Hacker News with Generative AI: Utilities

PowerToys – Windows system utilities to maximize productivity (github.com/microsoft)
Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity.

Windows, Productivity, Open Source, Utilities, Software

10 points by keepamovin 20 days ago | 2 comments

Edison to Bury More Than 150 Miles of Lines in LA Fire Area (bloomberg.com)
Edison International’s utility said it plans to bury more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) of electrical lines at a cost of as much as $925 million as part of a massive rebuilding effort in Los Angeles-area neighborhoods devastated by January wildfires.

Utilities, Infrastructure, Wildfires, California, Cost

6 points by JumpCrisscross 41 days ago | 1 comments

Show HN: Portable Giant File Viewer (github.com/sunny-chung)
Needing to check a 4.9 GB log file on a platform where the less file pager is not available? Don't cry. This software is going to save you!

Software, File Handling, Utilities

35 points by sunny41 41 days ago | 11 comments

Big Tech is striking secret deals to make you foot its electricity bill (archive.org)
Tech companies racing to secure power for their data centers have struck dozens of secretive electricity deals with utilities that could cost average Americans a "staggering" amount, Harvard research found.

Big Tech, Energy, Utilities, Data Centers, Costs

38 points by zekrioca 61 days ago | 3 comments

PG&E asks to raise rates for California customers so it can pay investors more (kcra.com)
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Thursday it has asked California regulators to raise rates, citing a need to “adequately compensate investors” amid risks in the business environment.

Utilities, California, Finance, Business

57 points by toomuchtodo 64 days ago | 57 comments

fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find' (github.com/sharkdp)
fd is a program to find entries in your filesystem. It is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find. While it does not aim to support all of find's powerful functionality, it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for a majority of use cases.

Software, Open Source, Linux, Utilities

718 points by tosh 65 days ago | 293 comments

Chinese Hackers Sat Undetected in Small Massachusetts Power Utility for Months (pcmag.com)
In late 2023, the general manager of a Massachusetts public utility company got a surprising phone call. It was an FBI agent, who told him that the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD) were being hacked.

Cybersecurity, Data Breaches, Government, Massachusetts, Utilities

12 points by toss1 71 days ago | 3 comments

How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50B/year from ratepayers (pluralistic.net)
How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50b/year from ratepayers: The Society of Utility and Regulatory Financial Analysts is a hell of a henhouse fox.

Utilities, Finance, Corruption, Regulation, Public Policy

7 points by hn_acker 88 days ago | 1 comments

L.A. power utility found irregularities on equipment where wildfire broke out (nytimes.com)
Southern California Edison said video evidence had led it to look more broadly at whether its equipment might have been the cause of the deadly blaze.

Wildfires, Utilities, California, Investigations, Safety

30 points by MilnerRoute 102 days ago | 25 comments

Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities (burke.dev)
I don't think PG&E ratepayers understand how much higher the rates they pay are than what it actually costs PG&E to generate and transmit the electricity to their house. The average PG&E electricity charge now starts at 40 cents per kilowatt hour and goes up from there. Silicon Valley Power, Santa Clara's utility company, is getting power to customers for 17 cents per kilowatt hour. Sacramento's utility company charges about the same.

Utilities, Energy Costs, Public Utilities, California

420 points by kevinburke 105 days ago | 395 comments

Why are UK electricity bills so expensive? (benjames.io)
I recently built a website that breaks down the cost of a UK electricity bill.

Energy, UK, Economics, Utilities

193 points by chmaynard 154 days ago | 341 comments

mesg(1) and write(1) no longer provided by Debian util-linux (debian.org)
Chatting is hopefully done using more security facilities, not by overwriting each other's terminal state anymore.

Security, Linux, Debian, Utilities, Software

6 points by greyface- 186 days ago | 0 comments

getopt() but smaller (dotat.at)

Programming, Software Development, Utilities

7 points by fanf2 198 days ago | 2 comments

Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities (weiyen.net)
Sometimes when I'm bored, I like to look at the list of macOS Bash commands. Here's some commands that I found interesting:

macOS, Command Line, Bash, Utilities

837 points by yen223 198 days ago | 232 comments

wstty – Windows Stty Replacement (github.com/aymanbagabas)
wstty is a small tool that sets or reports various console related settings on Windows systems. It is meant to be a replacement for the stty coreutils command on Unix systems.

Windows, Utilities, Open Source, Programming

3 points by aymanbagabas 205 days ago | 0 comments

Data Centers Will Have to Make Minimum Power Payments in Ohio (bloomberg.com)
Big data centers in Ohio will have to pay a minimum of 85% of the energy they need to cover the costs of grid improvements under a settlement submitted Wednesday by one of the state’s largest utilities.

Energy, Data Centers, Ohio, Utilities

3 points by mfiguiere 212 days ago | 7 comments

Major Toronto Utility Company Stores Customers' Passwords in Plain Text (reddit.com)
PSA: Toronto Hydro is able to see your login password in plaintext.

Data Security, Privacy, Toronto, Utilities

109 points by oneturkmen 242 days ago | 81 comments

Rust clean-slate POSIX CLI utilities 0.2.1 release: Awk, M4, ftw and more (github.com/rustcoreutils)
Race-free file tree walker library (ftw) Major new utils: awk, m4 New utils: ps, realpath, join, time, fuser, gencat Bug fixes and cleanups Beginnings of musl target support

Rust, Open Source, Utilities, Software

80 points by jgarzik 244 days ago | 29 comments

Customers who save on electric bills could be forced to pay utility lost profits (lailluminator.com)

Utilities, Law, Energy, Finance

26 points by DocFeind 284 days ago | 45 comments

A simply utility script which allows you to analyze your Python file (github.com/mraza007)

Python, Programming, Tools, Utilities

11 points by todsacerdoti 291 days ago | 7 comments

What is Toybox? (landley.net)

Linux, Utilities, Programming

118 points by thunderbong 303 days ago | 23 comments

Utility firms go nuclear over Amazon datacenter power deal (theregister.com)