halfeatenpie

Joined 9 years ago

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256

Submissions

Member since

May 2

PhD Climate Risk Management focusing on Resilience and Adaptation. Climate Risk Lead for a Big Tech company.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago

I'm a little concerned about using IEA model analysis to address the question of timing, as these models do try to hit timing but in reality are still very uncertain that any analysis based on the timing is fun to talk about but holds no real value and, from the publications I've read, shouldn't be interpreted as such.

This isn't to discount policies or decisions based on the energy transition scenarios used here, I mean we need more and more effort to curb our GHG emissions, but I would advise against interpreting this dataset in this manner.

Comment · 3 years ago

Don't sell your potential customers too short. We've outsourced analysis to be done with ERA5 dataset to an external vendor. There are many who know what to do and can do it themselves, but would rather outsource for liability reasons.

Comment · 3 years ago

Water Resources Engineering PhD (focus on climate change) and now in consulting for F100 companies. I'm probably the type of people you're looking to pay for this.

I love this as a product. I've used similar products/competitors that are much more feature rich and at my consulting firm we have our own group of internal tooling that pretty much does very similar things but we don't have to pay or outsource to another entity.

If I may add a few points of suggestions.

1. I need to understand the level of uncertainty this methodology brings or else it's not really useful for me.

2. The pricing is not competitive. You're asking someone to pay for an analysis that's freely available or with "lower grade of data". Most places want higher number of sites to understand what the level of risk is. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be "good enough" to make decisions (the pareto front problem). Your product looks cool but isn't answering the "why pay for it when I can get a good enough solution for free" argument. Unless your methodology is really compelling and/or is peer reviewed, it's going to be hard for us to justify paying for this product. If I'm going to pay for a flood analysis, I'm not going to pay for extreme precipitation but I'd rather pay (or do pay) https://fathom.global and Paul Bates' people for their flood data directly.

3. Climate Change is a major factor and it's impacting many larger organization's decision process. The White Paper glosses over climate change as follow guidance from IPCC Atlas. If you can include AR6 projections and show the relative change/difference or something more on top of this then I can see more of a reason to use the product. But if it's just an extreme precipitation analysis with no climate change (or hand-wavy climate change), it's hard for us to justify the charge.

I have a lot more suggestions but these are the top 3 that I can recommend.

I'm interested in hearing how this product continues to mature and grow! This is pretty cool.

Comment · 4 years ago

Well it's partially the cost/benefit analysis of:

1. How much benefit will we get? 2. Will this benefit be higher than the cost of purchasing this right now? 3. What other alternatives will satisfy our needs?

For most of these solutions, the answers are:

1. A lot. We need computing power to perform these analysis faster and to be competitive. 2. Yes, as continuing to innovate in this space will keep us competitive and give our scientists the resources to remain productive. 3. AWS/GCP/Azure are alternatives sure, but then (the rate at which Meta probably uses these resources) it probably cost them less to build this out than to pay AWS/GCP/Azure for access to these hardware.

Comment · 4 years ago

You can rent cluster access (to an extent) using Azure Batch.

Granted it's probably not at this scale, but it gives you access to a ton of resources.

Comment · 4 years ago

I'm still new to Clubhouse as well but my understanding of the ecosystem is that it's a lot more interactive than just a "live podcast" as there's ability for more audience engagement, community interviews, and basically a two-way interaction space where the audience can participate in the "live event". It's basically a discord channel but with more structure on who has the floor and moderation tools.

I think it's definitely an interesting approach to community creation and engaging with your audience. What I'm still trying to learn and understand is where it's going, as I don't think I use it enough yet to fully see the "road to monetization, profitability, and sustainability" of the platform. I kind of wish room discovery was a bit easier beyond the network-based approach that they're using, but I'm just being nitpicky now.

Comment · 5 years ago

I see your point and that's up to you. But I do think factoring in the end user's experience is important here if you want them to listen to your argument.

You're trying to sell someone that your idea is right, but having the desktop experience be a bit difficult (and putting it on the end user to deal with it) doesn't really help you in communicating your points. It also makes it harder for them to digest your content, therefore people might just skip over it.

But again, it's a personal blog so all these decisions are up to you and your liking!

Comment · 5 years ago

Graduate school is tough. Burnout is very possible. People come in thinking that it's basically continuation of undergrad (being asked "are you still in school? How's that going?").

It's a battle of endurance, not wits anymore. Things are hard, shit sucks. Find a support network with other graduate students, find new and creative ways to continue to be engaging (at one point in my PhD I was literally sitting on a camping chair with my laptop in the middle of the woods trying to write my thesis).

I am literally in my last year (hopefully) of my PhD and the final stretch is pretty much that. I was thriving earlier in my degree and right now I just want out. I wouldn't have survived so far if I didn't have my cohort of students and friends to support me (and for lack of a better reason, helping me complain a bit).

Don't work on the project more than you have to. Focus on what's important for your degree, the critical path. People will always want more from you the more you give. Take care of yourself first.

Comment · 5 years ago

How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.

Comment · 5 years ago

The concept is interesting and creative but I also think it's just repackaging the problem it's trying to address but using a different element as the datum. This adds an additional step where you have to translate N:45 time to local by remembering how the letters are re-arranged for your specific area. Therefore, I don't think this solution really solves the original/intended problem it's trying to address but rather hides it behind the letters.

I'd suggest a good alternative is to just stick with Google Calendar/Microsoft Outlook and/or WorldTimeBuddy.

Comment · 5 years ago

His youtube channel started out as him just rambling to the camera about his problems and how absurd it is. It's grown since then as people have been following it. His channel is basically that, him talking to the camera about problems he sees in the world. He does what he wants with the channel. I'm sure he's not going to change that format anytime soon just because he has more followers.

If you want to watch it sure. If not then that's fine. But he doesn't have to streamline anything and that might be his loss, but in the end it's his channel to do what he wishes.

Comment · 5 years ago

This is very fascinating and great. I mean this dataset has been available for a while know (from what I recall), but re-packaged and organized in this manner would be very useful.

One thing that really stands out to me is the change in our land use/environmental changes over time. You can even see the different reservoir levels for various years and can "guesstimate" what year certain droughts were.

I'm sure there's some amazing ideas to use this tool, I'm just excited about it.

Comment · 5 years ago

I agree with this comment. I don't understand what specifically makes this a "system approach".

Comment · 5 years ago

I've always been a big fan of R Markdown. For me and my work, there's always been a fine line between R Markdown and R Shiny, with certain limitations (or something I felt was a limitation) in R Markdown could be overcome by building it in R Shiny.

Comment · 5 years ago

Hey Dustin,

Glad you've already working with some people in academia! I'm familiar with UW's Civil Engineering department and they have some great faculty members there who are very competent in what they do. That's awesome to hear!

As someone who is in academia currently, I can understand the hesitation. I'd like to clarify that I'm not suggesting you join academia, but simply use it as a vehicle to help with the initial networking of business partners and maybe use that as a resource to grow and get your "business-side" help that you're looking for. Basically a jumping off point. If you're already coordinating with a faculty member there, I'm sure they're more than happy to work with you.

Many universities also have technology transfer offices (moving the technology developed in-house/university level to industry) that might be able to support your aspirations. While their support is assuming that your technology is an IP from the University, they're very nice people and I think it might be useful to setup a meeting with them and chat with them regarding what advice they can offer. Also, they're incentivized to support students and the local community. To put it frankly, they're not there to screw you and aren't incentivized to. Universities recognize there are a ton of technical founders out there who are missing the business counterparts. While the university system (in my opinion) is slow to accommodate these needs, there are still initiatives and programs out there on the university's side that I think you can tap into.

One thing I've previously gotten support from is the I-Corps (Innovation Corps) program funded by NSF ([1] for National level and [2] for UW Level) which is targeted at technical founders who need a "bootcamp" on the business side. This includes building a business model, financial model, and also giving you access to potential investors. It won't replace someone who is experienced in business, but it'll give you the fundamental skills and initial knowledge to understand more of what you're looking for (at least for me). It also does come with $$$ but it's not a lot (and the money they do provide is mostly spent during the two months bootcamp trying to get customer surveys). By the way, while these programs are rooted in academia, they're open to everyone. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution to get these grants.

The meet and greet are perfect! I think Seattle is probably the perfect place for this type of work! From talking with colleagues here (this was before COVID), I heard the City of Seattle is very welcoming of new ideas and are happy to prototype new transportation technology. Not sure if things have changed, but I really like your application. It's fantastic.

Outside of academia, there are also programs that are available to get you started off the ground. VentureWell (office is in Massachusetts but I believe they have a nation-wide scope) has an E-team program [3] that's basically similar to NSF's I-Corps program but with different funding sources.

I really appreciate what you've done so far. It was one of the few things on Hacker News that I actually stopped scrolling and looked in-depth on. I wish I could throw my hat in the ring. I hope it continues to grow and I'd be happy to keep an eye on it!

Don

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/ [2] https://comotion.uw.edu/what-we-do/icorps-grants/ [3] https://venturewell.org/e-team-grant-program/