ndonnellan
Joined 14 years ago
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Member since
Mar 21
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
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.
Comment · 2 years ago
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.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I think the key paragraph is buried:
"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.
Comment · 3 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
This appears to be a repost/summary/blogspam of a 2017 kotaku piece: https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-...
Comment · 5 years ago
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.
But props for getting this all down!
Comment · 5 years ago
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).
Comment · 5 years ago
You mean like Optimizely? I thought most startups these days had absurd adjectiverbnoun names.
Comment · 5 years ago
If you're looking to cut down on solar heating, steel roofs or even lighter colored or painted roofs would be a far more cost effective option.
Comment · 5 years ago
I think the legal definition of NA beer is maximum of 0.5%.
I may be misremembering, but I think Athletic Brewing mentioned their beers are closer to 0.2 -> 0.3% on average.
But even at 0.5%, that would be 10 NA beers to add up to one average alcoholic beer at 5% assuming equal volumes.
Comment · 5 years ago
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.
email me at ndonnellan@ that common email provider's domain. Hint: google for it.