Hacker News with Generative AI: Utilities

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 10 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 12 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 14 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 20 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 36 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 51 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 53 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 102 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- 134 days ago | 0 comments

getopt() but smaller (dotat.at)

Programming, Software Development, Utilities

7 points by fanf2 146 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 147 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 153 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 160 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 190 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 192 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 232 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 239 days ago | 7 comments

What is Toybox? (landley.net)

Linux, Utilities, Programming

118 points by thunderbong 251 days ago | 23 comments

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