Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/hot-crowded-and-running-out-of-fuel-earth-of-2050-a-scary-place.ars

<comment><USER3> When someone suggests energy, fuel, fresh water are in danger of "running out", you should ask them to sketch what they think the supply curve is for those resources. They have something in common: a horizontal asymptote. With energy, it's a virtually inifinite supply at a price somewhere between 1-2x coal (nuclear fission) to a conservative 4-8x (solar) -- this for existing technology, today. For water, such an asymptote is desalination cost somewhere around 1-2x treated tap water. Similar stories for fuel -- EVs are one asymptote. In the left corner there's a short slope with a cheap, very limited resource (coal, petroleum, groundwater); then at a slightly higher price you have an infinite supply. I interpret this as saying, in the _worst case_ , developed countries' crisis amounts to trivial negative economic adjustements ("trivial" compared to, e.g. everything else that happens through 2050...); and in the _expected case_ , pretty unremarkable technology gains combine with massive economic growth give you far more, for far less. (The "optimistic" case is singularitarian...)

<comment><USER4> My limited understanding of desalinization is that we avoid it not because of the expense, but because it's environmentally damaging to put a giant pipe in the ocean sucking up water that happens to bring a lot of fish and such with it.

<comment><USER5> The biggest problem is what to do with the highly-concentrated brine after you've extracted the water - e.g. [http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/hodges/site2006/project_pages/...](http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/hodges/site2006/project_pages/project_desalination_brine.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's quickly hit the three points they covered, and one they didn't.

1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very _slooooow_ problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic.

2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally.

3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - <USER2> the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption.

4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me.

In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech).

I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :)

Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...

<comment> loup-vaillant 1) 2°C is quite a big deal, because the increase will not be equal. Much ice will melt, and many regions will lack water because of this.

4) Productivity growth is wonderful, but right now is not used the way it should be. It makes us richer, and make us work less, but those gains are not reasonably distributed, hence poverty and unemployment. (I don't subscribe to the theory which says people mostly deserve their situation —good or bad. The laws of physics are neutral, and the world they spawn is currently unfair.)

Currently, I see only 2 ways out of a global collapse or a third world war: (i) start being reasonable, investigate what actually works and do that, simplify and localize the means of production, work less, and produce less (but more durable) stuff. (ii) make tremendous technological progress, up to and including a technological singularity.

<comment><USER7> 1) Most people in Switzerland will like it 2C warmer. Someplace will benefit (or not suffer) other will suffer.

2) Whats a global collapse? Break down of transportation? Breakdown of communication? I don't think either is like to happen to many people profit.

"Productivity growth is wonderful, but right now is not used the way it should be. It makes us richer, and make us work less, but those gains are not reasonably distributed, hence poverty and unemployment."

You don't get 10 productivity growth points ever year that you can throw at whatever you want (that would be nice). Its not an equall distribution but people are generally speaking better of then 50 or 10 years ago all this while the world population grows very fast. Economiclly an politiclly speaking things get better slowly.

"investigate what actually works and do that, simplify and localize the means of production"

Well we clearly see is that what works is to grow the food where it grows the best and bring it to where people want to eat is. If transporation gets much more expensive localization of will be cheaper and it will happen.

<comment> loup-vaillant 1) I think overall, the suffering is most likely to outweigh the benefits.

2) Starvation. Our soil is dying. What Acari used to do for free, we now do with chemicals, poorly. Peons have to buy their seed instead of re-using their own (mostly due to the usage of hybrid seeds, which are designed to reproduce very poorly). Plus, the seed is not adapted to the soil which then has to be irrigated, pesticized etc. Not to mention transgenic plants, which are not used to feed the world, but starve it (terminal seeds and patents come to mind).

We are already seeing some of the effects now, and it sucks (health, peasant suicide…). But for now it _merely_ sucks. The real danger lies elsewhere.

See, we hardly need fertilizers or pesticides. Except when the soil is dead, with no fungus nor acari to provide what the plants need to grow. Or when the soil is compressed by excessive ploughing, and the roots can't set in. Or when the soil is burned by the sun at the end of the summer, and is not protected by weeds (which in this case wouldn't actually be weeds). Most our soil is suffering all three. Therefore, we badly need a heavy industry, mostly based on oil.

When there is no oil, we starve.

It won't be quick. Oil will get more expensive, and so will food. Add in some random financial crisis, and the industry could halt for a time. This wouldn't be a big deal if our soil was alive. But when it's dead, you can't grow squat on it without a relatively heavy industry. Fortunately, we can revive soils. With hedge wood, actually (systematically cutting hedges was a really bad idea). It takes 3 years however, so we'd better start before we actually need live soils.

> _You don't get 10 productivity growth points ever year_

I wasn't clear. I just meant that producing more and more goods in less and less man-hour _would be_ a wonderful thing, and we should basically push for it. I also meant that we do have bit of that kind of growth (if I recall correctly, productivity doubled since the 70s, mostly due to computers and robots).

> _Economically an politically speaking things get better slowly._

Agree. It does get better. My fear is that we are too slow. We need something good enough before we start starving. Because if we do, things will get ugly. Will something good come out of that? Maybe. The French Revolution itself started as an ugly uproar of starving people. But I'd rather avoid it, if at all possible.

> _Well we clearly see is that what works is to grow the food where it grows > the best and bring it to where people want to eat is._

It works in the short term, for the West. I think the cost of transportation is vastly underestimated, because the price of fossil fuels is vastly underestimated. The market hardly measures environmental costs, nor does it plan for several decades ahead —classic tragedy of the commons. I have some hopes for a cleaner (and actually cheaper) transportation however. (Airships and self driving cars come to mind.)

<comment><USER7> If food gets to expensive more people will trie to make money with food. People will have a bigger insentive to produce, store and consume food in other ways then befor. You advocate one solution. I just trues in markets insentives, People spend moeny on food and the would spend more if needbe. People will sell me food. It may come with reduced life quality in other stuff but thats ok.

If your sure about your solution do a startup.

There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _If food gets too expensive more people will try to make money with food. > People will have a bigger incentive to produce, store and consume food in > other ways then before._

That'll work as long as it's only a price problem. But If the lack of resources is sufficiently dire, we will lack food, period. And our current lack of foresight tells me that the probability of such an outcome is far from negligible.

> _If you're sure about your solution do a startup._

Doesn't work. There are already plenty of ethical peasants which try their best to grow good food with few enough resources. They succeed, though they are often hindered by silly regulations and the sheer weight of their more "conventional" colleagues. The problem is, unlike software, food doesn't scale. _Everyone_ must adopt better ways, and that takes advocacy. In programming, the equivalent would be trying to significantly reduce the usage of, say, mutable state (self plug: <http://loup- vaillant.fr/articles/assignment>).

> _There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much._

Fair enough. A more reasonable prediction would run like this: "we may one day have depleted so much resources that a good deal of us will die of starvation, or of secondary effects like war".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Completely wrong:

 _The 80-percent increase predicted by 2050 translates to a total global energy consumption of 900 exajoules (EJ) per year (in other words 9 x 10^20 joules)—65 times the annual energy consumption of the US in 2009._

2008 primary energy consumption was about 100 quads [a] [1] in the US (~100 EJ), compared to 500 quads [1] for the world (or, ~20%). 900 EJ/year would be around 9 times the current US energy intensity.

I'm pretty sure about the etiology of this error: (1/65th) of 900 EJ/year is the US electricity intensity, about 4,000 TWh(elec.)/year [2]. They're mixing different energy statistics (apples & oranges). Primary energy measures the heat energy of the fuel input in power generation, not the output (e.g. 3 joules coal => 1 joule electricity; primary energy is the 3 J). It also measures non-electricity energy uses (like oil for fuel or natural gas for heat), which put together are even bigger than power generation [3].

[a] (a "quad" is short for "quadrillion btu [british thermal unit]", which coincidentally is about the same as 1 exajoule)

[1] <http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm>

[2] [http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1)

[3] <https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to live next door to a Thorium power plant. I'd be perfectly safe because I know that it would just decompress and stop fissioning, but the land prices would be amazing. And while everyone else is dying and other nonsense I'd have electricity to last me a millennium.

I easily see us using thorium powered desalination plants. Or my favorite, drop a giant turbine in the gulf stream and use that to power the East Coast + desalinate water to sell as a commodity.

<comment><USER9> A thorium power plant gets its fuel when the thorium "is used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233."

[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/)

(I think this article has been discussed on HN before; yes.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173>

Now we've all heard of breeder reactors since decades ago if we are part of the Baby Boom. Indeed, in one of Paul Graham's essays, "After the Ladder" (August 2005),

<http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html>

we can read, "The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that the way we do things is riskier. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way."

What will make the breeder reactor (thorium reactor) industry reappear? Who will make decisions on behalf of that industry? How much investment cost are we talking about here?

<http://www.economist.com/node/21549098>

<comment><USER10> China will:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99...](http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99s-nuclear- scientists-unveil-latest-breakthrough/)

See also:

<http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html>

At a very fundamental level, when they're willing to displace 1.4 million people for a dam,

[http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam- china...](http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam- china-%E2%80%93-more-to-move-and-environmental-problems-acknowledged/)

and we're not willing to suffer a small water bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge,

[http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/acti...](http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/activists_ramp_up_opposition_t.html)

I fear we may be outpaced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I checked the other commments here before looking for the full report "OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction"

[http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_4903655...](http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_49036555_1_1_1_37465,00.html)

by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Executive Summary of the report

[http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd- environmental-...](http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd- environmental-outlook-to-2050/executive-summary_env_outlook-2012-3-en)

sums up the future challenges: "Over the last four decades, human endeavour has unleashed unprecedented economic growth in the pursuit of higher living standards. While the world's population has increased by over 3 billion people since 1970, the size of the world economy has more than tripled. While this growth has pulled millions out of poverty, it has been unevenly distributed and incurred significant cost to the environment. Natural assets have been and continue to be depleted, with the services they deliver already compromised by environmental pollution. Providing for a further 2 billion people by 2050 and improving the living standards for all will challenge our ability to manage and restore those natural assets on which all life depends. Failure to do so will have serious consequences, especially for the poor, and ultimately undermine the growth and human development of future generations." In other words, a disastrous future is not a certainty, but a risk, and planning to minimize the risk is worthwhile. The long-term human trend, meanwhile, has been improving living conditions for people all over the world, ever since the ideas of science and personal freedom and democratic limited government have spread around the world.

<http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx>

AFTER EDIT: Do any of you remember reading the book The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich in your youth? I was amazed last week to discover a friend a bit younger than I am (born in the 1960s, a few years before the book was published) had never heard of the book. I've been seeing gloom-and-doom predictions for my whole life, and so far there is still a lot of petroleum, lifespans are going up and health is improving all over the world except in pathological countries like Russia, and most of the disasters predicted during my youth have failed to occur.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions>

<comment><USER11> "there is still a lot of petroleum"......

Thank Christ that will never run out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus predicted food shortages as population grows geometrically and food arithmetically. but here we are today with plenty of food :) in fact we have so much more that it causes us health problems...

I think these predictions overlook technological advancements just like Malthus did.

<comment><USER13> I actually think that food is the least of our problems.

Now growing animals for food is incredibly wasteful (in terms of water and other resources). Lab-grown meat isn't economically viable yet but by 2050 I imagine it may well be. Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow.

Fuels and metals are the big problem. The first is I believe a much bigger problem than the second. The reason is that there fuels are a means to an end: energy. When it comes to the electrical grid, you can supply that power with coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power, solar power or nuclear power. It doesn't matter to the end user. It will be reflected in the price but the point is that you can make substitutions.

The bigger problem is metals as we're rapidly running out of those or, rather, the cost of extracting those will in the next century or two drastically increase. It is incredibly cheap to rip up iron out of the ground (~$10-15/tonne IIRC). Transportation and smelting to steel may increase the overall cost by an order of magnitude but that's still cheap.

Some look to space as a means to solving that problem but I have trouble fathoming a situation where extracting metals from the Moon or asteroids or whatever will be within even a few orders of magnitude of the cost of digging a big pit on Earth. Even if energy were free (in fuel terms), the cost of travelling far, retrieving the ore, refining it (probably in space) and getting it back to Earth are just fundamentally high (in comparison).

I honestly believe there needs to be _at least_ one order of magnitude less of us than there is now and there will be one way or the other in coming centuries.

<comment><USER14> |Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow.

There's some interesting work being done on manufacturing food elements using synthetic biology[1]. they think it will cost one tenth of cheapest foods we have today, and will require little water. one of their food elements is a healthy substance with the taste of fat.

[1][http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5](http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Energy and water consumption projections seem to just take current per capita consumption rates and raise them against projected population growth. Then they ask the question of "how will energy producers cope with these demands?" and start guessing at which technology will swoop in to save the day. But that doesn't appear to be how things work in the world.

I imagine a lot of us on HN live in a world where you can blast your AC all day and leave all your faucets running with no repercussions beyond a cheap marginal bill.

Isn't it more likely that we'll encounter the economics of scarcity and an adaptive market instead of one day turning on our faucet and nothing comes out because, dang, we've run out?

I hear stories of parts of America fighting over water access, but aren't they really just fighting over a supply that still lets people run their faucets all day?

Perhaps, as the water supply becomes more and more jeopardized, it will stop being practically free. Like every other market in the world, its price will reflect and dictate nominal availability. And the introduction of new technologies will come, like most markets, when the price of water/energy hits a tipping point. In other words, if we start running out of fossil fuels, won't that just jack up the price until alternatives become cheaper? And the higher price of energy will mean we may have to be more deliberate about saving energy, for once?

<comment><USER16> Here in Dhaka, Bangladesh I do sometimes wonder if we're experiencing the _past_ (e.g. the industrial revolution) or the future. Hopefully it's the former. Check out my new project: www.smsdemandresponse.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's a little more than the UN medium estimate of world population, but the absolute number of people doesn't seem like a huge problem. That's only 30% more than today. We have plenty of coal to get at least the electricity, and although oil might be a problem, I imagine that we can substantially reduce our consumption of that if governments get serious about pricing in externalities.

The global warming aspect is very concerning though.

<comment><USER18> Water is a huge problem. Even in the U.S. the southwest is already fighting over diminishing supplies of water, and global warming is only going to make that problem worse.

The irony of the situation is that states like Arizona and Texas, who stand to lose the most from climate change and environmental damage, are politically the most intransigent about taking the measures to avoid it. When water supplies start drying up, people in those states are going to feel the pain far sooner than the dirty hippies in Washington and Massachusetts (though total pandemonium in the southwest isn't going to be good for anybody).

<comment><USER19> Interesting, we were going down a similar path in Victoria, Australia with falling water supplies. They build a very expensive desalination plant. Now it has turned around with 3 or 4 wet years so we are about to have this plant come online and not needed in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why Earth 2050 is going to be an awesome place:

1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3.

2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...)

3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially. 3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both.

Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool!

Heralds of optimism / references:

1) Caldeira.* [http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_g...](http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering?currentPage=all)

2) Rosling. [http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population- growth...](http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/)

3) Kurzweil. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A> 3b) Kamen. <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/>

* Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point.

In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.

<comment><USER20> It's not faith in some undiscovered technology, we already know how to quickly cool the planet for almost no money.

The concerns you raise are addressed by the references provided in the original comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there any interesting advances in desalination technology on the horizon? Access to fresh water is already a critical health issue and it will become more challenging with population growth and global warming.

<comment><USER22> There are self sustained mobile desalination platforms. You can see one here, made by a Greek university: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M>

The platform which weighs 150 tons produces 70.000 liters of water daily and it costs around 700 thousand Euros. It's not much but it's a good start, I'm sure there are other advancements in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "...biofuels and renewable energy sources are all projected to increase steadily."

That was the only happy thought I took away from that article. At some point the world will just run out of fossil fuels. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on regarding global warming one thing is for certain, we need new forms of energy.

<comment><USER23> Depends on what they mean by biofuels. Many current biofuels are net energy losers, and specifically require more fossil fuel as (energy) input than they yield in energy output. Moreover, I'd expect the food-vs-fuel issue to become significantly more prominent as population increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> To think that the water I'm gonna drink today is the exact same water that soils, plants, animals have been drinking since the beginning of time, makes me feel connected...to dinosaurs! Our problem has never been quantity but recycling rate, and not realizing we are all in the same boat.

</comment><comment><USER25> That article is like a giant danger sign saying, we should be putting our energy towards improving that 2050 picture.

At that point my kids will be a bit older than I am now, and considering the future for their own kids. How the hell will that feel, can you imagine??

This picture is also optimistic in that it seems to assume there was no massive war or plague.

What are we _doing_ , if we arent focused on improving that bleak vision?

</comment><comment><USER26> We'll just have to make a few adjustments (like shifting power generation to individual houses using solar, wind and other methods that will undoubtedly be affordable by then, if only because oil will be pretty expensive).

Myself, I'd like to build a house (out of containers, maybe) somewhere near a mountain, powered by wind+solar, with a satellite or long range WiFi connection to the Internet (aka the rest of the world). I'd be happy to retire this way, hiking in the summer and snowboarding during winter :-), growing food (including farm animals) on a patch of land and a hydroponic farm...

Also, make the images here your wallpapers - there's enough space and energy for everyone, even in 2050: <http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127>

</comment><comment><USER27> Context which I never see addressed: <http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG>

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the Earth's temperature has a background variability ...

.. or noting that if the Earth's average temperature warms by 5 degrees it will spike higher than any sustained period in the last 400,000 years.

<comment><USER27> Put 'em together, and perhaps that 5 degree increase will balance the we're- due-for-it 5 degree decrease.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The future will be nothing like the past.

</comment><comment><USER30> From the article:

> It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global > GDP four times the size of today's

Global domestic product is currently $63T. 2050 GDP = 4 * $63 = $252T.

Current per capita GDP = $63 trillion divided by 6.8 billion = $9,264.70588

2050 per capita GDP = $252 trillion divided by 9.2 billion = $27,391.3043

So basically everyone will be 3 times richer, at a cost of "80% more energy" (less than 2 times the energy), which means energy efficiency will increase _dramatically_ , probably due to the fact that we'll harness more solar and geo energy, which is delivered from the giant nuclear furnace in the sky, aka our sun.

</comment><comment><USER31> "based on current global trends"

Interesting bit of science fiction, but current trends never continue like that.</comment>


Hire HN: Web Developer Needed in Columbus, OH - <AUTHOR>

Greetings!
I used SearchYC to research the etiquette on job postings here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477675) and it seems like people are cool with it, so here goes:
We're a company called eRetailing (www.eretailing.com) in Columbus, Ohio.  We specialize in allowing our customers to create their own designs on apparel, wall graphics, stickers, and more. The very existence of custom products leads to a lot of exciting ideas.  We hope you'll be excited too.
We're looking for a programmer to aid in the development of several websites as well as rich media applications using web technologies.
Programming languages used will be PHP/ AJAX, Perl, and Flash. The job requires fluency in these languages, or a fluent base in C and C++ or Java with the ability to quickly learn PHP, Perl, and Flash. Unix experience a plus.
Requirements:
Bachelors in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.
Salary:
Negotiable based upon experience.
Respond to:
jbenzenberg at eretailing dot com
Thanks!
p.s. About 90 days ago PG said that we can soon post openings to the jobs page via Startuply.  It looks like that part is live now, which is awesome.  You can post there via JobSyndicate, which unfortunately is in private beta.  If I need to move this posting over to JobSyndicate, I'd be happy to!  (I suppose I just need to be invited first). <comment><USER2> Assuming your web development position actually requires a computer science background, I'd recommend rephrasing your educational requirements as "Bachelors in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, _or equivalent experience_ ".

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't edit the actual post at this point, but consider it added.

As a side note, thanks to everyone who voted this up. I know a posting about a job in Cbus doesn't apply to everyone here, but by voting this up you may have helped out one or two of you midwestern colleagues in a big way. And us, of course. So thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I just sent you an email re: JobSyndicate. Happy to chat anytime.

</comment><comment><USER4> It might also be useful to indicate whether you are interested in local candidates only, plan to provide relocation compensation, or can deal with remote employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Local candidates are ideal, but we'd be willing to listen if anyone made a strong enough case.

<comment><USER5> Are you guys looking for interns (for full time during the summer, and part time during the school year)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We would definitely be interested in anyone looking for internships, any time. Contact me at jbenzenberg at eretailing dot com.

<comment><USER5> I just emailed you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did you choose those programming languages that you use?</comment>


My Home-Built TTL Computer Processor - <AUTHOR> http://cpuville.com <comment><USER2> Wow, a webring widget at the bottom. That's been a while.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why you're downvoted, webrings are great, it's sort of a list of curated related content. I loved browsing those when they were more common.

<comment><USER2> Ever since speaking up on one of the threads about encryption/terrorism my comments have been more or less structurally downvoted by one particular user (confirmed). I'm fine with that, it's not going to make me shut up, if they feel better about it then that's mostly their problem, not mine.

<comment><USER4> What did you say to get that kind of crazy reaction?

[NB Having been a web user since the very early days I had encountered web rings and had completely forgotten about them]

<comment><USER2> Take your pick.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562679)

<comment><USER5> You just made my morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is another home-built CPU made from 74HC (TTL-compatible CMOS) integrated circuits:

[http://www.mycpu.eu/](http://www.mycpu.eu/)

The author gave a talk about it in our local hackerspace back in 2009. Fascinating stuff.

[http://video.kiberpipa.org/pot_mycpu_dennis_kuschel/?q=mycpu](http://video.kiberpipa.org/pot_mycpu_dennis_kuschel/?q=mycpu)

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the Duo Adept[1], a full TTL computer with video output, keyboard input and a homebrew operating system. All built by a teenager in his spare time.

1: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYvr0b8jqbg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYvr0b8jqbg)

<comment><USER2> Aptly named.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is something I still have on my bucket list. I remember as a kid looking at the electronics catalogue eyeing the z80 chip thinking to myself "I'm gonna build a gameboy!!1" because my friend had a gameboy and I wanted to join in on the pokemon fun!

<comment><USER9> Glad to see it's not just me that thinks things like that... the problem is I know it would take me forever, and when I eventually did it, everyone I know would just say "Why? It can't even do [insert killer app here]" and that would be that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was also thinking of constructing a CPU in this fashion using the ideas from Mill CPU folks.

I will probably never have enough time to go through this, which is sad.

<comment><USER11> A Mill-like architecture would require a huge register file (alternatively, a huge shift register). Not sure it's a good idea for a TTL design. Accumulator architectures are better suited.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would seem 4 4-bit word register files are all you could obtain from TI ([http://www.ti.com/product/sn74ls670);](http://www.ti.com/product/sn74ls670\);) I haven't dug deeper, but yeah as a bread-board layout you would need a lot of surface area to simulate even the smallest Mill. Cool idea though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow ... remember when "build a computer" didn't mean "order a motherboard and a disk drive, and make sure you get the right size power supply."

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's another home-built TTL computer: [http://www.homebrewcpu.com](http://www.homebrewcpu.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. Reminds me of _The Soul of a New Machine_, with all the painstakingly assembled discrete logic.

<comment><USER15> The computer in The Soul of a New Machine also used some of the first programmable logic chips, it wasn't all TTL.</comment></comment>


Conjuring Clojure in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://blog.djy.io/conjuring-clojure-in-vim/ <comment><USER2> Or you can just use CIDER in Emacs and have a fully-featured Clojure IDE that works out of the box ;)</comment>


OpenXR – Cross-Platform, Portable, Virtual Reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.khronos.org/openxr <comment><USER2> Glad to see Oculus and Valve both on the list of supporters. This is definitely something that was needed.

<comment><USER3> Sony as well was refreshing to see.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I think that'll make developers lives easier since games developed for the PS can be easily ported to other platforms.

I don't see microsoft anywhere, although I think they'll have to come around since everyone else is participating.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft are working on a VR layer for DirectX 13 to use on Windows and Xbox. Just like Vulkan/DirectX 12.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a pretty cool interview with Valve's Joe Ludwig on openXR you can to listen to

[http://voicesofvr.com/509-valves-joe-ludwig-on-khronos- group...](http://voicesofvr.com/509-valves-joe-ludwig-on-khronos-groups- openxr-vr-standard/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very good, but that's just APIs. Now we also need an open runtime implementation for those APIs that will work with common hardware.

<comment><USER7> We don't even have the APIs yet. Knowing Valve's approach with VR, they are probably going to aggressively pursue OpenXR support.

<comment><USER6> So far for example SteamVR is tied to Steam. So I'm more interested in open VR runtime, though of course a common and standard API is very good to have as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never really done anything with VR, but can someone explain why VR seems to so desperately needs a standard/API ?

I've done a bit of OpenGL, and _that_ I can understand needing standardization b/c you're talking to really complicated non-standard hardware and the graphics pipeline is pretty involved. But with VR... aren't you ultimately just outputting 2 warped video streams? I understand you have to talk to the hardware a little bit (to get eye and wand/controller positions) and u need to know lens parameters, but it seems like a very thin wrapper around the graphics API.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> The video display is probably the very _simplest_ part of the Virtual Reality experience. While it's directly responsible for a large part of the experience, it's not actually what needs to be standardized.

Everything else, from the various ways to perform head and motion tracking, to the myriad of input devices and controllers, varies wildly. Coming up with a standard cross-section of these features that most platforms support seems like an excellent idea to me.

<comment><USER7> > a standard cross-section

I don't envy the people doing this, in terms of controllers:

* There's Leap Motion Orion. Plausibly, there is some future tech involving body tracking.

* Valve doesn't know what the final form of the controller is[1], the current controllers are merely one of the better iterations.

* What we don't know.

There seems to be a need for multiple cross-sections. With the current state of flux in the field, I'm expecting controller to be highly vendor-extended.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/kMpQWSqQFK0?t=1m9s](https://youtu.be/kMpQWSqQFK0?t=1m9s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Name is quite similar to ILM's OpenEXR image format.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking why they didn't just go with OpenVR, but looks like valve already used that name.

[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I don't code, but I have an Electrical Engineering background and a passionate interest in Technology and VR. How can I get involved with this?

<comment><USER12> Learn the basics of coding - CodeAcademy JavaScript to Unity (major VR support there) I'd recommend.

<comment><USER13> Why go with an inferior language when you could use C# or C++ instead?

Like JS is well and good for web things but no reason to shove things where they don't belong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a very good thing and has support from the right people (which quite frankly surprises me a bit). The problem/solution graphics are pretty clear and a great way to visualize why this is a good idea. Bookmarked :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope it helps to speed up competition. We all expect VR as the next big revolution but the thing is going too slow..

</comment><comment><USER16> It's 'X' for EXTREEEEEEME Reality!</comment>


Wordpress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product - <AUTHOR> http://torgronsund.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/7-wordpress-themes-for-launching-your-minimum-viable-product/ <comment><USER2> I especially recommend these for technical founders who don't have a bone of design sense in their bodies, like myself. I used a spiritually similar WooThemes template (Delegate) to get AppointmentReminder's site ready. It took less than 20 minutes to set up. I added a 99Designs logo and a single custom image from my designer, and it now looks fairly professional relative to the amount of investment. (The service itself isn't near ready yet, but people ask to buy it on strength of the front page and the MVP demo, so that is probably a good sign.)

<comment><USER3> What's the advantage of using a WordPress install and theme? Why not just get a pure css/html theme, and build from there?

The advantage, imo, of using a non-WordPress theme is that when you start building the actual product, you're using the exact same files. As far as I know, if you get a WordPress theme, you'll have to scratch it when you start building your actual site. Am I wrong about this?

<comment><USER2> I can type decent copy a heck of a lot faster in a WYSIWYG editor which is guaranteed to make everything look pretty than I can type decent copy in NetBeans while worrying about adding my p's and div's and line breaks. Also, it is much easier to plump out the site, create new pages with a consistent navigation, and interlink them. You also get non-braindead on-page SEO for free, which is heads and tails above what many developers will deliver if you ask them to write pages in their editor of choice. ("Oh, that's nice, your sitewide title tag is 'Company Name Home Page'.")

Bonus points: you don't have to be an engineer to do it, so if you have a business guy, he can go be useful for a change. (I kid, I kid.)

If you want to make your application match your Wordpress theme (not sure if that is necessarily a good idea), you can do it fairly easily. In Rails, you'd View Source on your homepage, copy/paste everything into layouts/application.rhtml, delete the chunk that renders the main content on the page and replace it with <%= yield %>, and you're ready to go for development purposes. (You'll eventually hack it to bits for SEO, collapsing Javascripts/CSS, and other reasons, but you'd do that with a HTML/CSS template anyhow.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that sounds great.

One more question. You wrote: "If you want to make your application match your Wordpress theme (not sure if that is necessarily a good idea)".

Now, say I want to put up an MVP of some application, which is just a landing page. Shouldn't I include some kind of screenshot of what the application will look like?

If so, what design do you use for screenshots of the application itself? Do you use the same theme? A completely different design?

<comment><USER2> Why include a screenshot? We don't sell software, we sell the concrete improvement software will make in the customer's life. Show her having success with the software: she is a lot more interesting to herself than your app is. Plus, if you are me, your app is fugly anyhow.

My MVP used a cheap ThemeForest theme for the Rails part which shows minimal functionality, but the hero shot image is a racially ambiguous caryoon character, showing the successful businesswoman busy killing it because she was smart and bought my service. It is downright frightening to the engineer in me how radically that increased the number of requests for info I got from ladies. The marketer in me has to soul crush him some days.

This point stolen shamelessly from slide 9 of my Business of Software 2010 talk on selling software to women. I spent all day today on it today (well, when not breaking into Diaspora).

<comment><USER4> Will you or BoS be posting the video and slides? I'm not able to make the talk, but am working on a product whose users would be almost exclusively female.

<comment><USER2> I understand they will. If not, I will post slides and my best practice run after the conference.

<comment><USER4> That's good to know. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also a good option for someone working on a Launching a website for their MVP, especially if you are someone like myself who is a terrible designer. <http://themeforest.net/> has plenty of great themes that would work well for landing page, etc.

<comment><USER6> Actually I've had a bad experience with themeforest... I wouldn't recommend it.

<comment><USER7> What happened that put you off?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was blown away when I learned that Groupon actually started life as a simple WordPress install.

[http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started- on-...](http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-a- wordpress-blog/)

These themes aren't well suited for ecommerce, they are really just variations on an iPhone App landing page, but they are nice tools to get something commercial looking up fast.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have you ever seen an article and thought to yourself, well, I guess I'll have to jump in now?

This article inspired me to share (ahead of schedule) some info on a new service we're building to provide some of the lean startup metrics Tor mentioned, designed specifically for SaaS products.

We're looking for folks interested in beta testing and providing customer development feedback at StartMetrics (<http://startmetrics.com>).

Plus, I think it's fitting that we've been using one of the themes Tor listed. Took just a few hours to get the basic design up and running, which gives us more time to work on our MVP

</comment><comment><USER10> Use these with caution if your audience is fairly technical. I ran across a SaaS site the other day and liked how it looked, clicked on the "designed by" link and realized it was a template design. This dropped my confidence as anyone can throw up a cheap template design, what kind of attention to detail was put into the rest of the app? Is there even an app or is this just a credit card form and a nice looking template? If you are serious about your business drop the couple thousand to get a nice site designed.

<comment><USER11> I agree. But a "couple thousand" are probably not an option if you're bootstrapping. Such templates might just work until you can invest in a custom one.

<comment><USER10> If your a technical founder and building the product yourself I don't see why you couldn't spend a couple thousand to do it right, cutting corner in design is one of the top mistakes technical founders make. Spend a week consulting and it will cover the design and more.

<comment><USER12> I smell a designer.

<comment><USER13> To your customers, there is no difference between your "design" and your "product". If I had to choose between scrimping on design and scrimping on features, I would choose the latter hands down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Themes by Woothemes are fantastic, but...aren't all website going to look the same? I really like the way 37signals re-designed the Basecamp homepage. It's a little bit different than usual.

Your opinion?

<comment><USER15> Yes. It is true. However, you can customize the theme any way you want to make it look unique. For $150 that's a deal... or you can spend $3000 for a "buyout" template from monster template (<http://www.templatemonster.com/>) and not even going to work with WordPress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Klaveer[1] is a decent little template too. It's more targeted at freelancers than products though.

[1]<http://stefangrambart.ca/klaveer/>

</comment><comment><USER17> I myself have set up a site with a woothemes template and it was easy and painless and it worked across browsers too. It will take me forever to learn enough html, css, js to make the site look this good and also cross browser compatible, if I did this by myself from scratch. And gravity forms(<http://www.gravityforms.com/>) rocks too, for contact, download or sign up forms.

</comment><comment><USER15> There you go. <http://188.8.131.52> Build on WordPress. Anymore questions? Well, I have to say WooTheme is fantastic. It does everything I wanted...almost, then WP Plugins come to rescue. once you learned how to use WP as a content management platform, the possibility is endless.

</comment><comment><USER18> One side effect of canned themes is that you will look similar to other startups doing the same thing. This could be an advantage in the beginning, because the site will feel familiar to new customers who are used to the theme. You will want to differentiate if distinctive branding becomes part of your strategy.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is great. Is is easy to use Wordpress user management as a starting point for a user back end? Right now I am using userCake, which got me up in about 5 minutes. If I go with Wordpress would it be better to drop userCake for WP user management, or integrate the two?

</comment><comment><USER15> I was warned about potential security vulnerability in WP, but guess that's true for any Internet applications. Also, any WP updates could potentially break plugins used. If you got a lot of plugins, need to be very careful.

</comment><comment><USER20> Quite a few of Woothemes/Templatic templates are available in Drupal flavors as well.. and they look to be cheaper as well.

Given that I can run Drupal w/ Postgres (the DB I'm already using), its a nice value proposition.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know how I can download/buy the SaaS theme [1]? It looks quite good.

[1] <http://saas-wp-i.worryfreelabs.com/>

<comment><USER22> <http://themeforest.net/user/goThemeTeam/portfolio>

<comment><USER21> Update: I bought it, and it's _amazing_. Everything is changeable in HTML, _everything_! I wanted to add more features to the pricing table, just add a <li> and it all resizes properly. Text on buttons is all HTML (no images), everything's just fantastic. I'm thinking about emailing this guys to tell them about how great it is, best 10 pounds I've ever spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Many begin as a Wordpress. Many end as a "minimum viable product".

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice designs but I'm skeptical. WooThemes spam?</comment>


JQuery UI 1.6rc3: It's getting really close - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2008/12/31/jquery-ui-16rc3-its-getting-really-close/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. I just picked up learning jQuery, considering switching my project away from a mix of YUI 2 and 3. So far, it's been enjoyable, but it'll be even better as jQuery UI improves.</comment>


"How my lame joke saw me fall foul of the campus zealots" - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/how-my-lame-joke-saw-me-fall-foul-of-the-campus-zealots/ <comment><USER2> Being a very literal-minded programmer type that I am, when I was young, I would always state pretty much exactly whatever was on my mind. Inevitably, somebody would ask "what do you mean by that?" I was confused by the question... I meant what I said - why would I say something other than what I meant? But over time I caught on to some unspoken, unwritten, apparently unnoticed by most social cues and rules that you're supposed to abide by, one of which is "joking around". With a lot of practice, I've actually gotten pretty good at it, even though it feels completely alien to me: while I've gotten the knack of saying what I'm trying to say without actually saying it and deciphering what other people are trying to say, I would much prefer a world where everybody just said literally what they meant. Partly because, sometimes, I completely blow it. I overlooked one of them any possible double entendres in something that I said and, _of course_, everybody just assumed that I was going for the double entendre, because that's how most people actually talk. That's what makes all of this overreaction to simple jokes so disconcerting - you HAVE to talk and act this way and "joke around" with people, or else you become Dwight from "The Office". There's no opting out, and the stakes for missing just one cue become greater with each passing day.</comment>


Hackers break into Washington Post servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/hackers-break-into-washington-post-servers/2013/12/18/dff8c362-682c-11e3-8b5b-a77187b716a3_story.html

<comment><USER2> Don't they have the Snowden Leaks? It would be very useful to have internal email conversations about them. There is a great deal of people who would be interested in that around the globe.

<comment><USER3> Do they? I thought that was just The Guardian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Although company passwords are stored in encrypted form, hackers in some cases have shown the ability to decode such information"

Then they arn't _really_ encrypted are they... this really annoys me as it shifts the blame away from them and their poor security standards and threat models.

<comment><USER5> Actually encrypted does mean that. What you're thinking about is hashing. Hash functions are a one-way trip, and what is most commonly used for password storing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One would think that after at least two successful attacks, they would beef up security and start using crazy things like hashing and salting. If that happened to another company, they'd have a field day demanding more security.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good to know that mainstream media is still failing at distinguishing between hackers and crackers.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, at this point it is too late to reverse the situation and name things appropriately, specially due to the fact that "cracker" is a well known slang for something else... Using the appropriate terms at this point would just confuse people.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. Just let me be angry, darn it!

<comment><USER9> The best we can hope for is to push for modifiers to be added: "malicious hackers", "criminal hackers", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is anyone going to do anything about the SEA? They've been attacking a lot of large organizations recently.</comment>


I Constantly Lie to Get Airplane Upgrades. Is That Unethical? - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-lying-to-get-an-airplane-upgrade-so-bad-2014-12-05/? <comment><USER2> (It confuses me that someone even asked the question. Isn't it obvious?)</comment>


Unsafe RSA primes conjectured - <AUTHOR> https://mathoverflow.net/questions/283767/ <comment><USER2> A related public key news:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/10/crypt...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security- keys-750k-estonian-ids/)

It compromises the TPM 1.2 and Microsoft Bitlocker HDD encruption.

The researchers also scanned the Internet for fingerprinted keys and quickly found hits in a variety of surprising places. They found 447 fingerprinted keys—237 of them factorizable—used to sign GitHub submissions, some for very popular software packages. GitHub has since been notified of the fingerprinted keys and is in the process of getting users to change them.

The researchers also found 2,892 PGP keys used for encrypted e-mail, 956 of which were factorizable. The researchers speculated that the majority of the PGP keys were generated using the Yubikey 4, which allows owners to use the faulty library to create on-chip RSA keys. Other functions of the USB device, including U2F authentication, remain unaffected. Yubico has more details here.

<comment><USER3> What are the odds that this was intentional? TPM and Bitlocker have been two of the biggest conjectured targets of compromise. To the point that most security people/libraries use neither. Maybe they were right?

If this is true one of Stackoverflow comments is quite chilling

 _It would be a terrible idea and it would raise suspicions of a deliberate trapdoor if the primes for RSA were chosen from a quadratic progression rather than randomly_

<comment><USER4> That comment isn't intended to be "chilling"; it's intended to be the opposite.

This is a _terrible_ cryptographic backdoor. If you're going to backdoor cryptography, you do it cryptographically, so that only you and your partners can decrypt it (this is called a "NOBUS" backdoor, for "nobody but us"). The only reason nobody found the Infineon bug already is that nobody seriously looked for it.

The most plausible explanation for the Infineon bug is also the most widespread: there's prime number generation advice for quickly generating primes on low-power devices like smartcards, and that advice was badly flawed.

(This isn't the first time primegen bugs have created factorable public keys in the wild; Henninger has a similar attack relating to p = randomprime(start=0), q = randomprime(start=p)).

<comment><USER3> Don your shiny crinkly hats, but after [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG) I started believing that NSA involvement is not subtle in their exploits.

They only need to fool laymen, and backdoored primes are an easy way to do so. The number of true cryptography experts beyond their walls is a dozen in the world at best. Case in point [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein) . And BTW he's been sued by the US government for ???. Thank God the EFF has decent funding.

<comment><USER5> Do you honestly believe that China and Russia don't take cryptography seriously, and between them only employ a tiny handful of experts...?

<comment><USER3> The opposite. Government entities suck up all the world's crypto experts leaving very few working in the publics interest.

<comment><USER4> You mean except for every professor, postdoc, and grad student working in every crypto research group at every large CS department in the world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many primes within the usual range generated for RSA happen to fit the form 27 _a^2 + 27_ a + 7?

<comment><USER7> Assuming at least 768 bits (an RSA number of this size has been factored), the gaps between such numbers are more than 10^232. Even if every number of this form was prime, the prime number theorem tells us we can expect one out of every 10^229 primes to be weak.

There could or course be a larger class of such easy primes, but it seems like it's extremely unlikely a prime of this particular form would ever be generated by chance.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for that answer.

These "weak" primes are perfect for backdoors, however, if you know about them being weak, and noone else does.

<comment><USER9> Very likely that they've been used for that.

I once talked to someone who had worked at a company in the 90s that was shipping crypto software. This was shortly after Snowden, so the topic of backdoors came up. He said that back in those days, they'd been visited by the NSA and told to change the primes they were using, otherwise they wouldn't get export clearance. He said they couldn't figure out what was different about the primes they were given - the number passed primality testing, so they switched to using them to avoid being denied export clearance. His theory was that they were pseudoprimes that somehow passed testing because primality tests were statistical and not definitive.

But I guess this is an alternative explanation that would also make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just another example of the type of ignorance we have been dealing with ever since the day RSA was invented. Unfortunately people still don't get the Rivest-Silverman paper: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/RivestSilverman- AreStrong...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/RivestSilverman- AreStrongPrimesNeededForRSA.pdf)

To be brief, there exists infinitely many algorithms that rule out classes of so-called "weak primes", or "weak moduli." Such attacks are meaningless because you will not know which algorithm will crack a randomly chosen modulus until you try it. By trying algorithm after algorithm similar nature to this, your expected run time is exponential before you find one that works. Which essentially means that the concepts of "weak moduli" and "weak primes" are misnomers.

For an algorithm like this to be meaningful, the density of primes that it rules out needs to be significant. In this case, it is insignificant (it is exponentially small).

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is this significant?

<comment><USER12> Because it means that some RSA keys may be weaker than others. Without diving too far into the mathematics of it, the RSA cryptosystem (and indeed, many asymmetric-key cryptosystems) is based on the notion that multiplying two gigantic prime numbers together to get another gigantic non-prime number is easy; but taking a gigantic non-prime number and figuring out which two prime numbers were multiplied together is incredibly hard. This conjecture, if true, means that for some gigantic non-prime numbers, it is easier than expected (even if only slightly so) to figure out which two prime numbers were used.

<comment><USER4> He's asking why, if you only have a 2^-730 chance of generating one of these primes at random, would you care about that risk? Single-bit memory or computation faults can devastate the security of cryptographic operations, and they're multiple orders of magnitude more likely to _recur_ in a single computation than generating those particular primes.

<comment><USER9> Because it lets you ship crypto-systems with keys that appear to be strong on inspection but which are actually weak (if you deliberately want to ship backdoored crypto).

<comment><USER4> There are lots of ways to ship those systems without a "backdoor" that involves keys that will never occur once in the wild, let alone repeatedly. Why would they use an elaborate scheme that _screams_ tampering?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Werner Koch is starting to look less like a quack after the discovery of this conjecture. He's been pushing to deprecate gpg RSA in general, and is evidenced to have taken a step toward this goal in the latest 2.1 release with ed25519 support.

<comment><USER11> What's his reasoning, and how does this conjecture fit into it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It has always been the case that RSA keys should not have primes of certain forms. IIRC there are some forms that are preferred too.

</comment><comment><USER15> How long until we actually start using curve 25519 for everything?

EDIT: On a second though, a backdoored curve 25519 implementation might be even harder to discover, because any backdoored PRNG could be used, and there are no outstanding structure to them... My comment only makes sense if those keys were generated by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER16> Please use the original title.</comment>


Show HN: SmartPeople, some stats, let's you follow any HN thread - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
A week has passed, and it's time for some relaxing time during this weekend (if you are not on vacations, like me!)
First of all, thanks for the good reviews (from you) of SmartPeople. This is neat, I didn't expect this enthusiasm from you all.
Some stats before the news : 53 people are registered, following 32 people. 314 emails have been sent this week. That's a good start.
But Today, I'm announcing you that you can now follow a thread, with the help of a small bookmarklet. You can add it to your favorite bar, then everytime you are reading something neat on HN, just click on it and the thread will be added to your follow list. (get it on http://nasr.ath.cx/?q=node/79)
Also, for the iphone/ipod/android lovers, whenever you click on a link in the notification emails (for the users or thread you follow), you are redirected to the beautiful ihackernews (formerly toadjaw.com/hn).
Thanks again for your enthusiasm, and for reporting any problem you may have!
Next stuff, as requested, is : RSS feeds to follow your HN idols without emails ! Happy week end to all
edit:  numbers & typo <comment><USER2> Clickables...

<http://nasr.ath.cx/?q=node/79>

<http://nasr.ath.cx/>

<http://ihackernews.com/></comment>


Darpa has come up with a way to put out fires with sound waves - <AUTHOR> http://www.noisemademedoit.com/extinguish-fire-with-sound/

<comment><USER2> Some of us believe in historical determinism. I'd argue that sound waves would be putting out fires in 2012 whether or not the government put money into it.

 _Edit: I'm sorry, this was a poor attempt to joke about some of the sentiments seen in the recent Vint Cerf thread regarding the article in the WSJ_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295786>

<comment><USER3> but this is bullshit, in almost all of the sciences we advanced because of someone who had more insight then anyone else, if any one of those stumbled we might not of gotten anywhere close to what we have today.

what if edison has succeded and we built a bunch of dc waystations across the entire country would we ever consider switching to AC? what if all the railway/trolley companies werent destroyed by the car/oil companies? what if we recounted bush vs gore would 9/11 still have happened? if Hitler's mom aborted would Germany still have turned out militant? what if einstein died in the holocaust and no one figured out general relativity till 50 years later? what if sony never broke with Nintendo and we ended up with a console monopoly by Nintendo?

historical determinism is bullshit spewed by people who cant create and try to bring down the accomplishments of others. just because you cant contribute shit doesn't mean other people wont.

edit: sorry, people that actually believe historical determinism piss me off

<comment><USER4> If Hitler hadn't been born, you would still have Mussolini and Stalin.

If Edison had succeeded, we could never have had anything like a national grid because DC transmission was too inefficient until long after the invention of the transistor.

Einstein was only one of several scientists working on theoretical physics near the turn of the 20th century; he didn't go from cave painting to special relativity all on his own.

The rest of your examples have nothing to do with scientific advancement.

You should read _What Technology Wants_. The first chapter or two contains a few leaps of logic, but the rest of the book makes a compelling case for emergent behavior leading to most of our scientific results.

<comment><USER3> but no holocaust and Mussolini/stalin were fuck ups, stalin only got power because of sheer population and being on the winning side.

EXACTLY we would of had a shitty inefficient grid because edison had a stranglehold at the time, this would of pushed back everything.

when einstein came up with special reliativity it was dubbed only 3 other people could understand it and no one else could of came up wit hit, he sped up the field by who knows ho many years.

so many of the world events were based on little things, and if we kept using electrical trolleys are knowledge of systems like that would of been much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonder if they use a similar technique to putting out oil well fires, albeit on a much smaller/controlled scale. "Typically high explosives, such as dynamite, are used to consume all the local atmospheric oxygen and snuff the flame out." [1] Granded, they are not using dynamite, but if they can duplicate the displacement of oxygen it could probably work.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the_fires)

<comment><USER6> I wondered the same thing, and then I started wondering if you set up an infrasonic standing wave, what sort of pressure differential could you maintain? Could you drop the pressure in the nodal low spots down by a millibar? 10? 20!?

That started me down the path of trying to figure out how much energy transfer was there in a standing wave and rather than run down the physics rabbit hole yet again, went back to work.

<comment><USER7> Don't you, by definition, have to drop the pressure by exactly as much as your raise it?

Meaning just use the DB of the sound, and calculate the sound pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is actually a problem in land based gas turbines that are used for power production. A neat application to putting out sound waves.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder, what's the biggest fire that this could put out? And how much the placement of speakers matters?

I can imagine in 20 years, fire departments having pick-up trucks with huge speaker cones driving around to put out fires.

<comment><USER10> Or not having fire departments at all; speakers in your home for your home automation system (with Siri and Google Now plugged) would be used to put the fire out from the inside.

Your home is going to be like a deck on the Enterprise sooner than you think.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but that won't help put out car fires, etc.

I do look forward to having fire-proof homes that incidentally have amazing sound systems built into the walls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> i can already see sysop geeks setting up budget for massive sound systems in the dc. y'know, for fire protection...

</comment><comment><USER12> And it was called the Sonic Screwdriver.</comment>


Idea: A neural network optimizer (see link). Has anyone tried this? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1195188787955019776 <comment><AUTHOR> I wince at submitting my own tweets to HN, since I feel like tweets should have a very high bar to be featured on HN.

But this is sort of an Ask HN, or "ask the world" type question, and I spent some time formulating an exact description of the idea in that tweet chain.

Anyone know of prior research into this? This is a "meta" neural network. It's a network that learns the best techniques to help some other network learn some dataset.

Not only would this yield an optimizer specific to a certain training session, but the outcome would be specific to that specific dataset!

The advantage is, you'd be able to make that optimizer available to everyone else who's training on that same dataset, and say "as long as you keep the dataset the same, here's an optimizer that goes from 3.0 loss to 0.1 loss in the shortest number of training steps."

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah, it's quite similar to "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent" and related works

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for mentioning this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, Google AutoML and citing publications since. I think all of the major clouds offer this as an API now

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing out AutoML!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone also pointed out learn2learn, which seems potentially relevant: [http://learn2learn.net/](http://learn2learn.net/)</comment>


Money Wins Elections Infographic - <AUTHOR> http://letsfreecongress.org

<comment><USER2> How would you divide your $100 between the POTUS-hopeful, the two Senator- hopefuls, and the House-member-hopeful? Do you hedge and give money to more than one candidate? Do you pool your money together to a pool fund[1]? How is this $100 supposed to help? Don't the politicians have to come out and reach out to people to get their $100? How do they fund this initial reach-out campaign? At the end of the day, will 7.5 billion dollars be enough?

[1]Can a pool fund spend the money as they choose? Can a group of a hundred people pool their money and choose to send someone to DC? Can that one person use this money on personal expenses? Can the pool pay this one person a salary so he can spend something on personal expenses?</comment>


Show HN: React4s – straightforward, component based webapps with Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.react4s.org/examples/spotify-search <comment><AUTHOR> The link is full of live demos. Feedback appreciated!</comment>


If concurrency is easy, you're either absurdly smart or you're kidding yourself - <AUTHOR> http://plsadventures.blogspot.com/2009/08/if-concurrency-is-easy-youre-either.html

<comment><USER2> Funnily enough, Plan 9 uses concurrency (via CSP) as a way of structuring programs to make them easier to write and reason about.

Concurrency isn't hard; Sharing is hard. This is the reason that mutable state hurts understandability - things can change under you because the view of state is shared. This is the reason global variables are bad - they are shared between different parts of the program, and can be modified from places you can't see. And this is the reason shared-memory concurrency is hard. Add to shared-memory concurrency a dash of race conditions in operations involving a load and a store, and things get hard.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying as I write this, but I think that's really the gist of it.

<comment><USER3> This is why I generally prefer event-driven programming over multithread programming. This is the sort of programming you do, for example, when you are implementing a GUI: you write short event handler functions that respond to events (such as mouse clicks or the completion of network or disk reads), and then a master loop receives events and dispatches the handler functions.

You get the same benefits as concurrency (maximum processor usage, at least when you only have one processor), but you avoid the pitfalls of shared memory, race conditions, and unexpected state changes (because only one event handler runs at a time). It does take a bit of getting used to (it seems so easy to make function calls like time() or mkdir() that are actually blocking and thus technically should be separated into a new callback function). But I find that the benefits of processor efficiency plus the comfort of avoiding concurrency problems are worthwhile.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming>

<comment><USER2> The point that I was trying to make is that a well designed concurrent program is often easier to reason about than an event driven program. Even if it didn't have benefits scaling to multiple processors and hiding latency, concurrent programming would have advantages in clearly structuring programs.

A great talk about the advantages of concurrent programming in producing clear and understandable program structure can be seen in Rob Pike's newsqueak tech talk (<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It takes him all of five sentences to back off from his sensationalistic headline and admit there is another possibility:

 _or the way they are using concurrency is restricted to nice simple patterns of interaction to which we can apply some simple mental analogy_

Actually this possibility covers most programming requirements. I like to think I'm superhumanly smart, and I would love to tackle a hard concurrency problem, but so far I have only needed mundane engineering ingenuity to map my problems to known solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. The post was essentially a reaction against people going "concurrency is easy! What are you talking about it being hard?!"

When people say "concurrency is easy", they mean "I use little bits of concurrency that I understand well and I find those easy". That's not the same as "concurrency is easy". That kind of arrogance is essentially like saying "flying a jet fighter is easy, because I know how to use a seatbelt".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In an ideal world, concurrency need not be a problem. After all, we can say that it is simply a matter of checking the safety of every read/write against every possible state of every thread that may be running concurrently.

However, the reality is that developers can not do this checking with complete accuracy. The simplistic reason is that the complexity of concurrent programs is exponentially greater than that of non-concurrent programs. In a concurrent model if I have m threads of execution and n read/writes per thread I need to verify n^m states in my code. Such a blowup in state makes any reasonable person look for generalizations and optimizations, but those then lead incorrect assumptions and ultimately defects.

Outside of this simplistic reasoning lie other problems which serve to exacerbate code verification during design and construction; realities of deadlines, access to source or documentation of components, the learning curve of technologies used as black boxes.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a whole lot of text to describe determinism and non-determinism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using "determinism" with respect to concurrency means about a billion different things depending on who you talk to.

For example, is the process that results from parallel composition of two deterministic processes deterministic or non-deterministic?

The answer is "it depends".

Concurrent "deterministic" processes are not significantly easier to reason about (informally) than non-deterministic ones, whichever definition you choose.

In fact, re-reading, I definitely don't see anything in there that could described by either "determinism" or "non-determinism", so either your definition differs wildly from mine, or you're choosing to be dismissive deliberately :)

<comment><USER7> Unix pipes (deterministic concurrrency) are far easier to reson about than a mutitheaded shared state program (nondeterministic concurrency). But then you can of course argue that this is due to the fact that the shell with proper unix filters form a monad with cat as the unit and the pipe operation | as bind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Learn Clojure. Learn Haskell. Learn Erlang. Learn Mozart Oz. And you'll suprised that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to write robust highly concurrent code.

<comment><AUTHOR> _sigh_

From the article:

 _Now, before you jump up and down and tell me that "insert-your-favourite- concurrency-model-here addresses these problems", I know there are strategies for managing the complexity of these tasks. I did concurrency theory for a living, so I know some approaches are better than others. My point here was essentially to illustrate why it is important to manage complexity when doing concurrency. It's definitely not just a case of "you can't do concurrency so that means you are stupid". I'm arguing that pretty much everyone is bad at concurrency beyond some simple patterns of interaction that we cling to because we can maintain a good mental model by using them._

To elaborate, things like the technologies you mentioned may provide better mental models for concurrent development, but I'm not convinced that they have solved concurrency in its entirety.

<comment><USER8> I noted that from the article. But nowhere did you mention how these languages fail to allow for complex concurrent modeling, which they do. You simply discussed your viewpoint without context for how these languages do not competently allow for massively concurrent programs- that's what they're designed to do.

And I'm not saying they solve "concurrency in it's entirety". I'm not even clear what you're trying to express with that statement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me clarify: I'm a big fan of most of the languages you've described. I think they do a really good job in the problem domains they are designed for.

My only point is that the domains they are designed for are constrained. I don't mean this as a negative - I consider a general pthreads-style implementation of concurrency to be constrained by the ability of people to reason about that kind of concurrency, probably to a much larger degree than a considerably more elegant implementation in a modern functional programming language.

I would argue, however, that such languages simply make it easier to construct concurrent programs that follow certain patterns. They provide useful abstractions for managing the complexity of concurrent interactions, which I think was my original point, and which I think is brilliant! What is missing is something that provides good-quality abstractions, high-quality static analysis and very strong safety guarantees _in the general case_.

Think about things like mobile processes, "ubiquitous computing" and software with huge failure tolerances by virtue of being able to reconfigure and coalesce resources at will.

And hopefully the flow-on effect of that would be to essentially stop horrible concurrency implementations being used in languages like Java and friends.

<comment><USER8> "I think they do a really good job in the problem domains they are designed for."

The problem domain of concurrency?

"What is missing is something that provides good-quality abstractions, high- quality static analysis and very strong safety guarantees in the general case."

They have excellent abstractions and great safety guarantees. Not sure what you mean by static analysis. A concurrent program is non-deterministic, what is going to go under static analysis? I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here.

"software with huge failure tolerances by virtue of being able to reconfigure and coalesce resources at will."

Wasn't this the whole point of Erlang? You know like telecom switching?

<comment><AUTHOR> A very similar point was made in the blog comments, but I'll restate my response here in brief:

Concurrency is hard even when you're just using a pencil and a piece of paper. If you write down a description of a system using any kind of simple notation, it will be difficult for me or anyone else to read that an have a good intuition about the runtime behaviour of that system. This isn't a discussion of statefulness or mutability. It's just about the presence of a very large number of interactions that essentially defy any usual sense of causality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "It's our total inability to mentally reason about concurrency that makes it difficult"... hyperbole much? Ugh. Less ranting and more solutions, please? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Duly noted, thanks!</comment></comment>


Feathered dinosaur tail found in amber (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38224564 <comment><USER2> Would it theoretically be possible to extract DNA from these samples or are is that out of the question ever in any situation?

<comment><USER3> Impossible. DNA has an estimated half life of only 521 years [1]. It's a fairly reactive molecule due to the number of reactions it has to undergo to fulfill its purpose.

I believe the T-Rex soft tissue [2,3] that has been discovered contained short polypeptide sequences. You can infer the codons from this information, but that elides promotor, signaling, non-coding, etc regions that will be of massive importance. Not to mention you won't get much data in the first place.

Hundreds of years from now, any dinosaurs we recreate will be the result of creative genetic engineering and imagination.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half- life-1.1...](https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555)

[2] [https://m.phys.org/news/2019-11-mechanisms-soft-tissue- prote...](https://m.phys.org/news/2019-11-mechanisms-soft-tissue-protein- tyrannosaurus.html)

[3] [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur- shock...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur- shocker-115306469/)

<comment><USER4> > Hundreds of years from now, any dinosaurs we recreate will be the result of > creative genetic engineering and imagination.

Not to mention machine learning. I wonder if we get a bunch of samples from different individuals, could an AI simply just piece it all together?

<comment><USER5> If the information is gone, it is gone.

I'm sure you could devise a "machine learning algorithm" that'll shove some random numbers in there, though.

<comment><USER6> It'd be like using machine learning to recreate unrecorded speeches of Marcus Aurelius or Alexander the Great word-for-word.

<comment><USER5> And in this climate I'm sure you could get some venture capital for that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Feathers on a dinosaur make them a lot less scary IMO, even the one in the artist impression is kind of cute, but I know (if I was around) seeing a very toothy bird-like creature live and in person might make me change my mind.

<comment><USER8> I also had this with the Neanderthals paintings of Tom Bjørklund. Most of the time Neanderthals are rendered as ape like beings, but he draws them as humans. This made me think completely different about Neanderthals.

A list of his work: [https://steemit.com/art/@cultureshock/these-neanderthal- char...](https://steemit.com/art/@cultureshock/these-neanderthal-character- studies-by-tom-bjoerklund-look-awesome)

His website: [https://www.tombjorklund.fi/](https://www.tombjorklund.fi/)

Instagram: [https://www.instagram.com/tombjorklundart/](https://www.instagram.com/tombjorklundart/)

<comment><USER9> You (everyone) should study their skeletons. No different from ours, unless you are a forensic anthropologist. Especially considering the wide variety of human body shapes. Showing them as ape-like is a type of racism. Technically speciesism I suppose.

<comment><USER10> what? they seem noticeably different to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a time when dinosaurs and birds both co-existed how do they tell the difference between dinosaur feathers and bird feathers? What are the features of feathers between these species that differentiate them?

<comment><USER12> Essentially (or, "cladistically"), birds _are_ dinosaurs, and even if you restrict yourself to "non-modern dinosaurs", where do you draw the line?

<comment><USER13> Well maybe. There were a class of very birdlike creatures called enantiornithines which I suspect are a completely different line and quite possibly not dinosaurs, however I've dug around before and am unable to find any precise statement of their genetic relationship to extant birds (and therefore their relationship to true dinosaurs).

Enantiornithines had the wing joint inverted: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiornithes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiornithes)

"Enantiornitheans are thought to have left no living descendants ... the articulation of the shoulder bones – which has a concave-convex socket joint that is the reverse of that of modern birds"

If anyone can elucidate, please do.

At the bottom of the article is a link to another article on these creatures [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-36651471](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36651471) "Ancient birds' wings preserved in amber"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (2016)

Still cool.</comment>


Telegram says Apple has prevented it from updating since April - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-apple/telegram-says-apple-has-prevented-it-from-updating-since-april-idUSKCN1IW14R <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197817).</comment>