skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PVBenchmark – UserBenchmark for PV Systems
Hi HN,

I’d like to share a side project I’ve been working on: https://pvbenchmark.de/.

In Germany, small plug-and-play photovoltaic systems, often referred to as “balcony PV systems,” have become increasingly popular. These systems are designed for easy installation on balconies or rooftops, allowing homeowners and renters to feed a small amount of renewable energy back into the grid while reducing their electricity bills. However, one challenge for many users is assessing whether their system is performing well or if there’s room for optimization.

Inspired by online communities where users share performance data, I built PVBenchmark, a platform to help small PV system owners benchmark their energy production.

Here’s how it works:

Upload: Share a screenshot from your inverter app and input basic system data (ZIP code, peak power, orientation, tilt). Analysis: The tool extracts the data, matches it with local weather and site conditions, and calculates the theoretical potential for your setup. Comparison: See how your daily, monthly, or yearly energy generation stacks up against similar systems from other users.

Right now, the site is in German (sorry!), as it’s primarily targeting German users who own these small systems. If there’s interest, I’d be happy to work on making it more accessible to a broader audience.

I’d love for the HN community to check it out and share any feedback. It’s an early version, and I’m eager to improve it.
That's one of their issues. Other issues are borrow virality and stuff for next Rust.
> That few lines of Morpheus in The Matrix where pure wisdom.

Do you mean Agent Smith? Or is there an Ovid quote I’m missing?

I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.

Nerdsnipe: The core of the quote is wrong. All mammals go through the same boom and bust cycles that other species do. There is no “instinctive equilibrium.”
Maximum MPD – React Native Based MPD Client for iOS and Android
It's a nice visualization, but it reminds me of why I avoid social media. Endless, worthless garbage spewed out into the void.
He likely just appears on a lot of imported Twitter blocklists.
Sorry for spreading false information. I edited the post above.

It is interesting that you’re not as up front about multilingualism compared to cohere. They seem to mention it a lot, which led to my confusion.
What about those of IBM, Facebook, Google, Netflix, or Uber? They're just words, with gentle stylization. Sometimes their logos take on the shape of a single letter in a box, which by your standards might even be less creative.

But there are reasons for this. Plain wordmarks are high-contrast and easy to read almost by default, and they work great with groups that aren't already aware of your brand. Or as Netflix puts it (https://brand.netflix.com/en/assets/logos/),

> The Wordmark remains an essential identifier of our brand. While our goal is to lead with the N Symbol, we enlist the Wordmark to ensure brand recognition in low-awareness markets or when production limits the use of color.

CSS doesn't have a ton of brand awareness. Making something akin to the Nike Swoosh for CSS won't catch on, it's not like they have the money to flood your Instagram feed with it and force that brand recognition on you.

Going back to Netflix why would they use a single gently stylized letter where possible? Well,

> In high-awareness markets, we lead with the N Symbol. There is power in owning a letter of the alphabet: it’s universal and instantly identifiable as shorthand for our brand.

That's right. Netflix wants to own the letter N. I think "CSS" is in the same position: owning a combination of three letters is a power move. That's the most valuable thing about the "CSS brand," if ever there were one, so why not lead with it?

But maybe your opinion is still that all of these designers are full of it (apparently including Paul Rand).
That applies only if you're struggling with Rust. It's as good as any other general purpose programming language once you're out of the fight-the-borrow-checker stage. Structuring or refactoring large applications in Rust is nowhere as tedious as many project it. There are many zero-cost abstractions and other features that even makes it very pleasant.

My first preference for making simple utilities is as a shell script. The immediately next one is actually Rust.
Oh that explains a lot
AI trained on every text ever published is also able to be nasty - what a surprise
Oof. Back in the day friends and I would get together to LAN and the first few hours would just be fiddling with network cards, cables, terminators and software.

There was always someone who would just be totally unable to connect with someone else.
Wordpress has comments built in
Exactly this is the problem. The physics and engineering are well understood, nuclear reactors can be built and operated reasonably safely, but that'll cost (particularly when considering malicious actors).

Well, then there is also the issue of long term storage of radioactive waste ...
ISO 27001 implementation and certification doesn't have to be overly expensive if you have the right team to help you. It also doesn't have to be time consuming as you can outsource a good deal of the work.
I work as ISO 27001 auditor and I help companies get ISO certified. For a small company the combined cost of certification and external provider support ranges from $5k to $8k. Of course if you are a larger organisation the cost will go up, but not drastically.
>In Germany the government has literally collapsed due to the former coalition’s ineptitude.

The government collapsed because the party pushed by the country's most influential media company (Axel-Springer) with the expressed goal of collapsing the coalition did just that.
> For example, properly accounting for GR effects is enough to explain the observed rotational curve for our Galaxy without the need for any dark matter hypothesis.

Do you have some references handy for this? Or are you talking about the work of Deur?
Because you won't have to schedule full compatibility testing of your
app in order to find out that there were breaking changes in the newest
JDK version that require the user to fix the app. You can just not
update the major version of JRE for a long time. The JRE will still be
updated with security fixes and bugs, but no breaking changes should be
introduced.

Developers can focus on extending functionality instead of maintenance
and porting the app to new JRE. Devops can focus on different things
than adapting the environment to the new requirements that were broken
in new JRE major version. Product managers don't need to create another
spreadsheet columns to mark compatibility issues.

The problem with "most libraries keeping their code compatible with the
newest JRE version" is that most projects use a library that is not
kept up-to-date with the newest JRE version. Often that library is the
library which has no alternatives. Also switching libraries is rarely a
trivial thing to do.

Using bleeding edge software also means that we participate in "beta" testing. Company-oriented human resource management would suggest that the resources the company spends should be about the needs of the company, not some thirdparty product.
No worries at all. That's great feedback and an area of improvement for us when it comes to future posts -- we'll be more explicit about multilingualism in blogs and in our docs.
Sorry, by "my office" I meant the building my employer owns.

There were several companies when I searched for "shutters OR blinds inside double glazing".
i did build a react clone in a long weekend. but I built the first 90% that takes 10% of the time and not the last 10% that takes 90% of time.
That’s poetic.
This time scale is nuts to me. I cannot fathom it. Just…wow. None of this (humanity) matters in the grand scale.
Most economic growth seems to be driven by technology, both physical like machines and intellectual like legal and financial systems. For most of the world's history there wasn't much economic growth, things were much like they were a thousand years before. The UK got rich through the industrial revolution, but then other countries copied that which didn't make the UK poorer in absolute terms but did in relative terms as the rest of the world caught up.

There's a graph of that here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/...

A lot depends how you move along the curve. (graph is from this article https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...)

The next thirty years of the curve should be interesting with AI and all that.
> What computer science doesn’t teach you is how memory caching works in CPUs.

Yes it can, and there are tons of papers about data structures to use in various scenarios to handle not just L1, L2, L3, but also NUMA. Sure, this isn’t in SICP, but claiming CS as a field completely ignores how memory works is incorrect.
The first line they start with is utter nonsense. find -print0 will not produce lines, but records (or strings) separated by NUL. But grep is a tool working with lines (separated by LF). No mystery that it cannot work.

Using -print0 is necessary if you have filenames containing LF chars. Otherwise just use -print and grep and everything should be fine.

Now how do we handle NUL separated records? That required a bit of thinking, the Unix world is based so much on lines. Without extensive testing the following awk program seems to work:

BEGIN { RS = "\0" }
$0 ~ regexp

Call with

awk -v 'regexp=what I search for'

In their script that would be

awk -v "regexp=$1"

Edit: Credits for s/whitespace/LF chars/ go to user hnfong
Yes, a lot: https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language

what then should they be doing different? to contribute code to a software project you need to know or learn the language the project is written in. there is no way around that.

does it bother you that they don't want patches created with chatGPT? did you miss the controversy around that? can you assert that the code you submit is really free of copyright claims?
It depends on where you live. In a European or Asian city it’s just a normal commute. In North America it can be more difficult outside of cities.
Monoliths might be better in some cases, microservices in others. Performance can obviously differ based on implementation.
> fixing the vitamin c gene to remove scurvy

There's other possible fixes too. For starters, Vitamin D?
Pulling again is probably a pretty panic friendly procedure though.
Just another hallucination - humans _are_ society.
understandable. thee are always valid uses cases. although ORM in Go is not something that is widely used.
> It seems possible that AI could be a partial coach to Junior Developers at each step.

And who will pay them to do this while they learn?

The issue is as much cultural and political as it is about employment and training.
I'm so glad this is surfacing. I remember reading about the skepticism scientists had about this only for them to be finally proven wrong.

My anecdotal experience is that we are so out of touch with our bodies these days that we routinely underestimate just how adaptable we truly are if we have the will or need to learn. So I get frustrated when very useful things like echolocation are suppressed by ignorant and cynical scientists who are unaware of their blind sides because they think they studied hard and read a bunch of papers.

Our realities are shaped by our own experiences but what is sad is when people then shape other people's realities based on their own skewed realities.

I'm glad that the internet is so good at spreading disparate, niche and folky knowledge and forcing scientists to reconsider their priors more often.
> I don't understand the mentality of posts like this.

The purpose is simply to put my opinions and experience into writing. I chose to share in case it is useful to others, which it turned out to be. The intention is also to inspire teams to formalize their own list like this, and to establish a culture around how to write tests.

> I don't think it's true, but if it's true, make an argument.

That wasn't my purpose of this post. Every listed item in the article is a choice, for each of those there are alternatives with trade-offs.

> I don't think you know what a good test is.

Likewise, from what you describe as a "powerful" test sounds to me like nightmare to maintain and it saddens me to think about what you have left behind for posterity over the course of 30 years. I don't think tests should be powerful, I think they should be dumb and dead-simple to understand, and that they rather build usefulness in numbers.
This is definitely a logo, by all definitions of the word. It’s not just "text in a box", it’s:

- text, with a specific font, position, size, weight

- a specific color

- a box radius in 3 corners

- some variants

By your definition, the Coca Cola logo is not a logo because it’s "just text"
> The machines all boot off of a network drive based on this image. Each machine gets a copy-on-write overlay on top of the main image, so that guests can make changes to their machine which won't be seen by any other, and will be deleted at the end of the party.

How do you deal with Windows licensing/activation in that scenario? I didn't see anything in the Github repository, and I can't imagine that not being the worst PITA.
Ask HN: Great maker projects for 8th grade kids and above?
As a father of a 13-year-old kid, I tried to do my best to initiate him to different aspects of life. It could be watching a documentary about black holes, building coffee table or just enjoying a simple walk in nature.

I asked to some friends if they have great project idea that could be done by an 8th grade kid with or without support. I personally like to do it with him as it is a privileged time to build something together (for me) and learn new skills (for him).

The purpose of this thread is to assemble some ideas for Christmas presents.

I’m starting…

1. DIY LED Christmas tree kit for soldering (https://www.az-delivery.de/en/products/diy-weihnachtsbaum-kit-alles-inklusive-versandkostenfrei)

2. Software Defined Radios kit (https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/ and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CD7558GT)

3. DIY Internet Radio Alarm clock with touch screen control (https://www.az-delivery.de/en/products/radiowecker-mit-dem-az-touch)

Any other ideas or suggestions?
My father was born in Patiyalla, Punjab
and at a time just before WW2, Gandi ji
would make it his habbit to stay and rest in a small leanto, attached to the back of
a local mosque in Patiyala, and while there, he forbade contact with adults.
So familys would send.there children to sit at the great mans feet. My father was the child of land owners and went to be there with Ghandi ji, but things did not go well for him, he sat with the children of the other worthies in this hut, very likely feeling out out, when another small
child ducked in, upon which my father told this child "get out bunghi" ,bunghi bieng a slur against the class and caste of thus child, and dismissing such was(and is) something that my father is accustomed to.
Ghandu ji, spoke up and said ,"NO!, you are a bhungi, we are all bhungi!" and brought this child to sit beside him facing the rest.
And in the ensuing years, with the war and partition, and my family going through horror and 17 or our close and extended
family dieing, has left me with some different views.
Ghandi did try, but it is his signature beside that of mountbattens, that precipitated a war of ethnic clensing in
the break up of india.Hitler and stallin would be envious of the body count
that came after that signature.
And the best I can say for Ghandi is that at the crucial moment, he blinked.
Agreed. The first part of that task just seemed to be a misunderstanding of what -print0 is, and using `strings` as the fix is weird. I'm surprised they didn't suggest `tr '\0' '\n'`... :-)
Hmm? Nah, you can do that, references that only exist on paper and have to be sought in physical libraries are perfectly fine. What edit do you refer to that was rejected?
To fully represent HTML, they should be displayed with sightly different fonts and kerning in each operating system.
2 millions less then in 2020
I’m willing to be wrong, but, I don’t believe it.

The user’s inputs are so weird, and the response is so out of left field… I would put money on this being faked somehow, or there’s some missing information.

Edit: Yes even with the Gemini link, I’m still suspicious. It’s just too sci-fi.
M4 is absolutely ancient, one of those things you've probably only seen flashing by on your screen if you've found yourself running `make; make install`. I suppose it is a perfectly cromulent tool for SQL templating but you're right that you must be able to get more mileage out of something targeted like dbt/SQLMesh.
Makes you think how life so easily and randomly can be so different irrespective of who you are or what you do to affect you forever.
Plenty of people in tech moved from Silicon Valley to Austin to get a better tax / quality of life deal, even in my social circle.
Remote working becoming widely available really made a difference.

I'm in a completely different part of the world, but for similar reasons I ended up with a few friends in tech who moved to the same part of the world - and I've also met similar profiles to ours, attracted by the same reasons.
Second-largest GPU maker flees China before chip launch to avoid US sanctions
I agree. The best language to handle data in a RDBMs is SQL, and in that case the best language to handle application logic is Go (or Kotlin, Python or whatever). So there must be some meeting point. Handling everything in Go is not optimal, and all in sql not always practical. So how to avoid redundant data description ? I often have structs in a model Go file that reflect queries I do, but that's not optimal since I tend to have to repeat what's in a query to the language and the query to struct gathering is often boilerplate. I also almost can reuse the info I need for a query for another query but leave some fields blank since they're not needed.. the approaches are not optimal. Maybe a codegen sql to result structs / gathering info ?
Could you expand on this?

I don't like ORM because in my experience you inevitably want full SQL features at some point but not sure if you have the same issues in mind or not
It’s directed at one individual, not all humans
It's in Germany too, but recently it's become the norm for new-rich people to buy or rent these apartments and then sue the shop and especially bar owners for noise violations.

Not allowing that kind of mixed usage in the first place completely cuts away all that crap.
https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13
If you wanted to project an appearance of having read the article before injecting your opinion, you failed wildly.
Wha? Well, there are blind people who barely know how to use their cane, but... Let me explain.

Manfred Spitzer once wrote that he thinks there are two groups of people on this planet who really have good audio location capabilities. Blind people and conductors. Conductors because they need to be able to listen to a particular performer, to isolate them from the rest of the orchester. And blind people, because we use the ear to navigate the world.

Now, I actually use everything around me as a source of sound. Tapping with the cane is one of them. However, if I want to "scan" my environment, I usually make a clicking noise with my tongue.

But those are the a small part of the game. The rest of the noises I use come from outside. Just a small example, before I loose myself in thsi comment: I can hear poles and trees on the sidewalk. Not because they emit so much sound, but because they eat it up. If a car drives behind the pole along the street, I can actually hear the point where the external sound doesn't reach me, infering that there must be a pole or a tree.
Echo location is not always about what you send. Its m6ore about you learning how the sound waves around you behave. Sometimes, but this is getting borderline esoteric, I can hear the materials involved. Walking towards a wooden wall sounds destinctly different from walking towards a concrete wall...
Is he self-destructing? That's a short blog post 10 years after it happened. The latest before that in Rebecca category is 3 years before that. And then he just seems to do those blog posts during birthdays.

He's doing therapy etc, what else can he be doing? Writing blog posts is also processing.
https://archive.ph/31tZ3

While it hasn’t happened yet, most market watchers now say they expect money funds to see less demand in 2025.

The industry, for one, has historically tended to begin experiencing outflows roughly six months after the Fed begins a rate-cutting cycle, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Then there’s the potential for Donald Trump’s election victory earlier this month to spur a boom in merger and acquisition activity given the incoming administration’s perceived softer antitrust stance, driving more corporations to deploy cash they’ve been parking.
Since you emphasize designing systems over just programs, do you have any go-to resources or references ?
Fantastic news. The combination of nuclear and renewables is the foundation for a carbon free future. I’m also excited at the prospect of the new nuclear designs being built by the hundreds which will dramatically lower the per unit cost. Abundant, 24/7 reliable, clean power generation will decouple economic growth from environmental damage.
Oh yes damn it I meant agent Smith sorry
...
The conversation is up on Gemini still in its entirety: https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13

Nothing out of the ordinary, except for that final response.
Oxford relying on 'Deliveroo-style' contracts
If he's rich then he's financially worth employing an IP lawyer to pursue for copyright infringement, if it was infringement. Maybe he was licensed?
sheesh, everyone knows we'd just use the sun as an RF amplifier first
Though, couldn’t you say that the boom and bust cycle is the equilibrium; it’s just charted on a longer timeframe? But when the booms get bigger and bigger each time, there’s no longer equilibrium but an all-consuming upward trend.
At that point you might just as well send out a high power broadcast of Never Gonna Give You Up and congratulate yourself on a job well done, indulging in imaginations of fantastic ways of how it might get received somewhere half a universe lifespan later.
The message is so obviously meant to insult people from an AI, that I suspect someone found a way to plant it in the training material. Perhaps some kind of attack on LLMs.
This is really good news. Despite all the comments here, standing up to Must is a necessity. People like us leaving and using Mastodon is not significant, big corporations leaving is the thing. (For whatever reason) I'm happy to see people not playing along with Musk.