It's probably not a very high cost, but I can't imagine it's actually zero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some insight into the change year-on-year to the South Australian negative pricing; the change may be due to more active management by AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator). Wind is now mostly curtailed at ~1.2GW and a minimum quantity of synchronised gas generators operating. This was in response to a system security scare in 2016 where the entire state experienced a 'Black System' event where we lost all power -- lights out in the entire state. That was caused by a storm taking out some primary transmission lines on top of a less-than-ideal market generation mix causing a chain of events but it put focus and revealed the bigger security issue everyone ignored -- higher risk figures were reported but nobody cared until it was a problem.

Whilst we have enough wind and solar to take the state to 100% renewable (at times) it is not secure enough to provide industrial contracts or services like FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Service). With dwindling industrial contracts for energy providers the generation market has gotten smaller, primarily supplying domestic load/customers. That on top of a privatised market lacking responsibility for planning ahead has left the local market in a flux. The spot market has become so unreliable that some businesses have opted for their own on-site diesel generation.

One may assume that this would mean our power prices are pretty low. But that isn't the case. It has been said we have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. In context, this has been because of waining industrial load contracts and profit focussed privatised generators. We just also happen to have a high-wind generator mix.

So whilst living in a state with a high % of renewables is great, the lack of planning in a privatised market has left everything a bit messed up. Businesses looking outside the highly variable spot market into the hands of fossil fuel generators, domestic customers paying some of the highest power prices in the world, and nobody is really responsible/accountable for keeping the lights on.

</comment><comment><USER22> Negative energy prices have been a not uncommon occurrence in various places in the US and EU for a while. They are not necessarily a good thing. They occur due to a combination of how generating sources are managed/dispatched [1] and because of policies that make it possible for (some) generating facilities to still make a profit while bidding to provide electricity at a negative cost (literally paying the recipient to take the electricity). This is not necessarily a good thing and can actually lead to increased carbon footprints of our energy generation mix along with other not necessarily good outcomes [2].

[1] [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7590](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7590)

[2] [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6917222/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6917222/)

<comment><USER17> > They are not necessarily a good thing

Indeed. I would even go as far as to say they are never a good thing. They indicate that the plants are having to spend money to keep things running, and that extra cost is carried over to the very same consumers who for short periods get "free" power or get paid to absorb the load. And since the scenario of having negative prices is far from efficient the total cost is still positive. So unless you have a very unusual completely selective powerusage you end up paying more net than if the prices had remained positive but slightly lower throughout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if there's a way to remove CO2 from the air with surplus electricity without a half-billion dollar plant. That would be a win for everyone. It operates when the wholesale price of electicity drops below its threshold, perhaps only 4-6 hours per day, so would have to be a pretty cheap fixed cost.

<comment><USER24> Yes its called a grow light they cost about $7 at home depot. It doesn't matter what you grow; weeds will work.

<comment><USER25> A bioreactor full of algae is a bit more efficient. You can even pump CO2 exhaust from your power plant directly into it.

Then you can sell the glop.

<comment><USER24> Now _that 's_ soylent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >It's left the utilities complaining that they can't earn the returns they expected for their investment in generation capacity.

The "solution" to this "problem" is, rather than investing in a green production method, to desperately cling to existing investments by sending lobbyists to the government to convince them that Clean Coal is the future.

I love the line at the end of "The Big Short," I can't remember it verbatim but it was something along the lines of how "once again, like we've always done, we're going to seek out the short term gains and cripple long term ones, for no good reason."

<comment><USER27> I know you're being facetious, but it seems to me that the actual solution for these companies' financial woes would be to simply charge more for energy from their traditional plants when there is demand for it, just as suppliers of any other commodity do. If there are regulations in individual jurisdictions preventing them from doing this, those regulations should be relaxed. The reality is that we are still dependent on traditional energy sources sometimes. Therefore, these plants and the companies that own them have to be able to charge enough stay in business until we don't need them anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting that the utilities with fixed sunk costs are feeling a pinch from renewables.

I suppose some of them will take the bailout path (companies keep profits, taxpayers or ratepayers shoulder losses).

Traditional utility economics guarantees a return on capital, and imposes ratesetting in return for geographic monopolies. The real story here is the upending of that model as carbon-based fuel loses its deathgrip over the grid. A consequence of this is less economy-of-scale advantage for vast generation plants. Small distributed generation is more attractive than it was a generation ago.

But every market has its quirks. The Texas grid system doesn't have any way to export power to other markets. And West Texas is a windy place. So they find themselves with excess capacity sometimes.

I wonder if any grid operators will respond to these price signals by developing smart grids: by realizing that their future lies in offering both electricity and good information about that electricity. Then they can send signals to local time-shiftable equipment (for example car charging, water heating, power storage, desalinization, even blockchain mining).

In Norway the grid operators deliver near-real-time supply signals to customers using the same sort of radio signals that tell people the song that's playing on the radio station. Sure, the US is bigger. But if the don't try to do this, they'll never figure out how to do it.

One negative consequence of this pinch: as it spreads the net metering deal that current solar-cell households enjoy will fade away.

</comment><comment><USER29> If the general pattern holds of the electrical power market being like the natural gas market, just at much shorter time scales, then does this mean that we are going to see an increase in electrical power storage in the next few years? Companies have been making money by offering storage and pooling services in energy for quite awhile. It's just that storage has been more difficult from an economic and technical sense with electricity than with, say, natural gas.

<comment><USER30> Probably that and "quick start" powerplants already serving this function in the UK.

[https://www.ft.com/content/ba6bd46a-1d75-11e8-956a-43db76e69...](https://www.ft.com/content/ba6bd46a-1d75-11e8-956a-43db76e69936)

> The episode showed how small, flexible power plants are now bridging the > supply gaps, especially at a local level, between intermittent renewables > and Britain's fleet of large, but slow-to-fire-up, gas and coal plants.

<comment><USER29> _Probably that and "quick start" powerplants already serving this function in the UK._

Right. Quick start plants basically convert "stored" energy in the form of natural gas into electrical energy on the grid. The natural gas supply has a chemistry/physics advantage in terms of storage efficiency. (As well as industrial infrastructure already built up.) This would allow us to calculate a target number for the storage cost of batteries which could compete. We can then apply industry trends to see which battery chemistry or power storage technology might become competitive, and when it is likely to achieve that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Surely Bitcoin miners will snatch up these opportunities soon. Cheap electricity can be translated into money if you have the mining equipment.

<comment><USER32> Agreed but its a weird transaction system that works better on windy days. :)

<comment><USER33> I just saw myself licking the thumb, putting the arm out of the window, waiting a bit and thinking "ok the thumb got chilled enough so it is great time to pay that bill".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone please explain then why we are paying the highest prices in the continental US for retail electricity, at $0.28/kWh, in a state with the highest percentage of renewables in the country?

<comment><USER32> I can't say for sure, but quite likely renewables cause high costs like the article says. The problem is that electricity generators of all types have very high fixed costs. If you have a lot of wind and solar power its a problem that it ruins the profitability of the traditional generators half the year, so they need high prices in the other half to cover the capital costs.

Also California isn't most expensive, seems pretty much the same as many blue states. [https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/)

<comment><USER34> >Also California isn't most expensive, seems pretty much the same as many blue states. [https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/)

>Data for 2016

This lists California at $0.15/kWh. I've never paid even close to that anywhere I've lived.

The current PGE residential rate of $0.28/kWh [0] is about the same as Honolulu, Hawaii, where 100% of electricity is produced from burning natural gas and petroleum.[1]

[0] [https://www.pge.com/tariffs/electric.shtml](https://www.pge.com/tariffs/electric.shtml)

[1] [https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and- payment/rates-a...](https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and- payment/rates-and-regulations/average-price-of-electricity)

<comment><USER35> Silicon Valley Electric was 8c when I lived there, 10c now.

My PG&E's lowest off-peak rate is now 16c, though I'm on a TOU plan and just installed solar, and I have generation through Peninsula Clean Energy so my bill is somewhat more complicated than the charts involved to send Apollo 11 to the moon.

<comment><USER36> > Silicon Valley Electric was 8c when I lived there, 10c now.

If you mean Silicon Valley Power, the municipal electric utility for Santa Clara, it's now (as of Jan 2017) 11.82c [1] for residential non-TOU for the upper tier.

It's also only for the city of Santa Clara. Palo Alto has a municipal utility, but its rates are higher, and these are exceptions. AFAIK, the vast majority of California is served by a private utility (e.g. PG&E).

[1] [http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showdocument?id=6253](http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showdocument?id=6253)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is not a problem but a huge opportunity. Instead of shutting down capacity, they need to find ways to utilize it. There are plenty of things you can do with energy.

Water desalination, splitting water into h2 and o2, etc. all take lots of energy. California has a huge water shortage and apparently too much electricity.

<comment><USER38> Also cryptocurrency. People are complaining about the huge amounts of energy being wasted by it. But if prices are negative, and coming from green sources, then it's not an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> the key to solving this problem is a communications link between the supply side and the demand side. It's crazy that there's a complete disconnect between something that consumes power (that in many cases could delay it's consumption until a time when there was excess capacity, or at least make a more informed decision) and the supply side. I started episensor in Ireland and we've been working on this problem for many years.

<comment><USER40> To add to that, this recent article on HN [1] goes into a lot of great detail on how the economics of a home solar installation are part of the problem.

Basically, if there were an incentive for residential solar installations to include a little bit of storage capacity, it would be a net win for the entire economy.

[1] [https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-typical-home- solar-s...](https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-typical-home-solar-setup- does-not-work-off-grid.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Bring on the compressed air economy! [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future- of...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-the- compressed-air-economy.html)

<comment><USER42> "You only sell hot air?"

"Yes, I'm full of it! And quite dense!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Negative energy prices are one of the signals which might drive the devlopment of grid scale storage. Very obvious arbitrage potential here. The fact that utilities themselves are complaining about this instead of investing in storage is a little dismaying.

</comment><comment><USER44> A carbon tax combined with excess green energy could cause some unexpected results. Currently, most assume that EV cars are the future. However, there are companies working on processes that can convert CO2 from the air + energy + water into synthetic fuel. There are already working examples of this such as the Canadian company Carbon Engineering. If the energy is green (such as excess solar/wind) this fuel would be basically carbon neutral and exempt from any carbon tax. The process would be economically viable because the carbon tax would raise the price of oil from traditional fossil sources. But the increased price of oil would make a carbon neutral synthetic process like this viable at the same time.

If this happens, the EV car becomes much less competitive. From a pure efficiency view, EV is still much more efficient. But there is a lot of existing infrastructure supporting carbon fuel and billions of cars. This synthetic fuel would immediately fit into that. If there's a heavy carbon tax, can EV complete successfully against a carbon neutral synthetic fuel?

<comment><USER45> Yes they can because they don't cause air pollution in cities. Air quality standards are only getting stricter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Last time there were "weird" issues with power someone was gaming the system: Enron.

Something about this article just seems off to me, something isn't right from a technology point of view, and I suspect someone is manipulating things.

(No, I do not have evidence. Just a feeling like this isn't such a hard problem to solve technically.)

<comment><USER47> > Enron

"Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora."

It can seem weird to have an excess of power availability, but it's a consequence of electric power not being easily stored -- electricity is just a good energy _transmission_ system. While using electrostatics (batteries) is possible for storing very small amonts of energy, when you think at a state or country scale, it's just too much to store.

This means excess energy must be either immediately consumed, or transformed in order to store it. The most common storage system would be gravity -- build a pump right besides your dam, and pump water upstream so you can use it later when power is not readily available. There are already some reservoirs using this -- at least one in Wales and I've recently read they'd like to build one in Hoover Dam. It's not simple though, because usually water is left to fall yet another bit right after the dam, so a second reservoir right below the dam would be needed.

So, what does a negative price mean. As the article puts it, its a signal from the grid that it has no use for your energy, _right now_, as there's an excess of generation. But if untapped, wind and solar will be just lost, so why not offer it to the users.

As renewables continue to grow, probably more storages will get built that can buy that excess and this anomaly will cease.

<comment><USER48> To save you the Google tour:

> Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora.

This appears to be a saying that corresponds to the English saying "A burnt child dreads the fire."

<comment><USER49> But the literal translation is "That who has been burn with milk, watches a cow and cries". Much funnier

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The only reason power costs go less than zero is the contracts that the green (primarily wind) generators have that guarantee a minimum price for their power regardless of time of supply.

This creates an incentive for them to keep producing electricity beyond what people are currently willing to pay for it.

These minimums have been required to fund the capital expenditures to build the plants and have generally been funded by government subsidies.

Coal plants have a different incentive structure - they are very hard to bring online/offline quickly ("base load"). Natural gas plants are _relatively_ easy to spin up/down.

I expect this will resolve itself in changes to energy storage and contracts as the technologies involved become more pervasive.

</comment><comment><USER51> So store the excess with a gravity train and sell it back later. [https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/](https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/)

</comment><comment><USER52> That the market price of renewable power can and sometimes does go to zero is simply a consequence of that the marginal cost of producing additional energy is zero. The market price does not include the upfront cost but depends only on that marginal cost.

About the same is valid for nuclear power. Only the upfront cost is higher, and there is a much larger cost for decommissioning a plant.

That's the reason why renewable power needs to be subsidized, at least to some degree, and why nuclear power was always subsidized.

<comment><USER53> I've assumed that the reason was that green energy production, which is tied to climate factors (windy/rainy/sunny days), can't be ramped up or down to match demand. As surplus energy can't be stored or sold then its value tends to zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> How do you store it for when night comes? If you live near a mountain you could pump it up during the day but not everyone is that lucky. Now what about winter when its overcast half the time and solar panels barely work? Just think how much additional capacity needs to be built to allow for these long periods youre not making power. Basically one has to build 3-4x the capacity to supply what one coal plant produces nonstop.

The next Rockerfeller will be the one who stores gigawats on the cheap

</comment><comment><USER55> Sounds like a great time to be building Tesla-style battery stations. Get paid to take in energy when it's flooded, get paid to output energy when it's not flooded.

<comment><USER56> When residential and small commercial customers can participate in the spot markets, this will happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Another way to see this problem is: you have too much energy at the wrong time of day. This is a fundamental problem with unmitigated installation of green technologies without grid level storage mechanisms. The green plants are losing money while this is happening.

Solar/wind energy aren't delivering enough power in non-peak operation to shutdown other traditional sources. It is just the coal/traditional power industry optimizing for total profit...

</comment><comment><USER58> Can someone with a microecon background explain how this is possible?

(My guess is that consumption is somehow completely independent of unit price and that its also inelastic?)

<comment><USER59> Consumption and production are both inelastic and storage costs are high.

Traditionally when a producer produces more of a good than consumers want to buy, the price drops, consumers buy more, and producers produce less. If consumption & production are both inelastic, consumers won't buy more and producers can't produce less. The excess goes into inventory, where it's treated as an asset and then sold (often at lower prices) when supply and demand equilibrate.

You can't put electricity into inventory, at least not without batteries or similar tech, which cost money and leak charge. Hence, if you produce extra, you have to pay someone to manage the storage or usage of that extra current.

There are a few other industries that function like this. Garbage is a big one: you have to pay someone to take your garbage because demand for garbage is much less than supply and storage has non-zero cost.

<comment><USER11> > Consumption and production are both inelastic and storage costs are high.

Consumption is inelastic because the electricity rates are fixed 24/7\. Allow variable pricing based on supply, and you'll see very elastic behavior.

For example, people will charge their car batteries when the rates are cheapest. Same for running the electric hot water heater, and the A/C, refrigerator, etc.

<comment><USER60> I'd say it's more "slightly elastic" than "very elastic". A lot of people won't spend the mental energy to optimize anything more than the most major consumptions, and even then most of what they can do is rearranging loads, not reducing them.

<comment><USER11> It's not about reducing them, it's time-shifting them. The big electric consumers are A/C, heating, refrigeration, hot water heating, and car battery charging. All of those are very amenable to time shifting, and this shifting can be automated.

<comment><USER59> That's an interesting idea. The current residential home appliance setup is totally not amenable to it - I don't even know where my refrigerator & hot water heating on-switches are, I rarely touch the A/C & heating, and I'm certainly not going to remember the rates at a give time of day as a consumer (I likely wouldn't even be home or awake when they're lowest). But if rates actually varied throughout the day, I could imagine smart-thermostats and smart-switches being a very lucrative new market. Manufacture a piece of silicon & copper and it saves you a hundred dollars a month in electricity; I like the idea.

<comment><USER15> I'm on a time-of-use tariff, and I use the timer on my washing machine to have it finish just before the end of the very cheap overnight rate. That alone has made a pretty big difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Here's a crazy idea. Batteries? [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/06/analysis-reveals- that-w...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/06/analysis-reveals-that-worlds- largest-battery-saves-south-australia-8-9-million-in-6-months/)

<comment><USER62> They can't magically make national grid grade batteries overnight.

So, yes, at the moment it's a crazy idea. The whole point of the trials in Australia and places is to get it to work at the scale needed.

You can't just plug in 1,000,000 rechargeable batteries and hope it works.

<comment><USER63> You'd probably be better off with water pumps to put water back behind a hydro dam. If you assume the presence of hydro, it's a pretty cheap battery to lift water back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> So we need a product that uses large amounts of nearly free electricity that can be produced during specific parts of the day. Maybe some sort of smart aluminum factory, hydrogen generator or water purifier. Then again, maybe the capital depreciation would necessitate continuous usage.

</comment><comment><USER65> Or in other words watch out for the power companies to lobby to make wind and solar power illegal.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm not anti-gteen, but it's not worth "less than zero", it's the people's money being given away. This isn't a so much as a huge success as it is a legislative oversight. :/

</comment><comment><USER67> Power companies should really be petitioning the federal government to continue EV subsidies and help market them to create more demand.

Generally this seems like a temporary phenomenon until EVs start to come online in en masse.

</comment><comment><USER68> Any good book recommendations that could shed light on the mechanics/economics/incentives of the power industry and how it came to be?

<comment><USER69> The Grid.

I heard about it two years ago and recommend it often.

[https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The- Grid](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Grid)

[https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Best- Books-2016](https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Best-Books-2016)

<comment><USER68> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> It seems like a good time to use cryptocurrency mining to balance out the periods of zero or negative energy cost.

</comment><comment><USER71> Subsidy should be reduce now to become zero in 20-25 years.

</comment><comment><USER72> The nagging thought here is that this property of wind/solar make them not sustainable in capitalistic setup.

Let me explain: soon there will be point where investment in W/S would stop making sense - very difficult to compete when you mostly get your investment to produce power when all your competitors also produce power!

In most other markets you are free to produce if the price suits you, and stop otherwise.. . Oil is too cheap - stop pumping it, ice cream in winter not very popular - reduce production, don't pay people to please eat it because your ice cream making machine works best in winter..

</comment><comment><USER73> so...bitcoinminers now have 2 sources of income?

</comment><comment><USER74> The logical next step is devices (storage) which can arbitrage these prices and make a profit. Capitalism is a wonderful thing, especially when it's helping make green energy more efficient.

<comment><USER75> A power wall that's paid to be charged during peak generation, and gets paid again to discharge during peak consumption would be pretty fantastic.

<comment><USER25> Why would a power utility allow customers to perform time-of-day arbitrage when they could do that themselves without upgrading all the meters?

<comment><USER74> Lid shifting. PGE actually pays a subsidy for you to do it via a battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Champagne problems...

<comment><USER77> Well champagne has plenty of CO2, too.

<comment><USER78> this is what masogyny looks like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Hi. I'm an Electrical Power Engineer and I analyzed electrical power energy pricing for three years after working a startup designing renewable stations.

I worked at the NYISO, which runs all the real time energy pricing markets on a realtime power market separate from the public stock market. The issue is this. NYISO, MISO, ERCOT, CAISO run real time energy markets throughout the U.S.

The idea is energy demand is met with energy supply obtained at the LBMP (locational based marginal price) from energy bid into the markets by energy suppliers who can meet demand in that area (transmission line losses are 10%) so there is an advantage to local/decentralized energy as the markets price congestion on these transmission lines.

Transmission lines are expensive (consider buying up all those little protesting family farms lawsuits buying individual land) and will melt or if run beyond 90% of their capacity which could leave an area stranded and blacked out by cascading over voltage conditions and blacking out the entire power grid.

So the tldr is energy can only move so far before it becomes uneconomic and needs to be synced with another power bus.

Now, you have politicians throwing free money in subsidies, grants or 20yr loans to Venture capital funds who contract renewable energy farms like wind for example. They get paid subsidies for the power they produce.

That sounds reasonable, but this is where it becomes unreasonable. Power is realtime and needs to respond to demand usage.

The other important thing to note is even if we did vote for high taxes in the u.s. to fund clean energy, clean energy is massively inefficient right now, and this doesn't provide an economic incentive to innovate in the industry. Quite the opposite. It makes the people raking up this free money hapoy sitting on their behinds, which brings me to my previous point,

The VCs get paid to produce power but not when it's needed. They could store this in a battery somewhere, but it turns out hurricane Sandy flooded a $50million battery that was supposed to back up all of long island. Ironic. Most investors tweaked out after this, and anyways, why would venture capitalists spend their free money on actually investing in making the technology better by buying batteries to save power being produced when it's not needed (a windy night on a mtn vs 4pm the next day when everyone is using power) when they are getting paid either way?

The money that isn't lining their pockets is subsidizing their cost of production bids into thr market. So wind plants in NY always bid in at $0 and they get the bid to produce Everytime.

Since every five minutes economic dispatch (Google "acopf ferc") creates a price signal based on demand needed and this can actually drive the price negative. The decision making tree here is based on a mixed integer programming algorithm for which the implementation is close sourced by an algorithm contracting company, which I personally think is an egregious injustice to stakeholders but that's just me.

Sounds great, how does it get worse?

Well, because not in my backyard policy, all of these wind plants are in upstate NY, so they have to waste and dissipate 10% of the power on the way down to NYC clogging the transmission lines, if they happen to be running when it's needed.

For the few companies truly interested in putting batteries on their plants, the NYISO, CAISO and ERCOT are decades behind implementing the legal economic markets for these generators to engage in to set up batteries at different entry points on the power grid than where they are supplying it.

Germany runs on 50% solar and does well, which clearly shows this is not a technical background but a legal, political and organizational one. However, the economic efficiency is not entirely revealed t us. Do you think the u.s. would vote for 50% taxes like they have in Germany?

Hope that helps and feel free reach out if you have any more questions.</comment>


What's New from Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/new/ <comment><AUTHOR> New single point to keep up with news and news stuff from Amazon AWS which aggregates Jeff's blog posts, formal news and announcements etc. Just announced today apparently.</comment>


Microsoft contributes open-source code to Samba - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/microsoft-contributes-open-source-code-to-samba/9860 <comment><USER2> Let me just put my best Admiral Ackbar impersonation on, here: in the light of the recent patent wars, do I see a patent lawsuit in the future? "We kind of gave them a part of our functionality, but we didn't intend it and they're thus infringing on our patents." Yes, this is patently absurd (pardon the pun), but so are 99% of the patent cases out there; but even should it be brought to court and thrown out, it would be good fertilizer for the one core MS competency: FUD (see the current Android patent craziness).

With this in mind, I fear Redmonders bearing gifts.</comment>


Trump-Supporting CEO Kicked Out of Y Combinator Startup Incubator - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startup-ceo-kicked-out-of-y-combinator <comment><AUTHOR> Additional context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388)

</comment><comment><USER2> Alternate less click baity title: Abusive Bully CEO Kicked Out of Y Combinator Startup Incubator

Admittedly less interesting, though...

<comment><USER3> Well, in fairness, one was just elected president, so maybe we should give them more leeway.

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If an apprentice in one of Trump's reality shows was caught on video telling others to "fuck off", after being repeatedly told not to do that, Trump himself would've said "You're fired!" Probably kicked him out of the door himself.

Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know how you can tell the good buzzfeed articles from the clickbait without clicking?

<comment><USER6> I wasn't aware they had good articles.

<comment><USER7> BuzzFeed has an actual team of investigative journalists these days:

[http://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an- investigat...](http://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an- investigative-team-from-the-ground-up/396656/)

But I don't know how to tell the good articles from the clickbait built-for- viral chaff either...

<comment><USER8> I find it's increasingly a problem with the web in general these days. As for HN, maybe someone can work out an algorithm that digests the content of the piece after it's posted and provides a quality score.

The step after that is for each of us to train our own bots to comment as we would ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I asked Paul Graham on Twitter if YC would discriminate against Trump supporters, and while his answer was fine [1], I never did get a response from Sam Altman about the same issue. I also never got a decent response from an anonymous thread I posted here [2]. Sam Altman's statement of support for Hillary [3] was fine, of course he is entitled to his opinion, but it was incumbent upon Altman to make a statement that neither he nor the YC application review team would discriminate on the basis of political affiliation. He didn't, and one has to wonder, given this new situation, whether there really is systemic bias at YC.

[1][https://twitter.com/sparkzilla/status/788684294130630656](https://twitter.com/sparkzilla/status/788684294130630656) [2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733252) [3][http://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election](http://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election)

<comment><USER10> How bad does a leader have to be before supporting him is a genuine moral outrage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I definitely believe the guy was in the wrong here, but what would have happened if it were a leftist harassing Trump supporters?

<comment><USER12> when leftists want to kick people out of the country or be supported by the KKK or grope/molest woman, etc we can be worried about your thought experiment.

when the candidate you choose to support openly wants to make life harder, more difficult or even non-existent for groups of people you've chosen your side and be prepared to defend it.

<comment><USER13> So, what you're saying is that in 2016, there's only one valid side to the political discussion?

<comment><USER6> I hate the fact that we've come to the point where everything is now open for discussion and sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming is considered a valid debate style. These days it's the person who holds out the longest that wins, right or wrong.

<comment><USER13> I didn't see any chance for a debate. Once one side was labelled misogynist, racist, antisemitic and homophobic, it was the end of public discussion and open season on every one of its supporters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You have to admit though that this guy is smart. Getting kicked out of YC is probably exactly what he wanted. It will be PR magic for his startup... He almost definitely planned the whole thing from the beginning.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand, the very public circumstances of the dismissal will make it _impossible_ to get funding for the startup from legitimate investors.

<comment><USER14> I don't think so. He will find even stronger support among conservatives (especially when you factor in the nature of his startup). That's the thing about capitalism; there is no down-vote button.

The more controversy you create, the better it gets financially. Friends pay well and enemies don't cost much.

I think that this guy was secretly hoping for a Clinton win; then he would have looked even more like a victim; and the defeated, angry Trump supporters would have been cheering him on with pitchforks in their hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get this is a a technology forum a people generally shouldn't post politically charged stuff.

I am more then happy to never post any political crap here again, but I like to know why/how my recent post was flagged. I apologize, if I violated the etiquette or something.

<comment><USER8> Is this the comment you're referring to?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940111)

As to how, it was flag-killed, which means enough users flagged it to trigger its removal.

As to why, I can only speculate, but it may have been a combination of things:

\- invoking "moral obligation" and "dignity as human beings" implies that people who don't agree with you are somehow immoral, which they might react strongly to

\- "any means necessary" can be interpreted to mean that anything goes, including violence, which is pretty strong language, and more of a call to arms than an invitation to civil discussion (which is the purpose of HN, in part)

Some of the child comments point to reasons it was flagged as well.

And things are pretty heated in general around HN right now.

I wouldn't take it personally. Move on, reflect, figure out ways to engage more constructively if you choose to.

Hope this helps. This isn't meant as a criticism, just trying to read it as I see it, since you asked.

<comment><USER15> "By any means necessary", was in retrospect an inflammatory statement, which I should not have used. I don't believe violence is necessary, or even helpful in achieving a moral society.

As for judgements about the morality of others, this is my opinion. I don't apologize for it. I know I'm unlikely to be directly persuasive using this moral judgement as an argumentative tactic, but to make people conscious of the intangible, quasi-spritual ramafications of their political beliefs does at least as much good as simply getting someone to believe what I believe.

Thanks for your superb analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shitposting has severe consequence.

</comment><comment><USER17> Could anyone give more (insider) explanations? Not clicking on a buzzfeed link.

<comment><USER18> [https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2016-11/12/1...](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed- static/static/2016-11/12/13/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web10/sub- buzz-11163-1478974596-1.png?no-auto) probably says it all.

If you don't want to click on the image, it's a post from Andrew Torba which reads

> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling > bullshit and shove it.

> I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.

I can understand why YC would want to distance itself from that.

<comment><USER19> That's not all that happened. Torba did more than antagonize people on a Facebook feed. He carefully chose a screenshot that left out the context of his actual harassment of YC batchmates. In the most recent instance, he screenshotted the Facebook status of a Latino batchmate expressing concern about the election --- not to him, but to their personal Facebook feed --- and posted it publicly to Twitter with a "build the wall" taunt.

If the roles had been reversed and, on November 10th, a Clinton supporter (like myself) had done that to someone expressing relief on their personal Facebook feed that Trump had pulled off his upset, I'd have booted that person too.

But I'm not sure even that was enough to get him booted! It seems like the last straw was that, upon being confronted with his behavior and how it made his colleagues feel, he had an entitled temper tantrum. This could have been a Bears/Packers argument and still have been a fireable offense in a real company.

Since this is probably obvious to anyone over the age of 15, let alone to people with Philosophy/Business degrees, I think this is one of those rare cases where the most cynical explanation succeeds: this is a person whose YC Facebook advertising startup failed†, saw little future for themselves in the California startup market, and decided to burn their relationships for PR fuel.

† _I should have been way more careful here. I have in fact no idea how well this advertising startup was doing. I apologize for characterizing something I have no real info on (I think the company changed names, and I was going off Twitter feed activity and LinkedIn bios). For all I know, the company was doing great before the founder pivoted to an alt-right social network. Cynicism loses again!_

<comment><USER20> It is sadly amusing to look at the utter lack of empathy though. From the article, re his move to Texas:

       I didn't feel safe anymore in Silicon Valley as a conservative. I felt like
       such a minority that I just didn't feel safe being there anymore.

The inability to connect that to how the Mexican founder he mocked is feeling is instructive about Torba's character.

<comment><USER21> I think that's just mockery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the "Trump supporting CEO" part of the title is largely irrelevant—he was not kicked out because of that, but because he acted like a fucking retard.

<comment><USER23> > retard

Maybe think about not using this word in 2016.

<comment><USER24> That thinking is how Trump won. sigh.

I agree with you btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> hash-set Corporations and the Silicon Valley echo chamber itself are going to get the smack down for being such insufferable Marxists. It's only a matter of time. They might want to study some history and stop being such annoying know-it- alls. Might be a good idea to apologize to your conservative-leaning customers, too--they are at least half of your sales.

<comment><USER4> An investor, someone who provides _money_ in exchange of certain promises, decided the behavior is unacceptable and said "You will no longer have my money."

And that makes the investors Marxist?

Does the word "Marxist" even mean anything now?</comment></comment>


Can "Free Speech" Be "Moderated"? Yes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/can-free-speech-be-moderated-yes-15700db2b7ab#.52r9v0b6n <comment><USER2> "From a user perspective we should be careful in talking about "right to use" a particular service because none of us really want to see a service viewed as some sort of "essential facility" by the legal system (that's a specific word I learned from the DOJ and EU). We want services to be insanely useful, but not regulated like other insanely useful privileges."

He has it backwards. We don't want unregulated services to become "essential facilities" in the first place. Otherwise, when some services so embedded into daily life that it's nearly impossible to do without (e.g. banks, ISPs, in some contexts MS Windows, etc.), refuses to do business with you, you're screwed.

"However, we can vote with our accounts and we can be vocal through many means about what we think as individual users. We can use our marketplace influence to inform and change what we don't agree with. Product teams can and should be tuned into and act on this feedback. We want the marketplace to work and to respond.

[...]

As a whole our industry tends towards self-determinism and self-regulation yet we find ourselves today with a number of incredibly important platforms that are not keeping up with the basic test of "know it when we see it"."

So he's saying moderation is okay because people can always choose platforms with the kind of moderation they like... but there should be no 'important' platforms that fail to ban the things he doesn't like?

And that 'platforms', i.e. multinational corporations, should all moderate their users, but if a government should moderate (i.e. regulate) _them_ , well, that's a no-no!

"The free market works."

Sometimes, until it doesn't, and you have the choice of 2 ISPs, both of which sell your data to advertisers, or you get blacklisted by one bank, and the blacklist is shared, so suddenly you can use none. Or both desktop CPU manufacturers include hardware backdoors (called management engines).

The best I can gather from this meandering rant is that speech should be moderated, but only by corporations, who should never be held accountable for how they moderate it.</comment>


Ask HN: (Devoted time):(revenue) ratio for side project - <AUTHOR> What are (devoted time):(revenue) ratio for your side projects? <comment><USER2> I have been developing odd-ball physics apps (ThreeBody, Geodesic Asteroids most recently).

I'd say I put in about 10 hrs/week => 520/yr.

Last year my revenues were up 400% (to $88) with expenses of about $400 (apple developer fee, web host, test device, couple of books) - so a loss of about $300.

Time/revenue = 88/520 = $0.17/hr

<comment><USER3> Good to see I'm not the only one losing money :P

I'm in the same ballpark of time and losses. I'm selling a WebRTC-based video chat solution (pretty much vanilla at the moment), which we wanted to turn into a bigger platform.

Earnings should be a bit higher though (they're going to be $ 500 / year if I keep the customers because it's a SAAS model), but they come nowhere close to covering the time invested - and I still have a LOT of basic stuff to implement.

Let's say Time/Revenue: 500/600 = $0.83/hr

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Infinite. Can't make many things public nor open source either because nda, non competes or because I didn't ever put them past "it could work" phase. Mostly the latter to be honest. Figuring solutions is so much more interesting that working out kinks and corner cases

</comment><comment><USER5> Until the last few months, the ratio was stupendous: ~$300/hr

I've been working on upgrading the technology and business model. It's a risk and I think I'll fail...

<comment><USER3> What are you working on? Hopefully learning a new technology is worth the investment?

<comment><USER5> Just boring enterprise software. Yes, the new technology makes me more valuable in the job market but other than that, I think I'm just getting old as I see choice of technology as bikeshedding these days.

<comment><USER3> Amen to that, but unfortunately if you want to stay employable as a dev, you have to :( .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have an Android and iOS game that took me around 125h to do (including learning time). In the last 12 months it made around $25000, so about $200 per hour.

I'm not counting with time spent maintaining the game, but it should come to about 2~4h/week in the last year or so.

<comment><USER7> What game is it? if you don't mind sharing

<comment><USER8> is it Line? [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nmssoftwar...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nmssoftware.line.android)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a project that I now maintain on just 2 hours a week... But I worked on it for 4 weeks, 10 hours a week...

So that is 136hr/y.

Revenue for the past 12 months is £26,500

26500/136 = £195ph

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd say fairly good, first side project, so no other to compare to. Also an invaluable source of experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> 5hrs month: 0 revenue.</comment>


The Real Reason Microsoft About-Faced on IE8 Standards Opt-In - <AUTHOR> http://osnews.com/story/19428/The_Real_Reason_Microsoft_About-Faced_on_IE8_Standards_Opt-In

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this article is just making an elaborate guess or if it has support for its argument. Anyone have any idea?</comment>


Someone lucky got id Software's original NeXT hardware - <AUTHOR> http://serverfault.com/questions/470126/how-can-i-successfully-mount-an-8-bit-scsi-drive-on-a-modern-computer

<comment><USER2> Hi guys, I'm the "someone lucky". :)

Great definition, because it was mostly luck that I fell in with id, 3DRealms, and the rest of the FPS crowd. John knew I was into NeXT stuff (my father worked for Steve Jobs as head of Developer Relations at NeXT, so I hung out there pretty much every waking moment when I was a kid) and so when id no longer needed the gear, he offered them to me.

We'd known each other a few years (and I'd been trusted with other id secrets including early software), so I don't think there was a trust issue and he felt fine with my promise that I wouldn't pass along anything I found on the disks. I still haven't, and I wouldn't without his permission. It has been a long time, so if there is anything of archival value that he'd be fine releasing, I'll leave that up to him.

I've kept them safe & sound all these years, but haven't done anything really useful with them. They really belong in a museum, or in a collector's hands, who will cherish them more than I would. I'd like to auction some/all of them off with the proceeds going to Child's Play, but if the Computer History Museum wants one or something, that'd be awesome too. Mostly, I don't want them to still gather dust at my house - they should be helping someone if they can.

I'm positive Romero (we still stay fairly close) would like this stuff, but it was Carmack I made the promise too, so I wouldn't give the data to Romero without Carmack's ok.

Happy to answer any other questions if people have them. They're pretty unique pieces of hardware, especially considering what NeXTStep has turned into (Mac OS X and iOS - you can still find NeXT strings in them) and what they built (DOOM and Quake) and what other famous NeXTs have done (created the web).

Also happy to take suggestions on good homes for them, if you have any.

<comment><USER3> Hey! www.themade.org !

I posted on yer link as well.

We're a non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland.

Additionally, on the data: If Carmack is amenable, the data could be entrusted to Stanford. Stanford's curator is on our board, and they are able to do something similar to Mark Twain's agreement with UC Berkeley: hold his papers in a locked room for 100 years. Something similar could be worked out between the three of us. Please email me at alex at themade dot org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is "id" software, no caps, no periods. It is named for this concept: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego>

I used to make similar mistakes years ago, for a long time thinking it was "Eye Dee Software", so I'm posting this to enlighten others, rather than being a grammar commie.

Interestingly, there was a game called iD published in 1986: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID_%28video_game%29>

<comment><USER5> No, it is a lowercase shortening of the acronym for Ideas From the Deep, which is what they called themselves before id. Ideas From the Deep becomes IFD becomes ID.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.idsoftware.com/business/history>

"Taking its name from Freud's primal, instinct-driven face of the human psyche, id Software is, by general acknowledgement, the coolest game shop in the world."

<comment><USER5> That is still not the origin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, it's Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug.. I'd say it's in pretty good hands.

</comment><comment><USER7> For some odd reason (I think it was cited in a Wikipedia article or something) I happened to be reading Carmack's .plan file from 1998 this week: <http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_1998.pdf>

In it, he mentioned that he was getting rid of the last of id's NeXT hardware that year. Seemed to me like pretty late to be doing that, but hey, I can also see not wanting to let go of them.

His old writings were definitely an interesting time capsule. He writes about Windows NT being, ironically, the best platform to write OpenGL at the time. He writes about Apple's Rhapsody (first impressions: he liked the NeXTiness but was skeptical of Carbon/Classic; then later, he writes that he's more satisfied with it after a deeper look). He writes in passing about trips to Apple and talking up OpenGL to Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER2> Wow, talk about a blast from the past. Had forgotten he'd .plan'd about that. "Onethumb gets all of our old black NeXT hardware" (note my nick still, to this day, here on HN).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I loved the NeXT. It was one of the first Unix based machines that I ever used and have fond memories about hearing "this web thing" and Viola (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW>)

I'm bummed that Apple didn't bring the shelf over with the Finder.

I wonder if ddt would want one of them.

</comment><comment><USER9> I pinged Romero, I hope he see my message...

He is a game history activist and probably would love to archive that stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ugh. I still have a couple NeXT magneto-optical disks that haven't been used in 20+ years. Maybe I should donate them to a time capsule.

</comment><comment><USER11> Somehow I was half expecting some kind of "Hey, John Carmack here, you can...". This is the internet after all

</comment><comment><USER12> I used to rock a cube with a NeXTDimension board. That was glorious.

</comment><comment><USER13> If someone asks you to wipe data that is not yours, you need to do it otherwise no one will trust you. This guy is oblivious:

"Carmack had me promise more than a decade ago that I'd wipe the drives if I ever passed them along, and I'd hate to lose any priceless data that's on them."

Second,

Junk is junk, throw it away or recycle.

<comment><USER14> ...no. What Carmack said is "I don't want this data going any further than you". So he's archiving the data himself before passing the machines on. No trust violated.

 _Junk is junk, throw it away or recycle._

Surely he IS recycling it?

<comment><USER15> Furthermore while he's asking about sharing it with the world, he's making it clear that whether or not he does so is up to Carmack.

<comment><USER16> But he wants to keep his own private copy of the data. Then recycle the Next Cubes. For archival purposes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-buys-voip-engine-behind-yahoo-aol-webex-lotus-conferencing/34590?tag=nl.e539

<comment><USER2> they will make company to gizmo in the freezer?</comment>