Another new era of WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://bethesignal.org/blog/2015/02/27/new-era-wordpress-hhvm-rest-react/ <comment><USER3> "Unless you've goofed something up, the slowest part of your PHP-based application should be PHP itself."

Is the database not the bottleneck? Especially with the way wordpress stores "post meta data" with key and value columns it seems that the joins could get a bit ugly.

<comment><USER4> No.

Most of the large, healthy PHP-based sites I've worked on spend 5-20% of their average request time in the database. Which means PHP is chewing 80-95%. Which makes PHP the slow bit.

Not because PHP is bad: That's a pretty reasonable figure for platforms based on Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. (Less so for Java and .NET.)

It's a really good rule of thumb: If you're spending more time during each request doing database work rather than PHP work, then you've got a problem that needs to be fixed.

You've probably hit a database scalability limit, or tried to get the database to do something silly. (And hey, that's easy to do with MySQL, which is fast primarily because it's dumb.)

(By the way: WordPress, out of the box, doesn't spend much time in the database at all.)

<comment><USER5> I'm going to have to backup jdub on this. The "IO/database should be" classic wisdom has not really held up to my experience doing a stint providing managed support for LAMP(P as in PHP) servers at a hosting company. Most of the time there were performance issues it was PHP taking up the CPU's. We had a lot of success mitigating this for people with some proper varnish configs.

Very rarely was the issue with the databases. I've had people not want to normalize data and create some generally disgusting tables and code because "joins bad"... On tables that will only ever have a few 10k records. If you have the proper indexes and queries in place, your database is just traversing btree's in memory and it will be blazing fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I have to debug another problem in Wordpress, every time I encounter another bug in WP's core code I raise my head up and cry, impotent rage against the nameless void. Wordpress' architecture resembles a plate of spaghetti. It's abominable, a horror upon the face of this planet.

I don't mind PHP though :)

<comment><USER7> And, yet, the results for users are stunningly great. I heavily use both WordPress and Drupal for sites. WordPress may be uglier on the backend, but to people just using the software, the differences could not be more stark, and Drupal does not fare well.

Things like upgrading the core software...with WordPress it's so easy that it doesn't even take thought; hell, they've made upgrades automatic by default a few days ago. With Drupal, I'm _months_ into a migration process to get our site onto Drupal 7 (not even kidding). It's been more complicated, and more error-prone, than the process of migrating from OpenACS to Joomla and then from Joomla into Drupal 6.

WordPress also seems to have the ecosystem right. No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it). I've whipped up several websites in the past few weeks for various side projects I have, and it's downright _fun_ to build complicated sites with WordPress. And, because there are more themes than there are people using WordPress (exaggeration to make a point), getting a site looking good and not like every other WordPress site is trivial and cheap. I find myself _wanting_ to make new websites because it's more fun than working on my company website running Drupal. When it comes to building custom code, I prefer Drupal (mostly), but I do that pretty rarely; I interact with the frontend and admin interface daily.

I've almost talked myself into migrating my company site to WordPress+bbPress. I wonder if there's a really good ticket tracker option for WordPress...

<comment><USER8> "No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)."

This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.

<comment><USER7> But, I need more than one thing on my websites. Sure, you can have many disparate parts all doing their one thing well ..but the user experience for that often sucks. Controlling notifications from four different tools in four different places is deeply user hostile, for example, and that's the situation I'd be putting my users in for our website (unless I built a unified notification UI for forums, content, tickets, and store applications). Likewise unifying logins/sessions is often a nightmare (I've done it but don't like doing it). Handling spam across multiple tools that allow user content, etc. There are big costs to single-purpose tools. For some folks the cost is worth paying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What struck me is that one of the benefits of the WP-API is that you could create a drop-in replacement for the server-side of Wordpress. Why? To move WP away from PHP.

Seriously, if the API is stable, why not just build something that matches it using a faster, cleaner language? The user gets the speed benefits, the developers get to start again from a clean(er) slate. The only hole in this idea is the shortage of cheap hosting which offers something other than PHP for dynamic websites.

<comment><USER10> As the article notes, the most likely way Wordpress will get faster on the server is HHVM.

I doubt very much that the WP team has any intention of moving away from PHP anytime soon (if ever). Yes, they could start again on a clean slate of code, but they'd also have to start again on a clean slate of the community. But the community is worth way more than the code.

WP-API is important so that Wordpress can continue to grow into more complex projects. Javascript front-ends are getting more popular, and if WP cannot feed data to them in a flexible and performant way, it will lose out to other content frameworks that can (for example, Drupal), or custom development of content stores.

<comment><USER9> "I doubt very much that the WP team has any intention of moving away from PHP anytime soon (if ever)."

You've misunderstood me. I didn't envision this move would be made by the WP team. Anyone with the prerequisite skills to build server software could do it. A new open-source project, a WP-compatible drop in replacement. Even just for environmental reasons it'd be worth it, imagine what a difference it would make if a significant portion of the world's websites switched to a more efficient solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What other CMS is as easy to teach to end users, is free, and works 99% of the time? What other CMS can turn itself into an eCommerce store, blog, business website, magazine, etc with a few small tweaks?

I hear a lot of these comments from very well respected developers, but as a user and webmaster (not a developer) of WordPress I am very satisfied with it, and rarely see a WordPress site that runs slow, with the exceptions of poorly coded themes which will slow down ANY CMS.

I manage a lot of websites, probably 200 or so of them are WordPress. Over the last 5 years I've seen about 5 hacks, 3 were due to outdated plugins and 2 were brute forced. Backups are incredibly easy (file structure and database) for an end user with plugins, and maintenance for an average WordPress takes about 20 minutes per month.

I think this discussion is very positive in the fact that the core of WordPress is very outdated and has not really been touched in the last 5 years (or more?) or so. I'd love to see version 5 or 6 be a full re-write or even a partial rewrite of the main functions and core includes, perhaps even a more efficient language but that is not really my territory. The problem I see with all that is backwards compatibility. There are so many themes, plugins, and addons that depend on WordPress core hooks, I don't know how that could work seamlessly. I suppose that is what beta testing is for.

As I've already said in this thread, WordPress is a huge success in the mainstream and is gaining in popularity every day. 75 million WP sites last I checked vs a fraction of that in Drupal and Joomla.

Node is on the rise but is still a custom solution and not deployable unless you are a skilled developer with knowledge of the network stack.

We live in an age where end users want to be able to control their website backend. They want to blog, make changes to static pages, add images from events and even add their own products. Have you ever tried to teach someone to do this in Joomla and Drupal? I have, with success but it is 100x more difficult than WordPress.

<comment><USER12> Sorry to rain on this party but...

Wordpress is failing on mobile.

Most of the themes are poorly optimized for mobile. For example open [http://wordpress.org/news](http://wordpress.org/news) on your phone - there's so much mobile fail happening here, from the hamburger menu and the poor use of space at the top to tiny fonts and navigation elements. Over at blog.wordpress.com there's other fail going on, like the performance of opening the menu top left. Both of these reflect the general state of Wordpress themes from my experience.

Meanwhile, aside from some app-based editing tools, Wordpress has completely failed to bring blog content to apps.

The #1 use case here is for app developers who won't content from their blog to be available somewhere in their app.

And actually it's not just Wordpress failing here. There's such a gap in the market that mobile marketing platforms like AppBoy are filling the gap with product features e.g. [http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in- app-news...](http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/appboy-reveals-in-app-news- feeds-to-increase-click-through-rates/544791)

<comment><USER13> > Wordpress is failing on mobile.

I don't know much about WP, so I'm really curious, is it WP that is failing on mobile, or is it the poorly designed themes?

<comment><USER12> To me it's really that Wordpress developers / community are not taking mobile seriously. Poorly mobile optimized themes are just a symptom of the problem.

The consequence is a generation of Mobile developers are ignoring Wordpress, at least in their apps. Wordpress needs to have a drop-in SDK that allows content from an app developers blog to be displayed in a friendly way in-app, plus push notifications / badges etc. to inform users of new content. How do you tell users about new features in your app for example?

Then there are some deeper questions to answer like blog comments - do they make sense on mobile at all? Most people aren't going to write more than a sentence on their phone. What about finding different ways to provide feedback? Yelp for example spend a long time soul-searching about whether to allow reviews from mobile - [http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap- yelp-app-now-po...](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/08/oh-snap-yelp-app-now- post-reviews-straight-from-your-mobile-device.html) \- I don't think they found the answer but they certainly saw the problem. But that's another story...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No-backend cuasi-static would be a new era. There is no reason for a dynamic CMS on sites that are updated twice a month and maybe reach 50k visits/mo; I am sure the vast majority of WP sites out there are of such nature.

<comment><USER15> Static CMS's are great for personal projects, or very tech-friendly clients, but most clients paying for a website want the ability to manage content in a user friendly way.

I'm sure the vast majority of WP sites have been built for a paying client.

<comment><USER16> The backend could be dynamic, creating static html for the frontend. Which is essentially, what the numerous caching plugins are doing, just in a very convoluted way.

<comment><USER17> and what movabletype does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Once, maybe twice every year you have this blog post of how WordPress will improve, will be rewritten to a modern foundation, will reinvent blogging plastered with the sympathetic "WordPress gets the job done but the foundation is horrible". Fast-forward a few months and WordPress releases a new version, the project to rewrite WordPress didn't gather enough momentum and there you are, slapping in another function_exists in your module and thinking "man, why did nobody ever improve this horrible house of cards?".

</comment><comment><USER19> So far as I can tell, the actual meat and potatoes of Wordpress has been largely untouched for more than a decade. I first looked under the hood in 2004, last looked in I think 2013 or so. And basically it all seemed spookily familiar.

Wordpress is the triumph of style and marketing over all other considerations. Having managed a small fleet of Wordpress sites for over a decade, I am not a fan.

And I am not very optimistic about Grand Visions In Blog Posts. I've had a few of those myself.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can get behind WP-API and like that direction.

However, I can't wrap my mind around like React.js. Having a mental roadblock on even diving it to do prototypes with it to give it a whirl (which I often do with new libraries or languages even).

<comment><USER21> Try and ignore all of the flux stuff and any mention of immutable data - <USER2> on React itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm sorry, but the logo on this blog is so creepy. Seriously.

<comment><USER23> I had a bigger problem with the domain name -- for some reason I didn't read it as "be the signal" but as " _bethe_ signal," and wasted five minutes wondering if it was a clever reference to Hans Bethe ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe)) that I was too dense to understand.

(god I'm such a nerd)

<comment><USER4> I gave my email address to someone last night who misheard it as Beaver Signal. Pretty sure I like yours better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "the unkillable cockroach of the world wide web: PHP"

I'm biased but this is best quote I've heard in quite a while.

<comment><USER25> TurdPress is pretty much solely responsible for keeping PHP alive this long. So so many kids these days learn a little WordPress and tell people they're web developers.

<comment><USER26> It's the IE of blog platforms.

WP causes _endless_ security problems for hosting companies. Even when it's locked down it's (often) still wide open, and most users don't know how to lock it down.

But it's never going to die, because ecosystem. Static alternatives are never going to take over, because they don't have gargantuan theme factories supporting them. And most users like pretty.

So I guess we're stuck with it for a while yet.

<comment><USER27> Nothing is ever really going to kill PHP or Wordpress so long as the communities designing other languages and frameworks approach the business case of the common nontechnical user with disdain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is nice to read. I just started looking into a playing with React... and then got the great idea to start recreating something like [http://p2theme.com/](http://p2theme.com/) with React and WP-API. Good to see that I am on the right track ;) There is not much to it yet (still in prototype/PoC stage) but for those interested: [https://github.com/alexciarlillo/react- wp](https://github.com/alexciarlillo/react-wp)

<comment><USER4> Cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The thing about WordPress is that for most clients you'll likely end up running on a managed WP server like WP Engine.

The vanilla WP environment means goodies like React (which requires V8 to compile on the server) and HHVM are not in the cards. But PHP and WordPress really doesn't need to be fast (just put it behind a CDN).

Isomorphic rendering over the WP-API is all you need - I've had a lot of benefit using logic-less templates like Handlebars on the client and the server.

<comment><USER4> You don't need to build your React client-side JavaScript on the server. You build it on your development workstation and ship the resulting JavaScript bundle in your theme.

"PHP and WordPress really [don't] need to be fast"... until you're doing anything dynamic at all, and then they do. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "One taste of React in front of WP-API, and I reckon the jQuery and Backbone era will be finished."

This seems to me like a bit of an exaggeration (or maybe just facetious).

<comment><USER30> I think it is a bit of an exaggeration, but not entirely inaccurate. I am currently working on a large application UI re-write, we've moved to React, and JQuery was included from day one. The entire application uses JQuery exactly once as of today. (We're leveraging $.ajax) React solves a lot of the same issues JQuery does. We didn't purposely try avoiding JQuery, we just haven't needed it so far. That's a major change.

<comment><USER4> Check out superagent for all your $.ajax-replacing needs. :-)

[https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent](https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's unrealistic to compare WordPress php and Facebook php. Most website running WordPress do not need the optimization required to run facebook.

If there is something that slows down WordPress it's the database queries, the amount of external assets and bloated themes. There are more then files being downloaded for each requests and all served from the same server.

Throw in hhvm or any optimization on the code and you still have to deal with the other issues.

<comment><USER32> You definitely did not have a deep look at "how to optimize wordpress". It's a massive spaghetti piece of awful PHP that does _A LOT_ of completely unnecessary work. Now as a smart VM, it's possible to reduce quite a bit this amount of work (inlining etc.) and the JIT coming from HHVM can come handy in here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was just reading about this...

[http://wptavern.com/heroku-wp-a-template-for-installing- and-...](http://wptavern.com/heroku-wp-a-template-for-installing-and-running- wordpress-on-heroku)

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the idea of a WP API. I guess in the future you could more easily build non-browser apps that utilize WP data. Of course, there's always going to be the people who don't very much like the whole front-end JavaScript MVC idea (Backbone, React, Angular, etc.), but there will still be the regular PHP themes for them to use.

My only wish is that a proliferation of horrible themes based on inefficient JS does not occur. Front-end MVC can be done right, but don't abuse it with bad code that gives the rest a bad name!

<comment><USER23> I just wish there were a WP _management_ API. Like, let me remotely do updates, backups, user administration etc. against a bunch of WP sites from a single console (or better yet, command line script), rather than having to log in to each one individually to do that stuff, which is a pain.

EDIT: So it turns out there's a third party project that kinda sorta does this: WP-CLI ([http://wp-cli.org/](http://wp-cli.org/)). Anyone used it?

<comment><USER35> wp cli is the bomb, try it, it rocks!

<comment><USER36> Very much this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is not specific to Wordpress, you can apply the same to Drupal or any cms/framework able to send data in json

<comment><USER10> "Headless Drupal" is a growing idea in that community, and I believe how the new Tonight Show website was built--Drupal data store, JS front-end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really wish all of these similar ideas were to happen on Ruby and Rails.

Ruby need something similar to HHVM, progress on the RuJIT sponsored by Ruby Association looks like stalled. IronRuby ( or something similar ) on the new Microsoft CoreCLR will take years.

And Rails Core team, or DHH seems to be against the Rails API ideas.

</comment><comment><USER39> I had read the post, thinking that there is a good new direction in wp. At the end, the only valuable thing for me, is rendering templates using the wp-api instead of the big mess of files and code that actually is. Also this way, you don't expose your wordpress install xD

</comment><comment><USER40> All I want is a templating language in the WordPress core and I can live with all the other bad parts.

<comment><USER19> We could call it "Personal Hypertext Processor". It'll be great.

<comment><USER27> The meme that PHP is a templating language may be technically accurate, but as a templating language, raw PHP is so terrible that the thought of using it as such should also be dismissed outright.

There is nothing _great_ about this sort of thing:

        <?php for($i=0; $i<$num_rows; $i++) { ?>

            <div><?php echo htmlspecialchars($db_row[$i]['field']); ?></div>

        <?php } ?>

repeated ad-nauseum across hundreds of files.

And then somebody decides to drop php variables directly into javascript and css...

No. No no no.

<comment><USER41> You forgot `ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE` on `htmlspecialchars`, it's perilous to use directly in every single place. But after embracing `short_open_tag` (or `<?=` is always available in 5.4+), foreach, `\PDO::FETCH_OBJ` and a helper function;

        <?php foreach($row in $results) { ?>
            <div><?=h($row->field)?></div>
        <?php } ?>

Is it really longer/worse than the equivalent twig/smarty/handlebars ?

<comment><USER27> >You forgot `ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE` on `htmlspecialchars`, it's perilous to use directly in every single place.

I would have added it in real code... but manually escaping everything is still what you have to do with raw php. At the very least, have something to recursively escape an array (keys and values) before it gets dumped onto the page.

Twig at least lets you escape by default (and you don't have to worry about double-escaping), but the equivalent wouldn't be much less verbose. Twig's syntax is a bit cleaner in couple of places I think, and it lets you use array bracket syntax _[]_ in versions of PHP too old to support it natively.

       {% for row in results %}
         <div>{{ row.field }}</div>
       {% endfor %}

Of course this doesn't include the added complexity of an entire framework implementing its own language running on top of everything but still, the environment is a bit more sane.

<comment><USER42> Meh. With short tags, and a helper function which can be abstracted away in your stack, you can write the following:

      <? foreach($row in $results): ?>
        <div><?= $row['field'] ?></div>
      <? endforeach ?>

(Assume the helper function maps htmlspecialchars over an array returned by PDO::FETCH_ASSOC.)

<comment><USER27> At that point, though, once you no longer have to echo and escape everything, you have a templating framework on top of PHP. The number and complexity of 'helper functions' differs between this and something like Twig, but it's still using abstractions to manage what PHP doesn't do well on its own.

A lot of self-described minimalist templating languages do wind up looking a lot like that. I personally don't want to see raw PHP in anything i'm calling a template but to each their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "Unless you've goofed something up, the slowest part of your PHP-based application should be PHP itself. Other parts of your stack may exhibit scaling problems that affect response times, but in terms of raw performance, PHP is the piggy in the middle of your web server and data stores."

I completely disagree. PHP is rarely the issue and I don't know where people get this idea that PHP is slow. Unless you're calculating the flight trajectory to Mars, the main bottleneck of WordPress is MySQL. Fill up you PHP application with microtimers, you'll see PHP only needs milliseconds to do its job even without caching. If there's anything slowing you down, you're waiting for MySQL or Curl or some external application, which is unnecessary most of the time if you designed the application properly.

<comment><USER4> c.f. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121008)

<comment><USER43> Post links and downvote all you want. Drop in the microtimers yourself and see where your PHP apps are really spending time.

<comment><USER4> I run the numbers and monitor New Relic charts on large WordPress sites all the time. Yes, some request time is spent doing I/O, but the majority of request time in any healthy PHP (or Ruby, Python, etc.) site is spent in PHP.

(When more time is spent elsewhere, you have a problem that needs to be fixed. For example, waiting for I/O because you've done something silly with a database query or you've pushed it beyond its scaling limits and _everyone 's_ waiting for I/O.)

<comment><USER43> I wouldn't trust New Relic charts. Maybe that is the source of all this disinformation. Get in the actual code and time everything yourself. If PHP is actually slow, you should be able to isolate the problem, like a loop within a loop that's just bad coding. You can make any language go slow with bad code. Check out my blog post on this subject:

[http://pjbrunet.com/microtimers-on-hooks-to-measure- wordpres...](http://pjbrunet.com/microtimers-on-hooks-to-measure-wordpress- performance/)

<comment><USER4> _" I wouldn't trust New Relic charts."_

Good for you.

Putting microtimers throughout your code is like using printf for "debugging": It's banging rocks together. Use xdebug, xhprof, New Relic, _something_ sensible. You'll learn much more about your stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If all the UI will be delegated to JS, what HTML will WP produce? An empty body while React is loading?

<comment><USER45> It's a service-oriented architecture. The API is not your web server.

You can use something like Ambidex to render HTML from your React components on the web server, backed by your WP-API.

\</comment></comment><comment>

More info (in video form): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaymfLj5tjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaymfLj5tjA)

Ambidex (one of many ways you could implement this paradigm): [https://github.com/appsforartists/ambidex](https://github.com/appsforartists/ambidex)

</comment><comment><USER46> WordPress is a great product? PHP is the "cockroach of the world wide web"?

Who's next up on the soapbox?

</comment><comment><USER47> IMO, WordPress could benefit by shifting to Node.js.

<comment><USER48> I feel reasonably sure you're just trolling - or attempting a joke. However.

The reason WP did - and does - so well is that for most hosts, it's very easy to deploy, does what most sites need, and is reasonably easy to teach. It's also trivially extensible, within it's somewhat limited framework.

So any other PHP application (various shopping carts, etc) can be easily put on top of a normal WP site, and with a little glue, made to be a plugin that "just works" (most of the time. And occasionally makes the whole site return a completely empty page and no errors...).

However, there is going to be a general decline in PHP being easier to deploy than other server site languages, an interesting proposition might be to make a language agnostic WP 'database core'.

Currently, it's all a bit of a mess underneath - lots of the system still thinks it's a pure blogging engine, lots of the internal functions are aimed at that, etc.

But the core idea of the data model is

[post] >\- [categories] and [metadata] which can be attached to those somewhat ad hoc. Posts can be different 'types', dependant on the current theme (yeah - WP is kind of messed up).

But the idea of all your content pieces are roughly equivalent, so a blog post is basically the same thing as a static page, is basically the same thing as a custom-post-type-video, cat picture, etc, is reasonably powerful.

If the core of the database concepts were codified and 'locked down', and the PHP back end simplified down to being a RESTful interface on top of it (JSON for the back end, pretty HTML for the front end) + a few oddments, then that could be ported to any number of different languages quite easily.

This way mysql could be factored out, if desired, or PHP, and a lot of the concepts would still keep on working.

The trouble is you lose the WP 'it's PHP, so a custom theme can do ANYTHING!!!!! magic'. Which might be good for security, but bad for popularity.

If the core were codified enough, then many plugins and theme control stuff could simply become front-end javascript plus templating files, which would be good though. (And back-end agnostic).

<comment><USER49> I think about the future of WordPress a lot. Like what would WP look like if it was mostly JS? When I look at all the front-end developments (React etc), it's really hard to gauge. On one level I'd love to see things become more framework agnostic and flexible. The json api in theory frees up a lot of restrictions in what devs can do with WP running as a backend. Even cooler if we can switch out Mysql with other kinds of databases.

But it's kind of interesting, for all PHP's warts, it has made it so easy to build things, allowing a huge amount of plugins and themes to develop. For all these years, devs didn't need to worry about the latest library, from backbone to angular, from react to mithril etc. It's the stability and ease of access that has been so important to growth.

Now that the web is so javascript oriented it's really compelling to just think about how WP can adapt to it. But a big push toward adopting new methodologies just strips away the number one reason to develop with WordPress: the huge ecosystem that has solutions coded with PHP. And if you are going to create that rift, you might as well start with some other platform.

But it's really hard to pick a winner now, React for example, could easily be overtaken by another lib in a years time. We're unsure how Nodejs is going to develop. The json API's current state is not superfast or fully developed yet.

I sometimes wonder that we're underestimating the advantages of having something stable like PHP continuing to run at least part of the show. For example, I have yet to see any kind of theme (A WP theme or otherwise) coded with some kind of front-end oriented mvc setup that results in a qualitatively superior site experience.</comment></comment></comment>


Manta rays' food-capturing mechanism may hold key to better filtration systems - sahin-boydas https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/manta-rays%E2%80%99-food-capturing-mechanism-may-hold-key-better-filtration-systems <comment> kris-s The youtube link in the article has a nice animation of how mantas filter: [https://youtu.be/2nRN1ZJPs98](https://youtu.be/2nRN1ZJPs98)

This approach to problem solving is one of my favorite. Instead of thinking hard about a problem: observe nature and leverage a few billion years of evolutionary problem solving that's already been done.

<comment><AUTHOR> That strategy can be very successful, but sometimes what you discover is that nature often depends on things like regenerating materials, and other things we can't come close to replicating. We can understand how a dragonfly flies, but we can't replicate it efficiently. Nature is also often unconcerned with long service lives, again looking at the dragonfly. What we want from our machine tends to be durability and reparibility, not to mention affordability.

Nature can only get us so far with the current state of the art of materials science.

<comment><USER2> Seems to me that one of the more interesting directions that genetic engineering could take is manufacturing of exotic materials. The safety issues would be much easier to manage as well if the GM organisms are kept in vats in a lab instead of planted in farm fields, etc.

<comment><USER3> It already has, spider goat: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science- environment-16554357/t...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science- environment-16554357/the-goats-with-spider-genes-and-silk-in-their-milk)

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Spider goat! That's really amazing, and the promise of spider silk and related materials to everything from body armor to surgery can't be overstated.

Also...

Spider goat, spider goat, doing whatever a spider goat does. Is it a spider? No it's a goat. Spider goat. Spider goat.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Leonardo the Enigma - <AUTHOR> https://www.weeklystandard.com/danny-heitman/the-eternal-enigma-of-leonardo-da-vinci <comment><USER2> Nearly finished reading Walter Issacson's Da Vinci and highly recommend it for anyone interested in his life story. It paints a beautiful picture and demystifies his life into a way we can easily see ourselves, if we only take enough time to carefully observe our surroundings, question dogmas, and stay endlessly curious about the subtle and little things in life.

</comment><comment><USER3> According Robert A Heinlein, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Leonardo da Vinci...

He mentions it in _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ if you are interested.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you are thinking of The Door Into Summer:

"In Robert Heinlen's The Door Into Summer, Dr. Twitchell recounts a tale of a student whom he displaced in time by 500 years. While there was no way of knowing whether the student went to the past or the future, Dr. Twitchell hints that he believes it was the past due to the student's name—Leonard Vincent."

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

<comment><USER3> Arghh yes! Damn my faulty memory. :(</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Aecius – Website Recommendations based on browsing history - <AUTHOR> https://www.aecius.net <comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

I'm the creator, so feel free to ask any questions.

Aecius is a website recommender that works like an algorithmic hackernews. The recommendations are similar to the ones you would get from youtube, except that they are for links and not videos. The core of the recommender selects a set of articles it considers interesting based on your browsing history and then sorts them into topics for you to browse through.

I scraped about 50 million URLs for the database and wrote most of the engine myself. Let me know how you like it.</comment>


After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found Its Purpose, and Profits - <AUTHOR> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290543 <comment><USER2> Foursquare honestly has some of the best user location data you can buy on the market.

The only companies out there with better historical data are Facebook, Apple, and Google. And as far as I know, I can't call them up and start buying from them within a few weeks.

I've seen hedge funds right now making millions off of Foursquare's data as they can build algorithms around it quite easily and there's plenty of history to backtest off of. The great part is that Foursquare's previous money maker was selling their places database so they've already done a great job mapping GPS coordinates to businesses and it's pretty easy to map that further to a ticker symbol. Perfect for quants.

By combining Foursquare data with anonymized credit card data from Intuit or Yodlee... you've got the ability to predict retail sales on a DAILY basis rather than on a quarterly basis. You might even be able to a better job than that actual business in predicting their growth if you've got a whole team of quants working on creating the data models.

This is the start of a shift from the market at large relying on quarterly earnings for these types of companies and instead being able to track performance on a daily level. As far as I can tell, there's nothing companies can do to stop this either.

<comment><USER3> I was a bit surprised that the article didn't include 'Foursquare Hedge Fund' as yet another way to make money. Seems like they could exploit their own data just as easily.

<comment><USER4> Would this not count as a weak form of insider information?

<comment><USER5> No. Insider information has to ultimately come from an insider. Foursquare isn't getting its information from companies, it is getting them from its users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What this article tells me is to not share data with foursquare since their priority is to sell that data and make money and not to help me make decisions on where should I be eating.

<comment><USER7> They're incentivized to produce a service that is used by people often. One way of doing this is to provide value to the user.

<comment><USER8> This. Ads track me while simultaneously taking value away. I am more than happy to share some data while receiving some value in return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue, and profits are within sight for the first time._

Serious question: how is a software company that's bringing in $100MM a year without any substantial overhead in terms of physical manufacturing or shipping or similar real-world expenses _not_ profitable. As far as I can tell, they'd have to have infrastructure costs well into the double digit millions yearly and/or 450+ employees on payroll, neither of which is true as far as I can tell (regardless of how prudent either would be for them).

<comment><USER10> Let's do some quick napkin math. Foursquare has 286 employees[1], let's say the average salary is $120k, representing ~$180k fully-loaded cost. And there you already have a ~$51MM cost.

[1]: [https://equidateinc.com/company/foursquare](https://equidateinc.com/company/foursquare)

<comment><USER11> 120k for each and every employee? And none of them mention they shouldn't be spending $50,000,000 a year on... infrastructure (aws I'm assuming)?

<comment><USER10> Probably a sales- and engineering- heavy team; many of whom will be earning $150k+. Executives are probably making $300k+. This should bring up the average salary at the company.

Also, this is just one line-item. There's a lot more expenses to running a business. I wouldn't be surprised to see them close to $80M+ a year. The article didn't exactly say their revenues were $100M, just that it was "well on its way" there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" Looming large in this sector are Facebook and Google, each with its own armies of engineers working to compete. Glueck shrugs off these threats: The market is plenty big."_

What makes Glueck think Facebook and Google wants to share? They enter big markets then attempt to dominate it, especially Facebook. Currently Facebook gives no quarter. It will copy what you do well and go after your business fiercely.

 _"Foursquare has signed deals with Snapchat to improve its geo-filtering. More than one million users have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements"_

Facebook(Instagram) and Google have significantly more people using their apps on location, the have more location data. Both companies do not have to buy data/service from Snapchat. And what happens if Snapchat and Twitter decides to enter the market?

</comment><comment><USER13> That's pretty interesting, I thought they were dead for sure after "doing a digg" by splitting off Swarm from the main app. How do they even collect data if hardly anybody uses their app anymore?

<comment><USER14> If you read the article, you'll see that they are buying Snapchat's location data.

<comment><USER15> Might want to reread it...

Snapchat is paying four square. That sentence in the article could be clearer, is confusing.

[http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-signs-data-deal- fours...](http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-signs-data-deal-foursquare- better-targeted-geofilters-174627/)

<comment><USER16> That's a bold move, charging Snapchat for the privilege of selling out their users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You have to wonder whether all of this press is just a plug for an exit?

Additionally, how does the board of directors at Foursquare let this last for 8 years?

They raised a down round last year at a ~$300 million valuation and are "aiming" to get to a $100 million to reach profitability (8 years later).

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, but they are essentially building a profitable business on the backs of people willing to be tracked (or checkin). You wonder how that can be maintained.

<comment><USER19> This. There's no way a company that took 8 years to figure out that this is literally the only way to make money on the internet will last.

<comment><USER20> How do you figure?

<comment><USER19> I don't. I didn't read the article, I was bored and I thought parent was being sarcastic saying "building a profitable business on the backs of people willing to be tracked". Missing the key word "willing", I assumed it to be the same business model of just about every internet company and Foursquare was just now figuring this out. So I broke the rules and responded sarcastically thinking this post wasn't going to get much attention anyway (it's about Foursquare).

I've read it now and my comment makes little sense in context. I see they stated some users "have agreed to leave location sharing on all the time so Foursquare can track and analyze their movements." I'm not really sure how this is any different than what they were doing 8 years ago so I do, non- sarcastically, "wonder how that can be maintained".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i wonder if foursquare is creating this buzz to see if they can get a chance to IPO and dump all their useless shares on clueless public?

</comment><comment><USER22> Are they tying individual PII (name, UDID etc...) to the location data or are they anonymizing it?

</comment><comment><USER23> "Three of the top five hedge funds are using Foursquare data to give them an investing edge."

When you absolutely can't find a viable business model, the last resort is to shrug, and see if you can sell your data to hedge funds.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish there's was a Zillow for businesses. I'm trying to buy a small business but you never know if they're lying and sales are dying. And I'd buy it then go out of business.

</comment><comment><USER25> What is Foursquare's mechanism for gathering this data?

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how much Foursquare pays for their PR firm? Worth the money for articles like this =)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER27> They don't sell a product connected to the article so I don't really see the comparison.

<comment><USER26> They sell location analytics reporting and API access to their location data. Both are mentioned and extolled in the article. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER27> That's not a consumer product. That's an enterprise service.

<comment><USER26> It's still a product that being sold by the article. Submarine PR isn't limited to consumer products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't get why there are any more than 4-6 people needed to run Foursquare.</comment>


TIL: Personal Finance StackExchange has a 'sugar-daddy' tag - <AUTHOR> https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/sugar-daddy?tab=Votes <comment><USER2> Any StackExchange can have any tag - users add and curate them. Mods can "burninate" them[0], or blacklist them if they are total trash.

[0]: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120640/what-does- it...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120640/what-does-it-mean-to- burninate-a-tag)</comment>


The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/the-anatomy-of-an-entrepreneur.aspx#

<comment><USER2> An important item this article is missing is their definition of entrepreneur.

In the Philippines in the area I live I can reach a dozen stores within a 5 minute walk. These are stores people run out of their homes. They generally have a room with a barred window where people can walk up and buy basic goods.

Downtown, every parking area has numerous people who will park your scooter and they work off tips. Kids go from bar to bar selling peanuts. Vendors walk around selling fake viagra and cheap watches. People setup make-shift food carts in areas which are heavily trafficked.

Most of these people are working without any sort of license. They are hustlers doing what they need to do to get by. That's my definition of entrepreneur. If you were to survey these people using the same questions the article used, then they would get very different responses.

<comment><USER3> hustler!=entrepeneur, although I am sure it increases the chance of them becoming a successful one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Professional networks were important to the success of their current > businesses for 73 percent of the entrepreneurs. In comparison, 62 percent > felt the same way about personal networks._

And this is why this number is so:

> _Founders tended to be middle-aged—40 years old on average—when they started > their first companies._

Business is primarily about trust, relationships and reducing people's fear. Having 15+ years experience just _working_ with other people (like most middle class working 40 year olds) is a massive advantage when starting a business.

</comment><comment><USER5> _> More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs ... were well-educated: 95.1 percent of those surveyed had earned bachelor's degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees._

That really surprised me. Maybe it's just a tech entrepreneur thing but I thought the "college drop-out turned founder" narrative was more common.

</comment><comment><USER6> A very small sample and does not match actual real life experience. I don't think these findings are true or good. #fail

<comment><AUTHOR> Kauffman foundation is a conservative group (certainly not as much as, say, Chamber of Commerce, but it's right-leaning), so they will cherry-pick the data points that advance their policy recommendations

<comment><USER7> You might be right, but critique like "does not match actual real life experience" is cheap and might as well be "doesn't conform to my selection bias". From doing my own comparison it seems clear that in companies with big exits, a high level of education is very common. This doesn't necessarily mean that a high level of education is better for making large companies, but does challenge the picture of the entrepreneur as a dandelion child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best quote for me "Eighty-six percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as important"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a positive-feedback cycle: Ivy-League alums hire and promote other Ivy- League graduates, who in turn hire and promote other Ivy-League graduates ...</comment></comment>


Thorium - <AUTHOR> http://rein.pk/thorium <comment><USER2> > but thorium reactors have been pretty experimental

Not all thorium reactors. A good example for an industrial grade thorium reactor is the thtr-300 a high temperature thorium pebble bed reactor (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300>)

> Thorium reactors are inherently stable, so "nuclear meltdowns" can't happen.

This was also one reason for the design of the AVR in Jülich and it's successor the THTR-300. Although there wasn't any "nuclear meltdown", there were various other problems:

\- Small amounts of water leaking into the primary cooling circuit. Bigger amounts could have lead to a buildup of hydrogen and oxygen which can cause explosions. This is very comparable to a meltdown

\- The pebbles proved to be not very stable. This lead to a bigger amount of radioactive matter being released into the surrounding environment by the THTR-300

\- The AVR leaked a big amount of radioactive matter into the ground water

\- various other problems

Newer thorium reactor types won't have these problems because they will be considered in their designs, but there's still the problem with the timeframe. Estimates are that 2030 is the time when Gen IV reactors will get rolled out (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor>). Meanwhile Germany replaced 3.5% of it's electric power sources from 2010 to 2011 with renewable ones.

<comment><USER3> I think Germany replaced a lot more than 3.5% with renewable energy.

[http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/26/germany-26-of- electricit...](http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/26/germany-26-of-electricity- from-renewable-energy-in-1st-half-of-2012/)

<comment><USER4> One of you talks about absolute numbers, the other about % change. I don't have any numbers easily at hand but you might both be correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen several thorium-boosting articles like this, and none of them say why research and industrial development selected for uranium over thorium. Is it just because the initial research into power came out of weapons research?

<comment><USER6> There are numerous different reasons. Thorium proponents often gloss over a lot of the difficulties of the system, leading to a false sense of how easy it would be to make such reactors. One of the biggest problems is that a Thorium reactor is actually a U-233 reactor, which is bred from the Thorium, and U-233 is not so easy to work with. It emits a huge amount of gamma radiation, which is highly penetrating and dangerous for human life.

To work with U-235 or Plutonium you only need a glove box, but to work with U-233 you cannot have humans physically close to the material, you need waldos and closed circuit cameras and so forth. This naturally increases the cost of working with the fuel. But wait, it gets worse. As I said, gamma radiation is highly penetrating and heavily ionizing, which means that it damages delicate materials quite easily. Especially seals, made out of rubber or silicone or what-have-you, and electronics. This makes fuel cycle handling hugely challenging and also makes reactor construction rather challenging as well.

Now, likely we could overcome these problems but they are nevertheless huge problems.

One of the big reasons why Uranium/Plutonium reactors have caught on is because you can use 1950s technology to build reactors and process fuel. That's not the case with Thorium/U-233.

<comment><USER7> This pretty much nails it, that is why things have to be very different with Thorium and the combination "very different" and "nuclear" leads to an over abundance of caution.

One of the reasons the travelling wave reactor is "interesting" is that starts and ends with 'low grade' radioactive material, and works very much like a 'brushfire' which burns fuel ahead of it and leaves behind fully utilized fuel. The downside is that it doesn't really "stop" in the sense that you start one of these candles burning and for the most part it goes 10 years and then sputters out, you can harvest the energy or not but you can't really turn it off. (at least not in the early designs)

So much of the engineering issues with Thorium are mastering the fuel cycle and that is something the US DoE hasn't spent a whole lot of time investigating. Its an interesting question what we could do with a 1950's attitude toward researching nuclear power uses and 2010's level of technology.

<comment><USER8> LFTRs are not all that difficult. It is a WHOLE lot simpler than a Traveling Wave reactor!

<comment><USER7> We have different definitions of "difficult" I suspect.

The Thorium fuel cycle produces U232, that stuff kills at a distance, through walls. What that means is that there are a number of scenarios, one of which Fukishima just went through, where the core gets uncovered and rather than leaking Cesium it shoots gamma rays everywhere killing anything trying to get near it. That is not the case with the U238 fuel cycle.

Not saying it can't be dealt with, just saying its different, and by being different it is dangerous in different ways.

<comment><USER8> "The Thorium fuel produces U232..." Yup, which is one of its nicest features. It means that the U233 is unlikely to be used for weapons. And since it never leaves the well shielded containment area in a LFTR, there is no hazard.

If the kettle is breached in the LFTR, the salt will probably just condense on any small break and seal it. If the break is large, the salt drains into a drain tank which is still in the shielded containment volume. No worries, mate! Oh, and since there is no significant pressure and no volatile chemicals like liquid sodium, there are no forces trying to disperse the materials. Inherently MUCH safer than any PWR or LMFR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not only is thorium much more plentiful than Uranium, creating demand for thorium also solves diffuses the Chinese economic control of rare earth metals. Rare earths are plentiful in monazite sands as well as thorium and are available in the US. Right now, thorium is a radioactive byproduct that largely prevents economic extraction of rare earths. Build good thorium reactors in the US, and both energy and rare earth situations are alleviated.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The rare earth situation has already been solved. Mining has restarted in the US and US will likely be self-sufficient in REE in 2 years.

<comment><USER10> Do you have any citations? I'm not trying to nitpick, I am just interested in reading more.

<comment><USER11> I was also curious, so I did some digging and found this article:

[http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/U-S-rare-earth-mine- re...](http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/U-S-rare-earth-mine- revived-4057911.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an introductory video (10 mins) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw> a longer video <http://thoriumremix.com/2011/> (the surrounding links are worth exploring) and a summary [http://cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/brc/20120621060336/http...](http://cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/brc/20120621060336/http://www.brc.gov/sites/default/files/comments/attachments/flibe_energy_- _lftr_thorium_top_ten.pdf) The important point to get is that the excitement is not just "thorium" (as the title of the thread suggests) but the reactor as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be an update on the Norway story at the end:

[http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/11/norway-begins-four- year...](http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/11/norway-begins-four-year-test-of- thorium-nuclear-reactor/)

And how come he didn't even mention LFTR?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor>

<comment><AUTHOR> LFTR are a type of molten salt reactor, which is mentioned, though certainly not given enough attention in this first short article ;) will see what i can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there serious arguments against Thorium? Or is it just early stage waiting to be a bit more experimented with before going mainstream?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. a recent nature article pointed out how thorium can be used to make uranium-233 which can be used to make nuclear weapons.[1] (see the conclusions section at the end of the article)

here's a more detailed explanation: the "old" idea before this nature article was that the uranium-233 produced in thorium reactors would be inevitably mixed with uranium-232 (which isn't useful for making bombs). but the nature article pointed out that the real decay path is thorium-233 --> protactinium-233 --> (uranium-232 AND uranium-233), and that by separating the protactinium-233 from the thorium reactor's neutron flux after 1 month, you can ensure that the protactinium-233 converts to uranium-233 instead of uranium-232.[2] ... step 3 you can make a weapon.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a.html) (sorry for the paywall :( ) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle>

<comment><USER14> But this isn't practical in reality. First of all, you need a core of U-233 to start the process but once you start you're adding thorium at different points in time so the fuel slurry is going to be always a mix of thorium, protactinium, u-232, u-233 and other various products which makes extracting anything a royal pain. There's much easier ways of isolating weapons grade uranium instead of trying to extract it from a ongoing fuel process.

<comment><USER15> The question isn't whether there are easier ways of producing, but whether the thorium reactor doesn't provide better concealment for producing what would bring unwanted attention when done in the 'easier' way.

<comment><USER9> If you're trying to conceal what you're doing, it would be best by far to avoid U-232 being involved in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun related trivia:

I just read Robert A. Heinlein's first "Heinlein juvenile" (i.e. young adult) novel _Rocket Ship Galileo_. It was published in 1947. The rocket ship's power plant was a nuclear reactor using... thorium.

<comment><USER16> Probably not the best choice for fuel, though. It takes around a month after capturing a neutron for thorium to become fissile, and if they just needed to get to the moon and back, a thorium breeder reactor isn't going to be too helpful with that. Highly enriched uranium is the way the NERVA guys went.

If they needed long-term power for a moon base, of course, it might be another story.

<comment><USER17> Above [1], someone pointed out that a thorium reactor would produce gamma radiation that is highly penetrating and heavily ionizing. Probably not the "roommate" you want in the small confines of a spaceship. :)

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4913976>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Possibly Graphen coating of the metals could be used to solve the corrosion problem in molten salt Thorium reactors.

If we solve the corrosion problem we get cheap abundant energy with little to no nuclear waste and little to no material which can be used to make weapons of mass destruction.

<http://www.gizmag.com/graphene-metal-corrosion/24434/>

<comment><USER8> What corrosion issue? It has already been shown the a combination of adding one additional alloying element to the Hastalloy N while keeping the salt slightly fluorine poor will greatly reduce the already minimal corrosion issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A pretty good article overall but he seems to go off the rails when he starts talking about construction costs and assumes that a thorium reactor would cost the same as a uranium reactor. My understanding is that a thorium reactor should be dramatically cheaper for a variety of reasons (no need for a big containment bubble for one thing).

<comment><USER20> That is currently all speculative. We don't know how much it would cost to build a thorium reactor. There is strong evidence that it would be cheaper, but has yet to be demonstrated. To quote the article:

"Safety features of nuclear plants seem to dominate the cost. There are many claims about the inherent safety features of thorium Molten Salt Reactors. But those claims have yet to be proven in working prototypes. If thorium reactor designs and prototypes could prove the claims of inherent safety mechanisms, then thorium could dramatically reduce the cost of nuclear power."

<comment><USER8> Actually, there have been two working prototypes, one that ran without significant issue for about five full power years.

<comment><USER8> Oops, make that for two full power years over a period of five years. It was after all an experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Safety features of nuclear plants seem to dominate the cost. There are many claims about the inherent safety features of thorium Molten Salt Reactors. But those claims have yet to be proven in working prototypes." Actually, yes they have. The three main safety features have all been demonstrated.

First, the working fluid is non-volatile, no pressure nor chemical reactivity to drive dispersion of trapped gaseous fission products like Xenon and Iodine. Those were the two significant dispersed radionuclides in Fukushima.

Second, those same kind of radionuclides are removed from the salt continuously so there is not a store of them to BE dispersed.

Third, any loss of power to the reactor will passively result in a dump of the salt into a non-reactive tank where it will be passively cooled. It will be "walk away safe"!

</comment><comment><USER21> This Nature article throws some cold water on the claims that thorium isn't very useful for making weapons.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a.html)

Unfortunately the article is paywalled.

<comment> adam-f U233 more readily fizzes than booms, since it fissions faster it tends to pre- explode before getting into a really good super critcal state (probably something to do with the .6 instead of 1.6 delayed neutrons per 100 fissions mentioned above, it also has a slightly better neutron production factor than u-235).

U233 will have U232, which decays through some very high energy gamma emitters, making U233 impossible to smuggle through shipping ports etc... These gamma emissions also kill humans in minutes, so would-be bomb makers would need to use robots or other remote handling techniques to fabricate a bomb. This is something a rouge state would have a hard time pulling off, and is practically out of reach of basic terrorists.

It's not impossible but it would be easier/cheaper to just mine/steal some natural uranium and build centrifuges. It's easy to make U233 from thorium and thorium is abundant, so, really, how would reactors make thorium/U233 more available to rouge states when they could basically make it themselves, and why would they choose the U233 route?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I took a nuclear engineering class in 1975. In essence we discussed three reactor design ideas:

1\. Water, pressurized or otherwise. 2\. Gas-cooled. 3\. Molten-salt.

The big problem with molten salt was that you sent it through a whole lot of pipes. Hence, the physical plant that would get radioactive was much bigger than just the core of a water-based reactor. Also, you just had to deal with a whole lot of radioactive sludge.

A huge advantage was that the thing couldn't lose coolant and melt down; a catastrophic failure would amount to the molten salt sinking into the earth below.

It seemed at the time that if any major change would be made, it would be to HTGRs -- high-temperature gas reactors. But it also seemed as if the true "best" idea was molten-salt.

</comment><comment><USER23> Note well that you are reading an article by someone who doesn't know the difference between fission and fusion (he says that a uranium fission reaction can result in a "thermonuclear explosion").

<comment><AUTHOR> mmmm, yes quite inaccurate on my part. apologies. of course... uranium fission was a critical part of the hydrogen bomb ;) will correct that thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a full, frank discussion of the use of thorium in a LFTR [http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/79398/kirk-sorensen- de...](http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/79398/kirk-sorensen-detailed- exploration-thoriums-potential-energy-source) The nice thing about this item is that there's a transcript. For example, "Why thorium, not uranium?" Well the technicalities are explained (thermal vs fast reactors).

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd be much more comfortble seeing resources going to improving solar and wind power. Storage of waste is always going to cause massive issues.

<comment><USER9> Thorium reactors can burn our current nuclear waste store, reducing its volume by an order of magnitude and the duration of dangerous radioactivity to under 300 years.

<comment><USER25> 300 years is still far too long. You simply cannot expect most organizations to survive that long and remain trustworthy. Apart from that the real costs would still be very high.

<comment><USER26> The point is, we have a lot of nuclear waste _right now_ that needs containment for 10,000 years. Put it through liquid thorium reactors (or integral fast reactors) and you reduce the amount of waste by a couple orders of magnitude, while reducing the timeframe to 300 years. Do you have a better plan for it?

<comment><USER27> France seems to do okay by recycling it.

Of course it's cheaper to just toss the old stuff somewhere and dig up fresh uranium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you want to help raise public awareness of this issue, sign the petition on the We-The-People website to preserve U233 used to make LFTR reactors. <http://wh.gov/5Rmc>

More info can be found here <http://thoriumpetition.com/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Could someone please open a kickstarter for a new thorium reactor design and construction?

I'll gladly contribute to the initial cost (probably billions) just to get a lifetime of free and CO2-efficient electricity.

Couldn't this way of funding bypass most "big firm" inefficiencies and legacy cruft, just as SpaceX did?

<comment><USER30> There's a non-profit to support development of LFTR here: <https://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium?ref=nf>

If you are an American, another thing you can do is sign the petition to stop the destruction of the U233.

<http://wh.gov/5Rmc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For those interested, here's a TEDx talk about liquid fluoride thorium reactors and how they could be used to power a moon colony:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw>

</comment><comment><USER32> Shouldn't one rather frame this debate not as "proponents vs opponents" but as "scientists trying to figure out what is actually the case and hopefully inventing better nuclear power in the process"?

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know how much less waste Thorium produces when used compared to Uranium? Both this article and Peter Thiel's linked article say "less", but neither are exact.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually a bit hard to quantify. The true cost of radioactive waste is related to what type of radiation it emits (gamma? alpha particles?), how long-lived the radiation is i.e. it's half-life, and the actual quantity of that material that is produced per Watt. This triple-axis makes it a bit hard to quantify in simple terms, but the main idea behind thorium is that the waste has a significantly shorter half-life[1]. Depending on the exact reactor design, there may also be ways to reduce the quantity of secondary waste (like water that's been exposed to heavy neutron flux while transferring energy from nuclear core --> steam turbines).

[1] : [http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is- th...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the- biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/)

<comment><USER34> Offtopic: how did you get a .pk domain?

<comment><USER35> <http://www.pknic.net.pk></comment></comment></comment></comment>


People of Las Vegas - <AUTHOR> https://believermag.com/the-people-of-las-vegas/ <comment><USER2> I've lived all over the U.S., the last seven years in Las Vegas. The Believer piece was the most accurate portrayal of the city I've ever come across.

Las Vegas is, in many ways, the most American city.

* Top to bottom, the city hustles for your attention and your commerce. Everyone implicitly understands that if the customer doesn't like the product or service, there are a million other options. It's a welcome change compared to other we're-too-cool-for-you downtowns.

* It remains one of the only metro areas (perhaps the only one) in America where someone with a high school diploma can roll into town, get a job and, in fairly short order, make a middle-class life for him/herself.

* We're a big destination for immigrants of all types who come here looking for work -- busboys become valets become small-shop owners become big-shop owners.

* We're not sentimental when something doesn't work anymore. You see it on the Strip when hotels are imploded, sure, but you also see it all around town. We don't have a lot of half-dead, struggling businesses because, if it's not working, people try something new.

Having said all that? The summers are miserable.

<comment><USER3> Last time I was there I thought LV is like growing up in Germany I always thought the US was: pragmatic, over the top and innovative. Most of the US feels very stale and over the hill to me but it seems in Las Vegas people are still moving.

On the other hand: it's pretty nuts to build such a city in the middle of the desert.

<comment><USER4> Many cities are in the middle of the desert: Dubai, Cairo, Doha, etc... Bonus point: Land is cheap. No trees to care about.

<comment><USER5> Except for all of those trees (and grass!) we plant to help us forget we live in a desert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure exactly what the author's thesis is. Yes, there are people that live in the city, and they don't all hang out at Caesars Palace every weekend. This is not news. What strikes me about the Las Vegas metro area, apart from the gaming zones, is how boring it is.

Yes, there's a lot of natural beauty, and I love hiking when I'm there. But I've also been all around the metro area and honestly, there is just not a lot going on. Apart from the casinos, it's a pretty generic desert city; lots of chain restaurants and strip malls. There's not very much industry outside of tourism/hospitality.

I would never say "I could never live in Vegas" because of the casinos. I say "I could never live in Vegas" because there is almost nothing else going on.

<comment><USER7> Hard to argue with your subjective opinion, but I would guess that objectively there is more "going on" in Las Vegas at any given time than there is in most major cities. It just happens to be very concentrated into a small part of the city. But the number of high end restaurants, concerts, special events, shows, clubs, etc. in Vegas is unusually high.

Outside of that area it is pretty bland suburban, but that area supports a lot of interesting food choices because of the number of ethnicities in the city.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I guess I don't disagree that there's a lot going on there, but it's all in service of bringing in tourists, all sponsored by the casinos. Sure, locals are welcome to partake in any of that, but it's not "for" them in a large sense. It doesn't seem to have the same degree of cultural institutions that other similarly sized cities have.

<comment><USER8> I live on the east coast, but I have friends in Vegas, so when I visit, I avoid the Strip and touristy areas unless I want to specifically go out.

As a kid, I remember our family visiting Vegas multiple times as tourists; going back as an adult has felt very different. It was a fascinating transition to experience, not unlike when you stop flying window seats and start flying aisle seats instead.

In my teenage years, I lived in an east coast city with a boardwalk and beach, lots of hotels and condos and tourist shops. I hardly ever went to the beach -- it could get crowded, and parking and not getting your car wet and sandy would get complicated, so I often forgot that it's an option. All of that works a lot better if you're staying at the beach.

I suppose Vegas residents may feel similar about the Strip or Fremont Street during an average day, when they're trying to get stuff done. But if you're looking for ways to spend an afternoon or night out around town, there's plenty of variety, from shows to shopping, paid attractions, pedestrian spaces, museums, diverse restaurants, bars, nightclubs: much more so than metros of a comparable size: Charlotte, Sacramento, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Columbus, Cleveland. Its weakest areas arguably sports, and smaller "local" venues for bands on tour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my personal experience, Las Vegas also happens to be one of the nerdiest cities in America. The Luxor hotel and casino, one of the biggest and oldest on the strip, is also one of the first major establishments to host e-sports events.

I'm also consistently impressed with how many comic book shops, card shops, retro video game shops and video game bars there are. Even for Japanese rhythm arcade games, a relatively obscure hobby that I enjoy, one of the best communities in the US was located in Las Vegas at a place called Gemini Arcade Palace. It has since closed down, but a couple others have already taken its place, and the community is stronger than ever.

I feel like this might be related to the "refreshing lack of class consciousness" the author mentioned in the article. Nobody faults anyone for being a nerd (or drag queen, or crackhead, etc.) in Las Vegas.

<comment><USER10> Thats because they're realizing that the boomer population is aging out of las vegas. Meanwhile the millenials are turning into prime spending age, and they're going wherevcer they want to go. They've been trying to get millenials in for at least the last 10 years with big name electronic artists and now also e-sports. For the most part it seems to be working.

That said, I do tend to agree with you that overall that there's a bigger nerd market there per capita than most cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seconding the underappreciated hiking and wilderness access that Vegas provides. This excellent site is a huge portal to all natural areas, trails, etc. in the area: www.birdandhike.com

<comment><USER12> It's really the redeeming feature of Las Vegas events for me. In addition to the places that are within an hour or so, you're only about 3 hours from both Zion and Death Valley National Parks and only something like 4 1/2 to the Grand Canyon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be fair, I'll ask pretty much anyone "You still living in X" and follow that up by "And how is that going?"

It's not that something that I would say because I can't believe anyone would choose live in Vegas, it's just how I talk.

When I visited Las Vegas it occurred to me that it's a town like any other, just has a big tourist section. At least, it occurred to me when I saw that the urban lights reached the horizon when I was on the High Roller.

</comment><comment><USER14> For several years, I went to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas. It was usually in April, occasionally in March. One year all the palm trees looked dead. There had been a hard freeze, and the palm fronds (leaves) had all died. The trees weren't dead, but they looked dead...

... except at the Mirage, which spray-painted the fronds green.

That's how absolutely phony the tourist parts of Las Vegas are.

<comment><USER15> If by "phony" you mean "smart" then I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recommend going to Vegas and not doing any of the "normal" stuff. There is great camping 25 minutes from the strip. You can park on the strip for free and go to the hotel pools. Tons of a beautiful hiking and climbing.

<comment><USER17> Parking at the hotels on the strip is no longer free :-(

But yes, there's plenty of stuff to do in Vegas beyond the obvious. My favorite: Red Rock Canyon just west of Vegas is beautiful for hiking!

<comment><USER18> Woah. When did they start charging for parking at the casinos on the strip?

I lived in Vegas from 2009-2012, and I used to always park at the Bellagio whenever I took tourist friends to the strip. My mom used to always tell me "Yeah, parking is free because the casinos pay for it!" Sad times now that that's no longer the case :(

At least the casinos' tax revenue still makes up for a lack of a state income tax...right?

<comment><USER19> > When did they start charging for parking at the casinos on the strip?

Years ago, sadly. And it's not just that it's no longer free, it's actually creating more traffic. The whole Vegas experience is non-trivially worse for it.

<comment><USER12> The Wynn/Encore apparently brought back free parking last year.

The parking charges are a pain. Previously I would just pick up a car at the airport if I were using it to go somewhere like Death Valley after a four-day conference or so. Now it makes more sense to either rent a car at one of the hotels or just go back to the rental car center at the airport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was born and raised in Vegas, left when I was 25 for Dallas. Never went back except to visit family.

Dad was born there in 1936, and passed away there in late 2018. His father moved there to work on the dam during the Depression. Met my grandmother on Fremont St, which was then the only paved street in town. (4 blocks long.)

I have deep roots in Vegas, I know it really well, and I really dislike it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Overall a good well written article. I would have like to see some mention of the outdoor activities there, red rocks, Mt. Charleston etc. Also how the residents feel about the looming threat of water shortages(being its a city growing rapidly in the desert), How the city did after the 2008 housing crisis, (I assume pretty well?). Also Tony Hsieh's DTP(downtown project) and what residents think of it and its shortcomings.

<comment><USER22> 2008 crippled it. It didn't recover from it for years after the rest of the US did. Lots of homeless people. Many more working multiple crap jobs to get by.

Edit-btw if you work in IT never ever work for a casino. Every casino I've heard of treats IT as a cost center. Even the database admins and programmers. You will be treated like a waste of time and money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I highly recommend The Believer magazine and encourage you to subscribe to it as I do.</comment>


Chris Sacca: Big Company, Small Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2008/02/big-company-s-1.html

<comment><USER2> ugh no kidding. That's pretty much the main reason I like smaller projects. Who do I have to talk to in google to add conversions like "10 kilograms/megatons in joules"?

<comment><AUTHOR> When I was there last summer, the rate conversions project was basically a one person operation.

It doesn't look like Google knows what a megaton is, but even if it did, it'd be the same unit class as joules, so I doubt your conversion could ever work.

<comment><USER2> hmm? Megaton is a unit of energy.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you divide mass by enery, how do you get energy out?

<comment><USER2> My bad. I meant kilograms to joules or megatons to joules</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>