Facebook could become drag-queen free tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/facebook-is-deleting-the-accounts-of-drag-performers

<comment><USER2> Already outdated: the drag queens won, according to the linked Guardian article.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/01/victory- dr...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/01/victory-drag-queens- facebook-apologises-real-name-policy)</comment>


Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/ <comment><USER2> Rather than bringing out the old monolithic vs microkernel chestnut, let's hear some realistic ideas on how to cut down the bloat.

Does anyone know how much redundant code is in Linux right now? Would finding, isolating, generalising and merging it be a good way to start? I know of examples of this happening, e.g. libata taking over a lot of the old 'ide' drivers; the many attempts at unifying the various WLAN subsystems and drivers.

<comment><USER3> Whilst libata and the unifying of the WLAN may make the code easier to maintain, it will only save a tiny amount of memory and in the short term, just like any new code, is going to increase the number of bugs.

It sounds like the problem is that everyone is writing new features that probably not many people actually _need_ (since they did fine with out it before - I'm not talking about drivers here) but it's slowing the whole kernel down and people need to go back and optimise that stuff.

<comment><USER4> That's the problem though isn't it, you start off light weight and you continue working, adding more and more new and useful features until you have it all but now have a giant slow bloated system.

<comment><USER5> This makes me think of Apple's Snow Leopard. It was remarkable that they took an entire release just to shape up the code. Is something like that feasible for Linux with the open source model? Do you just have Linus tell everyone "I will only accept commits that improve performance and reduce memory footprint in this release?"

<comment><USER3> The difference is that Apple has a very specific idea what their kernel is for, where as Linux is pushed and pulled in different directions by people who want something very large scale or secure or embedded or lots of archetictures and so on.

Also you should put it in perspective, the Linux kernel itself is really not so bloated, that any normal user would notice, like they do with Gnome/KDE/Firefox's bloat. Even with that type of bloat, Linux distros still run well on a 1GB (probably less) and an old P4 CPU which people don't say about recent releases of OSX or Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it just shows that open source isn't immune to the same kinds of problems that plague commercial software. As the market for a product expands, so too do the features people require for the software to work within an ecosystem of other software. More hardware to support requires more code, bigger systems.

<comment><USER7> My operating system is open source but I bought it. What kind of software is it?

<comment><USER8> scamware? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it really possible to implement the full functionality of the Linux kernel in such a way that it would be significantly smaller? Obviously, there's bloat from bad code, but would a redesign of the kernel be seriously useful, or just a waste of time? As a (possible) comparison, is NetBSD's kernel any smaller?

It'd be nice to know if Linus had anything to say to that effect - it might lead to a more productive discussion than waxing lyrical about the wonders of microkernels.

<comment><USER10> > Torvalds answered. "Acceptable and avoidable are two different things. It's > unacceptable but it's also probably unavoidable."

I think that's more or less where things are right now. You can't have tons of features without paying a price. They do a pretty good job of balancing things, but maybe someone will come along and improve things in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's easy to make a tiny super efficient kernel. Just don't support stuff. WLAN? Who needs it? SMP? That'll never catch on. Take it out. Device driver support? Bleh. Let hardware makers post the source code on their websites and users can download and compile the code. No need to include it in the kernel source tree. And who uses anything but x86 anymore? Get all that PPC, ARM, SPARC non-sense out of there too. If we all work together we can make Linux completely useless but hey, it'll be tiny and efficient. We can sit around and congratulate each other for being such elegant programmers. We won't have to worry about those pesky end users anymore either.

<comment><USER12> Device drivers and processor architectures might make the source tree big, but they don't make the kernel slower or its memory footprint larger. I believe you can even still compile the kernel without SMP support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why he mentioned this.

I understand software bloat to describe the situation that arises when _unnecessary_ features added to a program increases it's size and/or decreases performance, without providing significant user benefits.

In the article, Linus says "Acceptable and avoidable are two different things. It's unacceptable but it's also probably unavoidable."

If it's unavoidable, then the features that were added aren't really bloat, because it implies that these features are _necessary_ , _and_ that they provide significant benefits. Necessary additions that provide significant benefits could be anything from security features to IO.

IMO, Linus should either state what he thinks should be removed from the kernel, or he shouldn't even bother mentioning it at all.

If on the other hand he's lamenting the fact that there's a cost associated with adding features (necessary or unnecessary), well then I think most people understand that you can't have your cake and eat it, so even from that perspective his point seems redundant.

</comment><comment><USER14> How about "Linux Lite"? I know, it's probably a silly idea, but is it possible that the kernel team could provide a "core" kernel, that runs on most modern hardware, most popular filesystems, etc. Shoot for some arbitrary support level (80% of systems). Also provide a "large" kernel with everything. Distro maintainers can use either.

Actually, that brings up another point. Who, besides Slackware maybe, uses a stock kernel? Don't most distros customize it anyway? Am I being unfair in saying most Linux users don't really encounter the kernel at all?

</comment><comment><USER15> Roughly 11.5 million lines of code for the kernel.. That's way more than I would have imagined.. 5k lines a day are added and 2k are modified. ([http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT- Workplace/68f20d4f-8ab9-40...](http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT- Workplace/68f20d4f-8ab9-402c-be30-df47e9812836.html))

IMHO it doesn't really jive with UNIX principles to have such a monolithic kernel.

<comment><USER16> It's monolithic but _modular_ 11.5M LOC for every platform it runs on, not to mention drivers for the devices it supports, and all the modules for other functionality, pluggable file-systems and networking stacks. Now throw in code for backward compatibility going further back at least to 2.4 and you have 11.5M lines.

In reality, the core Linux kernel is just the stuff that compiles to vmlinux. You could read it all in a few weeks and understand it.

<comment><USER7> thats right, bloat

filesystems dont belong in the kernel.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, there is the FUSE project: filesystem in a userspace. There are lots of interesting filesystems using this e.g. NTFS-3G, sshfs or ferrisfuse. These projects are valuable and most of them doesn't belong to the kernel as they use userspace libraries for network protocols and xml parsing.

Unfortunately native disk file systems like NTFS-3G is lot more slower than their native counterparts.

<comment><USER9> &totse users ran tests of zfs-fuse back in the day and found that it was actually noticeably slower than native ext3. From that, I'm inclined to argue the opposite: filesystems should almost definitely be in-kernel. Granted, their tests were on Linux, not on a modern microkernel.

<comment><USER7> Linux, fuse

there's your problem. it's not designed for it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Who should decide if a piece of code to run in kernel space or user space?

        user/developer/management/customer/congress/judiciary

</comment><comment><USER19> Now micro kernel doesn't seem that stupid after all?

<comment><USER20> Despite the snarky tone of your comment, you hint at an interesting point:

Unix is NOT the be-all, end-all definitive operating system. Linux is NOT even the be-all, end-all Unix (or Unix-like). There is A LOT of research left to be done in operating systems / kernels and many many years of evolution to come.

It's a shame that it is SO HARD to build the ecosystem required to launch a kernel. New ideas are hard pressed to gain traction.

<comment><USER21> You realize that OS X uses a micro-kernel, right? And that GNU Hurd is a micro-kernel too?

<comment><USER22> "Mac OS X is sort of microkernelish. Inside, it consists of Berkeley UNIX riding on top of a modified version of the Mach microkernel. Since all of it runs in kernel mode (to get that little extra bit of performance) it is not a true microkernel, but Carnegie Mellon University had Berkeley UNIX running on Mach in user space years ago, so it probably could be done again, albeit with a small amount of performance loss, as with L4Linux. Work is underway to port the Apple BSD code (Darwin) to L4 to make it a true microkernel system." - Andy Tanenbaum

reference - <http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/>

<comment><USER21> I realize that. On the same note, GNU HURD isn't technically a 'micro-kernel' because GNU Mach is the micro-kernel, but my point was that 'micro-kernel' instead of 'monolithic kernal' isn't some unexplored territory that only exists as theory in CompSci textbooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> it's a monolithic kernel what did he expect.

Remember the Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate?

I wonder what Linus thinks about it now.

btw, here they are together.

<http://lwn.net/images/conf/lca2007/lt-ast.jpg>

<comment> Tuna-Fish I'm sorry, but do you have any idea what you are talking about?

How the kernel is organized has no meaning on how bloated it is. A microkernel can be just as bloated, in it the bloat is just not in the kernel itself, but in the processes providing the services a monolithic kernel would provide. If anything, a microkernel is always more bloated because of the extra code needed to do all the process sync.

Linux being a microkernel would make the situation _worse_.

(What we need to do is to start spending more time on cutting features.)

<comment><USER24> Does bloat mean too many features? In that case I'd say those features are there because someone needs them. They don't all have to be loaded. In a monolithic kernel that has modules, load the ones you need. In a microkernel, load and unload as needed on the go.

Then there is the support issue. In Linux, all the modules must be maintained by the kernel team. This may constitute bloat as the team may have an unnecessary amount of code to maintain. Some modules may only be used by a few people. The issue isn't the features, but rather Linus's philosophy.

From his posts, it seems he like to keep changing kernel APIs as he sees fit. If you have many modules, this creates problems. Without a strict API, you will frequently break modules and thus create a lot of maintenance work. Fixed APIs are both very important and very good for large scale collaboration. Without standards like POSIX or the Windows APIs, we wouldn't be where we are today.

The second aspect to this is security. Say you built a very stable API and let others make modules as they need them. In a monolithic model, to maintain security you must audit every module. Thus for Linux to stay secure, the kernel team would need to either declare many less used modules as "tainting the kernel" or audit them all: a lot of work. In a microkernel model, the kernel team, so long as they designed it right, can let users build modules without audit.

Saying something has too much bloat is ambiguous to the point of being useless. Many people use that term simply as meaning slow, or a lot of code, or even poorly designed code. It's always better to describe things precisely. If it has too many features, say so. If it has bad design, then state that.

<comment><USER12> _Saying something has too much bloat is ambiguous to the point of being useless. Many people use that term simply as meaning slow, or a lot of code, or even poorly designed code. It's always better to describe things precisely._

The interviewer asked Linus about benchmarks that show the kernel getting slower and slower each year. Linus acknowledged that the kernel is in fact slowing down. I don't think they would be worrying about badly configured kernels, or kernels with unnecessary modules loaded. I don't know what features Linus is talking about that make a properly configured Linux kernel bigger and slower than it was ten years ago. Nor do I see any explanation or examples cited on this page. I wish someone who understands would give some examples of the feature creep they're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Linus is getting old.

</comment><comment><USER25> Out of context link bait drivel.

<comment><USER26> How so?

> "Uh, I'd love to say we have a plan," Torvalds replied to applause and > chuckles from the audience. "I mean, sometimes it's a bit sad that we are > definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I > envisioned 15 years ago...The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache > footprint is scary.

<comment><USER27> Does anyone know what icache is? instruction cache?

<comment><USER28> Yes: instruction cache. Big programs are slow programs.

<comment><USER16> I think joechung is more right here, icache in this instance means _inode cache_ ; the CPU D-Cache and I-Cache (not to be confused the file-system related dcache and icache for dentry cache and inode cache respectively) are of fixed size and you couldn't have "bloat" there. The FS _inode_ cache is more likely to be bloated given the larger upper limit for disk storage compared to CPU cache.

<comment><USER29> No way, for three reasons. (1) Saying "icache" and meaning anything other than "instruction cache" would be an obvious recipe for confusion, and Linus is not stupid. (2) It makes excellent sense with the obvious "instruction cache" meaning: "our icache footprint" means "the number of instruction cache lines occupied by kernel code". (3) It makes no sense with the "inode cache" meaning: how could a growth in the amount of code in the kernel possibly have anything much to do with the size or the occupancy of the inode cache?

<comment><USER16> And you would be absolutely right. Thanks for the good analysis :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bash Configurations Demystified for Linux and OS X - <AUTHOR> http://dghubble.org/post/.bashprofile-.profile-and-.bashrc-conventions

<comment><USER2> Also check out:

[http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt- HOWTO....](http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Moved to [http://dghubble.com/.bashprofile-.profile-and-.bashrc- conven...](http://dghubble.com/.bashprofile-.profile-and-.bashrc- conventions.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was immensely helpful. Thank you for posting this.

<comment><AUTHOR> NP, I'm glad you found it useful. :)</comment></comment>


I've given up on Windows Phone: Microsoft's mobile OS is being left behind - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/11/7377021/ive-given-up-on-windows-phone

<comment><USER2> I am reminded of how Linux folks would moan about exactly the same thing: "Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but it just doesn't have the features that NT has..." or whatever. It was apparently imperative to start with "Don't get me wrong, I love Linux". The writing in this article is exactly like the old, "Don't get me wrong, I love Linux" articles where the author would reveal that he or she actually uses Windows most of the time.

What can we make of this? Linux seems to have hit its stride, you hardly read articles with that tone any more. Will Windows Phone come back from near death? Or were all the "Don't get me wrong" people just Microsoft shills like a lot of people suspected? Or is this just a common journalism trope?

</comment><comment><USER3> Essentially .... "I'm the resident Microsoft expert here at The Verge, and for years I've switched between Android, iOS, and Windows Phone to check out new apps and how each platform is progressing, but it's now clear Windows Phone is being left behind."

</comment><comment><USER4> Who cares about Microsoft mobile OS? App developers don't. I develop only for android and iOS. Microsoft is not even on our radar, Microsoft just doesn't matter in this space.</comment>


The Fukushima accident was preventable - <AUTHOR> http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2053/20140379 <comment><USER2> Of course it was, as were things like the explosions afterward.

However, _management_ always gets in the way--either up front, because there is profit pressure, or on the backend, because there is profit and/or political pressure. This paper covers the up front failures.

However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core ( _NOT_ one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen) rather than letting the core melt into the bottom of the containment area _which was designed to deactivate and contain the core_ , were also rampant.

This was just like Three Mile Island. If people had _sat on their hands, done nothing, and let the engineered last-chance safety systems do their job_ , things would have turned out better.

Reactors should not be for-profit. Rickover showed us all how to do it right, but we lack the stomach.

Here is his quote about real reactors: "On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

<comment><USER3> The point that it's _organisational_ and _management_ issues which so frequently seem to be behind major disasters -- four of the larger nuclear accidents (Fukushima, the earlier Japanese criticality incident at Tokaimura, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island), as well as numerous other large-scale industrial accidents, of which energy systems play a large role: the BP Gulf Oil spill, Exxon Valdez, Banqiao Dam (China, 1975), recent South Carolina flooding and dam bursts, the Union Carbide Bhopal, India, disaster.

 _You cannot engineer out human nature._ This isn't a root cause for which there are technical solutions.

I _hugely_ recommend Charles Perrow's _Normal Accidents_ and _The Next Catastrophe_. As well as other writings.

Note that Rickover also wished we'd never gone to the nuclear option. He defended his choice for lack of options, but would have preferred to see all plants mothballed.

"Paper Reactors", which you quote in part, is _excellent_.

<comment><USER4> > You cannot engineer out human nature. This isn't a root cause for which > there are technical solutions.

Have you heard the saying: In the future they will be staffed by a man and a dog. The man to feed the dog, and the dog to bark at the man in case he tries to touch anything.

<comment><USER3> I have. Frequently when making comments similar to those above ;-)

(The dog is doing his job....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen).

It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that people suffer from hindsight bias, and believe that this specific case should have been foreseen. It is not clear what the cost of building everything to sustain all similar low-probability events would be, and whether doing so would be statistical murder.

<comment><USER6> If you read closely you see that the accident was so bad because of one simple problem.

If a nuclear reactor has a cooling failure, the fuel will eventually heat up and then melt down. To prevent this you have to keep water circulating around the reactor core. It doesn't take a huge amount of energy to do this, but it does take some. If the power goes out at the station and they can't get emergency power, the outcome is very bad.

If they had spent maybe $300k or so they could have moved the emergency generators a little bit higher up. With that investment there still would have been serious damage to the plant but only a very limited release of radioactivity because the fuel integrity and the coarse integrity of the plant would have been protected.

<comment><USER7> _If a nuclear reactor has a cooling failure, the fuel will eventually heat up and then melt down. To prevent this you have to keep water circulating around the reactor core._

This is the one simple problem.

There are now reactor designs that are passively fail-safe. So that even if all the pumps and everything stop, it will still not result in an explosion or otherwise serious release of radioactive material.

I don't know how much those sorts of designs were developed at the time Fukushima was commissioned though.

<comment><USER8> BWR reactors like Fukushima are all passive-safe in at least one way, since water moderates the neurons coming off the critical materials, slowing them enough to continue the reaction. If the water boils away, sure the thing will almost certainly melt but there won't be a runaway prompt-critical event like Chernobyl, and if the concrete "bathtub" around the core holds, there won't be much radioactive material released into the groundwater either.

From what I heard the concern at Fukushima was that the earthquake had compromised the integrity of the containment structure, so allowing the core to melt down was judged as too risky (I'm not sure if I agree with that decision, but of course my opinion in hindsight is not relevant). In fact the majority of radioactive material that was released in the incident might have leaked from the spent fuel storage, which was also damaged in the earthquake:

[http://web.mit.edu/nse/pdf/news/2011/Fukushima_Lessons_Learn...](http://web.mit.edu/nse/pdf/news/2011/Fukushima_Lessons_Learned_MIT- NSP-025.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't every accident preventable in hindsight since you know exactly what the failure mode was?

If they'd built the generators on a hillside that was washed away in a mudslide the article would read "Critical backup generators were built on unstable hillside despite warnings from scientists".

<comment><USER10> The idea with building safe systems is not to imagine what could cause subsystem X to fail, but to figure out how to cope when subsystem X fails.

The most obvious design failure at Fukushima was not "how big a tsunami we should protect against" but not asking "how will we cope when the seawall fails".

If the critical backup generators had been in a bunker designed to protect them from a seawall breach, the disaster would not have happened.

<comment><USER11> Although it's been a very long time since I did engineering that could actually kill people, this idea that you focus on what can go wrong and how you mitigate it has stuck with me and has proved useful in lots of things.

Having said that, the next questions are usually: what is the likelihood of it going wrong and what is the cost of mitigation? I don't envy the people making those decisions on something like a nuclear reactor, with or without hindsight.

<comment><USER10> At some point, you do assign a probability of systemic failure threshold, as nothing is perfect.

The idea behind orthogonal backups, however, is that since they are independent, very high reliability can be achieved with low reliable components. For example, if you've got a main with 90% reliability, and a backup with 90% reliability, the combined reliability is 99%. This can be a lot easier and less expensive to achieve than making one component 99%.

The backup generators could have a cheap extra seawall built around them, or could have simply raised them up on a 10 foot platform, or built them with snorkels like a jeep designed to cross streams.

Building a heftier main seawall would have been an order of magnitude or two more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a long read, here's a link to an article that summarizes some of the study's findings.

[http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was- preventable...](http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable- new-study-finds/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's something about the real world: Things break. Shit happens. We can sit on a chair now and look back and point out all the things that could've been done better, and I honestly don't see the value in it.

When the World Trade Center was built, it was designed to withstand the impact of a common airplane at the time and remain structurally sound. The engineers didn't envision a 757 being flown into them, and so they fell. Does that mean they were engineered poorly too? 9/11 would've been prevented if we built additional structure around the WTC each year to accommodate newer, larger, heavier aircraft, but at what point do you rule safety cost as too high to be justified?

On the same note, Fukushima survived a storm massively larger than it was ever meant to. It still failed, but it did so in a way that prevented any direct deaths. As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened.

How about we just agree to say we got lucky this time and do better in the future?

<comment><USER13> > As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be > among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually > happened.

There are hundreds of square miles still in the exclusion zone and some 80,000 people haven't been able to return to their homes.. I'd say a nuclear meltdown that displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars to clean up qualifies as a 'disaster'.

<comment><USER14> Eh. A traditional disaster kills people.

<comment><USER15> Eh?

I don't think "a traditional disaster" means what you think it means.

The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed about 420 homes and caused ~$1 billion in damages but no one died. The Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes but again left no fatalities. Tropical Storm Fay hit Texas and nine counties in Texas were declared disaster areas, but again, no fatalities.

<comment><USER12> But that's just stuff, the majority of which was probably insured and even if it wasn't, all of it can (theoretically) be replaced. People can't.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand your response.

When was there ever a tradition where something had to have deaths in order for it to be called a "disaster"? I gave three counter-examples of events which were labeled disasters but which had no fatalities.

While what you said is (theoretically) true, all evidence is that it's appropriate to use the term "disaster" for something which 'displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars', and there's no need to distinguish between 'traditional' and 'modern' definitions.

How does your comment fit into that context?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In hindsight all accidents are preventable.

<comment><USER17> > The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and > standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and > had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological > and hydrodynamic findings.

I think the main point is that the damage wasn't caused by a freak storm that no one could have predicted. It was caused by a series of mistakes that we shouldn't have made with the knowledge we had at the time.

<comment><USER6> The report says that for less than $1M they could have raised the emergency generators up higher in which case they could have maintained reactor cooling and had reactor damage but no major harm. Also there was evidence of similar events in the inhabited past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18>
      > causing the third most severe accident in an NPP ever.

I thought this was the second most severe nuclear power plant accident. Obviously Chernobyl is the first, so what is the second according to this article?

<comment><USER19> Hmm. According to the International Nuclear Event Scale, there have only been 2 events at the most severe level (7): Chernobyl and Fukushima. There was 1 event at a rating of 6, which was a Soviet explosion in 1957. There was also the Three Mile Island accident, which cost a lot of money to clean up (~$1 billion) but I don't think the severity was anywhere near Fukushima.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale#Details)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> With that Mk 1 reactor design, lose cooling water for 4-6 hours and you get a meltdown. The containment vessel is too small for the pressures in a worst- case accident. It's just not a good design.

Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania has the same Mk 1 design, and that's been a worry for years. They now have extra backup power systems of different types and multiple cooling water sources for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER21> Aren't all accidents preventable?

</comment><comment><USER22> >> The 11 March 2011 tsunami was probably the fourth largest in the past 100 years and killed over 15 000 people.

For me it still sounds to be a moronic idea to buid a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Or even to live there.

</comment><comment><USER23> Could have all been avoided. Japan's power consists of Fiefdoms and no cooperation from adjacent working power sources at that time.

They could have run an "extension cord" and saved themselves from the entire mess.

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course they _have_ to say that. If they admitted how dangerous nuclear power is, the bribes required to force the taxpayer to build new plants would be simply _enormous_.

<comment><USER25> Literally no one died of radiation due to Fukushima.

<comment><USER26> As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.

<comment><USER25> Yeah... the number of those deaths is estimated at somewhere between 0 and 100. Which is to say such a tiny number that it won't be empirically distinguishable from normal fluctuations.

<comment><USER26> I said _diseases_ , not deaths. Cancer isn't always fatal, but they impact the quality of life for the sufferers as well as putting an economic burden on the healthcare system.

<comment><USER27> Ok. That's still only a handful of people in the worst cases.

Now what is the cost to the healthcare system of the coal power generation that replaced the nuclear power stations that were shutdown after the tsunami?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Really this is silly. People who advocate nuclear power do not understand the difference between "risk" and "uncertainty".

"Risk" is where the probabilities of occurrence can be estimated and the consequences predicted.

"Uncertainty" is the set of other things going wrong.

Nuclear risk can be managed: We can contain a nuclear pile, we can design piping to withstand wear and sopply redundancy.

But with a nuclear power station if some thing unforeseen happens to the containment vessel the consequences are ruin and effectively unbounded catastrophe.

A coal burning stations are dirty polluting monstrosities (at their best) but it is all risk.

Not that I am advocating coal, I am not! But nuclear is no replacement. We are much better to do without energy than build nuclear power plants.

But the main incentive for nuclear power is making materials for bombs, IMO</comment>


Inside the Whispery, Wonderful Golden Age of ASMR - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/2018/09/07/asmr-whisper-videos-tingles-craig-richard-whisperlodge-1096749.html <comment><USER2> It's funny, I was thinking the exact opposite just yesterday, that the Golden Age of ASMR had passed and that we're in some sort of Dark Ages. Most content I see now in YouTube is unimaginative, low-quality attention whoring. Young people (usually women, but not always) just doing random shit on camera with a clickbait title and calling it ASMR.

Maybe I'm grumpy and crotchety, or maybe it's because I have very specific triggers, but I almost never enjoy 'intentional' ASMR and I especially dislike some of the more commercialized or sexualized content. It just feels like the opposite of what ASMR is supposed to be, which is simple and relaxing.

<comment><USER3> I would suggest checking out some of the Korean ASMR out there. Yes, most of it is done by pretty women, but it's usually not sexualized, and very creative and relaxing. Now, Chinese ASMR, that is often sexualized. I honestly don't find a problem with it, and don't understand why others do.

<comment><USER4> I think the strong consonants of Korean speech help making the videos more ASMR triggering. I am also fond of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting timing. I thought I'd check out ASMR recently and, wow, the videos I found were bad. Like, really bad. I completely gave up on it as a medium after giving a half dozen different videos a shot, and went back to rainymood (although I'd love to find some delightful newspaper crinkling or Scottish accents).

For reference, here's the videos that served as my introduction to ASMR:

* "ASMR: My Treasured Darling [Irish Accent] [Gaelic] [3D Sound][TLC]" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJiojl9ixRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJiojl9ixRw)

* "Zen ASMR | Typing & Soft/Whisper | Coding: Python | # 1" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWMYKfiNYts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWMYKfiNYts)

* "ASMR Keyboard Sound 1H (No Talking)" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6noMxePbj6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6noMxePbj6w)

* "ASMR Paper sounds , Old book , Crinkling ( No Talking )" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgtbr5oQeQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgtbr5oQeQw)

* "ASMR~ Fixing You {Keyboard Sounds}" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEpBdb-RGRM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEpBdb-RGRM)

* "ASMR Ear to Ear Whisper About C Programming for Relaxation (Layered Typing Sounds) Pt. 1" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFegNHpHfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFegNHpHfc)

To people who enjoy ASMR: are these videos just especially bad videos, or am I just not doing it right / appreciating it right? FWIW, I quit each video after a minute or two, after skipping around to see if they get any better. The thing that bothers me the most is when there's these ridiculously long spaces between words (maybe.. for emphasis?), but comes across as them just not knowing what to say, which is extremely offputting. OTOH, it's in every video i've watched so far so I don't know if it's intentional.

<comment><USER6> It's pretty much just a cover fronting for a genre of soft core cheesecake pinup phone sex.

It targets from two angles, the models don't really understand the cheap thrills listeners get from this audio, and the listeners retain plausible deniability for the sexualization of their fantasies, such that they don't have to admit to hoarding pornography, as is the case with images and video.

<comment><USER7> Sadly this is more about Youtube views and has become a huge bummer for me. I started listening to some of these early videos around 9 or 10 years ago and they weren't referred to as ASMR videos at first but rather I'd search for "whisper videos", "soft spoken relaxation videos", and stuff like that.

These typically didn't even show the person who was speaking as you typically listened on headphones while laying down to relax. I found it soothing and they probably triggered some instinctive reaction to non-sexual intimacy and care.

Over the years it's become harder to find videos that soothe and relax me in this way because the "scene" that has developed around ASMR seems to focus on all sorts of weird sounds like tapping on stuff, loud crinkling, rubber gloves, and the absolute worst (for me)...touching the damn mic!

If I'm trying to relax with some soothing, soft voice talking me through some relaxation scenario or just something to zone out on while I fall asleep, the last thing I want to hear is some loud, unexpected sound or brushing on the mic. As someone who has done quite a bit of video and audio production, if someone bumps or touches the mic it's not a good thing and it just kicks me out of whatever relaxing, tingly zone I may have been sinking into.

I understand that a lot of people dig the foley art and sound effects but it seems like now (on youtube at least) it's 95% crinkly, crackly, brushy, tappy, chewing (ugghhh) sounds made right up into a mic by some pretty girl in front of a ring light and a DIY chromakey backdrop. None of this is relaxing or soothing to me and it certainly doesn't trigger any ASMR tingles in me...

...but I'm sure it helps boost those view counts and grab viewer attention when that sexy thumbnail shows up in the Youtube listing.

<comment><USER8> >the absolute worst (for me)...touching the damn mic!

It really is the worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To many, whisper content in commercials and other A/V is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard or someone clipping their finger nails.

Can think of few trends that are so anxiety and discomfort inducing as intentional loud whispering. I sincerely hope it disappears as quickly as it arrived.

<comment><USER10> Same, I demand my partner uses headphones whenever she listens to ASMR in bed (which is pretty often). It makes me very uncomfortable. It's almost an irrational reaction, but a real and uncontrollable one for me.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't be able to live with someone who couldn't stand ASMR, much less someone who would get irritated by it.

<comment><USER10> Relationships are full of compromises like this. I put up with it occasionally but generally asking her to wear headphones when she listens to ASMR (which I believe youre supposed to anyway) is not a big ask.

<comment><USER12> You can even go the extra step and get them realistic noise-canceling ones for sleeping. They'll probably even thank you for it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally I enjoy the Cranial Nerve Exams and some of the unintentional asmr videos such as Sequoya by Lucas Paakh, the infamous T.M Lewin suit fitting video and that video on the Alexander Technique.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAfBsrds4_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAfBsrds4_g)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_qc5Veo9p84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_qc5Veo9p84)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXqIuvav5hY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXqIuvav5hY)

<comment><USER13> I like those, and also the vietnam barber shop stuff for some weird reason [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqwnv1eLfY4&t=836s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqwnv1eLfY4&t=836s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My trigger is hairdryers. This is the best channel by far: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ryuK4Fv1hvvIxMcXfcHsQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ryuK4Fv1hvvIxMcXfcHsQ/videos)

</comment><comment><USER15> ASMR is probably pretty well suited to ML. I had a sox one liner generating ~infinite content from [no talking] ASMR videos, which worked surprisingly well with some post processing in audacity. I would guess today some services could synthesize convincing speech too.

<comment><USER16> Would you mind sharing the said oneliner? I've never worked with sox, but it looks interesting.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, it seems I lost it.

It was nothing fancy at all though, I simply piped youtube-dl to sox, cut up the original audio on 'silence' (some tweaking the thresholds for what is considered silence was necessary) then concatenated the resulting segments in random order until it was long enough. Then some manual touches with audacity.

End result was something like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO_Z3MLZrNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO_Z3MLZrNQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen I've never had the experience with any videos online, but I do get it with certain music, and I got it a _lot_ more when I was younger.

I still get it a bit active listening to this song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UviPosBdGAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UviPosBdGAo)

<comment><USER17> Could it be that you are referring to frisson and not ASMR?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson)

<comment><USER18> What if I told you ASMR is just a frisson brought into the future?

Oh. My. God! I'm having one now. No.. hang on. That's horripilation.</comment></comment></comment>


Porting Flask to Go – Jinja2 to Pongo2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkful.me/porting-flask-to-go-jinja2-to-pongo2 <comment><USER2> Last 2 years I've been using Go (instead of Python), even for webpages & apis. I'm actually considering going back to Python(for webpages and apis) because dealing with database in Go is really ugly. Currently available orms are nowhere near as useful as sqlAlchemy or django orm :(

<comment><USER3> ORMs?

Am I alone when I say that I still hand code SQL into my applications?

Regardless of what web framework I'm using (e.g. Pylons/Rails/Django/etc), I still hand code SQL statement in my applications.

I've had far to many times ORMs unexpectedly nuke performance and have other issues than what's it's worth gaining by using an ORM.

<comment><USER4> By "hand code SQL" I hope you really mean using prepared statements of whatever language/framework you're using, not concatenating strings with input values. If not, say hello to SQLi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> String-based templating is a bad pattern fraught with security issues that shouldn't be translated from old languages to new ones.

<comment><USER6> I'm interested to hear an alternative, particularly one that will work with separate front end dev teams etc.

<comment><USER7> Enlive and related libraries for Clojure, Lift for Scala, and heist for Haskell use node transformation. I know that there are a few others I'm forgetting. Basically given a fragment of an HTML 5 or XML document, your view functions transform it into a different fragment. E.g. in Lift, given

lorem ipsum

And a transformation:

        ".greeting *" #> "Hello World"

The output will be:

Hello World

See [http://exploring.liftweb.net/master/index-5.html#entry- CSS-T...](http://exploring.liftweb.net/master/index-5.html#entry-CSS- Transforms-0) et alia

With this technique, your designers can create pure HTML and assets, with no logic in the templates. Basically they create static mock-ups and then the developers "enliven" them.

I prefer this but I don't imagine it will ever become mainstream.

React's JSX is also (as far as I can tell) node based, but with a lot less power (you can really only do insert operations, and the operations don't really compose well).

<comment><USER8> I recently did a project using this type of template system and it was ok, but not really better than string-based templating. You're really still doing String-based templating except you're embedding all your directives in data attributes and it gets super messy and unreadable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh thank god. Go is bearable in most areas, but the template system makes me weep. Is there any particular reason the string concatenation doesn't work? Seems special enough to be specialcased ;)

<comment><USER10> You can use {{print .foo.bar "string"}} and {{printf "%sstring" .foo.bar}} to concat strings in golang template, or even simpler way: {{.foo.bar}}{{"string"}}.</comment></comment>


Learning Web Development with Seaside - <AUTHOR> http://seaside.gemstone.com/tutorial.html <comment><USER2> I think the headline here is somewhat misleading, based on the other responses thus far. It's not intending to teach web development using Seaside as the tool; rather, it's a tutorial on how to develop Seaside web apps.

And while the fact that it's presented in PDFs is a little bit annoying, I'm about halfway through the tutorials and they're rather well written and expose a lot of features in Seaside and Smalltalk as a whole. As far as "zero to being able to make something interesting" guides go, this is one of the better ones I've encountered.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think their site makes clear why using Smalltalk to teach web development solves any problems.

The PDF halfway through their tutorial series on Smalltalk explains Seaside as a "framework" that addresses some of what I'd consider smaller annoyances in development (One example they offer is the ability to add <em> tags to every occurrence of specific words in a file.

Such tools _might_ be of use to a small audience, but I'm not sure anyone would want to learn web coding in such a roundabout way. Open Wordpad, go to W3Schools and practice an (X)HTML tutorial. Maybe consider Seaside once you've practiced the basics.

</comment><comment><USER4> The definitive guide to minimizing mindshare for your project: Offer documentation as PDF only.

<comment><USER5> Sorry to be so thick but 'minimizing mindshare for your project' means what?

<comment><USER4> Nobody reading their docs means nobody knowing about their project.</comment></comment></comment>


81% of Smartphones powered by Linux (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://haydenjames.io/81-percent-smartphones-powered-by-linux/ <comment><USER2> Too bad the vast majority of those "Linux powered phones" are completely useless without Google's Mobile Services (GMS) which is not only closed source but Google moves more and more functionality into GMS and out of AOSP with every iteration of Android. The Linux layer under Android is getting more and more like the Linux layer in Oracle Linux every year. I am very hopeful that Pinephone and Purism will gain maturity and market share so that a truly open mobile operating system is viable and has a growing app ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> Last time I checked, it was possible to run a full Linux environment on Android (ie [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu&hl=en_IE)). What exactly do you want to do?</comment></comment>


Shoelace formula - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoelace_formula <comment><USER2> For those who, like me, need to visualize such a method- I found an explainer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KjG8Pg6LGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KjG8Pg6LGk)

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked at a company, HouseCanary, writing software for doing home appraisals. We used this formula to calculate the square footage of a home based on a computer drawing. The funny thing is that for an appraisal, you have to show your calculations. We thought showing the points and a shoelace formula whitepaper would be enough. It wasn't. So, my boss wrote code that dumps the whole calculation onto a pdf so someone who works in lending can say "that looks right".

<comment><USER4> Do you no longer work there for publically divulgable reasons?

<comment><USER3> I got a job as a software engineer at another company. Came with a title bump and raise.

<comment><USER4> Glad to hear it. A friend who still works there as far as I know was singing their praises to me at a wedding a couple of years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you rewrite this method in terms of determinants, then it also has the bonus of generalizing correctly to arbitrarily many dimensions! And it also gives you a nice picture - imagine adding and subtracting simplices with one point at the origin (triangles in 2D, tetrahedra in 3D).

<comment><USER6> Came here to ask about 3D. Weird that the article doesn't mention the 3D or n-dimensional case.

<comment><USER7> Here is my answer to 3D from a long long time ago.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1838401/general- formula-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1838401/general-formula-to- calculate-polyhedron-volume/1849746?noredirect=1#comment93093356_1849746)

Another interesting thing about the metrix in that answer. If you invert it, the rows become the coefficients for the plane equations of the faces. You also don't need to fully invert it - IIRC the adjoint is sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use this in measuring field areas. Like the text reads, this is Green's Theorem.

The area of a triangle ABC can be determined by doing the cross product of any of the vectors that are the translation from a vertex to another (e.g. AB⨯AC = |AB|.|AC|.sin{^BAC}). More rigorously, this is the area of a lozenge, which then has to be divided by two.

Imagining a point X inside a convex polygon, it is easy to see a set of triangles with vertex X in common.

In fact, the polygon can not only be concave but point X can be outside the polygon, since the sine will compensate for negative and positive angles, subtracting any weird triangle out of the sum in the end.

Computationally, the point X should be as close as possible to every vertex, so that rounding errors are minimized.</comment>