dangjc
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2 months ago
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on: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
Rooftop solar has lower distribution costs. A solar farm needs new transmission and upgraded capacity distribution lines to get the power from far away to the users. Generating solar right next to your neighbors lets them access your surplus cheap power with existing slack capacity in the distribution lines. Our current monopoly utilities don’t have a mechanism to recognize that value created, and they would prefer to keep building more infrastructure as that’s what increases profits for them.
dangjc
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11 months ago
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on: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other
Then Tesla should pay for back up drivers until their safety record meets the bar.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: YIMBYism as Industrial Policy
I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Why I don't discuss politics with friends
There are horrible consequences and people are suffering, totally. So then what? How do we get others to understand the impacts and start to change their mind?
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Why I don't discuss politics with friends
We often reach for black and white thinking which makes political discussions difficult. Both sides do it, and it stunts our empathy for why people vote the way they do.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
This weakens the US against China. Europeans have no stake in a big Pacific conflict and will be much less interested to back US war mongering now. It’s short sighted for us to forego alliances that were helping us build a world order and a trading bloc that isolated China.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
China will benefit the most from this. Europe has zero interest in backing up the US in a fight for Pacific dominance. Good luck trying to form a trading block that excludes China now.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
I think most Americans value freedom and reject tyranny.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.
dangjc
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1 year ago
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on: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?
We have a product analytics team where people have transitioned from being fully PM focused to being deeply data analysis oriented. It starts with using code-lite tools like Tableau and SQL queries then easily opens up into running data transform jobs with Python scheduled on a cluster. It would probably be easier and more financially remunerative to be at a company where you provide value in a product role, and continue providing that value as you slowly transition to a more engineering role.
dangjc
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2 years ago
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on: US government opens 22M acres of federal lands to solar
One other issue with the Sahara is that you still have to transport that energy to where it will be used. It's been difficult already to build transmission within the US between a few states. Crossing the Mediterranean and getting the energy across southern Europe (which is sunny and doesn't need it) to cloudier northern Europe would be a lot of permitting. If they can convert the Sahara electricity to liquid fuels, it might actually fit with trade patterns better.
dangjc
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2 years ago
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on: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
We’re getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI generated content.
dangjc
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2 years ago
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on: Interview with Viktor Lofgren from Marginalia Search
> I can for example look at the HTML of a document and if it has too many ads or if it has too many tracking elements I can downrank the website for example. Or enable a user to have a check box to say I don’t want to many ads. I prefer content that does not have ads, for example. It is hard to get it perfectly right, but even to remove 75% of the ads that’s still a huge improvement.
That's a pretty big opening for a search engine that Google basically cannot fight since it is against their core interests.
dangjc
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2 years ago
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on: Most companies do not need Snowflake or Databricks
DBUs are about +50% the underlying compute cost.
We use Databricks in production extensively.
dangjc
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3 years ago
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on: Why and how we retired Elm
Some nuggets of wisdom from the article when managing an engineering org:
- “if the only reason an engineer wants to work for you is because of your tech stack, that may be a warning sign. Culture Amp therefore avoids hiring engineers who are purely technology-focused. As a product company, we seek to hire people who are mostly excited about our product and its mission, and who are happy to learn new things when necessary to progress that. When someone tells us in an interview they’re excited about working here because they like functional programming (say), we count that as an indication they might not be a good fit.”
- “Perhaps the greatest challenge for engineers as they reach more senior levels in their career is to make decisions that balance the moment-to-moment joy (or frustration) that a given tool affords them, and the costs (or benefits) that same tool might create for their team, company or client over time and at scale”
dangjc
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3 years ago
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on: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again
That’s reassuring we are in steady state. If perennial rice takes over, we will gradually drop atmospheric methane to a lower steady state.
dangjc
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3 years ago
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on: SVB was particularly poorly run
They decided not to hedge on purpose, take the risk, hoping to earn the extra profits. Slate money did a good episode on this last week. SVB has high touch relationships with their clients, and they need money to pay for all that client service. This was a bet that went bad (in a very foreseeable way).
