skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep having multi-hour power outages a few times a year, so I decided to build a battery system a few months ago. I was happy with it during a recent four hour high-wind winter outage, powering my 120V furnace, fridge, desktop PC, some lights and chargers. Here's what I ended up with:

- Bluetti Elite 200 V2 portable power station: $999, 2073 Wh LiFePO4, 2600 W inverter output (120 V only), 1000 W DC input at 60 V max, Bluetooth & Wi-Fi connectivity to app, 53 lbs [1]

- LiTime 51.2V 100 Ah battery: $999 (includes charger), 5120 Wh LiFePO4, local Bluetooth connectivity to app, 82 lbs [2]

TOTAL: $1,998 for 7.2 kWh = $278 / kWh (before 30% tax credit). Plus tax and a few hundred more for the random bits and bobs.

Here's a video that talks about using the big bulk LiFePO4 battery to extend the power station: [3] This setup can supply 2600 W for about an hour (limited by the Bluetti's inverter and internal battery capacity), or 1000 W average for 7 hours (limited by the Bluetti's DC input). Limited to 120 V loads only, of course.

For me, this made the recent outage smooth sailing, running a few hundred watts average load for furnace / fridge / small conveniences. A friend nearby had pipes freeze and burst ($$$ repair and highly inconvenient) during a 20-hour winter power outage. It was nice to have a longer buffer to get a good night's sleep and know that everything would be fine even if utility power didn't come back quickly!

I think the original poster here is latching on to a basic issue that the consumer-grade UPS companies (APC, CyberPower) are being slow to adopt LiFePO4 batteries. At the same time, the "portable power station" companies (Bluetti, Anker Solix, Ecoflow, etc) have been recklessly marketing that they have UPS functionality, without delivering on that until recently. Be careful if you buy one: many of these portable power stations will not turn back on their AC output unattended if they fully discharge before the utility power comes back on! Just recently, they are starting to roll this out on some models: Bluetti calls this option "System Switch Recovery", and Ecoflow calls it "AC Always On" -- and neither are enabled by default!

And I 100% recognize that I'm in the tiny minority willing to combine these products together to get a lower overall $ / kWh. But maybe you are too :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCJV9LTB
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG9BDB36
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ODIF2EfsUA
I have no idea what “dictators” you’re talking about. Both my argument and Hamid’s comes from the experiences with fledgling democracies in the Muslim world, where the model of liberal democracy has been tried and failed repeatedly.

What does “democracy, with rights” even mean? Who decides what the “rights” are? In Asia, “democracy, with rights” exists primarily in Japan and South Korea, where it was imposed by the United States. Previously, it existed in Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Singapore also has “democracy, with rights” but again as a result of British colonization. And post-colonization, the “with rights” part is pretty circumscribed.

“Democracy, with rights” was a foreign import to India (and Bangladesh), imposed by an Oxbridge-educated Indian elite. Nehru didn’t get secularism and social democracy from India, he got them to England while he was studying at Cambridge.[1] What you’re seeing in India now is the result of India becoming more democratic as British colonial influence fades: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

[1] The last Congress prime minister has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While the current leader of Congress is half Italian and went to college near Orlando, then got his masters at Cambridge.
Love how the person who did a “AI-powered code snippets manager and generator and … Mod CSS framework” just casually dismisses millions of people around the globe who ensure safe drinking water, distribution of vaccines, maintenance of nuclear warheads, provision of public health, etc., et fucking cetera, as a class of people who “contribute nothing to the world.”

Very cool - good luck with Mod. Can’t wait until it changes my life as much as living in a functional, stable society (well, at least until a couple months ago, in my case, lol).
Show HN: XPipe, a shell connection hub for SSH, Docker, K8s, VMs, and more
Hey HN, I built XPipe as I always wanted to have an easy file system and terminal access to all of my remote systems, including containers, virtual machines, clusters, and more that you normally can't connect to with existing solutions out of the box.

XPipe is a new type of connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors like Proxmox, Kubernetes clusters, tools like Teleport and Tailscale, and more without requiring any setup on your remote systems. You can link your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it, allowing you to keep using your own favourite tools when working with XPipe.

The entire implementation of how it communicates with remote systems is completely different from most other solutions out there. What happens in the background can essentially be explained this way: It launches a local shell process like cmd or bash and executes a command that opens a remote shell connection such as ssh user@host in that shell process. All communication is then done through the stdin/stdout/stderr of that shell process. From there, it detects what kind of server and environment, such as shell type, os, user, etc. you have logged into and adjusts how it talks to the remote system. By then using, for example, file system related commands such as ls, rm, touch, etc. and its equivalents, it can realize a functional file manager that can connect to essentially every system.

It is essentially the same idea as emacs TRAMP mode if you have ever used that. With the difference being that it works on all kinds of systems and is also not constrained to a certain editor/tool environment. VSCode also uses a similar approach for some of the remote development tools with SSH, but that one is more limited in scope and is a little bit sluggish to use. And it's also bound to the VSCode platform. The goal of XPipe's implementation is to not be limited by a certain environment or specific set of tools.

The development took a while as this new approach requires a completely new implementation in many areas, but I am confident that it's ready now. I appreciate any kind of feedback from you to guide me in the right development direction from here.

Enjoy!
> Not conflicting is not a property of parallel binary deployment

I fail to see how starting another process under an OS like Linux or Windows can be conflicting. Don't share resources, and you're conflict-free.

> IPC is, by definition intended to be accessible by other processes

Yes, but you can limit the visibility of the IPC channel to a specific process, in the form of stdin/stdout pipe between processes, which is not shared by any other processes. This is enough of a channel to coordinate creation of a more efficient channel, e.g. a shmem region for high-bandwidth communication, or a Unix domain socket (under Linux, you can open a UDS completely outside of the filesystem tree), etc.

A Unix shell is a thing that spawns and communicates with running processes all day long, and I'm yet to hear about any conflicts arising from its normal use.
I used to look up to YCombinator, but now I am disappointed in the role YCombinator played in platforming anti-democratic figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. who espouse scientific racism and eugenics with their obsession of race-based IQ levels and their desire for European whites to dominate over others. Big Tech's disruption model is not good for stability and notions of tolerance and decency. Happy 20th Birthday I guess.
Even babysitting 2 checkouts is still better than employing 2 cashiers. And that is assuming you can even find cashiers. Way back when I was a child the supermarket cashiers were women in their 40s who got divorced and needed a low skilled job. But thanks to equal education opportunities for men and women that group is gone.

We are going to have to come to terms with the reality that for the first time since the plague employable humans are scarce. Now do you want them to work at Ikea or work in a hospital or school?
Hi, I develop firmware for mesh networked communications tech. What exactly does Pila's mesh network do? Why do the units need to talk to each other?
A thick Cajun accent, which is relatively rare these days, is understandably difficult to make out: Their primary language isn't English at all. It's Cajun French. So they are a French speaker (with an uncommon French accent) speaking English.
The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
I run a B2C SaaS business. We're an EU company. We use Stripe for all billing, and we use Stripe Checkout and Stripe Tax for all of our tax calculations. We've built our own tools to generate monthly/quarterly tax summary reports from our Stripe payments data.

Luckily most of our business is in the EU, so as an EU company, filing our EU VAT is easy.

We used Avalara for 1 year in order to setup VAT registration in Norway. We chose Avalara because they do in fact provide full service solutions for VAT (registration, filing, and remittance). However, they are expensive and were AWFUL to work with: poor communication/support, no integration with Stripe, and we had to manually generate carefully structured Excel files in order to import our sales data. We cancelled our contract with them after 1 year, but were able to take over the filing account from them and now our in-house accountant does the filing and remittance (which is quick, easy, and MUCH cheaper).

We have considered something like Paddle, but it is difficult to justify the increased fees as our business grows. For the amount of money we'd be spending on Paddle in extra fees vs Stripe, we may as well just use a service provider or hire our own staff.

With Stripe Tax we can easily monitor our thresholds in other countries. There are some countries that technically require registration for even a single transaction in that country, which is ridiculous. I imagine for most companies it is definitely not feasible to register, file, and remit in all of those countries.
Since this is just Hello World, then TinyGo: 644kB
Having gone through quite a number of compliance audits... the one thing that is good in that advice, is that many items in an audit are just a checklist of questions, such as

do you have a policy for XYZ?

or confirm you have a process for "thing"

So what ends up happeneing is if you feel stressed about an audit, just getting a list of the audit, you will realize how much you can just say "yes" to and feel less daunted by the audit.

So, its a good self-check even if youre just crossing out the things you should have already have a framework for.
Great article. Insane that this kind of anti-social kid-numbing garbage production line is not only allowed to exist in our society but also very well rewarded. This is another symptom of our deeply sick world, in which financial success is completely decorrelated from having any kind of positive impact on the world.
> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities

Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
How much will it cost though? 1.6KWh of LFP or such batteries isn’t cheap…

It would take several full refrigerators worth of food to make that up, not counting the intangible inconvenience…
You just don't understand that AI becoming smarter than humans
Im having trouble understanding this, if you back feed into a circuit why wouldn't it go out via the beaker and onto the power grid?
I’m always confused by these comments. Maybe the quality of scanners differs wildly between chains?

The places I go regularly seem to have units that work fine for me. It’s very very rare I get a warning about bagging stuff. And I can scan at a pretty good speed.

Not practiced checkout clerk high speed, but plenty fast to the point the limit is often me finding the barcode.
My recently installed Powerwall 3 will only power my home for a few hours. If I don't stop HVAC and car charging, I may be out of power before I even wake up in the morning.

What I really want is my milk not to spoil (keep my family fed, not opening the fridge is defeating the purpose) and to charge devices if the outage will last more than half a day. Pila is WAY cheaper and more targeted.

I considered buying a Jackery Explorer 1000 and pushing my refrigerator out to plug it in during and outage but that seemed ridiculous.

https://www.jackery.com/products/explorer-1000-portable-powe...

EDIT: Other people are mentioning arbitrage, which is also pointless for me. My Powerwall 3 will save me a few hundred dollars a year if I set it send power to the grid AND during that time I lose backup protection.
Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll definitely take this into consideration.
A New Pitch to Fix Penn Station: Move Madison Square Garden
iirc it's the concentration of tartaric acid that's toxic to dogs. You got lucky your dog didn't like grapes! A lot of dogs will just eat them, btw, so don't think they all will instinctively avoid grapes.
That's fair. I'd basically agree, which is why I decided not to hybridize SPHINCS+ with Dilithium as I did with the two post-quantum encryption algorithms.

Having said that, while SPHINCS+ seems highly likely to be safe (particularly as far as PQC goes), it isn't impossible that someone finds a flaw in e.g. the construction used to implement statelessness. It's probably fine on its own, and stacking it with something like RSA is maybe more trouble than it's worth, but there's also very little downside to hybridizing with Ed25519 given its overhead relative to SPHINCS+; 64 bytes on top of a ~30 KB signature is practically a rounding error.

(Also, small correction to my last comment: only the SPHINCS+ signatures are large, not the public keys.)
$999 with a $99 pre-order. Normally $1299
Tech community does not have many of LGBTQ than other communities
You work there, did you forget to disclose that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339651

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339647

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339485

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339366

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338869

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338681
TLDR it's so that we can seamlessly synchronize settings and events between them. When to charge from solar, cheap utility rates, or when a storm is incoming.

Consumers (incl me) will not update their 2nd Pila to their new Wifi password when they change it, or not even pare it properly with their first to start with. Also, in an offline situation like a power outage where the internet goes down, you won't be able to communicate over the cloud and synchronize them there. If our servers ever go down (they won't) then you want to be able to rely on local communication.

The local mesh is going to set up new follower devices over an open MQTT api and talk to each other over it - but yes it's more of an enable than a feature in and of itself.
> they could do that with or without the contest

Then why does the contest give you any more confidence that the selection isn't backdoored?
That’s a good question!
As a layman I would assume there’s no way to read/detect the hormones that would demand acceleration of the heartbeat? So one has to take it easy for the rest of their life? Or maybe there’s a way to manipulate it manually?
Soviets might just really be bad at everything. Capitalism didn't work for them either.
Would love to try Comma, very disappointed they don't seem to support the entire category of cars I have any interest in owning (Mercedes-Benz S class, Lexus LS, BMW 7-series). Acura and Audi don't really compete at this level, despite being in the same brand segment as others I've listed.
The weak point in the OAI armor is SLAs.

So - are people forming relationships with OAI which include an SLA, and if so - what do those look like?
He rags on the Distractatron but that’s the exact method that Sesame Street started out using early on (if Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed).
Not a bad product, terrible pitch/focus.

- Literally nobody but you (founder) cares about this "mission" to create a battery-backed distributed grid. Regular people don't live in silicon valley talking to VCs and software developers, they don't care about mission statements. If it's a consumer product, please drop the bullshit. (Is your website built this way because VCs told you to? If so, for god's sake please stop listening to them, they are not normal people)

- What exactly is the purpose of this battery? To provide power to a single 15/20A circuit, to power a fridge, tv and microwave for a day? So it's not going to help a multi-day outage. If I buy a dinky solar panel it's going to take forever to charge, assuming there's good weather on the day of the emergency. So really if I wanted to survive multi-day outage, I need a bigger battery. Which Jackery already sells, with solar panels, for cheaper than your unit, in a more portable, easier to move form.

- Why aren't the expansion pack and solar panel listed on the front page?? It's under tech specs?!?!? Is this a VC-focused B2B SaaS pitch panel, or a consumer product? If it's a consumer product, get rid of all these stupid I-have-to-scroll-for-a-week-to-find-information pages, and just show me what you want me to buy, right there at the top of the page, with pictures of happy people using the product in real life. That sells product to consumers. This silicon valley design dreck doesn't. (I just counted... there are 20 pages with virtually no information on the front page. Jesus christ.)

- Now if you had pitched this as a "save on your energy bill" solution, I can totally see buying one or more of these with a solar panel, if you have software that'll pull power from solar alone when the battery is full. Even if it didn't actually save me much money, I'm still stupid enough that I would buy it anyway. But you didn't pitch this... so I'm not buying it.

- What it actually seems most useful for in its current form is people in developing countries with inconsistent power and short brown-outs, but I don't see wide adoption there at this price point.
Sphere looks quite promising, and I haven't come across them before. Their coverage looks pretty good as well, and pricing sounds reasonable. It looks like they have a Stripe integration. Is that something you're using?
Lot of folks suggesting / commenting on solutions. Wanted to add some nuance on 1. MORs (Merchant of Records) vs global sales tax providers (StripeTax/TaxJar, Avalara, Anrok) and 2. the risk / reward of actually handling these taxes at different stages of your business.

1. Merchants of record can make sense for smaller B2C companies with lots of international revenue that don't want to handle taxes or chargebacks/fraud. But the fees are extremely high and often your company would only be remitting in a few jurisdictions if you were handling this independently. Respectfully, a lot of the MORs are selling fear more than something you actually need for a lot of sellers. If you're already on Stripe, I'd stay there vs going to a Paddle. Prob not worth the fees. StripeTax is good but very expensive and you'll need something else for filing, registration remittance. A bunch of new startups have hit the space in the last couple years (several of which have been mentioned here) that can help with US and/or international calcs, filings, remittance.

Just do your diligence and don't get sold something that's overkill for what your business needs.

2. On that point, not legal advice but from a risk management POV, below a certain amount of revenue ($500k-1M in ARR), it's probably fine to temporarily punt on these taxes or to just collect & remit in your home state / country. You probably won't have nexus in most jurisdictions early on anyway. Additionally, many VAT countries don't tax B2B software so if you primarily sell remotely to other businesses (sounds like you are mostly b2c so not relevant to you) you might not need to worry about VAT in most countries, just US sales tax. Additionally, if you're based in the US, you're probably at higher risk of enforcement here than you are abroad. Washington or New York is more likely to catch up with you than a country in the EU (or vice versa if you're based internationaly). tl;dr - get PMF. And then handle your home country / states first. Don't freak out about this at a lower volume of revenue.

Full disclosure I'm the co-founder of Taxwire.com and we're a startup in this space. We do registrations, filings, remittance, and calculations in Stripe, QBO, and other billing/payment platforms for the US and recently launched VAT as well. So obviously I have some bias on solutions but hopefully the above is helpful.
Thanks! What color are you going to order?
Retired now, but I may come back as a LLM Vibe Engineer.
Based on my 7 years in Baltimore I have to say West was pretty spot on. An old 70s vice cop I knew sounded just like that.
This whole discussion is very confusing to me - is this just a UPS you have to plug all your items into, or does it somehow back feed into the plug to power the circuit?

If it's the former it's nothing new and inconvenient, if it's the latter how do you avoid backfeeding the grid?
> probably learning from Whole Foods.

Oddly our local Whole Foods, is just a couple years old, and has very poor self check-outs. They error out on random bar codes and stop until a human staff member unlocks them. The Prime barcode scanner is “broken” half the time, and can’t be overridden by the human staff. It’s bad. I go on the human side now exclusively, where they also have hilarious problems. It's like grocery store management peaked, was utterly and perfectly solved, but Whole Foods can’t stop trying new things that only make the shopping experience worse.
And most GitOps workflows have considerably more complexity and overhead than your typical Terraform "IaC" workflow.
In fairness, if this was in a relational data store, the same code as above would probably look more like...

SELECT DISTINCT authors.some_field FROM books
JOIN authors ON books.author_id = authors.author_id
WHERE books.pageCount > 1000

And if you wanted to grab the entire authors record (like the code does) you'd probably need some more complexity in there:

SELECT * FROM authors WHERE author_id IN (
SELECT DISTINCT authors.author_id FROM books
JOIN authors ON books.author_id = authors.author_id
WHERE books.pageCount > 1000
)
Has heard about it but didn’t know the reliability. Too bad it doesn’t support my 2011 Honda. Next car!
I thought about it a bit more:

- That last point (attaining sqrt(2)) follows from Bolzano-Weierstrass. Just unroll the embedding into an n^2-dimensional space if you have n points, and that sequence of embeddings (as a technical detail, center them on the origin to squeeze them all into a bounded space). The function (skew of that embedding) of the limit equals the limit of the function in this case, so there is some embedding attaining that bound.

I'm still not exactly sure how the result I'm basing this all on is proven.
If low cost is the goal, a box store generator is considerably cheaper.

Even if you have to buy 2.