Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | davidhunter's comments login

Optimal | London, UK | ONSITE

AI Simulation and Control Engineer: Up to £150k + 2% depending on experience (https://wellfound.com/l/2AUs7A)

Optimal builds AI agents to control the world’s critical infrastructure - from factories, to datacenters, to farms.

We are backed by the Director of AI Research at Google DeepMind as well as early VC investors in SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir.

We have built the world’s most advanced AI control system for high-tech greenhouses and have just signed out first customer contracts in North America and Europe having proven the performance of our AI across 3 seasons in our own demonstration greenhouse.

david@optimal.ag

https://www.optimal.ag


Has anyone else gone on the following journey:

1. Use excel

2. See ledger/hledger. Think this must be 'the way'. Go all in.

3. Constantly wrestle with ledger/hledger because you only do your accounting once per month/quarter which is not enough frequency to really grok it.

4. Use excel with a new sense of calm that you're not missing out on something better


Been there. hedger/ledger look tempting, but if you follow the approach of the OP, you need to build your own toolchain around it so that it recompiles your journals on each rule change.

I've found it easier to use a spreadsheet. Sheet 1 contains the csv export to which i constantly append, sheet 2 the hierarchical acoount structure: an account name like "expenses: groceries:walmart" is followed by a regex that matches the expense description on sheet 1 for that account (walmart). On sheet 1 I have an "detected Account" column, into which a formula outputs the detected account based in the regexes.

Sumif formulas sum up the totals per account. Since no compilation step is necessary, rule changes are picked up much faster


That's a nice idea. Thanks for sharing.

I have a single sheet per account (current accounts, share accounts etc). I download csvs and append to the relevant sheet - usually once per month.

In each sheet I've added a column called 'tag'. And I just tag anything that I want to keep track of - which is a small percentage of transactions. Then I can filter transactions by that tag.

Whilst it was a nice idea in theory to book every transaction to an account in a chart of accounts, I found that I very rarely looked at the PnL. And so it didn't justify the time involved in booking each transaction.


Not Excel, but LibreOffice Calc, here. It's just a biweekly budget, helps with making sure Ive acheduled my bills for the month and tracks savings.

Toward the end of every year, I go through the ritual of preparing to move back to ledger and getting files ready. And shortly after the start of the year, I abandon it. Maybe one year I will stick with it. Maybe.


AI-generated content marketing has finally got to the front page of HN


The answer my friend, is rovin’ in the wind


Skin in the game for evangelists


Did anyone else check each item manually one-by-one to ensure that the system was accurate?


Investigative journalism report into Boeing by Al Jazeera in 2014:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...


I don't know about this one, but a few years earlier they also reported on the 737 NG, and those claims did not hold up all too well. So I'd take this one with a large grain of salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Str...


The people who are said it wouldn't work lost credibility as these startups raised rounds at progressively higher valuations. After all, money talks, so clearly the naysayers were missing something...


After the later rounds closed at insane valuations, the early VC investors in infarm were seen as legends. This created jealously amongst other VC investors who felt they had 'missed out' which resulted in more money being invested into infarm and other vertical farming companies e.g. Bowery/Plenty.

Decisions to invest were made on FOMO, not a first-principles analysis of the farming technique which shows very clearly that vertical farming is unfeasible.


Would be interested to chat and hear your views on the viability of the greenhouse industry in the US if you're up for it? david [at] optimal.ag


I’m not at all interested in chatting. I’ve already given enough of my limited lifetime to the ag tech space, and I never want to go back - even via a phone call.

The main problem isn’t growing the fruit - it’s selling and distributing it.

Mastronardi has a monopoly on North American distribution in all but name. (For tomatoes, at least. ) You can grow as much produce as you want, but they’re going to figure out a way to capture any consumer surplus produced by the growers as part of the distribution chain.

That didn’t really matter so much for AppHarvest because they couldn’t profitably produce fruit at Mastronardi’s market rate. But if they did, Mastronardi would figure out a way to shift the market pricing they negotiated with them. Since they control most of the foodservice and retail grocery supply, and have those contracts pretty sewn up, Mastronardi is basically the only way to get fruit into store shelves. That gives them a ton of power negotiating with greenhouses that are otherwise commodities - water and sun go in, tomatoes come on.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: