do you have a blog or some links of walking through the process of getting everything setup?

Don’t underestimate how politicized renewables have become. You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself, but any time solar comes up in a rural community there’s a whole host of bad faith “but what about x?” comments

In Florida, the irony is that hurricane is the reason for not having too many solar panels. For example, Miami-Dade county requires commercial solar panel installation to have hurricane-approved solar mounts, which can withstand up to 160mph+ winds. This means installation is very costly. Even for homes, many insurance company will not insure homes with roof solar panel because of hurricane.

I could have sworn that FL was like top five in solar production.

Edit : it is! It’s 3rd https://seia.org/solar-state-by-state/

In Alabama regulatory capture is such that installing solar panels attached to the grid incurs fees higher than just buying the electricity from Alabama Power.

I know California has reduced the incentives to purchase solar panels. You have to also have a battery backup system which increases the costs considerably. I'm guessing we may have too much solar in the day and not enough storage for the energy created.

Liquid-cooled computers have one major benefit; usually, your computer ages over time, and there's a long period where it's still barely fast enough but you wish you had something nicer. A liquid-cooled workstation prevents you from needing to manage this grey area by catastrophically failing at unexpected intervals.

He just does this with all his blog posts, don't overthink it. The tech industry is full of people with unexpected quirks.

I really don't think we should be shaming computer enthusiasts for being enthusiastic about their computers on HN of all places

The 9950X is an excellent CPU at a reasonable price point and works perfectly fine with an ordinary air-cooled heat sink in an ordinary case without stupid numbers of fans. The TDP is just not that high.

source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled.

(Embarrassingly, I have an M4 Max that can almost match it in the CPU-bound workload I care about while sipping some 45W. The rest of the industry really needs to catch up with Apple on power efficiency.)

Obviously he's telling you their spec incase you wish to reproduce his results. Why don't you try it and tell us how your result compares.

If you're not familiar with his blog, he also occasionally does benchmarks of databases & extensions. He starts every post by outlining his setup.

It had a very 90s/early-2000s tech blog feel to it. Only thing missing was his custom Gentoo build.

It's funny how I started skimming as soon as I saw "My Workstation" without ever consciously perceiving why I had started hitting Page Down, until you mentioned it and I went back to notice what it said there. My brain has really automated web page signal extraction.

My initial thought was that was a weird choice in this article, but I wouldn't fault someone for being thorough.

Probably a better choice as an appendix, move the good stuff up to the top. But overall its NBD.

> 96 GB of DDR5 RAM

Most people drive cars worth less than this.

Why is the top comment criticising a geek for being a geek? He gave us a wealth of information including his exact methodology and queries on how he produced his results. This is an ideal approach. You want just results and "trust me, bro"?

I had the exact same thought, particularly when I read there were fewer than 4M records.

I really have to wonder if people truly know how powerful any modern computer is. Like I just assume any modern PC with sufficient storage can handle a database with a billion rows of data. I think my phone probably could.

Now if you were, say, analyzing commercial satellite imagery of the entire US and trying to find rooftop solar, matching it against the database and finding data that wasn't in the dataset, that's something where your computer power would be way more relevant.

Come to think of it, you could probably use such imagery to construct a power generation network from power plants to transmission lines to utility poles. Of course some places have underground cables but there are other datasets for that.

Another interesting project is mapping the growth of solar. This would require access to commercial satellite imagery over time. I'm sure some government agency already does it. Or used to at least. Snapshots years or even months apart are less interesting.

Anyway, I guess the point is the author's computer is capable of way more than I suspect they think it is.

I love that idea. I don't have time for anything elaborate today but I dropped two visualisations at the bottom of the post.

> In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.

Folks are doing some interesting exploration of the pros and cons of different alignments, e.g.:

> When roof area is limited, the question becomes: What layout lets you install the most space-efficient solar capacity within budget on the available area? In those scenarios, an east–west (E–W) layout can outperform a south-facing layout. The South layout may be “better positioned”, but the E-W allows the installation of more panels in the same area.

* https://ases.org/east-west-vs-south-facing-solar-when-more-p...

Basically examining 'quality versus quantity', depending on what your location and roof allows.

There's a helpful chart here, which happens to match your approximate latitude:

https://ratedpower.com/blog/solar-panel-orientation/

It should be roughly correlated with latitude (the exceptions being panels on sloped roofs which will match the roof slope).

I think the lack of concentration in some areas, particularly hubs in Texas and Florida, is actually pretty eye-opening. To me these areas should be very dense with panels from the cost/benefit alone.

Something's wrong with xkcd's data if Portland doesn't rate a red dot on the furry porn map.

It's not a comprehensive dataset. The US installed 43 GW_peak in 2025, which should be around 80M new panels.

Still, an order of magnitude less new capacity than China - but not two orders.

With how backwards US policy is - this will be the major factor in the future.

Energy heavy use cases with little to no energy costs will lap western industries.

Imagine believing in "regional IQ".

You can read the (open access) paper here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4

In the abstract: “We use these newly compiled and delineated solar arrays and panel-rows to harmonize and independently estimate value-added attributes to existing datasets including installation year, azimuth, mount technology, panel-row area and dimensions, inter-row spacing, ground cover ratio, tilt, and installed capacity.“

I would like to know more detail as well.

I think they are shutting it down. It had the nasty habit of frying birds that ventured too close to it. And that particular valley actually is far more cloudy then what you would expect for the desert near Las Vegas.

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll update the post.

That's actually only cheap because of the free shipping - in Germany 450W panels are at about 55-60€ retail right now, for example. So a balcony set (2 panels for 1kW total, plus inverter) is about 150-200€, depending on the specific parts. Both exluding shipping, though.

Prices fell dramatically in the last few years, if I understood things correctly the high prices in the US are mostly due to tariffs.

And Reagan taking them down.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/22/jiimmy-ca...

>It was pretty symbolic back in 1979, too. The symbolism depended on what you thought of Carter and his policies. For some, the panels were a much-needed acknowledgment that America had to wean itself from fossil fuel, explore alternative energy sources and help save the planet. For others, they were in the same category as Carter’s virtue-signaling cardigan. Of course, critics moaned, Carter would put solar panels on the White House.

>The panels came down in 1986 when the White House roof was undergoing repairs. Ronald Reagan did not have them replaced. Of course, Reagan wouldn’t put solar panels on the White House.

What is the story behind Reagan taking down the solar panels installed by Carter? Was it symbolic of a new, less enthusiastic approach to clean energy?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4w4ww/what_...

Solar power at the White House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House

>On June 20, 1979, 32 solar water heating panels were placed on the roof of the West Wing. The panels were made by InterTechnology/Solar Corp. from Warrenton, Virginia and installed by Hector Guevara of Alternate Energy Industries Corp.[2] At the dedication ceremony for the panels, President Carter said, "In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy... A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people".[1]

The whole installation cost $35,000 in 1979 (about $160,000 now).

https://books.google.nl/books?id=e9dlzwL4Ck4C&dq=solar+white...

The link isn't available here. Can you share the specs and price of that panel?