Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-fusion-on-brink-of-being-realised-say-mit-scientists?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><USER2> Meta rant: I would like people to remind themselves that HN's rules explicitly disallow shallow dismissals. Unfortunately this comment section seems to be nothing but.

The material science behind high temperature semiconductors has undergone radical changes in recent years. The techniques being used are largely well understood science and the downsides of previous approaches like ITER are explicitly avoided. There has been a visible explosion of commercial activity in recent years.

People bander around the "always 20 years away" moniker as if we should put _today 's_ estimates on the same grounds as the guesses from those early 1970s projects that were never even properly funded. People were not screaming "20 years more" at the turn of the century.

You don't get to discount something as potentially groundbreaking as this just because it's taken a little while to get here. Either put up or shut up. I would _love_ to hear genuine substantive conversations here, if people were willing to have them.

<comment><USER3> Unsolved problems for fusion as powerplant:

-Sputtering of shielding and every other part of the reactor from fast neutrons. If your reactor is becoming brittle as it's in operation, and requires constant maintenance, it won't be operating enough to be cost effective.

-Breeding blankets. If we're not breeding tritium in the blanket (and no one has been able to sustain a reaction that way yet) then we're just using fission a _lot_. Expense becomes an issue, as does radiological issues.

-The plasma diverter is very much an unsolved problem. I can get into more detail here, but in short this is the part of the reactor that "skims" some of the hot plasma off to do the work. The dynamics of very hot, magnetically constrained plasmas still escapes us, and when you throw a rock into that stream, the complexity increases. Current divertes wouldn't last a day in an operating plant. Disassembling your whole plant every day and reassembling it is a non-starter.

-Containment of plasma at sufficient energies is still something measured in seconds, or fractions of seconds. The usual metaphor is trying to uniformly squeeze a balloon; it will just "squirt" out. For s research reactor a second or two of fusion is an achievement. For power generation it's nothing.

-Neutron activation of otherwise inert materials means you're going to have serious radioactive waste. It's unclear just how dirty D-T fusion would be from soup to nuts, but "pretty dirty" seems like a good bet.

-Tritium penetration.

-Most of the energy produced is in the form of neutrons, and we don't know how to use that as a source of power. Those neutrons, in addition to destroying the reactor itself and activating materials, represent a loss.

-What we really need is aneutronic fusion through alternative cycles to D-T, like p-p, but that's a much hotter plasma and no one has a clue how to make it work yet.

-Coolant for a constantly running reactor is a boring, but unsolved problem.

There's more, but these are the ones most poeple on HN probably are aware of when they dismiss this article.

Some further reading [https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what- they're-cra...](https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they're- cracked-be10699)

<comment><USER4> The waste problem from neutron activation is beginning to get the publicity it deserves in both articles and in comments like the parent's.

Fusion is advertised as a clean power-generation technology, but it will, in general, have its own radioactive-waste disposal problems.

<comment><USER3> And if we're willing to deal with that waste, then we _already_ have a viable source of atomic energy from fission! The future is whenever we decide to deal with the problem instead of leaving it pools or casks to solve itself.

@csallen: Be willing to actually dispose of it. We need to commit the money and political will to set up a single disposal site. Right now it's a NIMBY nightmare so we get the worst outcome.

<comment><USER5> Curious what you mean by "deal with" it. Somehow make it non-radioactive, or improve our disposal techniques, or what?

<comment><USER6> I think the tradition is to dump it off the coast of Somalia.

<comment><USER7> My thinking is more around using thorium cycle nuclear reactors which consume almost all their input material [1].

1T of thorium produces the same amount of energy as 35T of uranium or 4166000T of coal. 83% of the waste products are inert, and 17% require only 300 years to reach background levels of radiation. Much safer than uranium cycle too.

This technology is very promising IMO, though given the general attitude people have towards nuclear, it's not surprising it is underdeveloped, more research is needed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Saw this video explaining in a HN comment why stronger magnets and a different approach might make fusion work. After ca. 22:00 Minutes he is done with the fusion basics and explains the new approach. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4)

<comment><USER9> At one point he briefly mentions (almost in an off-handed way) the issue of scaling the novel semiconductor production approach. Would be interesting to know how big of an ask that really is. Maybe I'm jaded by current events but figure it's only a matter of time before the science community has its Bernie Madoff moment. Especially in light of how renewables seem on the cusp of their moment to shine.

<comment><USER10> >semiconductor

Is there a reason everyone in this thread is saying "semiconductor" instead of 'superconductor'?

<comment><USER11> Might be because people here generally work with computers. Not many people work with superconductors, so might be a priming issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is greatly overrated.

The design of the ARC reactor in the 2014 arxiv paper produced 500 MW(th) fusion power. The FLiBe bath contained some 90 tons of beryllium. The annual world production of Be is just 220 tons. If the world's entire estimate resource of mineable Be (100,000 tonnes, according to USGS) were used to make ARC reactors, they might supply 1% of the world's primary energy demand.

The FLiBe also contains about 1/4 the 6Li produced by the entire US hydrogen bomb program. The facility that enriched that lithium used 10,000 tons of mercury and is an environmental problem even to this day because of leaks. That process is also now illegal in the US due to this pollution, and there is no facility in the world that could make that much 6Li.

Perhaps those problems could be worked around, but there's a deeper issue. The power density of the ARC reactor is around 0.5 MW/m^3. This is an order of magnitude, or more, lower than the power density of a PWR fission reactor core. The ARC reactor is also much more complex, and will require very expensive maintenance operations every couple of years (manufacturing a new pressure vessel and remotely installing it, as the innards of the reactor will be too hot for hands-on access.)

So, how could this possibly be cost competitive with fission reactors, never mind the energy sources that are currently beating fission?

It's ironic that the ARC reactor is just demonstrating the fatal flaws with DT fusion reactors, flaws that were also pointed out at MIT by Lawrence Lidsky some 35 years ago. ARC is better than ITER, but that's damning with faint praise.

<comment><USER13> As you can see from some here, people just want to believe. Fusion is the power source of sci-fi, and they're scared of fission. As with self-driving cars, people just imagine what it could be like and that's enough for them. Never mind that decades of R&D on fission has yielded breakthroughs in safety and efficiency, and by the time a workable fusion design is possible far more advanced fission will be possible. People want the future to be now, so they believe their way into it. Scientists want funding for research, so they sex it up for the media and mass consumption.

The truth is that politics aside, we could be using fission today to solve the problems people want fusion to solve decades from now. Granted, if aneutronic fusion becomes possible (no time soon, even experimentally with a surplus of energy) that will be a miracle. DT fusion though, is only useful for research purposes.

Most people, including most people here don't have a working understanding of nuclear physics or the requisite engineering of a power plant. When you don't understand the hurdles, fusion seems kind of magical. If you're desperate for advanced space flight, fusion seems kind of magical. Even more, no one has any negative experiences with fusion, while we've been literally burned by fission.

It's hard to argue against a fantasy, and hoping for fusion also let's people ignore the hard work of using fission. The politics feel intractable in the US, the waste is manageable, but scary. Fusion isn't real yet in that sense, so like an online romance people can project a fantasy onto it.

<comment><USER12> "Granted, if aneutronic fusion becomes possible (no time soon, even experimentally with a surplus of energy) that will be a miracle."

A group at Princeton has a concept for a FRC-based reactor burning D-3He that, through a combination of quite interesting tricks, reduces the fraction of power output in neutrons to as little as 0.5%. The design is also very small, with a power output of 1 MW. At this level of neutron output the reactor structure are lifetime components, with no replacement needed due to neutron damage. Power density is still a struggle, although the small size of the reactor helps there.

The downside (assuming the aggressive plasma physics doesn't disappoint) is where do you get the 3He.

At this point, my default vision of the future is neither fission nor fusion, but rather renewables and storage. The engineering and economic issues of these appear much more tractable. Simply extrapolating solar down its demonstrated experience curve puts the cost of PV electricity at $0.01/kWh or less when fully scaled out.

<comment><USER14> I was only aware of Helion doing D-3He, and they're in Washington. Do you have a link for the Princeton group?

<comment><USER15> Sam Cohen's Rotating Magnetic Field experiments have shown higher temperature and reasonably long-lived FRCs. His vision is steady operating, 3He systems, atleast at first targeting propulsion. As you dial up the Helium percentages, the neutron output goes down, though the required ion temperature goes up. Princeton Satellite Systems has several NASA programs looking at the propulsion applications.

<comment><USER12> "required ion temperature"

The scheme involves significantly non-maxwellian ion distributions, so "temperature" isn't really appropriate. In particular, 3He ions get pumped to higher energy than D ions, which helps suppress DD fusion. They claim the scheme is consistent with Rider's limits on energy circulation in non- maxwellian plasmas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Serious question: what could be the cost of fusion generated electricity if the reactors go mainstream like fission reactors? Unlike uranium, hydrogen is for free and there is no cost associated with storing burned fuel. You can probably also save a lot on safety systems. But you still probably need a badass reactor with auxiliary power source, huge steam turbine and cooling towers. Or not? What factors will determine the cost?

<comment><USER17> Even if we assume for a moment that we got it working, the factors are: scale and embrittlement. Current thermonuclear technology, theoretically, breaks even, energywise, on reactors of certain scale. There is a reason to believe that once we build a reactor of a certain size, the energy output of a reaction will be bigger than the energy spent on jumpstarting it and magnetic containtainment. embrittlement of reactor structural materials is caused by radiation. After a while, reactor has to be rebuilt from totally new materials.

<comment><USER14> The MIT design essentially solves those two issues. Scale is smaller with stronger magnetic fields, and embrittlement is confined to an inner wall which is easily replaced once a year.

<comment><USER18> You are correct! It's maddening that you had to make the correction, though. Commenters in here seem incurious about the new developments detailed in the source material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just one thought: I am glad that there are people who are trying to solve extremely hard problems even if they will never see success themselves. I much prefer money and intelligence being spent on fusion than on developing new weapons or technology to create perfect surveillance so more ads can be served.

As far as I understand fusion is at a point where we know almost 100% it can be done but there is a long list of hairy problems to solve. Working on these is money well spent in my view.

</comment><comment><USER20> Long to short, a couple years ago, I was out for drinks and bumped into a friend. She was having drinks with a friend who is a prominent researcher at Princeton Plasma Labs.

We got to talking. He assured me they were getting closer and it was only a matter of time (read: money). I'm not a politician or an investor, etc. so he had no motivation to blow smoke up my arse.

Less than a week later there was this:

[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-fusion- breakthrough](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-fusion-breakthrough)

100+ seconds is not a lot of time. But if you double that every few weeks then it __is__ only a matter of time.

</comment><comment> DC-3 Maybe I'm naive, but I honestly don't understand why governments and private foundations alike aren't throwing money at Fusion scientists. It seems far and away the best possible investment one could make today in humanity's future.

<comment><USER21> Throwing money at a problem gets you "more", not "better". If your problem is that you need more scale, then throwing more money at a problem will get you that scale. If what you need is a breakthrough, feeding more money tends to lead to more heartbreak (see, e.g., Alzheimer's--we've spent several billion dollars on a cure and the only thing to show for it is that reducing amyloid plaques doesn't seem to do a damn thing). Fusion is still very much in the latter category: we don't have a working fusion reactor we need to make feasible, we have a vague sketch of one that might become a feasible reactor, if we achieve a few breakthroughs (and even then, we have several more issues to work through to actually make it economical).

<comment><USER22> I didn't downvote you because I find your assertion about throwing money at a problem to the point. Others have downvoted you perhaps because your other assertion that there's no working fusion reactor might be unfounded, in other words, we might have already working fusion reactors but they are just not yet profitable. (I am not an expert.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Only slightly related- but what endevours would become at how much energy output per $ Helium inserted viable? Has that been studied?

There must be a curve, where it can be estimated at what cost-point fission and solar are out- and for example growing ressources in vats becomes cheaper then farming/ chopping down natural grown wood.

What other "uneconomic" endavours become feasible with fusion at what price?

<comment><USER24> Carbon sequestration - not sure on what price point, but at least the current cost of oil reserves. This factor should include national security 'returns' (the huge boon from moving away from middle east controlled energy) - so say trillions of dollars per decade.

Salt water desalination - at some point pumping salt water (possibly long distances) to desalination plants for agricultural and domestic use becomes feasible.

Space programs - once oil is disrupted as an energy source for the masses it will be cheaper to push things into orbit.

<comment><USER25> Genuine question: What does not using oil for mass transit have to do with reducing cost to orbit?

<comment><USER24> I didn't say mass transit.

<comment><USER25> You wrote:

> once oil is disrupted as an energy source for the masses

I'm confused, what else do _the masses_ use oil for? If I'm not mistaken the production of fuel for transportation is the lions share of oil use.

But regardless, how does that help us get things to orbit?

<comment><USER26> Mass transit is public transportation, not all transportation. Many rockets use fuels derived from oil and other fossil fuels, e.g. kerosene and methane.

<comment><USER25> I meant mass transportation in the general sense, cars, busses, trains, planes. I just kind of typed the wrong thing.

This article[1] claims Falcon 9 launch _list price_ is _$61.2 million_ and _" Musk said the fuel used on a Falcon 9 is between $200,000 and $300,000."_

So the fuel cost is 0.5% of the launch price.

It could be argued that if we stop using oil for transportation the price of oil derived kerosene and methane could go _up_ as production scales down and fewer refineries sell in to the market.

1\. [http://spacenews.com/spacexs-reusable-falcon-9-what-are- the-...](http://spacenews.com/spacexs-reusable-falcon-9-what-are-the-real- cost-savings-for-customers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the > project was exciting he couldn't see how it would achieve its goal of > putting energy on the grid within 15 years.

So the startup seeking more funding is over promising as usual. As many others here have said, I'll get excited when someone actually achieves a net positive fusion burn and it's confirmed by a third party.

</comment><comment><USER28> I am all for fusion but I am curious, what happens if there is a magnet failure and the plasma, which is "...hundreds of millions of degrees celsius," escapes the containment vessel?

What damage will it do while it's cooling off for whatever period of time.

<comment><USER29> It's actually an incredibly small amount of material that is heated to millions of degrees. It is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of matter in the immediate surrounding environment, so the energy can be soaked up relativity easily.

I think I remember hearing something like that anyone more than 50 feet away would be completely unaffected (but don't quote me on that).

<comment> D-Coder "relativity easily" is my favorite typo of the week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fusion_experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fusion_experiments)

</comment><comment><USER31> Like other fusion projects all of this is pure speculation, sadly.

However, I truly think it is wonderful that there seems to be a resurgence in the area of nuclear fusion. After Fukushima any project that had "nuclear" in its name was put on hold for political reasons and it's good to see that people don't have cold feet anymore.

<comment><USER29> Can you please elaborate on why it's pure speculation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private > company, _will take_ a radically different approach to other efforts to > transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable > commercial energy source. The team _intend to_ use a new class of high- > temperature superconductors _they predict will allow_ them to create the > world's first fusion reactor that produces more energy than needs to be put > in to get the fusion reaction going.

Etc.

<comment><USER33> The article talks about new, smaller, and more powerful magnets that could enable real advancement toward positive energy fusion.

<comment><USER34> Until they have a working prototype, this is the equivalent of vaporware.

Moreover, it's not clear if they will have a working reactor in less or more than 15 years, it's not clear if they are building a research reactor or a production reactor, it's not clear if they are going to collect the heat and use it to produce electricity, ...

Also, the article say that:

> _A newly available superconducting material – a steel tape coated with a > compound called yttrium-barium-copper oxide, or YBCO – has allowed > scientists to produce smaller, more powerful magnets._

but if I understand correctly the new material is just a new type of superconductor wire that is more efficient than the current wires, it is not a superconductor magnet. If they have better wires, they can make better electromagnets, but it is confusing. Also is not clear if they have tested the new kind of magnets or it is just a theoretical application.

Also, 15 years is a lot of time, usually it means they don't have a clear idea of how to solve all the technical details. [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

<comment><USER35> > but if I understand correctly the new material is just a new type of > superconductor wire that is more efficient than the current wires, it is not > a superconductor magnet. If they have better wires, they can make better > electromagnets, but it is confusing. Also is not clear if they have tested > the new kind of magnets or it is just a theoretical application.

Both: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=32m35s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=32m35s)

This work is being done by the head of MIT's Nuclear Science department, in collaboration with most of the top grad students there. You can go look through all the publications that have resulted. They're going into great detail with practical engineering concerns, not just vague concept.

It's _really_ disappointing and frustrating to me to see all the shallow dismissals here. The original article/press release didn't have much concrete information. But instead of making the reasonable assumption that some of the best people in the field actually know what they're talking about, and the article is poor, instead HN commenters are deciding their zero content, zero knowledge, shallow dismissals are more likely than what the experts are saying.

Nearly all the information about the ARC project is out there in the literature. If you don't want to read it that's fine, just try to have some awareness that you can't dismiss things without actually knowing what they are.

<comment><USER34> I've read too many papers published in peer review journals where a tiny advance is sold like a groundbreaking game changing advance, so I'm very difficult to impress.

The most popular cases of overstatement are the improvement of the batteries life and the cure of cancer. but there are similar bad reporting in less popular fields.

In this case it's easy to decide. We can just wait until April 1st 2033 and see if there is a tokamak fusion reactor that can break even without creative accounting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Another April Fool's headline?

</comment><comment><USER37> At this point I'll believe it when I see an independently confirmed measurement of a working prototype. This stuff seems to be perpetually 20 years out.

<comment><USER31> It's the "year of Linux on the desktop" of alternative power.

<comment><USER37> It's worse. At least Linux _can_ be viable on the desktop. The challenges surrounding fusion are so staggering that putting any definite timeline around solving them is pure bovine manure.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, there is nothing technical that stops Linux.

It is mental and political/financial.

<comment><USER39> Has Linux desktop caught up technically to Windows yet? The last time I used it there were still problems like double clicking a jpg from the Firefox downloads list opening an "open with" dialog pointed to /usr/bin or something. And it seems like where Windows will put things in places that might not technically be a perfect categorization but are convenient and make some sense, like monitor/video/screensaver properties from right clicking the desktop, this seemed to happen a lot less in Linux DEs. Aside from them seeming somewhat less responsive in general and lacking equivalent GUI system utilities to things like "Computer Management" or the device manager.

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure that the Windows desktop has caught up technically compared to many of the graphical shells available for linux desktops, it just depends on which list of things you value in particular.

<comment><USER41> It's not there yet but the Bash for Ubuntu on Windows system is very very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Whether this is likely or not, I hate articles like this. People refuse to give up even a little of their current lifestyles to make their lives sustainable and this article makes them think that is OK because technology is going to save them in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> The title is the worst kind of deceptive, clickbaity, untrue crap. As usual, MIT is the hub of both exciting science/engineering, and horrid press releases.

<comment><USER42> The first paragraph and the sub header is an outright lie:

"Carbon-free fusion power could be 'on the grid in 15 years'"

And then later:

"Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the project was exciting he couldn't see how it would achieve its goal of putting energy on the grid within 15 years."

<comment><USER14> The MIT team thinks they might be able to do it in 15 years. Wilson isn't on their team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "The aspiration is to have a working power plant in time to combat climate change."

Let's combat global warming by producing even more heat, converting 40% of it to electricity.

<comment><USER44> > Let's combat global warming by producing even more heat, converting 40% of > it to electricity.

All the wattage produced by humanity is utterly insignificant in the face of the energy we receive from the sun. It will still be insignificant if we double it.

(We receive about 2 × 10^18 watt hours per day from the sun at the ground. Daily human energy production is about 5 × 10^15 watt hours.)

<comment><USER45> On the other hand, at a fixed doubling period of 35 years (i.e. assuming 2% yearly growth) we'll get at that "one extra sun" level in only 500 years.

Or if we take "5% of an extra sun" as the problematic power output, it will take only 150 years.

(Now consider that in the golden age of oil before the oil shocks in the seventies, oil consumption was growing more like 8% per year.)

<comment><USER44> > (Now consider that in the golden age of oil before the oil shocks in the > seventies, oil consumption was growing more like 8% per year.)

At that time, per capita energy use in the US was growing by 3% per year while population would grow by 1.5% per year. Today, per capita energy consumption in the United States is falling, and the population is growing more slowly. The story is much the same elsewhere. Even China has leveled off in per capita energy consumption. India's is still growing, but it will take many years considering their baseline of 1/10 of the United States per capita before they're the biggest problem, and I guess they'll probably turn that trend around before they actually get to that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> >15 years

Stopped reading.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is old news.

</comment><comment><USER48> Nuclear fusion substantially eliminates the "meltdown" risk associated with contemporary fission-based nuclear energy sources.

But it's no panacea [1], there's still substantial radioactive waste produced and radiation hazards to those working near the reactor.

If you operate under the assumption that we should pursue nuclear energy, then this is great. But if you operate under the assumption that between solar wind and storage, we have everything we need without any radioactive waste or radiation hazards to workers, this is pretty uninteresting beyond academic purposes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Safety_and_the_en...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Safety_and_the_environment)

<comment><USER49> > In general terms, fusion reactors would create far less radioactive material > than a fission reactor, the material it would create is less damaging > biologically, and the radioactivity "burns off" within a time period that is > well within existing engineering capabilities for safe long-term waste > storage.

There's really no comparison; fusion is vastly cleaner and safer.

<comment><USER23> I think the problem here, is that all those environement protection groups fighting fission, would cease to be after they "won" and thus are desperat in search of a new "evil".

Has there ever been a activist group that stated loudly: "Yes, we pulled it off"\- and then peacefully disolved, with the promise to reunite the day the defeated cause should return?

<comment><USER50> As a freshman at MIT in the 1980's, I was impressed to hear the announcement that the MIT Group Against Smoking had just disbanded. They had accomplished everything they set out to do and felt their were better places for them to invest their time.

And yes, I vividly recall the only time in my tenure at MIT I saw a student light a cigarette. It was in 10-250, the person was sitting audience right side of the lecture hall, about 1/3 of the way back in the room. She did so once, on her first day of class as a transfer student.

So yes, change can happen, and be recognized, and the activists move on.

<comment><USER23> Well my hat off to that.

I just have a very negative counter-example here though: It was a radio- interview with a green-peace activist on ITER. And they would go to great length, to put the nuclear waste problem of fusion into the same category as the nuclear waste dilema of fission- although the fusion byproducts decay down to zero in 300 years- which is near nothing next to fission.

I really rooted for greenpeace once, but such intellectual dishonesty- with a fundamentalistic approach, expecting humanity to give up civilisation as we know it, instead of working with the humanity they got- lead to a deep distrust to everything they publish.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/music-in-the-age-of-algorithms-47syg <comment><USER2> It's an interesting article, but the essential information is buried in the middle:

 _In my experience, it's only when I get on an editorial playlist that my songs get heavily featured on algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly.

So how do you get on editorial playlists? I sincerely have no clue. I've been on editorial playlists 16 times but I have no idea how to replicate that._

I find that this is true of many of these "I made X dollars per month doing Y!" articles: somewhere in the chain of events, there is a fateful intervention out of the control of the author that propels them to a higher tier of income than their peers who are otherwise following the same procedures.

<comment><USER3> Another thing I found interesting is that he earns $800 / month from a total of about 3 million listens. I wonder how this compares to the royalties from a radio play from a popular local radio station?

Comparatively, my dad has a moderately successful youtube channel, his most popular video has 18m views, and the next 3m. He has 66k subscribers. In an average month he'd earn ~£300 or so. Though usually quite a lot more around Christmas.

<comment><USER4> For the radio, in the US, artists are not paid a cent. Only the songwriters and publishers are paid.

<comment><USER5> True, but an indie artist is nearly always the songwriter and publisher (no one else owns the publishing rights, hence "independent"). So it's a fair comparison, and unfortunately, all else being equal, streaming woefully underperforms to radio to the point of tears.

<comment><USER6> So a radio play gets $0.12 and goes out to 10,000 listeners. Amazon Music Unlimited pays $0.012 per stream, or $120 for 10,000 listeners. Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream, or $31.80 per 10,000 listeners.

Maybe radio does haven't that many listeners? But by my math, if your radio play goes out more than 265 people, you are getting less per listen than on Spotify.

The real loss is the $15 10 track CD, which someone would have to listen to 471 times to reach Spotify pricing.

<comment><USER5> Terrestrial radio isn't paying based on the number of listeners. The radio station is paying for a license to broadcast the music (so that people listen to the ads in between, just like TV), a portion of which goes to the songwriter(s), and the publisher(s), and so on. Audience size has nothing to do with it.

Embedded in what you're saying is the expectation that radio plays/streams/etc are primarily for "exposure." It's a tired argument and not one any professional musician cares about past a certain point, especially considering that, yes, radio plays ideally drive album sales. But in the world of Spotify, streaming replaces both. What matters is that a [radio station | streaming company] is licensing my music so that they can have something to attract people to in order to expose them to ads. Without the music, the model doesn't work. Sure, some people pay to not have ads — I don't care. That should only raise, or at best have a neutral effect on, my per-stream rate.

You're right that the real loss is the CD purchase. Radio plays used to not only pay me and THEN lead to that further CD income, but now Spotify has replaced both and pays far worse than either.

"But Spotify pays $31.80 for 10,000 streams while radio only pays $0.12 for the same exposure!" I hear you saying. Wrong. Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream while radio pays $0.12 per "stream" (broadcast), and that's the only number that matters (due to the aforementioned way in which radio works). So, not even counting the much larger cost of CD sales, Spotify has reduced my income by nearly 38x. This is all fuzzy math, but that checks out with my anecdotal experience and talking with older folks who were selling gold or platinum records pre-Napster.

Streaming is NOT okay where it is right now. As a music listener I can't argue that it's not a better product, but as a music creator having my income slashed by at least 38x isn't worth it.

To give you an idea of a still-decent avenue for income making music and how far it's fallen, I'm primarily a composer for film/TV, and broadcast royalties for a single broadcast of a single minute of underscore can pay between $0.99 to a few dollars for broadcast, cable, terrestrial TV. On the other hand, an entire yearly quarter's worth of earnings for that same minute of music on a streaming service (untold thousands of streams) rarely pay a single dollar — usually more in the single-digit cent range. Do the math — it's worse than 38x. On a recent royalty statement I calculated that streaming services paid 70x worse than cable. And to top it off, some streaming services are outright refusing to pay legally mandated writers' royalties (the portion I'm supposed to retain and get paid for, no matter what, by law). It's moved to cable, too — Discovery tried to pull a stunt last year where they just decided "no more royalties." They walked it back, thankfully, but we all took it as a warning shot.

Imagine your coding salary getting slashed from $100k to $2k, and imagine never having benefits in the first place, and having had all the costs associated with doing the job shifted from the company to you over the last twenty years, and you'll get an idea of what it's like to be a working musician or composer nowadays.

 _breath_

To further clarify my point about streaming:

Radio and albums were how people consumed music in the old days — the deal was that if you want something on-demand, you gotta shell out and buy the thing. Otherwise, endure ad breaks while waiting for the song you want to come on, listen to it once until who knows when, and hopefully you like all the other music along the way. Right?

Now, we can listen to any music we want at any time, on demand. Album ownership is pretty much moot. And that's great! Again, as a music listener, I love it. But this means that we're getting the _benefits_ of album ownership in the _format_ of radio. What do people demand more — the benefits, or the format? Obviously there's a bit of intertwining between the two, but I'm sure most people would say "I care more about being able to listen to what I want when I want" than "I care about being able to stream music" (even though obviously the latter enables the former). This is why piracy was so great for music listeners — it enabled the former. Now, for a small fee, we get the convenience of radio and the benefits of not only album sales, but also piracy, which we now have to compete with. They're basically the same thing, though: you "own" the album and can thus listen to it whenever you want.

At the end of the day, though, we're paying for the more important of the two (album ownership) with the payment model of the lesser-valued (radio). Radio licenses worked for stations because they were (and continue to be) distributed amongst a large number of artists and labels, and could be negotiated down via the leverage that radio was ultimately driving album sales.

Now, those ad payments are distributed amongst literally hundreds of thousands of more artists, and instead of a radio station going cheaper with the argument "but this will lead to more album sales via exposure," Spotify can just use its leverage of "well, fuck you, what else are you gonna do?" It's a mob mentality. They're essentially the only game in town and they know it. Furthermore, not all streams are equal — just as radio stations would license in order to play a popular song more often (getting more ears glued to the ads in between), Spotify doesn't pay Beyoncé and Joe Amateur the same per-stream rate. The lions get the lion's share and the rest get the scraps divided up between them — but "the rest" is the _overwhelming majority_ of the artists present on Spotify. The curve is exponential.

Consumers are getting a categorically better product in every conceivable way and yet the payment to the actual creators of the product, the reason they're actually there — to listen to the music - has gone down by such a degree that it's laughable. It's an unbelievable amount. It's disastrous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend unless you live it.

Music is rapidly becoming a field that only the already-extremely-rich can do professionally.

<comment><USER6> "Terrestrial radio isn't paying based on the number of listeners." I know this. However, you are acting like a terrestrial broadcast to n listeners is equivalent to a Spotify non-broadcast to one listener. If n > 265 you are making more money with Spotify per person listening to the song. If 10,000 people are listening to it on a radio broadcast, you are getting $0.12. If 10,000 people listen on Spotify, you are getting $31.80. Even Spotify pays better than radio, in most scenarios. $0.12 per stream is not a viable model for music.

The better argument you make is that Spotify shouldn't be compared to radio, because it is "on demand". It is more like a CD purchase. There is some truth to this, and it should probably fall in the middle pricewise (and it does) it's just a matter of which direction it should move. It shouldn't cost as much as CD, because you have to keep paying every month for access and have no resale option. You don't own it, you're just renting for 4 minutes. I did a lot of CD trading- spent way too much time and money in used CD stores which paid the artists nothing, but meant you could a least capture some residual value from a CD you purchased.

Having streaming access has really changed my music listening patterns. I hardly ever listen to an album on repeat. There's so much more to listen to, but I listen to each thing less. Patterns of consumption may have changed for others as well.

I don't know how to best try to get more money. You still have some artists selling directly, not putting all material on Spotify, only putting it on the higher paying places, putting it on well after release, treating it as a sample shop.

<comment><USER5> Try reading your first paragraph again. You're contradicting yourself and are completely missing the point.

You say that you "know" that terrestrial broadcast isn't based on the number of listeners, and then go and make the same argument that Spotify pays better than radio based on "radio plays with n listeners."

> You are acting like a terrestrial broadcast to n listeners is equivalent to > a Spotify non-broadcast to one listener.

Yes, I am, exactly! Please tell me you understand the difference between 10,000 people _individually_ seeking out a song on Spotify vs a radio broadcasting a song _one time to n people_ (and sure, n can equal 10,000).

I like how you say "$0.12 per stream is not a viable model for music" while somehow pushing that $0.00318 per stream is. You're right, though —- $0.12 per stream isn't a viable model for music _without the album sales those streams used to lead to._ Spotify, if it's to replace both radio and CD sales, needs to pay at least _comparably_ to _both._ I'd say $1 per stream with a small bonus on top if someone listens to an album from start to finish all the way through would be a decent model.

Your last paragraph betrays your ignorance of the subject. The situation in which an artist voluntarily choose to not put their music on Spotify is so rare I'm not sure it's even statistically significant. A more common reason is due to the _publisher_ refusing for some sort of money reason, but those situations are eroding all the time. Spotify is the de facto king.

And it's not like "some artists sell directly." Everyone does! They do so because they have to recoup the utterly disastrous rates paid by Spotify somehow. So yes, by all means pay for music directly. But it's not a better product than Spotify, because both allow the listener the same experiencing of "owning the album" (due to the benefit of "on-demand access"), so direct music purchases are just a "nice to have," nothing a musician can actually depend upon. In other words: who cares about the edge cases when the majority use case is so shit and is actively pushing edge cases even closer and closer to the edge. Direct music sales are not a remedy to Spotify's abhorrent per- stream rate and overall effect on the music selling landscape. Only one thing is: negotiating better per-stream rates. Period.

<comment><USER6> > You say that you "know" that terrestrial broadcast isn't based on the number > of listeners, and then go and make the same argument that Spotify pays > better than radio based on "radio plays with n listeners."

What I am saying is that even though the $0.12 isn't based on the number of listeners, there is a number of listeners (n). So that $0.12 should be divided by that n in order to calculate how much money is paid per listen. If that n > 265, then Spotify is paying more per listen. I agree that the on-demand nature means Spotify should cost more than radio. Still, the argument that Spotify does pay less than radio per listen is wrong, and it makes your case a lot weaker if insist on that, because it's contrary.

When I said $0.12 a stream isn't a viable model for music, I didn't mean because it paid the artists too little, I meant it cost too much! Paying the artist and songwriter $0.12 per stream means charging the user about $0.15 each time they listen to the song. (Which doesn't seem right when compared to the purchase price of a song, unless people listen to music they purchase fewer than 8 times on average.) If they stream 25 hours per month, at average song length of 4 minutes, that's about 375 songs per month, or about $56/month. For heavy listeners, it would be a lot more. I don't think many people would sign up at that level. It definitely couldn't be covered by advertising. That said, you could probably get a lot more than Spotify is paying. Still, it does indicate some room there to get more than the $0.00318.

It is surprising to me that we don't see more exclusivity with music like we do with video content, where subscriptions to various services end up being necessary if you want to watch a particular show. The consumption patterns are quite different. However, given the number of competing platforms out there and the low switching costs associated associated, probably the best strategy is for a whole company with a lot of publishing rights to pull their content from the lowest paying services. Something like what Disney did to Netflix.

<comment><USER5> You are still completely missing my point w/r/t the number of listeners with radio, but I'm not sure how else to get you to see it, so I'm gonna duck out. Best of luck to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from getting a new account?

<comment><USER8> Youtube suffers from the same bias in their algorithm. I bet it's just a bias setting or a single falloff that would help things.

It reminds me of Cronenberg's "The Fly" where Brundle had to teach his teleporting pod to reproduce living tissue rather than interpret it.

<comment><USER9> YouTube however lets you create multiple (sub)accounts that you can easily switch to. Just create one for "sleeping", one for "animals", "news" etc.

This is what's perhaps missing from Spotify, an easy way to namespace your account activity.

<comment><USER8> Whaaaa?! This I did not know. I will have to look into it. Thank you so much.

Still, I think the future is in human hand crafted recommendations like Stephenson sketched out in "Fall: or Dodge in Hell".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anybody wants to know how to earn $20/decade with Spotify I can throw some of my own experiences into a blog post :)

<comment><USER11> It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world. The reason wages for musicians is so low is that there are already countless professional musicians making music in every style.

<comment><USER12> Maybe, but I think it could be better if Spotify paid artists per listen instead of just paying them for being popular.

Also Spotify is definitely missing a lot of obscure music and there definitely aren't enough _live_ musicians. Otherwise I could afford to have a good band play live in my living room every Sunday morning.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I don't think Spotify is the optimal conclusion of the music industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 65,000 listeners a month – $800 in revenue. 1.23 cents per listener per month. That works out to 14.7 cents per year. To earn a modest $50,000, you would need ~360,000 monthly listeners. This doesn't seem sustainable without outside sources of revenue.

<comment><USER14> Correct, this is why bands tour and sell shirts and other merch, and for most, work second jobs. As an anecdote, friend of mine is in two or three bands at any given time and bartends most nights he's not playing shows.

Spotify makes it easier than ever for an artist to get their work out there, which is great, but it's similar to the publishing world, where most authors who self publish do so into the void.

<comment><USER15> The best way to support an artist you really like is to purchase merchandise, buy their music on Bandcamp, and see them live. For bands I really like, I buy the album on Bandcamp and then just listen to it on Spotify for convenience.

Besides, who doesn't love a good tee with your favorite band's lyrics on it?

<comment><USER14> I love buying tour t-shirts. I have amassed a large collection I hope to pass onto my kids at some point.

What I wouldn't give for some of the shirts I've seen my dad wearing in old photos of shows he went to. Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Plus I think asking listeners to listen to a full-length album don't make > sense in our attention-starved world. Asking listeners to listen to a single > song might just be a more realistic ask.

This is why I love listening to albums, because it flies in the face of throwaway/hyper-consumable media. Spotify, with its algorithmic playlists and singles focus, bolsters the throwaway consumption of music, but many artists also enjoy the long tail of revenue from album streams. If an artist creates an album with lasting appeal, they can smooth out the initial spike of physical sales with a long slow burn of revenue.

<comment><USER17> > with its algorithmic playlists and singles focus, bolsters the throwaway > consumption of music

What is "throwaway" music?

Personally, I tend to listen to genre-focused playlists I curate over time, and often in "radio" mode (so algorithms select similar music). When I find something new I really like, I add it to my playlist. Rarely do I find anything I actively dislike, but there's lots of stuff that I don't add but I don't mind either way if I hear again -- is that "throwaway"?

I think like anyone, I have a gradient of music preferences -- ranging from "can't stand" to "love". The middle ground is huge -- there's a _lot_ of good music out there, I simply don't have the capacity to "love" everything.

<comment><USER16> By throwaway I mean music that is extremely popular for a short moment in time (measured in months or weeks) and then becomes irrelevant as the next hit single comes out. I don't mean throwaway in terms of musical preference or taste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author is the same guy behind a $40k/month website builder review site. Big fan of his interview on Indie Hackers[1]

It's interesting to see him use SEO to describe algorithmic playlists. He would know, SEO is a huge part of his other business.

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/besting-the- competiti...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/besting-the-competition- and-building-a-40k-mo-review-site-f2bf1023f0)

<comment><USER19> There is even a shout out to HN in that article!

> I worried that readers would not trust this arrangement [affiliate links] > when I first started. But in practice it hasn't been a big issue. In fact, > readers ask me which links to click to ensure I get my commission. Honestly, > negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community > like Hacker News than it is from my readers.

<comment><USER20> That's a backhanded shout out if I have ever seen one.

... although I think it's probably accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I made a surprising find on Spotify not so long ago. One of their curated playlists - Techno Bunker [1] - algorithmically mixes from track to track, like a fairly competent DJ, and it does it even if you turn on shuffle. There may be others, but this is the only one I've found so far.

[1] [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6J5NfMJS675?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6J5NfMJS675?si=x_R4CbLXTrawmOShhzv_ow)

<comment><USER22> This is amazing, and I'm surprised this isn't noted down in the playlist description, nor anywhere else. It doesn't simply crossfade, it matches beats up much like a human would. This is insanely neat and such a nice find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> His comment on albums is interesting. It seems like he's given up on getting press, so albums don't make as much sense for him, but music critics are still the major driver for who gets listens in the non-pop music space. I don't see albums disappearing for that reason. I also enjoy listening to albums much more than singles, but that could just be me.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. I think his view comes more from the pop section of the market. Everything I consume and discover is still album-based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can imagine my astonishment when someone I know, a deejay and producer, came to me several months ago, at a club, with the very unexpected answer of 'how to run more Ubuntus on one box' ?!

Because... he wanted to have them subscribe and then click and play a list of alter-ego-monikers of himself, who release to unknown probably ghost-audience in Spotify

Making money in the way - without releases, without gigs.

And it is exactly 600-800$ per month he cited as the amount he made from one alter ego with several albums.

Somehow I'm sure there are others out there doing the same.

I'm leaving for folks here to imagine and comment how relevant would soon Spotify be for indie artists that will be competing with such Spotify click- botnets...

<comment><USER26> Bots have been an issue on Spotify for years. Spotify is pretty good at sorting them and removing fake streams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> With great power comes great responsibility, Spotify Data Scientists.

If discover weekly is truly that impactful a decision made by a model to include or not include a song could determine whether or not an indie artist can pay their rent that month.

Not quite iris dataset classification.

Edit: I should clarify that I only mean that this impact raises interesting questions and DSs (I am one) should pay close attention to the impact of their models.

<comment><USER28> It's not Spotify's responsibility to make sure indie artists are getting paid.

<comment><USER29> Well, it is definitely in Spotify's interest to keep as many quality artists as possible on Spotify, and that probably involves paying them.

<comment><USER30> I heard a rumour once that artists did not actually need to eat.

/s

<comment><USER28> Imagine saying this about a CD store a few decades ago. It would be ridiculous to say that a store was responsible for promoting indie artist CDs. If you want to get listens or sales make good music, it's pretty simple.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, money earned from streaming vs money earned from CD sales (especially a few decades ago) is completely incomparable.

If selling CDs through a store could earn you (using simple but realistic numbers here) $100k per year, and Spotify streams to the same audience size earn $1k per year, it's not unreasonable to expect that Spotify should add a hell of a lot more value on its end, perhaps in the form of driving listeners to artists — especially if Spotify possesses the means to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Speaking of carving out a niche on Spotify.... If your kid ever asks Siri/Google/Alexa to play the poop song a few cents of royalties goes to Matt Farley aka the Toiletbowl Cleaners. It's quite fascinating [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Farley](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Farley)

> According to Farley, one song that contains only the word "poop" repeated > over and over generates $500 in streaming revenue every month as of 2018, > likely in part because children request it from Alexa or other > devices.[4][5][6] Farley earned over $23,000 in 2013 from his song catalog.

</comment><comment><USER32> I feel Spotify makes it hard to listen to albums. I can queue up a song to play and it'll then get back to my playlist, but if I play and album eventually it'll reach the end and quit playing anything. Then I will have to stop what I'm doing and find something else to play.

I feel the UX could be improved and it might change listening habits similar to Discover Weekly

<comment><USER33> What do you want to happen after an album is finished?

<comment><USER34> Spotify needs better queuing strategies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Albums are big statements. Some of the most iconic releases in popular music > have been albums.

On the contrary, most of the greatest contemporary hits was singles. I can't remember really bold and moving statements in the form of albums, except maybe "The Wall". Classic composers never wrote albums,their large forms were symfonies and opera - whole pieces of separate parts.

Albums was invented by vinyl/CD music industry and will die with them.

<comment><USER36> > Classic composers never wrote albums,their large forms were symfonies and > opera - whole pieces of separate parts.

Albums, in the idealized form (there are, of course, lots that are collections of basically disconnected singles, too) are "whole pieces of separate parts", like symphonies or operas (or, I suppose, soundtracks.) People who lament losing albums aren't talking about package-of-convenience collections of singles, they are talking about pieces where, while the individual songs may stand alone the same way each planetary theme in Holst's _The Planets_ can, but they also form a single thematic work with an arc and movement across the whole body.

<comment><USER35> The Planets is a later piece (beginning of XX) and may be inspired by sheet music industry, which worked the same way and has same limitations - it was too expensive to manufacture and distribute "singles". I beleive the term "album" itself was inherited from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was pretty sure I had read this before on HN but it turns out it was the previous blog post, when he was only earning $400/month:

[https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/spotify-and-discover- wee...](https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/spotify-and-discover-weekly)

Still it would be better if the posts had a date.

I have 14 "weekly" listeners on Spotify but I only started a month ago. Still, I'm short of ideas on how to grow this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting blog post.

Off-topic question: When a song gets covered/made into an instrumental version by a 3rd party on Spotify , who gets paid for the plays?

The original recording artist or the 3rd party?

<comment><USER39> There are actually two copyrights and sets of rights in play here: one (the © copyright[1] and the "publishing rights") is on the song itself, in the abstract - the melody and lyrics. This is owned by the songwriter, and usually assigned to a publishing company.

The other, (the ℗ copyright[2], and "master rights") is on a specific recording of the song, and is usually owned by a record label.

The cover generates royalties for both the recording artist (or their record label) that recorded the cover through the ℗ copyright and the songwriter that wrote the song (or their publishing company) through the © copyright.

1: [https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formpa.pdf](https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formpa.pdf)

2: [https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formsr.pdf](https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formsr.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So in effect, the Spotify Discover Weekly Algorithm has become the 'last dj'

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00sy6_jv7Lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00sy6_jv7Lc)

</comment><comment><USER41> His Spotify Artist page lists ~70k plays a month, so he's just slightly over $1/1000 plays.

I suppose this is peanuts compared to what a radio play is, etc. but strikes me as fairly reasonable?

<comment><USER42> Radios don't have to pay anything unless they're an internet stream

<comment><USER41> I believe that over the air and internet streams are paid out separately.

Over the air looks to play 12c to 6c per play [https://www.quora.com/How-much- are-music-artists-paid-in-Roy...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-are-music- artists-paid-in-Royalties-for-each-song-played-on-radio)

<comment><USER43> US terrestrial radio only pays out to the composition side (whoever wrote the song) and not to the master side (who performed and recorded the song). Internet and satellite radio pay both sides. Non-interactive radio uses rates set by statute across the board; this is all separate from on-demand streaming like Spotify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > In my experience, major label artists have an easier time getting on > editorial playlists. ... But major label artists also only typically get 13% > - 20% of streaming royalties… so there are still plenty of reasons to stay > indie!

This is just like the tradeoff startups make when they choose to take VC.

Will giving up 80% of the company lead to the company being at least five times bigger? If so, then it seems worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER45> Very interesting read. I have never made any music but I am compelled by the idea of starting some time in the future. I have always thought that releasing music on Spotify was nothing that could ever bring in any revenue but it seems I was a bit wrong on that.

Really nice blogpost!

</comment><comment><USER46> this music is fantastic! Congrats on the success.

<comment><USER47> I just listened to "Lullabies For Little Crimes" and "Circles", it was great! I'm really happy Spotify found a way to surface artists like this who deserve attention!

<comment><USER48> Agreed. After an initial listening, it's clear Steve's really talented. Which admittedly probably helps with the earning money part of the article.

It's kind of like that PG quote:

"What Customers Want - It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?"

(edit - formatting)

<comment><USER49> I can think of many restaurants with really good food that went out of business... that's a terrible analogy. Certainly a very helpful ingredient, though maybe not even the main one.

<comment><USER48> I agree that it's definitely not a foolproof analogy. But good food (like good music) is usually a table-stakes ingredient for a successful restaurant. Again of course again, there are exceptions there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It may be that causality on this works backwards, but I've also noticed that artists that perform concerts together (Spotify does keep track of concerts and who performs at them) tend to be very algorithmically associated. At the very least, I think it's a huge factor in "Related Artists".

</comment><comment><USER51> Does anyone still buy albums on iTunes? I haven't done that in a while, but I have to say I prefer to physically own the music I listen to often. If I can't get a physical media like CD or vinyl, then iTunes store was second best aside from illegal options.

<comment><USER52> I buy digital music from Bandcamp whenever possible. (Otherwise I buy it from Amazon MP3 or pirate it from Soulseek.) I like to build a collection and I can't stand the notion that some streaming company or copyright holder can just decide I'm not allowed to listen to an album anymore.

<comment><USER53> Make sure you backup your Bandcamp purchases. I know of at least two artists whose Bandcamp accounts were deleted. The artists claim that Bandcamp never notified them of any copyright claims or policy violations.

There is an album I purchased which no longer appears in my collection. I am only able to listen to it via mobile app because it's still cached on the device.

In the course of writing this response I realized that I had not contacted customer support so I now have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I love your songs :) Thank you!! <3 And you defnitly popped up on discover weekly :D. I usually star songs that I like there, and / or order them in my custom playlists.

<comment> steve-benjamins Thank you very much— that's awesome to hear!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> He's really talented as well, so that helps.

</comment><comment><USER56> When i first read this i tried to imagine what kind of music this would be. It sounded exactly what i thought it would.

</comment><comment><USER57> So, what's the best distributor to use to get your music on spotify? Is it cdbaby? tunecore? distrokid?

</comment><comment><USER58> Its cool that what looks like your hobby generates income. What do you do to pay the bills otherwise?

<comment><USER59> He's actually got a really cool story, I happened to recognize him from this Indie Hackers interview: [https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/site-builder- report-f...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/site-builder- report-f2bf1023f0)

<comment><USER58> Nice, good for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Note that this is all applies only to easy listening music suitable for the background (I checked the author's playlist at the end). Not something emotionally intense or overly energetic that demands your full attention. Spotify is optimizing for muzak, and artists who thrive in this ecosystem are muzak.

I could (and soon will) go deeper to prove my point, but Liz Pelly already did a lion-hearted job covering the problems with streaming platforms and Spotify specifically — they have a catastrophic effect on music.[1]

Spotify is the No. 1 enemy of music culture and artistic expression.

[1] [https://lizpelly.com/writing](https://lizpelly.com/writing)

<comment><USER61> I think this is a pretty valid point—in fact the effect of Spotify's approach to promoting music with this hegemonic quality has been documented pretty well, even resulting in something people call "The Spotify Sound":

[https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/06/how-the-spotify- soun...](https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/06/how-the-spotify-sound-is- changing-music.html)

Not to mention they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar a number of times, promoting their own fake artists "algorithmically", and it was such a good game that Sony got in on it as well.</comment></comment>


In a doomsday cyber attack scenario, answers are unsettling - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-cyber-attack17-2010feb17,0,305928.story

<comment><USER2> Oh no, a major cyber attack against the US, we'd better call in the experts :

> Michael Chertoff, who played the national security advisor in the exercise

A lawyer

> Stewart Baker played national cyber coordinator

Attorney

> Jamie Gorelick

Attorney

> Frances Townsend

former Counsel to the Attorney General

> Charles F. Wald played Defense secretary

a retired Air Force general

> John Negroponte

Profession Diplomat

> Stephen Friedman

Juris Doctor (i.e. Dr of Law)

> John E. McLaughlin

former Director of Central Intelligence & magician</comment>


HN Insights: Playing with Hacker News Data - <AUTHOR> https://fxenik.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/hacker-news-insights-playing-with-hacker-news-data/

<comment><USER2> You're using the Hacker News Search API from Algolia (which is great), but you'll probably want to read about the main HN API:

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news- api](http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422599)

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

<comment><USER3> The official API has no option for bulk requests. Otherwise I'd be using it too. :)

<comment><USER2> Would this help you with bulk requests?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss](https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please don't use sockpuppets to comment and upvote. (which is especially a shame as I'm a fan of this topic)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeap, sorry about that, a colleague from the office..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting "toy". I would use a "better" API documentation though

<comment><AUTHOR> I will probably write some better documentation if I see some interest in the API (though I understand that good documentation promotes interest). My main intention was to expose this experiment fast and build on it afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice one... Can I try it?

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice post and app</comment>


Gamma-ray bursts are a threat to life - <AUTHOR> http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/59937 <comment><USER2> Is the gamma-ray burst a spherical field, or is it a narrow, directed cone? If the latter, I wonder how the burst spreads/diffuses as it travels and what sort of equation governs the energy flux with respect to distance and initial conditions.

<comment><USER3> Great question! Since they're emanated in jets, the GRBs travel in a conical shape that spreads out as it travels. Check out page 19 of this paper, it has a histogram of the jet opening angle; [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2458.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2458.pdf)

Then you can figure out the flux from the area of a circle on a sphere, which is something like 2πr^2(1−cosθ) Where theta is the opening angle and r is the distance from point of emanation of the GRB.

<comment><USER4> Do you know if there is any bias to the orientation of the jets?

e.g. in a spiral galaxy, do they tend to align with the axis of rotation and so do less damage locally (spray out "up and down" from the galaxy)?

<comment><USER5> jets are randomly oriented with no preferred orientation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anybody know if a gamma-ray burst is preceded by an increased neutrino flux? I've heard that neutrinos will actually arrive at earth several hours before the light from a supernova. When the core of a star collapses, the light is physically prevented from coming outwards until the collapse is complete. Since the neutrinos move right through the gas, they are emitted as soon as the explosion occurs. Would detecting neutrinos be sufficient to give up ~4 hours of warning before a gamma-ray burst?

<comment><USER7> Neutrino detection in correlation with GRBs is problematic at best, because the events tend to be so far away and neutrino emissions are not expected to be focused into cones the same way EM and charged particles are, by virtue of not interacting with electromagnetic processes they'll be emitted in all directions. (There is some hypothetical neutrino/antineutrino emission within the GRB cone, but it's likely a weak signal and hasn't been measured in practice.)

We expect GRB neutrino flux to weaken far below the detection threshold by the time it gets here. Across these vast distances, neutrinos should also lag _behind_ photons because they're not technically as fast as light.

The other question is what would we do with that advance warning if it existed? We can't do anything about the fact that our atmosphere is going to absorb these gamma rays, and chances are the event wouldn't be energetic enough to kill us directly as we're walking around so there is no point in taking cover either. The damage to our ecosystem is going to be what kills us, not radiation exposure.

<comment><USER8> How useful a barrier is the earth itself for the initial burst? Would there be any benefit in arranging to be on the opposite side of it for the duration?

<comment><USER7> If it's an exceptionally strong burst, yes. If it's not (which is very likely), there is no need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this really an explanation for the Fermi paradox? Would a factor of 0.1 or even 0.01 really change the import of the Fermi paradox?

<comment><USER10> It is complicated by the fact that this implies intelligent civilizations have a very finite window of opportunity in order to communicate. 500 Myr is a pretty short on cosmic timescale; so the odds that:

1) our civilization comes to exist in some 500Myr window

2) another civilization comes to exist in another 500Myr window

3) Signals sent from that other civilization arrive at the right time for ours to observe them

are considerably lower than just the odds that two civilizations develop that are advanced enough to communicate with each other.

<comment><USER11> Those windows are pretty big. These aren't life-scouring cosmic rays, just mass extinctions. Complex life is still there, and can develop a civilization in a couple million years.

The reshuffling of life could even increase the chances of a civilization occurring. And a smart species has pretty good odds of surviving a mass extinction.

<comment><USER12> To survive a mass extinction from gamma-ray bursts, a smart species would build a self-sustaining subterranean city with 1 million humans in residence at any one time, perhaps rotating in and out on tours. I'm sure the Chinese will have one within 50 years even if no-one else does. And such subterranean cities are also likely how humans will be living on Mars for thousands of years before it's terraformed.

<comment><USER13> A subterranean city won't protect your from a GRB.

<comment><USER14> Why not, if the extinction mechanism is disruption of the ozone layer?

<comment><USER15> Well, my understanding could be wrong, but it seemed like the risk is to the ecosystem, not to human bodies directly. We personally don't need to be protected from the burst itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _The authors found previously that GRBs are more frequent in low-mass > galaxies such as the Small Magellanic Cloud with a small fraction of > elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This reduces the GRB hazard in > the Milky Way by a factor of 10 compared with the overall rate._

Smaller galaxies are deadlier, got it. Is this because GRBs tend to emanate from the galactic centre? And larger galaxies, having more stars further from the centre, have more "habitable" space? Or does it have to do with the higher frequency of heavy elements in large galaxies? If the latter, how do heavy element concentrations cause or moderate GRB activity?

<comment><USER17> They're not completely sure, but:

> There are at least two different types of progenitors (sources) of GRBs: one > responsible for the long-duration, soft-spectrum bursts and one (or possibly > more) responsible for short-duration, hard-spectrum bursts. The progenitors > of long GRBs are believed to be massive, low-metallicity stars exploding due > to the collapse of their cores. The progenitors of short GRBs are still > unknown but mergers of neutron stars is probably the most popular model as > of 2007.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma- ray_burst_progenitors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma- ray_burst_progenitors)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Greg Egan's fantastic _Disaspora_ begins with a GRB hitting earth. It isn't pretty. Hence the title. Best scifi I've ever read.

<comment><USER19> Actually the title is "Diaspora"... Nothing to do with disasters.

<comment><USER18> Admittedly I did make a typo there but the diaspora is motivated/necessitated by the disaster.

<comment><USER7> It's an interesting typo, also because disaster literally means "bad star".

<comment><USER20> And the etymology of dis-aster is astrological: a negative event caused by an unfavourable planetary configuration, by "bad stars".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the Universe is too dangerous for life to exist elsewhere, what are the chances that it's not too dangerous to exist here? Not very high.

Either there is an abundance of life out there, or we are most likely just experiencing a brief period of lucky safety in a tiny corner of the Universe.

<comment><USER21> Or life is rare and can be found here and there.

I don't get it why so many people either want life to be basically on every second star or not exist outside Earth at all.

Let's just accept that Fermi and all others hugely overestimated the chances and roll with it, will be far more productive imo.

So with the GRBs in mind, we can safely narrow livable space to outskirts of Milky Way and focus our search there.

<comment><USER22> I think it's generally because the balance point isn't a stable equillibrium. There's no force that encourages balance - it would have to be serendipitous. That's unlike the extremes, where a thriving interstellar civilization likely leads to mass colonization or that life is hard and typically goes extinct before then.

The time scales in these sorts of estimates are enormous, often tens or hundreds of times the span we needed to rise up. So if we even have an inkling to be expansionary (and we do), and aliens are like us in wanting to thrive comfortably (with enough space per unit being), then it's likely they too would have at least a mild drive to expand. Over mnay millions of years, even a very mild push out would fill a galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this the Great Filter?

<comment><USER24> Certainly seems like one of them, if this claim is true: "The Milky Way would therefore be among only 10% of all galaxies in the universe – the larger ones – that can sustain complex life in the long-term."

<comment><USER25> Actually, filters that select on galaxy scale are unlikely to be _the_ "great filter", because we don't seem to see any artificially generated signals coming from within our own galaxy. This particular filter does strike within our own galaxy though, just to a lesser degree.

So maybe.

<comment><USER26> It seems like it might exclude a lot of the galaxy, the central part, from hosting long lived complex life.

This would mean that complex life is more common along the outer rim, where we are. This in turn means that the median distance between complex living biospheres might be very large, further reducing the likelihood of visitation or receiving signals.

<comment><USER27> There's a reasonably broad consensus that life isn't possible in the central part of the galaxy due to _normal_ excessive radiation levels, even before considering extreme events.

Of course, galactic size being what it is, these two "central parts" could have boundaries differing by, oh, say, twenty thousand light years no problem.

I forget the details but I've seen arguments that too far away from the core is bad too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is a hypothesis that the Ordovician–Silurian mass extinction 450 million years ago was caused by a Gamma-ray burst!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_ext...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_extinction_events#Gamma_ray_burst_hypothesis)

It stripped the Earth's ozone and killed all the surface-dwelling organisms.

</comment><comment><USER29> How far along the Kardashev scale do we need to before we can build a shield?

<comment><USER22> At least Type I, but easily at Type II [0].

Here the trick is that a planet-scale barrier is needed, since we need to defend against tipping our ecosystem into chaos. If we're Type II, then we could theoretically just let the earth get whacked and restart using nearby systems to seed it. Kinda funny how a disaster stops being as terrible once you have backups:

Type 0: extinction

Type 1: mega-scale engineering effort to block GRB

Type 2: start over from scratch easily

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Theoretical_exa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Theoretical_examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's really hard to recommend one of my favourite novel this article reminds me of without spoiling the whole story :(.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if 500 million years is long enough for an intelligent civilization to come up with some sort of early warning system such as figuring out which stars might be turning dangerous. The article doesn't say how long the bursts last.

<comment><USER32> The burst lasts as long as it takes the stuff (radiation) get past the planet. That is only a few seconds. That radiation is travelling at light speed so given our present knowledge an early warning system is unthinkable. However for a star big enough to go supernova, expected life expectancy and spectral analysis can give you some estimate rounded to the 10s or 100s of millions of years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there any way to rapidly repopulate the ozone layer? Assume unlimited funding.

<comment><USER34> So, assuming we don't also all die of burns or cancer or natural disasters caused by the sudden influx of energy into the atmosphere immediately...

According to [http://www.epa.gov/ozonedesignations/faq.htm](http://www.epa.gov/ozonedesignations/faq.htm) , ground ozone tends to be produced by pollutants, i.e. we are ourselves producing this ozone, mostly by burning fossil fuels.

From [http://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov/science/basics.htm](http://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov/science/basics.htm) , we find that 90% of that is in the upper layer, so 10% is lower layers.

So we have actually already produced at least 10% of the ozone we'd need to repopulate the upper atmosphere, we're just producing it in the wrong place...

From reading these links, it sounds like ground-level ozone is often a seasonal effect, so it could well be that a lot of this ozone is being produced on a regular basis and then dissipates in some fashion.

So... my back of the envelope calculation would be that yes, if we had unlimited funding and a bit of time, we should be able to produce enough ozone just by burning organic matter. The key question would be, can we get that ozone in the right place?

With unlimited funding, and with a deliberate effort to burn fossil fuels at high altitudes, my gut feeling would be yes... I think the key question would be would we be able to do this in time, before we all burn to a crisp along with most of the plant and animal life on Earth...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Let's assume this happened tomorrow, and it took another 500 million for life to evolve to what we would consider intelligent. Would anything of our civilisation be left? What would be the best way to leave a record that we existed?

<comment><USER36> Just keep going business as usual. Given that we have plenty of trilobite fossils from the Cambrian, might even expect future paleontologists to find some fossilized skulls.

[http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Paleobiology/CambrianFossils.htm](http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Paleobiology/CambrianFossils.htm)

<comment><USER37> The only problem with this is that we might not have long enough for multi- cellular life to recover. While the red giant phase is a long way off, some scientists think that the carbon cycle could shut down as little as 500 million years from now, either due to oceanic evaporation or due to a failure in the weathering process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This makes a lot of assumptions about extra-terrestrial life. This article assumes that all "life" depends on a protective ozone layer and that it's similar to life on Earth.

<comment><USER39> The article doesn't assume that _all life_ depends on a protective ozone layer. The article states several times that life _like that on earth_ depends on a protective ozone layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As I read New Cosmogony by Stanislaw Lem, I cannot help but think that older civilizations (gods), hated organic life very much and tried to erase it everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER41> I know I may get dinged for this observation, but it is something that really bothers me about certain types of forecasts...be it weather or things of this sort...

That would be the "50% forecast", which, when examined with a bit of thought, really is saying "well, maybe it did, and maybe it didn't...we don't really know but hey, doesn't 50% sound scientific!"

For sure, GRBs are scary, potentially life-wiping events, but, really..don't we deserve better than a coin-flip?

<comment><USER3> It's just statistics. You look at how often we see GRBs, how long they last (on average), how intense they are (on average) then do a big time integral and figure out the odds of a big one hitting earth over such and such a period of time. There is no better than a coin-flip, the coin flip _is_ the odds of it having happened (by the author's approximations). If I can help explain any further please let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does this mean we could look for extraterrestrial civilizations by looking for signs of planet-scale radiation shielding?

</comment><comment><USER43> the font on this site is a threat to life

</comment><comment><USER44> The article lost a lot of credibility for me with it's, "thousands of millions." Apparently they think their readers are really dumb.

</comment><comment><USER45> Cern Courrier are a threat to eyes.

</comment><comment><USER46> can someone comment on the legitimacy/reliablity of the "Cern Courier". The article seems legit (no tin foil hats), but that font. woof, it makes it look super amateur.

<comment><USER47> >Produced for CERN by IOP Publishing

>©COPYRIGHT CERN 2007 for the content of CERN Courier and images and logos identifying CERN.

>©COPYRIGHT IOP 2007 for the design, format and typography of the CERN Courier Web Pages, ...

The author appears to be an astrophysicist, and you may know CERN from such products as the Large Hadron Collider and the World Wide Web.</comment></comment>