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Products I Wish Existed

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#411

Post by Retric »

Jedd wrote: post #358
mabbo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.ieso.ca/power-data Ontario sits at about 2/3 nuclear. We have for a long time. And our electricity is relatively cheap.

I was going to point out that Ontario, at 15m, accounts for 0.002% of the population, and suggest it may be a statistical blip. But -- and thanks for the link, it's fascinating -- diving into that page raises some questions. The nuclear component is very steady at 11MW, which I suppose is a function of the technology, to provide a reliable base load. Nuclear fission accounts for 12MW -- while Hydro seems to consisten…

The import vs export numbers are critical for understanding what’s going on. The reactors are located in Ontario, but they supply power across a much wider area. Further, abundant hydroelectric power allows them to load follow locally at low cost. Yet they are still often paying 15+c/kWh.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#412

Post by mabbo »

Retric wrote: post #411
Jedd wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to point out that Ontario, at 15m, accounts for 0.002% of the population, and suggest it may be a statistical blip. But -- and thanks for the link, it's fascinating -- diving into that page raises some questions. The nuclear component is very steady at 11MW, which I suppose is a function of the technology, to provide a reliable base load. Nuclear fission accounts for 12MW -- while Hydro seems to consisten…

The import vs export numbers are critical for understanding what’s going on. The reactors are located in Ontario, but they supply power across a much wider area. Further, abundant hydroelectric power allows them to load follow locally at low cost. Yet they are still often paying 15+c/kWh.

The hydro power is actually pretty fascinating in what it might mean for usage of unstable renewables like solar and wind. Hydro is a giant, slowly recharging battery. It's perfect to pair with wind and solar because it can deal with their highly variable generation and our society's highly variable needs.

But we don't have enough hydro-battery storage to allow for solar and wind to provide our base load. That's where nuclear shines, and why Ontario uses it so much.

Until we can come up with a way to store something like a week's worth of power, it's going to be very difficult to ever phase out of nuclear. But given how clean nuclear is compared to the alternative base-load energy sources (gas, coal, etc), I think that's just fine.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#413

Post by Retric »

mabbo wrote: post #412
Retric wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The import vs export numbers are critical for understanding what’s going on. The reactors are located in Ontario, but they supply power across a much wider area. Further, abundant hydroelectric power allows them to load follow locally at low cost. Yet they are still often paying 15+c/kWh.

The hydro power is actually pretty fascinating in what it might mean for usage of unstable renewables like solar and wind. Hydro is a giant, slowly recharging battery. It's perfect to pair with wind and solar because it can deal with their highly variable generation and our society's highly variable needs. But we don't have enough hydro-battery storage to allow for solar and wind to provide our base load. That's wher…

It might seem that way, but minimum and maximum power demand are generally so far apart when you include seasonal differences, solar and nuclear need about as much peaking power to supplement each other. That’s why even with huge exports Frances nuclear power stations hover around 77% utilization where US nuclear can hit 92%. Nuclear can clearly play a role, especially near the poles, but it’s just really expensive.

In the end Ontario is in an unusual situation that stops working as the rest of Canada scales either nuclear or wind power. It’s working for them and their electricity is mostly carbon neutral, it just does not scale.

PS: That’s not to say nuclear can’t scale to 100%, nuclear subs make it work with wildly swinging demand. However, low capacity factor directly results in higher costs.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#414

Post by krapp »

Lucadg wrote: post #398
ACS_Solver wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really find reddit comparable to forums, mainly because reddit is also built around recent comments. It has very rudimentary search functionality, and the way submissions and comments are scored discourages long conversations. Unless you're on a really small subreddit, stuff falls off the first page quickly, and your comment will be far less visible if posted half a day later. This is completely different tha…

Exactly. Forums optimize for quality content and this makes it hard to monetize them because when you found the good stuff you are not going to click on ads. Also, mobile which is not ideal for long conversations helped their demise. Still, I hope they come back big time. I miss them.

The forums I hung out on simply sorted by the last comment, or by votes. They certainly didn't "optimize for quality content" in any particular way, other than banning trolls (sometimes.)

Also plenty of good forums had ads. I don't think it's a common thing to want to refuse to click on ads because of high quality content, I would guess the opposite tends to be true.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#415

Post by wDcBKgt66V8WDs »

oh_sigh wrote: post #318
wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but there's a difference between an entire street of personal security systems accompanied by apps and social networks built on fear mongering. "just vague fears" they're called opinions which I'm allowed to have and voice in a public forum. Sorry for trying to consider the well being of the less privileged overly targeted people getting aggressively kicked out of their neighborhood.

PoC have a voice. If they have a fear, they can express it. They don't need a random white person hand-wringing on their behalf when that person self-admittedly doesn't even know how they might feel on the subject.

I think white people giving a shit and talking about these issues is the only reason we've come so far. Your attitude would have kept us on the 1700s.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#416

Post by tabtab »

Products I wish existed:

1) Dynamic relational databases. They wouldn't be too different from existing RDBMS, unlike the "noSql" products, yet allow dynamism. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66385/dynamic-database-s...

2) A GUI-friendly and desktop-friendly http-based markup standard for "productivity" and CRUD applications. HTML/DOM/CSS/JS keeps sucking for that, after 2 decades of trying. Focus a standard on GUI's and only GUI's so that it's done right for once. Java applets & Flash failed because they got feature-happy, making them buggy and security risks.

3) A hybrid file system and database to serve as intranet CMS's. One should be able to put documents into a folder and have the folder automatically be displayed in a "nice" listing or menu of links (to view or open documents), along with folder tree navigation features. Additional attributes could allow finer control, such as document synopsis, author name or ID (cross-reference), and thumbnails or icons. As things are now, one is pretty much forced to use either a file system or a CMS for many intranet-ish things. Merge the concepts.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#417

Post by Jedd »

Retric wrote: post #413
mabbo wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hydro power is actually pretty fascinating in what it might mean for usage of unstable renewables like solar and wind. Hydro is a giant, slowly recharging battery. It's perfect to pair with wind and solar because it can deal with their highly variable generation and our society's highly variable needs. But we don't have enough hydro-battery storage to allow for solar and wind to provide our base load. That's wher…

It might seem that way, but minimum and maximum power demand are generally so far apart when you include seasonal differences, solar and nuclear need about as much peaking power to supplement each other. That’s why even with huge exports Frances nuclear power stations hover around 77% utilization where US nuclear can hit 92%. Nuclear can clearly play a role, especially near the poles, but it’s just really expensive.…

Thanks mabbo, Retric.

Given 10-15 years ago there were very definite plans to build new plants, but these [1] all appear to have lapsed or been deferred indefinitely, this further supports my original point -- even seemingly enlightened & pro-nuclear societies / governments are pulling back on their nuclear fission build-out plans.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#418

Post by pro-duct »

petrocrat wrote: post #369
_gx8n wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already see it, imagine people who have their list full, removing people and replacing them would be a public passive aggressive "thing" people would do and the such drama that would follow. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I think this would actually be a selling point of the platform, however could possibly turn into a negative part of the social culture.

What if it automatically populated the list of your "close friends" by some algorithm that ranks your overall interaction with them. So you can't arbitrarily add or remove the friends. You could "game" it but only by actually interacting with the person. If they include sentiment analysis on the interactions, then you couldn't "game" it by spamming or being a cyber bully either. You'd actually have to be friendly tow…

If I want to person A as a close friend, and they're not active on the platform, that should be allowed. Maximizing interactions isn't the goal, or else we wouldn't limit the feed in the first place

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#419

Post by Jedd »

deadmetheny wrote: post #407
Jedd wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…

I worked in the nuclear power in the past. The massive volumes of red tape involved is not conjecture, I experienced it firsthand. Activists will stonewall any new construction, full stop, and the NRC requirements for existing plants only go up over time.

> I worked in the nuclear power in the past.

Where?

My point was and remains that USA federal government hoops around building out new nuclear fission plants can not explain the dearth of new nuclear fission plants being built everywhere else.

Canada was cited elsewhere in this thread as pro nuclear fission plants -- but they've deferred all plans to build new plants.

France is the really obvious big proponent, but their recent experiences (building Flamanville in FR, involvement in Hinkley in the UK) suggest there is more complexity here than can be addressed by complaints that 'The USA government has red tape'.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#420

Post by Lucadg »

krapp wrote: post #414
Lucadg wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Forums optimize for quality content and this makes it hard to monetize them because when you found the good stuff you are not going to click on ads. Also, mobile which is not ideal for long conversations helped their demise. Still, I hope they come back big time. I miss them.

The forums I hung out on simply sorted by the last comment, or by votes. They certainly didn't "optimize for quality content" in any particular way, other than banning trolls (sometimes.) Also plenty of good forums had ads. I don't think it's a common thing to want to refuse to click on ads because of high quality content, I would guess the opposite tends to be true.

I probably have a too much romantic memory of them :)

Anyway, it was easy to come back to a specific topic, so it was easier to find good ones. You could bookmark them, see the number of views/replies or even find them in search engines.

Good content surfaced and survived better, so optimization is probably the wrong word.

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