The Nuclear Option - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/atomic-power <comment><USER2> Some of nuclear energy's challenges get a good amount of coverage: politicians unwilling to support it, citizen opposition, and cost overruns and delays at plant currently under construction. Others, less so. And if we discount politics for a moment, the day-to-day economics of new nuclear barely pencil out. Nuclear needs immense capital expenditure vs. other types of generation. Solar gets generous subsidies and doesn't need a lot of opex, wind is similar. And in the US, natural gas is cheap and plentiful, and pairs well with intermittent renewables, and load-following gas turbines are blurring the distinction between baseload generation and peakers.

Despite the wishes of many, pollution externalities are not priced in, and while that is the case and fracking continues to bring up cheap gas, the rule of natgas will continue.

But nuclear's immense capex is a problem nonetheless. While reactor designs purport to be off-the-shelf, the each plant itself is a one-off. There's no institutional memory and hardly any re-use of expertise, there's no economies of scale -- just all the hallmarks of difficult megaprojects. Sound familiar?

This is why research into 'small modular reactors' is promising. Plenty of political barriers remain, but removing some institutional barriers and easing some of the economic ones would improve nuclear energy's prospects.

<comment><USER3> Existing nuclear plants got as big as they are because of economies of scale. Turns out that a plant twice as big costs less than twice as much as two smaller ones.

But, due to nuclear expansion faltering we build too few of these plants, and thus all of them become essentially first-of-a-kind, which tends to mean a lot of (very expensive!) delays.

I also think SMR's are very promising, trying to break the cycle of ever- increasing costs of big plants through mass production (and passive safety) rather than just making them as big as possible. Think airliner factory rather than one-off megaprojects.

<comment><USER4> They also got big because of economies of scale of operation. Making a reactor smaller doesn't proportionally scale down the staff you need to operate it. This is relevant when as many as a third of reactors in the US are not even making an operating profit.

SMRs will require changes to operational regulation if they are to compete.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Many microreactors of the past like the PM3A in Antarctica were just too expensive to operate and maintain so they got replaced with oil. SMRs are great for lower capital cost but they won't just automatically be cheap to operate. The nuclear industry has to focus heavily on getting maintenance and operation costs way down. Some of that is regulatory, but lots of it is inherent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...Less radioactive material than coal ash as well. Very excited for he NRG Thorium reactor test going on in the Netherlands.

Coal Ash more radioactive: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal- ash-is-more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more- radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

NRG Thorium Reactor tests: [https://www.technologyreview.com/the- download/608712/a-thori...](https://www.technologyreview.com/the- download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in- four-decades/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sigh.

I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons.

* There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle of optimistic non-problem-solving.

* No politician will back nuclear. If there's an accident, they'll be run out of town. Not worth the risk.

* Along the same lines, there is zero interest in technology research/investment. This became obvious when they shut down reprocessing in the 70s and IFR was shut down in the 90s. And the reprocessing ban was by a President who happened to be a nuclear engineer! If he won't do it, who will?

* The scare-mongering in the media over accidents is impossible to overcome. There's no way to have a rational discussion when all someone has to do is point to the endless exclusion zone documentaries to win their argument.

* And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 -> 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?

<comment><USER8> The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl incident, they're usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude. In general what people don't understand about radiation is effectively everything about it, and worse, they don't want to know. Meanwhile trying to explain how many million die _each and every year_ from burning hydrocarbons rolls right off them. It's pathetic and infuriating and I've also given up completely.

 _And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 - > 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?_

It has to do with fuck all investment, a dead regulatory environment, and inability to test new designs at scale. For all the other reasons you mentioned the investment isn't there. I'd add that the waste issue is seen by most of the public as technically insurmountable, whereas in fact it's technically simple, but politically insurmountable. At this point you'd need it to be _the_ platform issue for a popular president, along with a truly huge education initiative and a lot of arm-twisting in the senate. It would cost a fortune, but less than the inevitable disaster were hurtling toward without nuclear.

Unfortunately even on a site like HN, optimism about renewables and new tech combines with ignorance of nuclear power; how can we expect better from the average American?

<comment><USER9> Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. Additionally, it's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small.

<comment><USER8> _Nuclear power is cost prohibitive._

Really, because it's widely employed around the world. If you have some evidence that it's "cost prohibitive" though I'd love to see it. Evidence mind you, not flat declarations devoid of substance.

 _Additionally, it 's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small._

Many decades and thousands of reactors on land and naval applications with only a few notable disasters beg to differ. I'm also curious where this "wasteland" comment is coming from. The worst nuclear disaster, one singular in its extremity, has led to something far from a wasteland, although quite a few people had to be relocated.

Either way, trading in the known mass casualtiesin the millions per annum, and environmental catastrophe of burning hydrocarbons, for scaremongering "what if's" so profoundly out of touch with reality as yours is the falsest of dilemmas. The total death toll from everything nuclear, including weapons can't match a year of deaths and illness from burning coal. Never mind mining coal, drilling for oil and transporting it and the associated sociopolitical disaster of the Middle East, the environmental harm of fracking, and the sheer stupidity of not addressing climate change _now_.

<comment><USER10> _Nuclear power is cost prohibitive._

How about: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368)?

For the cost to be prohibitive, it only really needs to be dearer than an alternative that's at least as good. That alternative is now wind: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948).

<comment><USER11> Wind is not a like-for-like replacement for nuclear. The amount of land wind would need to replace just one nuclear reactor is many orders of magnitude greater.

Renewables must be supported by a reliable base-load supply, which effectively means you need to choose between either nuclear or fossil fuels.

<comment><USER10> 1\. The amount of land _or sea_ , which latter makes for a dearer installation but is much easier to find in densely populated countries like the UK.

2\. My understanding is that, sure, you can't have a grid that runs purely on wind, but you can go a lot higher than we currently do without much trouble. The issue with massive new nuclear is that outages can take a sizeable percentage of your generation off-grid unexpectedly at a moment's notice (Hinkley will I believe represent 7% of UK grid capacity), which in a sense is a worse intermittency problem than you get with renewables (which tend to ramp up and down more smoothly and broadly in line with weather forecasts). Also, battery storage can help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the construction costs, the case for keeping existing, already paid-for nuclear plants open seems a lot stronger than building new plants that won't pay for themselves for decades. Who knows what the electricity market will look like then?

Solar and wind infrastructure is now mass-produced and competition is driving costs down. It's unclear what forms of energy storage will win, but I would expect it to be competitive as well.

<comment><USER13> Except that's why we have so many power plants based 1950's era designs instead of safer, more modern plants.

<comment><USER14> "Safer, modern" plants in the US, the UK, and China are being scrapped because they're not affordable.

Solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. So why build nuclear?

<comment><USER15> As far as I know scalable storage for base-load is not a solved problem. Has that changed?

Personally I find it hard to believe that we can live on renewabls until a european country goes 1 year completely on renewables (I guess Germany is probably the best candidate for that since they are going all-in).

<comment><USER14> If batteries and renewables are cheaper than nuclear, how is it not a solved problem? You still need to build the new renewables and the batteries, but it's cost effective and can be done.

<comment><USER16> Because renewables are regional. They make exceedingly good sense in places like the US midwest or most of Europe where you can build solar / wind and have substantial availability. Solar, by contrast, is much less performant if you live somewhere with less sunlight due to any number of reasons - weather, smog, latitude, etc. Same with wind - it only makes sense to build wind where you get the most wind.

And the trick with those is that its not a zero sum. Even if solar would be viable somewhere less optimal panels are still going to go where solar is cheapest first. And then you are looking at the costs of transporting that power gradually towards areas of reduced renewables efficiency and/or storing it.

To put it even more generally, if the state of Maine were willing to build a fission plant but not buy solar, wind, hydro, etc LET THEM BUILD IT. You can manufacture all the solar panels and windmills you can while also building nuclear plants. The priority has to be shutting down all oil and gas plants as soon as possible by any means available.

<comment><USER14> No one is stopping anyone from building modern nuclear reactors except debt markets and utilities. The problem is that no one wants them (compared to other generation technologies).

Timoth3y in another thread explains it extensively: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057)

<comment><USER17> That's wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don't favor it precisely because so many different parties can block new builds.

<comment><USER14> I disagree with your assertion. It's simply time value of money. As an investor, you don't want to wait decades for a higher risk low return that may never materialize, or the bond defaults entirely because your nuclear plant is shuttered for safety or political reasons. Could government insure the bond? Yes! But then they're subsidizing nuclear when that money could go into renewables and storage.

<comment><USER17> You didn't disagree, you just affirmed it. The debt markets treat it as high risk precisely because so many parties can easily stop it.

Nobody refuses to invest in nuclear because of the negligible meltdown risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to build.

France: 44 Billion would be saved by investing in rewables instead of nuclear

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french- po...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs- will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped)

Private operators in the US have said new plants are unlikely due to the economics of nuclear:

[https://www.usnews.com/news/national- news/articles/2018-04-1...](https://www.usnews.com/news/national- news/articles/2018-04-16/exelon-official-no-new-nuclear-plants-to-be-built-in- the-us)

The last few completed plants in the US (that didn't get canceled) were 20-30 years in the making - and typically over budget and schedule by more than 2x. With some of the cancelled projects over budget by 3-4x.

Even China, which embarked on building it's own fleet of nuclear plants, and has all sorts of regulatory advantages found that construction was slow and overbudget:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing- its-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste- for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/)

<comment><USER15> I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take.

Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not?

Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission for an unproven "We still have problems to solve around wide-scale baseload" seems to be ass-backwards to me and pinning more on hope than common sense.

<comment><USER19> It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are proven_.

You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure.

Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

<comment><USER15> Someone said roughly the same thing in another thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167849)

But as far as I know there is no proven large-scale storage system, which is a criticla part of renewables. The other commenter mentioned building batteries and then it is just a matter of scale which seems like an over-simplification to me but I cannot find much useful info on it.

Personally I would love a 100% renewable setup but I would not bet the future of our civilization on it when nuclear is another option.

<comment><USER20> We do have a very simple large-scale storage system that's already in use across the world: pumping water uphill. It's just not as economical as rain when you factor in the efficiency losses from generating and transferring power twice.

<comment><USER15> And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable".

I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover the storage requirements.

However another posted did point out that 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries is apparently enough to store US energy requirements.

<comment><USER21> Unless there is big improvements in battery tech I don't see it as a solution. Lithium batteries have their own environmental problems and die after 10 years.

Pumped hydro requires the geography, building new capacity tends to flood large areas and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases initially.

Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and can be adapted anywhere. It will probably win out in many cases.

<comment><USER22> > Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient > and can be adapted anywhere.

The energy density of that kind of scheme is a joke. Thought experiment: a fully charged Tesla, how often could it climb a hill the size of that crane if it skips recuperation on the downhill leg? That's how much lower the energy density of a crane storage would be. Pumped storage works (where the geography allows it) because water is by far the cheapest and the most easily transported ballast and geographic height differences dwarf almost every human made structure.

If you want something that scales everywhere, look no further than compressed air. It's usually ignored because of the big thermal losses, but if you have a direct application for coolant they are not that bad and even without, it serves as an almost trivial lower bound to the storage problem. We can calculate how much intermittent energy production we would need with compressed air to serve a power demand profile and everything else is just a possible improvement.

<comment><USER21> Since when was energy density ever been a problem for grid storage? Even in the most crowded cities on earth it's not a constraint.

Unless you are talking about portable applications it's all about round trip efficiency and cost, I'm not sure if you are getting confused about terms here or talking about an entirely different subject.

Compressed air efficiency isn't great. Using it for cooling lowers the efficiency even more.

Crane and rail gravity storage are pushing 80-90% round trip efficiency.

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What stinks about nuclear is it got too big too fast. There was a massive buildout of these 1950s-1960s reactor designs, before we had time to fully realize the full cost lifecycle of said designs, and their failure modes. I guess it didn't help at the time we were facing nuclear obliteration between two super powers :/

Still I really wish people could differentiate the risks behind a PWR, BWR, Liquid Metal cooled, the AP-2000 design, and a thorium cycle. They're all kind of lumped together unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's just no way nuclear is making a come back until the economic issues are resolved. Almost all nuclear projects are over budget and over time by 2x or 3x, except for plants built in/by Russia, India, China

<comment><USER25> As I mentioned in another comment, China and Russia don't build reactors all that quickly. Their newest commercially operating reactors Hayiang-2 and Leningrad 2-1 took 8 and 9 years respectively.

India is slower yet. Their newest reactor Kudankulum-2 took 14 years to build:

[https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....](https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=853)

Could the US build a reactor in 14 years like India does? I think so, even with my currently-low opinion of the industry's ability to plan. But I also don't see how to guarantee institutional support that lasts 14 years. Neither utilities nor politicians have the tools or incentives to support something that takes that long to gestate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This highlights the foolishness of relying on magical government solutions. Nuclear power has plenty of promise, if the waste is magically taken care of by an as yet to be implemented solution from the government. Since this solution never arrived, the waste gets stored at each nuclear plant, where it needs to be actively cooled for some period of time.

<comment><USER27> There's nothing in principle preventing private companies from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and storing what remains in long-term underground storage. It's just illegal for them to do the reprocessing and too politically unpopular for any local government to consent to having a storage facility built on land it manages.

It's misleading to refer to a 'magic government solution' as though the nuclear industry is expecting the government to invent a magic wand that will disappear spent fuel with a flourish of the hand.

<comment><USER4> It's not illegal to reprocess. Carter's ban was rescinded by Reagan. What it is is stupid. Reprocessing is a net economic loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Worked in nuclear industry in the late 90's. Most *WR designs are inherently not fail-safe, complex, require dedicated teams, are nearly impossible to insure and require a massive capex investment. This isn't necessary. Modern MSR/LFTR designs tend to get around most of these problems by being smaller, simpler and most robus, similar to what some startups, Taylor Wilson proposed and partially what ANP/ASTR/MSRE/DMSR proved. Downsides to many small reactors include more, smaller sites needing physical/SCADA security and more geographically-diffuse waste handling. Upsides include no exploding containment vessels and consumption of HEU down-blended.

<comment><USER29> There's nothing to keep us from putting lots of small reactors at the same site, if that's what we want. We'd still get the economy of scale from factory-built reactors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We need nuclear. Not only is a reliable carbon-free source of nuclear energy, even if wind and solar continue to develop where they provide all the power for day to day use, we can use the excess energy generated to drive CO2 removal from the atmosphere. It is seeming less likely that we able to change course in time such that just stopping carbon emissions prevents disaster. We will likely also need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. All such processes are energy intensive, and having excess nuclear power will be helpful.

<comment><USER31> It's our best chance going forward (short of Fusion) but how do you go about calming people who are quite rightfully scared by it? I live in Japan which has a long history with nuclear but after Fukushima people take to the streets whenever a nuclear plant comes (or is announced to come) back online. If a country like Japan can still screw nuclear up so monumentally I don't hold out much hope for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER32> They are not "rightfully scared." Even if you take the highest number of death estimates -- all the way from the initial incident through the people who died in evacuation all the way those who will die of cancer in 20 years -- the death toll is staggeringly low compared to carbon emissions. It just so happens that radiation is scary and deaths happen all at once.

<comment><USER33> Don't just count deaths: Nuclear fallout has profound long-term negative effects that coal accidents do not. At Fukushima, nearly 80.000 people are still displaced, almost eight years later. Source: [http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/](http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/)

<comment><USER3> That's true, but OTOH those people are displaced due to fear of radiation (and due to large areas being trashed by the tsunami), not due to the actual effects of radiation.

And FFS, something like 15000 people were killed by the Tsunami, while 0 have died due to radiation released by the plant. Yet we continue to obsess about the nuclear accident. WTF?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> China now has four AP1000 plants in operation. The US still has two under construction. We'll have to see how the AP1000 works out.

</comment><comment><USER35> As far as I can tell every top level comment in this thread claiming that Nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar is simply wrong.

\-- First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if you are trying to argue for wind/solar; as the only reason you could plausibly make a case that solar/wind enjoy a comparable marginal levelized cost as fossil fuels is assuming that the cost of capital is insanely low thus making the large upfront capital expenditures on solar/wind infrastructure look like a better tradeoff than the cheaper upfront cost of fossil fuel and higher ongoing maintenance/fuel to run a fossil fuel plant.

If you are making that assumption for wind/solar it stands to reason you can make the same assumptions for nuclear as well. Of course, in the "real world" only super rich countries can afford to make those tradeoffs in the first place and given that nuclear usually requires access to cheap capital (i.e. government loans) it stands to reason wind/solar have the same problems; and to use an example I will return to later Germany has considerable subsidies for wind/solar compared to fossil fuels as expected.

\-- Secondly, no utility uses the marginal cost of producing electricity for a power source that is inherently variable. The economic costs of failing to produce enough power for a regional or national utility outweigh any hypothetical marginal advantage for wind/solar. Essentially every wind/solar power source has to have a reliable backup source that can step in to ensure the utility can meet the demand for electricity. In most cases this just means you build cheap combined cycle gas plants. If you are a rich country like germany you can afford to overbuild your power generation capacity.

Countries like germany also have the advantage of being able to purchase energy from neighboring countries to make up shortfalls in demand. The german energy program relies on the availability of french nuclear power for precisely this reason. Of course, some days you can trumpet that some gigantic % of total production is supplied by wind/solar but this is mostly irrelevant from the financial perspective of the utility.

\-- Finally, energy storage for wind/solar simply doesn't make sense with current technology. To take one example, Hydropower can already be expensive; now add in the cost of producing enough renewable energy to power all the original power produced by hydro cycle AND the cost of machinery to somehow replicate the operation of gravity. Basically you are looking at 2.5 to 3x the cost of your original investment to make your variable energy source reliable. Current lithium battery technology is totally unworkable at scale as another alternative.

To top it off I think the levelized cost figures often trumpted on this site for wind/solar are off anyway. Basically, unless you get a bunch of subsidies from the government it almost never makes sense unfortunately.

<comment><USER36> > First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if you > are trying to argue for wind/solar;

I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim. You compare the costs of wind/solar to nuclear basically by capex only, why does the cost of capital even matters? Why what relation do fossil fuels beating them on under developed countries change how one compares to the other?

<comment><USER4> His claim is absurd. The easily checked facts on the ground show new nuclear being several times more expensive than renewables in the US, on a levelized basis.

The president of Exelon, a US corporation that operates 23 nuclear powerplants, has stated that effective CO2 taxes would have to be $300/ton or higher for new nuclear powerplants to compete with natural gas in the US. And yet, wind and solar are increasingly competing with and winning against gas here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm going to attack nuclear from an entirely new point of view: What if thorium or uranium have other, yet unknown uses? We could be burning potentially invaluable resources for relatively unimportant amounts of energy.

<comment><USER27> This argument could be applied to literally every depletable resource in existence. If utilized efficiently with reprocessing and breeder reactors the world's proven Thorium + Uranium reserves would last thousands of years, even powering 80-90% of world energy use. By that point we should be using either fusion energy or beamed power from panels in solar orbit, depending on how optimistic you are - and if uranium does turn out to have a miraculous alternative use we'll have a sufficiently developed space program to mine it from somewhere other than Earth.

I disagree with the notion that we'd be producing 'relatively unimportant amounts of energy' when we're talking about the only geography-independent near-zero-carbon energy source with the proven capability to provide base load power for an advanced economy, unless you think anthropogenic climate disruption is no big deal.

<comment><USER37> There are no other resources depletable in the same sense - even if you burn coal or oil, equivalent resources can be synthesized. The rest is usualy not depleted in the literal sense, only put into use and may need to be recycled to be used elsewhere. But the elements used in nuclear fuel are completely destroyed in the process and there may be no easy way to recreate them.

<comment><USER27> Uranium and Thorium could be produced by nuclear transmutation in the event we discover some miraculous property they have ten thousand years from now. This is non-trivial, but it's essentially the process used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and we managed to get pretty good at that.

<comment><USER37> I suppose recreating those would be much harder, because of the gap between them and the other elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I agree that nuclear power is safe and that reactors in good condition should not be retired before fossil generators on the same grid. Subsidies are justified to prevent premature nuclear retirements. But anyone who thinks that all new nuclear projects need is the tax subsidies currently going to renewables is willfully blind to recent history.

 _"Subsidies to wind and solar are backfiring, both economically and environmentally," says Michael Shellenberger, head of the pro-nuclear advocacy group Environmental Progress. "That money should be shifted to nuclear."_

The most generous renewable subsidy offered across the USA [1] is the wind Production Tax Credit, which offers wind projects $23 in tax credits per megawatt-hour that they generate over the first 10 years of operation [2]. There is only 1 American reactor new enough that it would qualify if the same terms were offered to nuclear projects: Watts Bar II, which was completed in 2016 after a 30 year construction hiatus.

There are 4 partially completed AP1000 reactors that would also now qualify for wind-like tax incentives if they had met their planned construction schedules. Unfortunately, all 4 are horrendously behind schedule and over budget. Two have been canceled. These project failures drove the bankruptcy of Westinghouse in 2017.

New nuclear power has had its own federal production tax credit since 2005, though on terms less generous than those offered to wind:

[https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear- prod...](https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear-production- tax-credit)

I would guess that it's less generous because in 2005 nuclear power was considered to be relatively mature, affordable technology already; wind was riskier and needed more incentives to develop to maturity. 14 years later, wind projects look like the predictable option for investors and nuclear projects are the crazy gamble. So I wouldn't be _opposed_ to offering reactor builders the same incentives offered to builders of wind and solar farms, but I don't think that will move the needle much. The problem isn't that new reactors need more revenue per MWh. It's that they have trouble delivering any MWh. You can offer $50 per MWh and it doesn't help if the project can't deliver a single megawatt and is years delayed, billions over budget.

Why are all the AP1000s late and over budget? Why did schedules slip so badly? They were originally supposed to be built within 5 years in the US. In fact, they are taking 8 years or more. Even the AP1000s built in China ended up taking nearly 9 years. It wasn't obstructionist tactics from anti-nuclear activists or lawyers. It wasn't shifting regulatory requirements. _It was the nuclear industry itself._

Here are the Post and Courier stories tagged "Westinghouse." These are all about the failed VC Summer AP1000 project in South Carolina.

[https://www.postandcourier.com/search/?k=%22westinghouse%22#...](https://www.postandcourier.com/search/?k=%22westinghouse%22#tncms- source=keyword)

Some damning headlines:

 _S.C. utilities knew of big problems 6 months into nuclear project but didn't tell customers_

 _Insight that would've alerted problems with nuclear project scrubbed from audit two years ago_

 _Whistleblower says he was demoted after finding problems in S.C. nuclear project, report says_

 _Confidential Westinghouse report details early faults with nuclear projects_

 _Letter shows S.C. utilities knew Westinghouse's reactor designs would lead to increased costs and schedule delays_

The American nuclear industry is going to take a decade to recover from these self-inflicted wounds, if it ever does. Maybe (I hope) small modular reactors can avoid the runaway schedule and cost problems that plagued the AP1000 and the EPR.

I've been reading calls to prioritize building reactors over renewable projects for at least 15 years now. They even made a lot of sense back then. The pitch: if we can just get the irrationally fearful public out of the way, nuclear projects can displace fossils faster and cheaper than renewables. These American AP1000s were supposed to convince fence-sitting environmentalists and ratepayers alike that it was time for an American nuclear renaissance. Reactors would be as all-seasons reliable as coal and generate a MWh cheaper than any solar farm. Instead they've been complete fiscal disasters that to date have generated less electricity than a single rooftop solar system.

People who are still pitching the "cheaper and more predictable than renewables" line about nuclear projects should be dismissed as chat-bots stuck in a loop. They're not integrating new information and reconsidering past stances.

[1] I don't know details of all 50 states' renewable incentive policies, and some of them are structured in ways that make it difficult to assign a straightforward dollars-per-MWh value.

[2] [https://www.energy.gov/savings/renewable-electricity- product...](https://www.energy.gov/savings/renewable-electricity-production- tax-credit-ptc)

<comment><USER38> The fact that yours is the only post here to _mention_ South Carolina makes me really wonder how practical the typical nuclear advocate could be. $25B would buy a lot of solar panels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My issue with trying to calm people down on the subject of nuclear is as far as I can tell they are scared of risks that don't exist. That can't be controlled with engineering solutions; so making nuclear energy safer won't do anything.

Take a recent article [0]. Now, they talk about getting "one chest X-ray every week", and apparently a chest Xray is about as radiation as 10 days of background radiation [1]. We're talking about a bit more than doubling a completely safe background rate to a figure that we have no evidence is of practically different, and that the experts claim is safe. I'm not going to look in to it, but I bet that the 'international limit' they talk about wasn't even derived scientifically, they probably just multiplied average background rate by some constant.

This is almost literally the same as taking the anti-vaccination crowd seriously. People who seem to be anti-chest-xray are being treated like credible sources of information! How can we expect sane policy in that sort of environment.

[0] [https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/03/fukushima-...](https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/03/fukushima- radiation-levels-100-times-higher-than-normal-greenpeace-report-warns/)

[1] [https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=safety- xray](https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=safety-xray)

</comment><comment><USER40> One thing we always keep forgetting: spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. It has to be kept safe for years and somehow I don't this is really calculated into price of nuclear electricity. But if we had a reactor that wouldn't have issue with highly radioactive waste, then it would be a different story.

<comment><USER41> Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a subduction zone.

As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury nuclear waste, there doesn't seem to be much hope for others like France and Japan.

<comment><USER40> I am not convinced that it is a solved problem. How old are Egyptian pyramids? Yet there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about them. We are confident, that after 20 000 years, people will still know about nuclear waste storage facilities? Think about it: records could be lost, our language will be different. Why are we so sure that somebody will not dig it up?

<comment><USER3> The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially. After a few hundred years, most of it is gone, although there is of course the danger due to the chemical toxicity, just like any other heavy metal deposit. Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in reality.

<comment><USER40> > The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially

True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium)

> Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is > not anchored in reality.

It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history produced such toxic waste that lives so long. I don't know about you, but I do hope that Homo sapiens will survive next 10k years.

<comment><USER3> > > The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially

> True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium)

To expand my statement, yes, spent fuel is a mix of different isotopes, some stable, and others unstable with different half-lives. The point being, if something is super-radioactive, then by definition it has a short half-life. And conversely, if something has a long half-live, it's per definition not as radioactive has something with a short half-life.

Thus, after 10k years, what is left is not that radioactive (to be more specific, after 10k years with a once-through cycle, spent fuel will have a radio-toxicity about 20 times that of natural uranium ore. Now, I'm not suggesting you should grind it into dust and sprinkle on your cheerios in the morning. But it's not any kind of civilization-ending toxicity either.

The idea that a future civilization will have the know-how to mine stuff 1 km underground, but somehow they have no clue about chemical or radio-toxicity just seems so absurd to me.

> It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history > produced such toxic waste that lives so long.

Citation needed. My guess would be that we have produced an unfortunately large amount of toxic waste, but the vast vast majority of that is not radioactive, and will thus never decay. Dig it up a million years from now, and it will be as toxic as it is today. The incredible energy density of nuclear fuel means that, in the end, the amount of nuclear waste is very small.

> I don't know about you, but I do hope that Homo sapiens will survive next > 10k years.

I hope so too. In my mind, however, climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss etc. rate far far higher as risk factors than a comparatively small amount of nuclear waste. In fact, by not deploying nuclear due to risks associated with nuclear waste, we significantly reduce our chances of dealing effectively with climate change, a much higher risk.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommended payment processor for monthly subscriptions - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a payment processor that handles monthly subscriptions to a SaaS and doesn't require a ton of boilerplate code.<p>The only one that comes to my mind is Stripe. Is there a reason not to use it, or are there any other suggestions? <comment><USER2> Years ago the company I worked for set up subscriptions and we used chargify.

[https://www.chargify.com](https://www.chargify.com)

worked well enough and was pretty straight forward to set up for a couple of developers. We also wanted to set up one time payments (later), it wasn't a good fit for non-subscription billing. I think the back end charging was handled by braintree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I will look into it.</comment></comment>


Making hardware: first you torture it, then you ship it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/engineering-at-formlabs/making-the-form-2-first-you-torture-it-then-you-ship-it-cd41e5379ef6 <comment><USER2> Making your own galvos is a huge feat. High quality ones used for laser cutting or etching can cost up to $2k each. I'm guessing they must have needed to hire someone with a background in this area.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if they needed super high quality galvos since the ones they used in the Form 1 were cheap Chinese light show ones. Still impressive to figure out all the magnetics etc. I wonder if the scanners or laser power are speed limiting for the machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >so we went ahead and put a fully assembled Form 2 in a dust chamber for 6 hours.

I am looking forward to see prints from sahara desert too. LP

<comment><AUTHOR> We took the inspiration from Markus Kayser who built the solar sinter :) One of my favorite projects.

[http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/](http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a lot of testing.</comment>


Love is a math problem: How Triangulate raised $750K for Facebook dating app - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/27/triangulate-raises-750k-for-data-driven-dating-on-facebook/

<comment><USER2> I've wondered lately why things like Power and Friendfeed weren't doing this already. They've had more datapoints than Triangulate are using for some time now.</comment>


Contrasts in Number Theory - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/contrasts-in-number-theory <comment><USER2> On a less advanced level than this, people find it very hard to publish expository work. Journals want papers with new results, not papers which explain known results in a way that lets people (students) understand them. I know from experience that there's a lot of demand for the latter, though!

I've started trying to write such things myself [1], because it's almost impossible to find fully-motivated proofs for anything more advanced than first-year undergraduate material. Mathematicians tend to the slick and short, rather than the comprehensible; I have met professors who think their job is done if they take thirty seconds to prove a result, and the student needs ten hours to understand it. This is one of the primary reasons why lectures, rather than textbooks, are still relevant: the lecturer gets a chance to _explain_ rather than just to _prove_. [2]

Interestingly, in computer science where basic category theory has some traction, the Internet is full of exposition. Methinks there is something of a culture clash between the academics who created category theory, and the compscis who use it.

[1]: [http://www.patrickstevens.co.uk/misc/AdjointFunctorTheorems/...](http://www.patrickstevens.co.uk/misc/AdjointFunctorTheorems/AdjointFunctorTheorems.pdf) [2]: [https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Lecture.pdf](https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Lecture.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks very much for the link to the essay "In Praise of Lectures" (it's not a lecture) by T. W. Körner. Both the points he makes and the way he makes his points (with his characteristic sense of humor) are well worth reading.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Research Paper Suggestions for College Reading Group? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I along with a few friends of mine are undergrad engineering students. We have started a reading group for research papers in the engineering field and we are looking for suggestions. We are looking for cutting-edge technology research papers that are accessible for students with a good math science, and CS  background.
Thus far we have read:
1. PageRank 2. Bitcoin whitepaper although most of our interest lies in the CS world, we are open to any suggestions. <comment><USER2> This has been asked many times: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20hn%20papers&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20hn%20papers&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

For recent papers I like The Morning Paper: [https://blog.acolyer.org/](https://blog.acolyer.org/)</comment>


There's a Lot We Don't Know About Ebola - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/17/448380921/so-it-turns-out-theres-a-lot-we-dont-know-about-ebola <comment><USER2> I know this is probably already being work on but ... wouldn't it be nice if we could create our own robotic (programmable) cells that travel the body looking for other objects that matched their internal database of known pathogens? Upon discovery, destroy those sorry cells!

My little girls play with dolls and love to care for them. They also ask me what I do. Why not merge the two interests? We need more people working on this instead of "medicine" and drugs.

<comment><USER3> That's sort of not too far off from how the human immune system works. The internal database would be your collection of antibodies[1] which match epitopes[2] presented by MHCs[3] on cell surfaces. The presence of Pathogen Associated Molecular-Pattern[4] should trigger a response. In terms of adding to the database, I think monoclonal antibodies[5] have been used to that end. I'm not entirely up-to-date and this is very simplified, so take with a grain of salt.

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_compl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogen- associated_molecular_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogen- associated_molecular_pattern)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Therapeuti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Therapeutic_treatment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to harvest some immune cells/antibodies from blood, then inject them in the spaces they normally don't get to, to clear the virus from those areas?</comment>


Eight hours a night isn't enough, according to a leading sleep scientist - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1301123/why-eight-hours-a-night-isnt-enough-according-to-a-leading-sleep-scientist/ <comment><USER2> Great article. Sleep is important. I liked that the article went out of its way to dispel several of the "but four hours is fine" myths. Two of my favorites:

>some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. That's rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep.

Blunt and effective. The outliers who really do fine with just a few hours are just that: outliers. Congratulations if you're one of them, but your genetic gift doesn't make the need for sleep any less real for the rest of us, and talk about these outliers is mostly a distraction.

>I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level?

>Right. That's like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn't know that he's in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he's in water. Also, when you're sleep deprived, research has shown that you're really bad at being able to tell that you're sleep deprived.

To me that's a great analogy. Most people can grasp the concept of having a problem and dealing/coping/adapting so long that they don't realize they have the problem. It makes sense that this phenomenon can apply to sleep as well.

Intellectually, I know I need to consistently sleep longer. If only knowing that and then acting on it were an easier gap to bridge (as I write this just past midnight...).

<comment><USER3> I used to habitually play bullet and blitz chess online, which confirmed the necessity of sleep for me. After a 6 hour night of sleep I noticed my rating would drop significantly the next day, and after several low sleep nights in a row it would take days to recover completely. A graph of my bullet rating over time clearly showed the periods of low sleep.

Most people don't have a measurement that objective. After I stopped playing chess so much in college, I even caught myself trying to excuse my poor sleep habits by telling myself I wasn't falling asleep in lectures and I could still finish my homework.

<comment><USER4> I use online chess tactics problems to assess how good my brain is that day. I estimate there's a 300+ ELO variance, perhaps even more, in my performance between when I'm tired and when I'm rested.

300 ELO points between 2 players means that the higher rates one wins about 9 out of 10 games against the lower rates one. A huge difference in performance.

<comment><USER5> First thing I do at my computer if I am groggy is to do chess tactics. Based on the results, I take a break or continue with my actual work. I should probably be looking at ELO as well, I just go by numbers at this time !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If there is one thing in this world I'd like to see, it's the worker's right for an afternoon nap: I really would become highly anxious if deprived long- term of my siesta.

I've been lucky in most of my environments to find somewhere to close my eyes and sleep for 10-15 minutes - I just need somewhere to lie down or recline and something to block the light: if I'm tired enough sound doesn't bother me. Some people tell me they just don't fall asleep quickly enough and don't bother to take any time to rest, so it's good to see the scientist here mention quiet-time and meditation as options.

<comment><USER7> I freelanced through college and continued doing that after I graduated. Since I was working from home, I was used to taking afternoon naps.

When I finally did join an office, I was surprised that afternoon napping wasn't a thing.

My 20-30 minute naps completely re-energize me and drastically improve my focus. And for some reason, I have extremely vivid dreams during these naps.

<comment><USER8> I used to book 'meetings' on my calendar and sneak off to the toilet cubicles for an afternoon nap. After a while I could even sleep through the noise of Dyson hand-dryers.

It still disappoints me that napping at work is stigmatised.

<comment> 2020-3030 All hail the 10-15 min toilet nap and locks on bathroom doors. Yes our country as a whole underestimates and stigmatizes healthy sleep patterns. People and companies which recognize the great benefits of short mid-day brain resets/toxin flushes (naps) are excellent but uncommon. Two cups of coffee won't accomplish what one 10-15 min afternoon nap achieves. It also matters what and how much you eat for lunch because the wrong foods or amounts can cause drowsiness even in well-rested people. I find that vegetarian meals make me less sleepy than meat-heavy meals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sleep is a twilight zone where personal problems get either amplified so that they become tangible or even get solved. He's right about one thing: it's not only 8 hours minimum you need, you should care about the quality of sleep you get. Especially that tendency of some people being completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch is _a thing_ you should solve the right way.

Though, the facts that he's a _TED talks resident_ and that he's _selling apps_ doesn't do much damage to his actual research, but it definitely explains why he's "the most talked about sleep scientist". I must admit that I don't trust a scientist who deliberately draws attention to their work instead of being just _that good_ to generate buzz.

<comment><USER10> > completely K.O. and unproductive after lunch

That's totally me. At that point I have no choice than to entirely skip lunch to be productive in the afternoon. Even eating a little can make me dramatically less productive.

> you should solve the right way.

What's the way to solve this?

Sleeping more helps me but only a bit and I still get K.O. after lunch.

I've researched this many times but never found any solution. Would love so much to fix that.

Thanks!

<comment><USER11> Same here, I get so tired after lunch. I did a full blood panel and nothing abnormal. I eat low carb, healthy lunches and I still get tired. The only thing that helps is a strong coffee or a nap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it:

Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig)

<comment><USER13> The bit that really stuck with me from this podcast was how overworked some medical professionals are, especially those in residency. Which ends up contributing to them making mistakes with their patients, including deadly ones. Shift work is already extremely taxing on the human body, on top of the large amounts of stress nurses and doctors are already under; but on top of _that_ , we're working the newbies 80 hours a week!?

According to Matthew Walker, this phenomenon started with one influential guy who thought it was important for the residents to "prove themselves" by working these insane hours, and it's just kind of stuck since then. Scary stuff, and basically no reason for it.

<comment><USER14> Medical residents do stupid work hours, and medicine is the one profession ought to know better. Pilots and truck drivers are legally restricted in the number of hours they can work, and doctors should be also. We know the effects of sleep deprivation, but doctors are 'special'.

There is no reason for it that I can see, apart from a general shortage of cheap, early-career doctors, due to their stupid guild-like methods of limiting inputs. That and their stupid machismo of proving themselves, as you say.

<comment><AUTHOR> > William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in the 1890s > and a founder of modern medical training, required his residents to be on > call 362 days a year (only later was it revealed that _Halsted fueled his > manic work ethic with cocaine_ ), and for the next 100 years the attitude of > the medical establishment was more or less the same.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom- mena...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-menace-of- sleep-deprived-doctors.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > There's this new finding where playing sounds at a certain frequency when > your brain is in deep sleep actually increases the percentage of time spent > in deep sleep. We're publishing this paper in Society for Neuroscience > Conference in a couple of weeks, and it's basically what my TED talk is > about. Playing these pulses at the same frequency as your deep-sleep > brainwaves primes more deep sleep. Scientifically speaking, it's a similar > process as transcranial direct-current stimulation, except it doesn't use > electricity—just sound. Sound gets transmitted into electricity because > you're picking up on the auditory cortex while you're sleeping.

I've tried the open source app Binaural Beats[0] a few days ago, mainly just as a noise blocker, but I was surprised to notice it working quite well with getting me into a deep sleep too. I don't know if it uses these frequencies though.

[0] [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeat...](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.binauralbeats/)

<comment><USER16> Do you use phone speaker or sleep with headphones?

<comment><USER17> If headphones, I'd be curious which ones. All the ones I've tried give me a headache after a few hours.

<comment><USER18> I've slept with LG Tone headphones as well as Beats X. I'd say the LG Tone was more comfortable to sleep with, since the connection to the neck part is very thin and moves around easily, and the neck part is free to move around loosely as you move. It never seems to get in the way, and the buds aren't ripped out. The BeatsX had a bigger problem with their stiffer neck part, if I moved they'd be pulled from my ears. Plus their at-best 8 hour battery life doesn't always last a full night, so I've been woken up by the sudden lack of white noise.

Then again, when the Tone dies, it screams "LOW BATTERY PLEASE CHARGE NOW" at you over and over again, which might wake you up :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Small quibble: the headline should be "in bed for more than eight hours"

The expert says 8.5 hours in bed (trying to sleep) to sleep 8, since we don't sleep the whole time.

So, if you have an accurate sleep tracker, "8" is still the number.

<comment><USER20> Was ready to say the same.

Over 8 hours of sleep starts reaching into the "hell no" territory for me, typically resulting in a headache all day. But I'm usually in bed before then, so it does work out much closer to what I actually go for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >A professor I collaborate with at Penn State named Orfeu Buxton says that 8.5 hours of sleep is the new eight hours. In order to get a healthy eight hours of sleep, which is the amount that many people need, you need to be in bed for 8.5 hours.

So, the title is misleading. It means you should _lie in bed_ for 8.5 hours in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours.

That said, this article has plenty of good insight and is well-written.

<comment><USER22> > _So, the title is misleading. It means you should lie in bed for 8.5 hours > in order to actually be asleep for 8 hours._

No, the title is not misleading.

Sleep is not just the time you're actually asleep. It's the whole time that you're in bed.

If you are in bed for only 8 hours a night, do you account for the times you woke up mid-sleep and went to have a piss, for example?

<comment><USER21> Ah, I assumed that was obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Bose just released an earbud that you can sleep with, for example

Wait, what? These are 249.95$. Why not just use simple earplugs? In Germany, we have Ohropax, made from wax, which sell for less than 3€ for a set of 12: [http://www.ohropax.de/en.html](http://www.ohropax.de/en.html)

<comment><USER24> Because earplugs also tune out the sounds of an alarm clock. This isn't an issue if I never have to wake before 11 or noon. A 6am waking time means I continually run the risk of simply not hearing the alarm, even with good sleeping habits and not sleeping in on weekends.

Of course, most of the earbuds that say they are designed for sleep only hold a charge for an average of 6 hours, and at the most 8. These actually have 16 hours, but unfortunately it seems they won't stream music instead of their pre-set sounds.

<comment><USER25> I've used Ohropax for the past couple of years, and they're absolutely amazing. None of the regular earplugs fit my ears, or are uncomfortable. Ohropax is just bees wax I think, and there's other brands that work just as well.

I also use an alarm if I have work to show up for, and I've never missed the alarm, the alarms on my phone are annoying as hell and never fail to wake me.

If you're so tired that you fall back asleep after your alarm, then you've messed up, and you probably were so tired that you could've fallen asleep without the earplugs anyway. I know I had many of those mornings during school/university.

<comment><USER24> mornings for me is akin to most folks trying to work a late shift. I'm fine if I have an adequately late waking time: 11 is pretty natural. I can do 9 with good sleep. 6am? My actual quality of sleep suffers.

And I think you misunderstand: I don't fall back asleep. I fail to hear the alarm at all. Or the phone. While we were dating, my now spouse called me to wake me up since he realized he didn't see me online. I did wake... on the 17th phone call. This simply happens with early wakings, regardless of sleep hygiene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know much about the source, Daniel Gartenberg? The credentials in the article are not great for a "leading" scientist, but perhaps others know more:

"assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State"

"one of the world's _most-talked-about_ sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about?

"entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy apps"

<comment><USER22> There's this place called Google, and it's literally a click on his name away:

[http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/](http://danielgartenberg.com/resume/)

[http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/](http://danielgartenberg.com/publications/)

[http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/](http://danielgartenberg.com/patents/)

> _" assistant adjunct professor ... at Penn State" (...) "one of the world's > most-talked-about sleep scientist" (emphasis added) - most talked about? > (...) "entrepreneur who has launched several cognitive-behavioral-therapy > apps"_

Basically: "someone we saw at TED and which has several videos of him attempting a career as a popularizer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I believe I'm one of the "short sleepers" they mention in the article. I've bought wirstband mostly to track my sleep patterns. Even though article says that devices like fitbit are not accurate enough in tracking different phases of sleep, my goal was largley to see how much time do I spend sleeping. In the last four months, I average out at 6,1hrs.

90% of the time I will wake up before the alarm and will sleep the same amount of time over the weekends, when I usually don't go to bed as early as I do during the working part of the week. The thing that I constantly think about is - could I benefit from those 2 extra hours to get to that magic number 8? I would really like to try it, but I keep waking up after 6 hrs. :)

I've started to think it's because of not so healthy lifestile - no exerxice, sub optimal diet, irregular bed time. Is it possible that my poor lifestyle results in me waking up after only 6 hrs of sleep and while feeling OK (it became normal to me), I could feel better if I slept longer? That was always something I pondered about. How to know if you really are a short sleeper, or you're just a person that gets by with sleeping less than recommended while not feeling as good as they could if they slept longer?

<comment><USER28> You mention you bought a wristband. Tracking my sleep is one of those things I want to start doing. Do you have any recommendations?

I don't particularly want to remember to put it on every night. I know Nokia launched a mattress pad recently ([https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep](https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep)) but I'm concerned about how reliable this is if I don't sleep exactly on top of it. (Plus I don't know how this could actually tell anything like sleep cycles and what not, or even detect that I'm asleep vs. watching TV in bed)

<comment><USER29> Not the parent, but I've been using the Oura ring ([https://ouraring.com/](https://ouraring.com/)) for almost a year and it works very well for sleep tracking. It's a sleep tracker above all, and has rather limited exercise tracking. It tracks resting heart rate, sleep phases, body temperature, and breathing. There's also an API to download data from their cloud service, although I haven't tried it.

I haven't yet received the newer model, but it seems to solve the issue of limited battery life in the previous model and the ring is also significantly smaller.

<comment><USER28> Woah, that's cool. I'll try it out, thanks for the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm jealous of folks who have the luxury of being able to have their bodies let them sleep 8 or more hours. I'm not sitting there with a phone next to my pillow, and I have no problems falling asleep. But I always wake up too early, before the alarm, meaning I can't get more than 6.5-7.5 hours because my body is too sensitive to light, noise and everything else: I'm cursed genetically as a light sleeper.

Worst part is, I'm in an unsympathetic world of non-light sleepers who play music, stomp around at odd hours, etc.

<comment><USER31> You should try earplugs and/or sleeping masks. They both take a little getting used to but they will definitely improve your sleep quality if external stimulation is your main problem.

<comment><USER30> I use earplugs almost every night. Earplugs don't block thumping from bass music or footsteps or slamming doors unfortunately. :-(

<comment><USER32> I live in Manhattan next to an intersection where people are beeping all night long. White noise machine on = I don't hear anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article understates how important pure darkness is, just a crack of light under a door can whack lab animals' melatonin levels. Also for constant biphasic sleep (which you want) 8.5 hrs isn't really enough, certainly not year 'round (I do skimp a bit during summer, near equinox.)

</comment><comment><USER34> But is it worth the time?

I've seen the studies showing how people who get more sleep live longer, but I always wonder, if you were measuring "total number of waking hours lived", would they come out to more or less equal?

(My curiosity has never been strong enough to make me actually do the calculation.)

<comment><USER35> From my experience* yes, it is worth it. But not in "total number of waking hours lived", but in performance in those waking hours - every hour cut from my optimal 8-8.5h sleep reduces my awareness / perf at work / social skills by 10% or more.

* I worked both in menial jobs and as a programmer, both with periods of short & long sleep.

EDIT: I can of course force myself to perform at higher level even with shorter sleep, but that very often leads to need for even longer sleep or health issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What if one always finds oneself waking up spontaneously, in a moderately alert state, after about 5-6 hours' sleep and can then only achieve fitful, unrefreshing sleep for the rest of the night?

In my youth, in the absence of an alarm, I would consistently get 8-9 hours of deep, unbroken sleep, but since my early 20s, I've found it impossible to get more than about six hours in one block. If I do succeed in returning to sleep after a premature awakening, I'll wake up again no more than 30 minutes later from what feels like a very non-restorative light sleep.

Schedule permitting, what seems to work best for me is a biphasic routine where the bulk of my sleep, typically about 5-6 hours, is had at night together with a short siesta in the afternoon, usually after lunch.

<comment><USER37> How is your exercise? Are you limiting your intake of artificial light?

<comment><USER36> I've experimented with all the commonly suggested stuff: blue-light blocking, sublingual melatonin (dosed appropriately and timed according to the phase response curve), exercise, meditation, etc., simultaneously and in isolation, and nothing extended my sleep significantly.

I suspect if I went through a grueling few weeks of sleep restriction, I would eventually see an increase in the duration of my sleep, but I'm content for now to stick with my biphasic protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I suffer from nocturia (diagnosed as non pathological after many rounds of tests all turning up negative).

In a typical night I get five hours max of contiguous sleep and have started sleeping (by that I mean the in bed duration) nine to ten hours as an attempt to compensate for not being able to stay asleep.

I've always been curious about the difference between time spent in bed and actual time in deep sleep and their equivalence.

Also for anyone with an Android phone that is interested in tracking sleep the app Sleep As Android is really great.[https://sleep.urbandroid.org/](https://sleep.urbandroid.org/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think we are only beginning to understand the importance of a good night's sleep.

I just recently listened to a fantastic episode of the Kevin Rose podcast featuring sleep scientist Matthew Walker [0], and found it very enlightening.

[0] [https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew- walker](https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker)

</comment><comment> T-Winsnes >Jobs used to be very manual, but as jobs are becoming more and more cognitive, I think caring for your cognition is going to become increasingly important for the work.

That's an interesting point, it will become less about not sitting in the same position for a long period of time, and more about making sure you don't strain your brain

<comment><USER40> your muscles wont grow and your body goes kaput if you sleep insufficiently and do physical labor.

<comment><USER22> Employees didn't care about that though, as they could get another cheap hired hand to do your work went you went kaput. Plus it didn't take much clarity or muscle to do most factory, farm etc work, just tedious persistence -- so you could be overtired all the time and they would still get productive work out of you.

With mental work it's not so simple (e.g. there are bigger costs in training you and in employee churn).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> >> Lightsabers?

>> Zeitgebers! It's this weird German word. There's a lot of cool words in sleep: like the photo receptors control the release of melatonin by sending signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, just like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

See kids? Science is this really cool thing with all those cool words. And stuff.

Science!

</comment><comment><USER42> It's about quality not quantity.

"You people do not sleep correctly ..." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ- CwPo&t=65](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxNgQ-CwPo&t=65)

</comment><comment><USER43> I must be a genetic short sleeper: 4 hours and I'm awake, as in my eyes won't stay shut. 5 hours and I'm groggy. Been this way for quite a while, and I used to stress about it, but now I just get up and get things done. I do take a nap here and there, but maybe once a month? However, I am somewhat of a health nut, crunches and core stuff during compiles, and a hard cardio mid afternoon. All this while coding 10 to 14 hours a day. Working from home, no commute, and a boss 12 time zones away, I've been able to get pretty extreme because I really like my work.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone seen research into letting your body sleep as long as it wants by not setting an alarm? I don't set an alarm anymore and reason that my body will wake up when it wants to. However doctors have told me that just because I don't "artificially" wake up, I might not be getting enough sleep.

<comment><USER44> _my body will wake up when it wants to._

That only works if you can completely control your external environment. Even when I don't set an alarm clock I often wake up at least partially due to external light/noise/temperature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder if there are any studies of the effect on the quality and quantity of people's sleep and their general wellbeing since this recent surge of "sleep shaming" in the press started.

It's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't.

<comment><USER22> > _It 's always the same thing: "You are not sleeping in exactly this way and > you should feel bad." Nope, sorry. I don't._

The article already mentions that sleep deprived people, up to a certain point at least, don't feel bad.

Their inferior performance and clarity becomes their "new normal" \-- like people who have shortsightedness and don't know it, and think everybody just sees that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This headline couldn't have been worse. People always overstate the importance of what they study. Pretty much period.

Obviously doesn't mean there isn't something to this; but "topic x is something everyone neglects, according to person studying x" is enough to set me on defensive. Hard.

</comment><comment><USER47> "You actually have genes that dictate whether you're a morning person or an evening person."

The workplace constantly discriminates against night owls. How long will it take for cultures to finally catch up in this respect?

</comment><comment><USER48> Is there some way I can test if I have this short sleeper gene? I have a hard time sleeping more than 5 to 6 hours and these articles all make me think I'm going to die early, lose memories, and every other affliction possible.

<comment><USER49> check 23andme

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ever since my teens I considered sleep the most difficult thing in my life, and the most detrimental to my health. For me falling asleep has been a difficult assignment that usually takes 1-3 hours. It's been a negative feedback loop where when I am tired I lose discipline and stay awake longer, which makes me even more tired the next day, which makes me stay awake even longer. It makes no sense at all and frequently throws me in bouts of grogginess that last days.

It's been that way for more than ten years now, and I've read and talked a lot about sleeping but nothing ever made me get rid of this problem of not being able to fall asleep. A couple of weeks ago however I read two HN articles that together seem to have finally given me some grip on falling asleep more quickly (i.e. in less than 1 hour).

Reading back that last paragraph makes me feel like I'm about to introduce a "doctors hate this one trick" product.. Anyway, the first article is the one about WW2 pilots having to fall asleep in two minutes:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep- fast/](https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/)

The key takeaway from that is kind of obvious, but it's nice to be made conscious of it, and that is that it's important to _actively_ make yourself relax. Relax both your muscles, and your mind.

I can't seem to find the second article, maybe it didn't have sleep in the title or something, but it was the missing link for me. The article was a little bit controversial because it had a linkbaity title implying sleep is not important. The main point of that article was that since stress and stressful thinking inhibits sleep, you sleep better if you don't worry about sleeping. It's the old ice bear problem, you have to sleep, but you're not allowed to think about having to sleep.

I combined those two articles into a simple strategy that seems to be fairly succesful so far. First step is to get into a position where all my limbs are relaxed, and I actively relax my body.

The next step is to stop my mind from racing through the realization and acceptation that the most important thing right now is to sleep. That means that my ideas are unimportant, that my organization of tomorrows tasks are unimportant, that sudden realizations are unimportant, that nothing matters, not even falling asleep. I kill any brain activity with "it doesn't matter", almost as a mantra. When something pops up in my brain, I force myself to think "it doesn't matter" and cease working on the idea.

Maybe it sounds a bit silly, but I think it might help someone in the same situation as me. I think I let myself feel my thoughts were important for too long. I really enjoy thinking about how to do things, and apparently it's become a point of discipline to make myself stop thinking about things.

</comment><comment><USER50> > ...misconceptions... Even that eating cheese before snoozing causes > nightmares.

Stilton definitely does cause weird dreams -- the fungus in it is psychoactive, I am absolutely sure of it.

<comment><USER51> Man... some Rarebit an hour or two before going to bed (eggs, cheese, mustard, Worcestershire and a couple other spices)... that is a guaranteed way for me to have totally messed up dreams. They're generally not nightmares so much as super vivid and weird.

At least I'm not the only one: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Rarebit_Fiend)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I never use an alarm clock and rarely sleep more than six hours. I've been trying to sleep eight for as long as I can remember and it never seems to happen

</comment><comment><USER53> How someone with no sleep issues can choose to sleep less than 8 hours is beyond me. I would be in heaven if I could consistently pull off more than 8 hours.

</comment><comment><USER54> The article claims that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn't work. This is most likely wrong information, as shown in this very recent study [0].

[0] [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jsr.12712)

<comment><USER55> As far as I can tell your linked study says that "possibly, long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep" in terms of _mortality_ but says nothing about qualify of life.

You can catchup/reset but the days you don't sleep enough you'll do worse.

<comment><USER54> Yes, different priorities lead to different results. If you are looking at life satisfaction, then 8 hours a day is claimed to be optimal [0].

[0] [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-016-0256-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Where can we get the actual research paper?

</comment><comment><USER57> I get along just fine on 6.

<comment><USER22> Probably missed the part of the interview where they explained that people that get less sleep become less able to tell whether they're sleep deprived or not.

Their new, less than perfect, functioning, becomes "the new normal".

(That, or you're one of the outliers with the genes for "short sleeping").

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Previously Discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17299491)

</comment><comment><USER59> Zeitgeber isn't "like totally this weird German word OMG." (Foreign languages aren't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just because you don't speak them.) It just means "time-giver" \- a cue (like the sunrise) that tells your body what time it is.

<comment><USER22> > _Foreign languages aren 't, as a rule, inherently super fucked up just > because you don't speak them_

No, but German kinda is. It almost always sounds like someone in authority is screaming at you :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIMvXpw0t0)

<comment><USER60> Speaking as a German here, the German words in that video were pronounced that way for the sole purpose to ridicule our language. No German would ever pronounce them like that.

Not to mention that the supposedly German in that video looks like a Bavarian and believe me here, Bavarians are not Germans and they're not representative of Germany as a whole. Officially and geographically they are, but in reality the Free State of Bavaria is more like its own nation with its own language and culture. They even have their own political party, the CSU, that only campaigns in Bavaria.

<comment><USER61> The video is just an exaggeration, a caricature, of an existing feature. There is a grain of truth behind it, particularly 'High German', but the video definitely exaggerates it. If anything, as an outsider, Bavarian and Low German sound much softer.

I lived in Germany for about 5 years (still go back at least once a year) but mostly always spoke English for the job, though obviously I was surrounded by the language. Germanic languages (English included) do contain quite a lot more 'sharp' sounds and generally are spoken in a deeper register than romantic languages.

Mongrel languages like English contain characteristics of both, though I'd say English sounds way more like Low German to me.

Going from memory - in 'High German' sharper sounds like 'echt', 'icht', gutteral 'um', 'zee', ' tzim', gutteral 'uct', 'acht', gutteral 'tur', gutteral 'ch' and 'schmeh' are just a few common examples that are often spoken with emphasised or strong pronunciation even in northern Germany (where I worked but actually now spend more time in Bavaria) and can easily given an impression of a 'harsher' tone to the language to us outsiders. I certainly remember them standing out enough to recall them now.

I guess this comes from the strong pronunciation of each syllable in German, which certainly seems to be more common than something like French or Italian where sounds can be rolled together.

I do agree with you though that emphasis can change the characteristic of the language. To use an example from English, a Glaswegian accent sounds very aggressive. Yet, listen to someone from Aberdeenshire or parts of Wales and English becomes quite mellifluous. Talk to someone from Northern Ireland and you might become concerned they're suicidal such is the cadence and tone of the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "What I study is important and everyone else should value it more too"

</comment><comment><USER40> man, do i have a funny...

despite being a genius i just couldn't do skool. Eventually i concluded that the topics just bored me. It just now struck me that they bored me because i barely slept before school. in the weekends i would sleep 14 hours then did things mentally that blew my own mind. to borrow an example from the discussion: i could look at a chessboard and explore openings without moving a piece, all the way to the end game then the next variation. there was this huge inconsistency with my one ear in other ear out school performance.

<comment><USER63> I've always felt there was a dramatic difference in my mental performance/IQ/genius-level thinking when I got a full 9 hours of sleep versus just 7-8 hours. Very noticeable in school or the early years of work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Young but serious developer, do I stay in college? - <AUTHOR> I've been programming since I was 9, and started my professional career a few years after that. I'm quite skillful in several languages/fields within Computer Science, and have taken a few products from concept to production as a technical lead. I hate to sound like I'm bragging - I don't mean to. I just want to set the stage a bit. I'm 18 now and I'm in my first year of college. I love Computer Science: my only hobby is programming, and I love doing it professionally. However my career has always been in between school. At first middle school, then high school, and now college. Each step gives me more free time to work, which is great. Over the summers and during breaks I work a normal 9-5. And I love it. Even after a 90 minute commute each way each day, for months during the hot summers, I love what I do at work and I find developing new technologies is always exciting. But thats in between school. I've come to the conclusion that most classes are just incompatible with my personality. For whatever irrational reason, when I'm forced to learn something (as opposed to learning it on my own terms), even a subject which I love dearly, becomes a drudgery for me. Tests make me dread even thinking about a subject, and when I inevitably (no matter how hard I study) get a poor test grade, it makes me despise the subject entirely until the feelings from the class subside and I can develop my own joy for the subject again.
And of course, there's the money. However I make a pretty serious salary at my current job. If I was able to work full time, I'd be earning ~$100k/yr. College however, is ~$55k/yr. If I had to take out student loans it wouldn't even be a question for me, however my parents are paying for college.
So HN, help me out here. Is it worth staying in college? I quite a few years of professional experience at a few different companies, it's becoming hard to justify staying. <comment><USER2> This is up to you, and much like being forced to be in school against your will, you will only truly own the decision if you make it yourself. If you want other people to validate your decision, you haven't worked it through or been through enough pain to own the outcome.

If I was in your shoes (I was) I would drop out. I completed high school in three years (I hated it, but forced myself to finish for signaling) and then it seemed to make more sense to just start working full time, so I did and I do not regret it at all. I am an outsider because I did not even start university, and I am usually the only person on a team or call not to have gone to university. It doesn't matter now, but only because I have some professional experience.

That said, at least two thirds of companies I have ever talked to screen me on the first call for not having a degree. So you really force yourself into a part of the economy that values merit. For the most part, this has not been an issue, but it may be for you. I more or less ignored my parents thoughts on this, though they were surprisingly supportive, as their influence goes down a lot when you make your own money.

I would think more about what your goals are long term (presumably not just to program for someone else forever) and what they require. If you want to do anything more conservative (big company in non-tech industry, government, etc.) you should stick it out for signaling. If you want to run your own company and/or are on that path, you really won't miss it.

If something is hard but seems right, usually that means it is right and the hard part is the part preventing you from taking the leap. Most people project conservative values on others, while being more forgiving of themselves, so you will get a lot of "stay in school" advise.</comment>


The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/demaio/2009/03/the-art-of-the-selfimposed-dea.html <comment><USER2> I like the advice to "start your day as early as possible, even if you're not a morning person." I'm definitely not a morning person, but he's right that it feels so good to have accomplishments done early in the day. Need to do that more often.

Another one of his points is similar to Randy Pausch's advice to "eat the biggest frog first."

<comment><USER3> Second the advice about early starts. Engineering and then grad school inevitably turned me into an insomniac but my productivity since I had to (more like was forced to) start waking up early as increased a lot.

And re: "Find poetry in the humdrum". If big chunks of your life regularly feel humdrum, you're either doing it wrong or doing the wrong thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's see: meet my self-imposed deadline, or read _The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline_? Tough choice.

</comment><comment><USER5> The third suggestion about making the parts of a project get shorter and shorter so that you feel like you are making progress is really smart. I'm definitely going to try that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could anyone offer more advice for making self-imposed deadlines stick?

<comment><USER7> Here's what works for me:

Keep a SIMPLE running list of tasks in a plain 'ol text file and sort them by priority. If you find yourself "spacing out", grep the list for the easiest thing you could possibly do and do it immediately. This often get your engine running.

Assign specific times for surfing and goofing off. Give yourself one hour in the morning to check email/news/blogs/etc... and don't surf again until lunch. Another hour or so, max, and then back to work. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you aren't reading about other people's great accomplishments.

Reconsider blogging. Yes, I know, this is heresy. However, I found that it was really hurting my productivity, and my desire to create a great blog post was sucking time away from creating a great app.

Challenge yourself. If you are feeling frustrated, pick the thing you've been avoiding like the plague and attack it. Tell yourself that you aren't stopping until it's dead or at least extremely subdued. You'll feel so good at the end that everything else will seem easy.

<comment><USER8> "Reconsider blogging. Yes, I know, this is heresy. However, I found that it was really hurting my productivity, and my desire to create a great blog post was sucking time away from creating a great app."

Using your own advice,("Assign specific times for surfing and goofing off. Give yourself one hour in the morning to check email/news/blogs/etc... and don't surf again until lunch. Another hour or so, max, and then back to work.") one could just allot a couple of hours a week to blogging and thus avoid it becoming a productivity sink ;-)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. You just have to set priorities and know yourself. My "goof-off" time is mostly used for research on various topics and that takes priority over blogging for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The early or late point is debatable, but the other three bits of advice are great. That one about about breaking up the project so that each step is smaller than the last makes so much sense. You have to reorganize the way you do things probably, but it seems like it will pay off in the end. I am going to try it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nothing new here. I've been following these guidelines and others for years as a telecommuter. Each person works differently, some do well starting early and others staying up late. I think that consistency is the real key -- stick with a schedule even when you hit the 80% blahs.

<comment><USER5> I am using these guidelines, starated today. I got a lot accomplished. Let's see how well it holds up. There's bad consistency and good consistency.</comment></comment>


The JuliaConnectoR: a functionally oriented interface for integrating Julia in R [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2005/2005.06334.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I found the example of training a neural ODE in R using the Julia tools quite cool and wanted to share it!</comment>


Income guide for independent developer - <AUTHOR> http://damnsmalllinux.org/income-guide/

<comment><USER2> There's something fundamentally wrong with a guide that purports to be for independent developer income, yet lists advertisements above software development and claims they will be the largest source of income.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with lobe.io? - <AUTHOR>

I bought the domain name lobe.io because it's 4 letters and kind of fun to pronounce. Does anyone have any ideas for what I could do with it? The word lobe invokes lobes of the brain, earlobes, subdivided structures in general, ...<p>(I know, starting from a name is not actually a good way to come up with entrepreneurial ideas.) <comment><USER2> Something to do with patterns. For e.g: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pattern](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pattern)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you had lube.io i saw a business opportunity :P Too bad. But just try to sell your domain for cash.

Or set up a wordpress blog for relevant content.

</comment><comment><USER4> Let it expire and save yourself $50 next year.

</comment><comment><USER5> Make a site where I can design my very own tunnels and plugs for my lobes and buy them.

</comment><comment><USER6> You bought it for fun and now you find yourself clueless about it ? Let it expire</comment>


Ask HN: How can I find this thread? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to find few old threads where people created Google docs to share of their startup ideas and partner up with each other. Anyone has one of those threads or knows how to search for it? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772398>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks revorad.</comment></comment>


The Silicon Valley Heavyweights Who Want to Settle the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-05/the-silicon-valley-heavyweights-who-want-to-settle-the-moon <comment><USER2> Though now forgotten, much of the early european settlements in the Americas came from a sort of proto venture capital. Both Jamestown and the Mayflower for example, were private ventures with the intent of turning a profit. Of course many details remain to be filled in. While they sought gold, it's not clear that any riches will be found on the moon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please, please, please go as fast as possible.

The quicker we get rid of the "tech bros" the better the world will be.

<comment><USER4> They once tried to get rid of a certain PayPal mafia member. He decided to foolishly burn the cash on building rockets; everybody knows how sure this way is to part with funds. Guess he lost the last money and nobody can remember his name anymore. At least the world can breathe with relief :) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "The picture that emerged out of those meetings was that you could create a > permanent, economically self-sustaining presence on the moon that could be > done for the single-digit billions," said Steve Jurvetson, a venture > capitalist, who provided the initial Open Lunar funding.

Exactly how will this be economically self-sustaining? I don't think the stuff of moon-rocks is particularly valuable, other than to collectors and scientists. Presumable a moon colony would have difficulty just creating enough food for its populace, so I can't imagine it would have the capability to become self-sustaining. Maybe everyone becomes remote software engineers working for companies on Earth, and those companies send supplies in return?

<comment><USER4> Nobody (*) can imagine the vast market of construction materials and rocket fuel in refueling station on Earth orbit. That is, until some enterprising souls would invest and create some, and rise the hype enough to start building satellites and stations which would take advantage of that - after all, fuel and construction materials are the biggest parts by mass, and mass lifted from Earth costs pretty penny. The trick with pioneers is that they carry oxygen from the Moon, as well as titanium and aluminum - and that's the killer feature, allowing to drop prices safely below the abilities of Earth-based enterprises. Of course the profits are in part reinvested into growing the Moon base - which would be better called Moon settlement then.</comment></comment>


DropMocks: create a quick gallery by dropping in images - <AUTHOR> http://www.dropmocks.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Friend passed this on and I thought it was interesting - could offer various gallery modes (slideshow, grid, etc), white label options so that designs can use it to show concepts to clients, annotations, etc.</comment>


Amazon Kindle format broke Python's indention - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingpursuit.com/2012/03/amazon-kindle-format-broke-pythons.html

<comment><USER2> That was a very long article just to say what everyone already knows, "Sometimes text formatted on the Kindle doesn't look exactly like the printed copy"</comment>