Yeah for me when we were buying our next minivan Honda it was more important that we didn't end up buying the first cars in a generation refresh. The first year of a generation tends to have more bugs than others. New vs like-new doesn't matter for the big reliable mass produced cars.
I have solar on my house and in IL we get paid via "net metering": https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/illinois-net-metering/ . The idea is you size a system for your annual energy consumption, and then you don't pay for electricity for the year.
If you sold the power back for real-time pricing you'd need a much larger system than your annual consumption. Net metering basically lets you sell the power back at a retail price, not a wholesale price.
From what I understand there is a lot of variation in providers. As I understand SDGE's Net Metering policy(https://www.sdge.com/residential/solar/getting-started-with-...), you sell back power at retail prices only for the current month's billing cycle. Excess energy created within a billing cycle is "true-upped" at wholesale prices which can be applied to other month's billing cycles.
I would also be curious in how the Texas case works. Especially if the grid is down, would it be able to accept the energy you are producing?
The rules in Illinois are you net meter for the year. If you make more than you use in a year that is free power for the utility. If you want a different deal you need a contract with the utility (In general you need to be in the millions of dollars/year range to be of interest). In Texas it is more complex as each provider can give you a different deal for residential systems.
When the grid is down you can't sell power back. The whole system shuts down. Though if you have a whole house battery backup you can use that instead of the grid (if it is built for it - solar gets weird if you aren't using exactly as much power as you make so you need something to use or make up the difference).
I originally found this link on the HN front page years ago and have kept it bookmarked. It's got lots of good suggestions like this. The comments on the post have great suggestions too.
Thanks for that link. I already listen to half the artists mentioned in the article, so I’m interested in checking out the others. I only recently discovered Tycho (who sound very similar to Ulrich Schnauss) while God is an Astronaut (along with Mogwai) have been on my play-list for the past decade or so. I’d also recommend minimal techno and the second wave of Detroit (Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, etc.). I spend a lot of time listening to Warp records from the 90s. When I really need to get stuff done, I reach for Fuck Buttons (best listened to with a player capable of gap-less playback).
Perhaps if the methods are sound (even if expensive) then someone can step up and make tooling or refine them so the methods are more accessible to smaller firms. Uncle Bob's opinion's might be discouraging people from exploring them and finding ways to drive down the cost of adopting these better methods.
> Perhaps if the methods are sound (even if expensive) then someone can step up and make tooling or refine them so the methods are more accessible to smaller firms.
To his credit, Hillel is trying to evangelize (in general, not directly through the post linked) a particular tool (TLA+) whose creator (Leslie Lamport) wants to do exactly this. I don't know how big Hillel's employer is, but from what I understand it's nowhere near the biggest engineering firm in number of technical employees. Lamport's current objective with TLA+ is to get people to learn concepts for formal description/specification of systems, and he happens to provide an effective tool for testing those system specs.
We have about ten engineers, so nowhere near the size where people consider formal methods "appropriate". Nonetheless it's still been incredibly useful for our work.
I'm a pretty huge evangelist of TLA+, but I don't think it's the silver bullet of software correctness. It just happens to be the tool I'm most familiar with and the one I thought could benefit most from a free guide. If people start widely using TLA+, I'll be ecstatic. If people ignore TLA+ but start widely using Alloy, I'll still be ecstatic. Software correctness is a really huge field and there's lots of really cool stuff in it!
Speaking of making methods more accessible, I'm working on a tutorial about Stateful Testing. Hypothesis (https://hypothesis.works) is an absolutely incredible property-based testing library for Python, and I think it could potentially make PBT a mainstream technique. One of the more niche features is that you can define a test state machine that runs by randomly selecting transitions rules and mutating your program state, then running assertions on the new state. It's really neat!
Perhaps it's like what Sony did with the PS3 a long time ago: they manufactured it with an eight-core processor but only allowed access to seven of them. The manufacturing yields were really low at launch so they manufactured an eight-core and played the odds that they'd be able to fix the yields later.
The PS3 had one PPE core, and eight SPE cores. One SPE was disabled for yield purposes and of the remaining seven only six were available for usage by end developers.
