>Google spent decades selecting for these "moralizers" and is now reaping what it sowed; "don't be evil" was a cultural slogan that carries consequences if it attracts a particular kind of mindset.
And apparently that mindset drove an enormous amount of profit and, at least in the beginning, gave the company some sort of social conscience.
It's amazing that you can be so against these things
If that last sentence was directed at me, I fail to see what you've perceived me to be against. I'm in favor of people who may feel they were sold a false bill of goods when they joined re-evaluating their position and either fighting internally to change the direction the ship is steering or leaving the company if they don't see the direction as changeable.
Okay, so we're all at the sausage factory one day making sausage. We notice that we're shoving an awful lot of rat shit into the sausages, but the boss says it's more profitable this way. We get together and tell the boss, look we're not gonna keep shoving rat shit into the sausage. To you, this is illegitimate, because we're paying our rent out of profits from the rat shit, after all. So fine, we decide to leave. Now the boss hires new employees, and the process continues.
Ultimately, I think hypocrisy is the wrong lens to look at this through. Activists are not seeking purity or moral perfection, we're seeking change. Change requires organizing, which has to start within the company. An individual employee does fuck-all if they leave by themselves.
> We get together and tell the boss, look we're not gonna keep shoving rat shit into the sausage
Absolutely no one at Google is doing that. What is happening is that these employees are telling their bosses "we would prefer not to shove rat shit into sausages" and the bosses are saying "no". Then these employees are going home and posting about it on social media and going back to work making the same sausage the next day.
Exactly. I'm a little surprised at the size of the immediate and vicious reaction. There's more that people aren't saying besides "Google isn't that special".
To be fair Google did downgrade their "do not evil" value to "it is possible to conduct business without being evil" but it's fair to be reminded of all the evil they do do that led them to downgrade themselves in their own estimation.
A lot of people on hacker news get threatened by collective action. This is understandable, given the number of employers, wannabe employers and people with large portfolios who frequent this site.
This is kind of why I expected some people to make a big deal out of how this isn't a big deal. Tech unionisation is genuinely threatening to many here and this Google walkout stuff is a potential sign of things to come in this industry.
>The problem of waiting for a database (for example) to be ready is really just a subset of a much larger problem of distributed systems. In production, your database could become unavailable or move hosts at any time. Your application needs to be resilient to these types of failures.
absolute bullshit. docker compose thinks that it can excuse its bugs by dint of the fact that we're supposed to build "more resilient" applications to accommodate them.
and, their proposed workaround with "wait for" is disgusting. their tool should be able to handle readiness detection. it's so fucking basic.
it's not only this but this is an example of the bullshit in this shitty tool excused with shitty reasons.
> my test of "does my application work given that the database is running" is explicitly not accommodated.
Are you working with tools where this is a problem in practice?
Most web frameworks I've used will keep trying to connect to the DB in a loop until it either connects and things start normally, or it times out after X amount of seconds where X by default is configured to some number that's way higher than it would normally take for your DB to be available, even if it's starting from scratch with no existing volume.
No "wait for it" script needed (and I do agree that type of solution is very hacky). Although to be fair the same page you quoted said the best solution is to handle this at the app level, which is what most web frameworks do.
Yes, I remember it was a problem with Django. It wasn't just the application server, you might need to run some scripts, after the database is up, before kicking off the webserver. Any workflow like this is explicitly unaccommodated.
100% of the solutions ive seen to address this problem have been hacky - either polling bash scripts or explicit waits.
Language policing is big in every human circle where people realize language has impacts, whether it's a religion that has prohibitions on the name of God, a disgust-sensitive subculture that finds some words too vulgar, or a political culture that insists the United States is "A republic, not a democracy."
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
1) Increased investment in nuclear energetics should bring the cost down
2) 2x cost for these attributes does not seem particularly bad to me.
3) I am not aware of any production ready options that have been deployed at scale somewhere. I know there are a lot of ideas however. If you have time can you please point me to the most promising ones? I am genuinely interested.
Nuclear is way too expensive, it essentially has lost. It will certainly will play a part for decades, but e.g. wind turbine parks are already at the same price level and have none of the disadvantages of nuclear. Plus several wind parks in a grid work just fine as base load providers, see e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...
Nuclear is more expensive than building a combination of wind turbine parks and natural gas plant. That is a fact.
People theorize that nuclear could be more expensive than a grid that relies on over capacity wind turbine parks in combination with thermal or hydro batteries, but no country has gone that route yet. We have countries that are almost 100% nuclear and we have a bunch that are a mix between wind/solar which falls backs to fossil fuels when needed.
The cost of running a energy grid is the total cost, not individual megawatts being produced in isolation.
Ban fossil fuels and the real costs comparison between clean energy becomes apparent.
The intermittency is the one thing nuclear does better than wind. Nuclear can run 24/7 for multiple years on one fuel load on a tiny land footprint with very few raw materials. No other low-carbon source can do that.
But real world nuclear plants seldomly run for years. I just posted links in another comment, nuclears capacity factor in France (the country with a high nuclear buildout) is about 72%, while that of wind is about 50%. The nuclear plants in France routinely have to be shut down / throttled during the summer heat - just at the times of high energy demands.
In the US the nuclear capacity is over 90% across 100 plants. Just because France chooses to curtail doesn't mean they have to. Wind cannot be higher than the wind itself. The characteristic of coming on and off when you want is called being dispatchable.
In the us northwest there's a fairly regular 2-week wind outage across a 4 state area each winter.
It's unavoidable that if you get almost all of your power from some source, but demand varies, you will have a lower capacity factor for that source, unless you have utility-scale power. France does indeed have to curtail nuclear power plant output, because they get almost all their electrical power from nukes, and they don't have big enough resistors to burn up the excess electrical energy that would be produced otherwise. The US has a higher nuclear capacity factor because it gets most of its power from other sources.
> This characteristic is called being dispatchable.
While I mostly appreciate your contributions to this conversation as being informative, a dispatchable plant is one that you can turn on and off to respond to demand, not one that cannot be higher than the wind itself.
If we do get serious about intermittent renewable scale-ups without fracked gas backup we will have to build giant energy storage systems that the nukes will be able to feed into just like the solar PV and wind.
Additionally, nukes can be used for district heating, seawater desalination, hydrogen production, and lots of other non-electric things when the electricity demand is low by using steam bypass techniques.
Regarding correction: I meant to say that but thank you for pointing out that it made no sense as written. I have edited accordingly.
That's an excellent point about the fungibility of energy storage. But I don't think the lower capacity factor of nuclear plants in France is a reasonable argument against nuclear energy anyway.
The non-electric uses of nuclear thermal energy you mention are potentially interesting, but essentially they're just a slightly different form of demand response. If you're doing demand response in your desal plant, you can do it regardless of whether it's an MSF plant driven from nuclear thermal power or an RO plant driven by electric pumps. (And RO is usually considered more efficient.) I think it's more common for waste heat from power plants to be a nuisance that results in cooling towers rather than an asset that results in district heating, although I'm not entirely sure why that is.
Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja
Throttling nuclear power happens only a few days in the summer, once every few years, with only a few percent because it only impact a few reactor on some rivers for environmental norms, during the lowest electricity usage of the year.
There are a number of onshore wind farms that reach 50%, but a better average for onshore wind is 35%. But offshore wind can reach 60%, and so 50% is a reasonable overall average, depending on where you expect wind farms to be built in the future.
They're cost effective when the sun is shining or wind is blowing but are strongly tied to increased high carbon fracked natural gas otherwise. When batteries are used the Energy Return on Investment drops below what's necessary to sustain industrialized civilization (around 5:1).
Even without including cost overruns and decomissioning, wind energy costs the same per kilowatt of capacity[0,1].
And the actually produced energy as share of capacity (= the capacity factor) is way better than most think. For the nuclear plants in France it currently is just over 70%, while it is about 50% globally for offshore wind parks [2,3]
Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja
The price of the MWh of offsore park will be from 44 to 150€/MWh, where EDF is forced to sell its nuclear at 42€/MWh, average price of wind in 2020 93€/MWh.
I disagree that current onshore wind in France is not 50%, only 21%; also maybe you were comparing the low capacity factor of French nuclear because it is used for load following and curtailed in summer because it is scaled for winter usage using restive heating. And comparing it to offshore with intermitttent power, not dispatchable in the best location. Totally misleading.
Comparing worst capacity factor (for cited reasons) with best CF without saying it is offshore in some of the best location is misleading. Also is comparing dispatchable and intermittent/fatal. There a other factors to consider like reserve ratio, or how the production can cover the power needs over the year, it gives hints at how you need to scale seasonal storage.
It sounds like you confirmed their nuclear capacity factor ("just over 70%") and pointed out that French wind farms have a lower capacity factor (21.1%) than wind farms on average. I don't think that constitutes evidence that they are "completely wrong on [their] numbers".
Nuclear: " Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in
the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100
MW plant." https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...
Then it's now my turn to call your numbers misleading ;) I don't think you can directly compare the two that way because a) The French government heavily invested in nuclear for strategic reasons, not directly economical ones. The EDF still is essentially state-run. We can't really infer cost arguments from this. b) Practically all nuclear plants in France are decades old, and had many years for recouping initial investments. Current market prices for energy are therefore not a good argument for costs of newly built plants.
If we look at the costs of constructing new nuclear plants (which the article we comment on is about), France is a particularly bad example, with current costs already at $11B for 1600MW of capacity for the Flamanville project. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-flamanville/e...
That was not obvious, it was written like a French nuclear with French wind comparison.
And also that is misleading because comparing the low capacity factor of French nuclear because it is used for load following and curtailed in summer because it is scaled for winter usage using restive heating. And comparing it to offshore with intermittent power, not dispatchable in the best location, does not make sense. With penetration wind will also be curtailed, and is already happening in china and Germany.
If only there was one standard package manager... dealing with brew/apt/[yum|dnf] and handling multiple yearly vendor releases (Ubuntu and Fedora) gets to be annoying.
And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures?
Sure, some install scripts will be quite simple, but in that case, why do you need to have the install script in the first place? You'd only need it if the installation procedure was too complicated for an `INSTALL` or `README` document.
> And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures?
Surprisingly, yes. Especially for *nix systems where a lot of things (but not package managers) are more-or-less unified. The author may not have the time or desire to learn the half-a-dozen or so package managers and set up a build system to create packages for all of those, and then do the work of getting them into the standard repositories.
Well I guess if that's too much trouble, then why write documentation either? That's extra work and people could just read the code. And so on. Ultimately, the effort put in to proper distribution reflects on the maturity of the project. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping users from submitting things like rpm specs upstream either if they're requested.
> Well I guess if that's too much trouble, then why write documentation either?
Bad guess.
> Ultimately, the effort put in to proper distribution reflects on the maturity of the project
For some, maybe. Even though there maturity of the project is reflected by how timely three bugs are fixed, quality of docs, size of community, development of new features.
Not only that, but I always end up with impossible-to-diagnose phantom errors if I start mixing and matching some installations from package manager and some installations from elsewhere (like curl | sh or ./configure, make, make install). I avoid using package managers as much as possible because they do too much hidden, undoable, inscrutable magic behind the scenes that breaks everything when it’s most inconvenient.
And here, I go the other way -- I keep to only using package managers as much as possible because at least they have some coherent plan for where installation data should go. Random install scripts can put data anywhere and can easily mess with global or system installed data. If I can't set the installation prefix myself, I don't use the code.
(I'm sure this issue has something to do with the popularity of containers)
And apparently that mindset drove an enormous amount of profit and, at least in the beginning, gave the company some sort of social conscience.
It's amazing that you can be so against these things