I was going to chime in to second this. In a former life I worked on power towers and we had designs for air receivers that would potentially work really well with this type of system:
- High temperatures
- Intermittent solar input not a problem
- tall central structure (?? maybe a plus given the paper's tall storage vessels)
But high temperature air receivers have their own problems, mostly around receiver material properties (thermal cycling / stress) and heat loss. It's really hard to focus a lot of light from the sun into a tiny aperture, because the sun isn't really a point source, and no mirror is perfectly shaped.
Portland, OR (NW Oregon in general) also has a lot of planted Giant Sequoias! So it may not be strictly true that they are super picky. I imagine as climate warms, the PNW will become a better spot for Sequoias. Unfortunately at the cost of trees that like it cooler and wetter e.g. Western Red Cedars.
I would plant one, but their trunks get huge quickly, and I see a lot of busted sidewalks around here due to that.
"Though water itself does not absorb much light, and neither does the hydrogel material itself, when the two combine they become strong absorbers, Chen says. That allows the material to harness the energy of the solar photons efficiently and exceed the thermal limit, without the need for any dark dyes for absorption."
So when water is combined with hydrogel, they absorb more light -> more light = more energy -> more energy = more evaporation.
I wonder why Wired didn't provide any hyperlinks despite mentioning the site (italicized) several times. Seems like common internet courtesy. Perhaps just a direct-from-print copy.
If you want all these things and exponential growth, check out Neptune's pride: https://np.ironhelmet.com/ for basically "diplomacy in space with a few extra dimensions". I haven't played in a few years (it was great at the beginning of the pandemic), but it was a lot of "fun" in the same way that diplomacy is "fun". Except with a space theme and a lot of anxiety waking up at 2am hoping your fleet arrives at an empty star system and doesn't get immediately obliterated.
Thanks for the reply! Sorry I don't have any great sources off the top of my head. It makes sense that you'd want to restrict the scope of the article to make it more understandable.
I've only been part of one startup, and it went nowhere, but it's very common (ubiquitous?) for prospective employees to be sold the "if we IPO for $1xB" line when that likelihood is laughably small; hence my suggestion to lower the expectations with some lower numbers.
I like the structure of the article and it's a good procedure for evaluation compensation, but my nitpick would be it could be more helpful if it included more realistic numbers.
Do 5% of startups actually reach 1B valuation in 4 years? No. Uber took 10 years to IPO. I don't know the average, but I would imagine based on a cursory search that it's closer to 7 or 8 years for highly valued companies in the past decade. And 5% seems extremely high for billion dollar IPOs.
Also, only 2 startups are compared in the NPV calculation. What about joining a BigCo / FAANG? That would really put it into context.
On the other hand, the math gets slightly better if you assume you leave after some amount of vesting. I thought danluu had a post about this, but can't find it. Staying in a startup until the bitter end is almost never the optimal choice, especially if you have inside knowledge of its progress.
https://tldroptions.io/ - This was posted a few years back, and while it doesn't give tell you the likelihood of a particular size of exit, it does help give an idea of the type of dilution and final equity value (with no discounting though).
This is the important question. At my previous job the results of internal surveys would have these fairly high numbers, like 20% of employees don't think they will be here in a year.
But if you looked at the previous year's numbers, it was something like 18% or 15%. And the previous year's actual attrition was closer to 5-8%. So perhaps you could extrapolate if you had the attrition rates combined with survey data, but surveys are a much weaker signal.
One of the first comments I heard from coworkers on work-life-balance was "hope you're not working with a team in Mountain View", and they weren't referring to just the time zone difference (we're in Austin). Before Covid the office was empty before 8:30am and after 4:30pm.
I think it's obvious this list doesn't take into account cultural properties or medium sized cities, as others have commented.
Caution though: this can lead to blind spots. I witnessed a critical bug become exacerbated by the first fix because the developer and reviewer had essentially co-wrote the solution, so the sign-off was essentially a rubber stamp.
If you want the least bias, you should find someone to review something that hasn't been deeply involved in designing it. And for pieces of code that are small enough, reading and getting up to speed shouldn't take that much time. I prefer sending reviews to engineers that are familiar with the area of the code, but we don't do pair-programming so the implementation hasn't been seen before.
We do, however, do a lot of design work before a single line of code is written.
Summer months in most of the southern US are extremely hot (in Austin, 4-5 months of the year could have temps above 100F), so for example here is CA in August (see graph in article for demand): https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-californias...
Utilities can't design just for the average month, but the worst ones, and the worst hours of the worst days. Building new peak demand (peaker) plants is very expensive and most consumers probably don't see the actual market prices during those times. Shifting load by a very small percent could result in a decent cost savings and/or avoid building new capacity.
I doubt the rotation speed is 1/s, that would imply pi*220m/s at the tips or 2488 km/hour! Based on animations, it looks more like 1 rotation per 20 or 30 seconds. 20-30kWh seems very reasonable for a house's consumption.
If I had to guess, I'd say they were talking about (in most US restaurants)
- Ask for check -> waiter brings check -> put card in fold, wait ?? minutes for waiter to return to grab card -> wait ?? minutes for waiter to run card and return it -> sign receipt and leave.
On a busy night, this ritual could last 15-20 minutes.
To be fair, in some countries in Europe (and a small number of restaurants I've been to in the US), it's more like:
- ask for check -> waiter brings hand terminal to table -> swipe card, then leave
After reading this, I searched for and found this report on earthquake impact from 2018 (for both "the big one" and a smaller, 6.8 portland hills quake), I believe based on the OP referenced data:
- High temperatures - Intermittent solar input not a problem - tall central structure (?? maybe a plus given the paper's tall storage vessels)
But high temperature air receivers have their own problems, mostly around receiver material properties (thermal cycling / stress) and heat loss. It's really hard to focus a lot of light from the sun into a tiny aperture, because the sun isn't really a point source, and no mirror is perfectly shaped.