PostgreSQL Studio - <AUTHOR> http://www.postgresqlstudio.org/ <comment><USER2> Official announcement from PostgreSQL.org: [http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1485/](http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1485/)

 _OpenSCG is pleased to announce the release of PostgreSQL Studio 1.0. PostgreSQL Studio is an open-source, web-based GUI for PostgreSQL. It allows users to manage and query their database from a browser._

 _Version 1.0 of PostgreSQL Studio is distributed under the PostgreSQL License. Some of its key features include:_

\- _Easy to use AJAX web interface_

\- _Secure access over HTTPS_

\- _Robust object wizards_

\- _Query editor with syntax highlighting_

\- _Cross platform and easy to install_

 _You can find more information about PostgreSQL Studio at www.postgresqlstudio.org_

</comment><comment><USER3> JavaServer Pages? That's an interesting choice.. and will probably rule it out for a lot of people. I'm not running Java on my web server, sorry. Interesting that a PostgreSQL product licensed under PostgreSQL is using an Oracle technology. Edit - removed the MySQL reference.

<comment><USER4> _> I'm not running Java on my web server, sorry._

This attitude is interesting to me, because I use Play Framework and Dropwizard quite heavily. What exactly is the objectionability of a JVM versus, say, running PHP-FPM?

<comment><USER5> Maybe the objection is running the JVM on the server just for this tool?

<comment><USER6> As opposed to running rails or PHP just for any particular application?

<comment><USER5> Well yes, personally I wouldn't install Rails or PHP on my servers just to run a database tool.

<comment><USER6> Ok, but I wonder what you will use for a web-based database administration tool...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We make a similar thing: [http://www.teampostgresql.com](http://www.teampostgresql.com)

AJAX/JavaScript powered rich web GUI for PostgreSQL. Looks like this took some inspiration from us too (which is great). TeamPostgreSQL is a side-project but pretty mature, having been around since 2010.

<comment><USER8> It seems it only works with Java 6 (at least according to the Mac installer), which is too bad, because I don't want yet another version of Java on my machines.

Is the source code publicly available?

<comment><USER7> I believe the installer packages bundle a JRE (which runs in isolation from your other Java installations) so that shouldn't be a problem.

Only the cross-platform archive assumes you have a Java (6+) installed. Off the top of my head I can't remember if backporting to 5 would be a possibility but considering that Java 5 is almost ten years old, it may be too much effort to be worth it.

The source code isn't public anymore than my dirty underwear is :) Seriously though, I might open source it if I thought anyone would be able to get anything out of it.

<comment><USER8> I downloaded the Mac version, ran the installer, and it immediately said it required Java 1.6 and launched a JRE 6 install.

        $ java -version
        java version "1.7.0_25"
        Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_25-b15)
        Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.25-b01, mixed mode)

<comment><USER9> Which one is the Mac version? Usability fail.

<comment><USER7> There's a dropdown ('Select download') with four options, one of which says 'Mac OSX Installer'. Can you explain what makes it unclear? Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER9> I see three download options, one for zip, one for tar.gz, and one for tar.bz. Mac installers are usually bundled in .dmg archives, or .pkg.

<comment><USER7> Ah, you are talking about the OP's site - this subthread was discussing TeamPostgreSQL: [http://www.teampostgresql.com/download.jsp](http://www.teampostgresql.com/download.jsp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This image gives an idea of UI: [http://www.openscg.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/pgstudio_s...](http://www.openscg.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/pgstudio_screen-1024x738.png)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the image link. At a quick glance, it reminded me of PHPMySQL, but I guess most, good, web-based admin UI's will have a similar layout and functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We have a similar Html5/AJAX powered offering[1] as well though in addition to Postgres we also support a number of other database types (MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server). Looking forward to trying this out to see how it compares.

[1]: [http://www.jackdb.com/](http://www.jackdb.com/)

<comment><USER13> Note the above is not open source though it does have a crippled "free" option.

<comment><USER12> To clarify, our free cloud version is a complete product. The only difference between it and the paid plans is the number of simultaneous connections and the organization, team, and audit management features.

<comment><USER14> And the limit on the number of rows per query.

It does sound slightly crippled in that sense.

<comment><USER15> Just click on the 'Fetch More' button, and 50 more rows will be retrieved. For cloud based _free_ solutions, I haven't found anything better than this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ..and the site has gone down. Sounds fantastic, though- pgSQL has always been lacking in admin tools compared to MySQL.

<comment><USER17> Huh? There's the great free PGAdmin which is WAY better than any of the web- based tools, and it has built-in SSH tunneling so it's easy to use against a remote server.

<comment><USER16> PGAdmin is unspeakably awful. I run a Mac and it was very painful going from the world of Sequel Pro (for MySQL) to the awful, awful, terrible pgAdmin.

I ended up buying NaviCat Essentials, which is considerably better but still not perfect.

<comment><USER17> What do you find to be wrong with it? It's always done the job well for me, whereas Sequel Pro, while a prettier face, and useable enough, manages to crash at least once a day.

<comment><USER18> PGAdmin crashes regularly, and in a very annoying (and stupid!) move blocks the UI for all the windows on some database operations e.g. adding indexes. It also blocks the UI when it's processing the results of a db query, which can be slow if there is a lot of data being returned. The interface is sort-of ok though.

<comment><USER19> I don't see how that's "unspeakable bad, terrible, terrible". Latest versions crash a lot less and if you really need to use UI during long database queries you can run another instance of pgadmin. It's still very useful and powerful tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll eventually try it out, but I have absolutely no idea how to go from this .war file to a running web server. (I see some .war files actually have a web server built in so you can just to java -jar, but not this one.)

<comment><USER21> The total absence of any information on the site about what it is you're downloading, what it's requirements are, or how to install it, is rather unhelpful. I downloaded the zip file just to find out what was inside it.

I haven't tried installing it yet, but in principle installing .war files can be very simple. You need an application server (such as Apache Tomcat), you log into the admin section of that in your browser, and somewhere in there there's a form where you just upload the .war file, and it gets automatically unpacked, installed, services started up, and so on.

Edit: I take it all back. Well, most of it. They have an install guide, which you can find via Support, Documentation.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, simple. And then the Java app tells you that you don't have the right version of Tomcat and do need at least an 0.0.1 update. (Yes, I was forced to run JIRA on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

Stupid Java environment. :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been thinking about making the switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

For database design/GUI work SQLyog has been pretty awesome over the years (auto-complete, drag & drop, tabbed editor windows, export query result to csv, etc.). Is there an equivalent for PostgreSQL?

When I hear web-based I think phpMyAdmin, which, while functional, pales in comparison to SQLyog (web app in question does look a lot more polished than phpMyAdmin)

<comment><USER24> These apps are nice, but the best PostgreSQL editor and GUI I've seen is EMS PostgreSQL Manager, [http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/postgresql/manager](http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/postgresql/manager). It even has a pretty nice query builder. Though I believe it's windows only, and also costs money. I use it every day and vastly prefer it over every other tool I've used.

<comment><USER23> Linux workstation here but run a couple of Windows VMs for browser testing and Windows only apps.

EMS looks pretty feature rich, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very interested to see this, once the site comes back online. In spite of the previous efforts, I've always found the admin/query tools for Mysql and Postgresql as lacking compared to the ones from the commercial-only vendors. And I've never cared for the non-db-specific sql utilities. An easier tool to work with Postgres would certainly make my clients much happier.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey, random internet stranger here -- I like the idea -- maybe you could show some comparisons with the other products on the market (other postgres management programs). Also, I think you should put the screenshot of the dashboard on the front page, will make it instantly clearer what it does, and probably generate interest quicker?

</comment><comment><USER27> I have to admit, the first thing I thought about when I saw it was "phpMyAdmin" and "security vulnerabilities". I hope I'm simply being uncharitable, but I'd have to have a lot of faith in the product and the underlying stack before I let a web-based GUI anywhere near a production database.

<comment><USER7> As the author of a comparable tool (TeamPostgreSQL), most of our users use an IP whitelist in their firewall to access the web client. Of course, you can also use the tool on your local network only as a substitute for a regular admin tool.

<comment><USER28> IP whitelist... secure? O'RLY?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This looks interesting (via the description and screenshot in the comments...the site is down as of this writing), but what does this provide that pgAdmin ([http://www.pgadmin.org/](http://www.pgadmin.org/)) doesn't?

<comment><USER10> As per OpenSCG: [http://www.openscg.com/2013/10/postgresql-studio-1-0-is- out/](http://www.openscg.com/2013/10/postgresql-studio-1-0-is-out/)

The standard bearer for PostgreSQL GUIs is pgAdmin, but that requires people to make a database connection across the internet which they may be reluctant to do if they don't have a VPN of some sort set up. The right thing is to have a web-based GUI allowing users to connect to their database through a browser. PhpPgAdmin is an option, but many of the new PostgreSQL users I've talked to like the newer look and feel of sites like Heroku and are turned off by the UI of phpPgAdmin.

<comment><USER30> So, instead of making a database connection through the internet, you tunnel it over http? What can you gain by doing that?

<comment><USER31> Looks like what I wanted is already here. I think I can now learn Postgres on a Chromebook which just has a web browser. (I had created a free database on heroku previously.)

[https://teampostgresql.herokuapp.com](https://teampostgresql.herokuapp.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Clearly there is a pain point with PostgreSQL and GUI front-ends. Wish I could see the site.

<comment><USER33> Honestly I found the sooner one gives up and just uses the command line, the better.

<comment><USER34> Indeed. I really have no idea why so much energy is spent on GUI tools.

What do these things provide that one can't get from the command line, I wonder?

<comment><USER33> I guess being able to see a whole bunch of things at the same time is useful, plus never having learn much SQL, plus being edit things by clicking on them.

<comment><USER34> [I just realized that my comment may have appeared very harsh, specially from the authors' point of view. My apologies to them, I was _very happy_ to have a good GUI when I started working with databases]

@antihero : Seeing things does help, but in my experience, using scripts and the command line is faster for developpement, because a lot of code can be reused, which is not the case with clicks.

I was being too restrictive though, a lot can be done with a GUI, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Currently the site is trying to request this URL [http://localhost/wordpress/wp- content/themes/alexandria/skin...](http://localhost/wordpress/wp- content/themes/alexandria/skins/images/alexandria/page_bg.png)

(I have a local Django server running on 0.0.0.0:80 and the terminal keeps flashing when I browser the site and this image is obviously missing and gives a 404)

</comment><comment><USER36> Server's down - anyone got a mirror, announcement or enough experience with the project to give a good rundown of what it is and what it does?

</comment><comment><USER37> I was really excited when Induction ([http://inductionapp.com/](http://inductionapp.com/)) was announced, but I don't think there's too much development for it. The interface is probably the best I've seen, but functionality is fairly sparse. pgAdmin3 has been my go-to app, but I'm excited try out PostgreSQL Studio!

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm amazed no on mentioned SQLWorkbenchJ. For postgres on Mac, it is infinitely better than pgAdmin. There are a few usability issues (manually setting the JDBC driver, for one), but once you get the hang of it, it's quick and very fully featured. I use it over Navicat, and it's free.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ugh, java... Really?

I really don't want to have to run a java server just to host this.

</comment><comment><USER40> This looks amazing for people who want to install and maintain their database client as a webapp on their production database server.

<comment><USER41> You don't run it on a production server, you can configure it to point at any db server in your network. They use localhost as an example only.

[http://www.postgresqlstudio.org/support/documentation/suppor...](http://www.postgresqlstudio.org/support/documentation/supportdocumentationinstallation- guide/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> They should have wrapped it with jetty-runner or something that makes it easy to run it without having to fire up Tomcat.

</comment><comment><USER43> Surface comment of the day - What an excellent, clean website. From the color scheme to the font choices. Excellent.

</comment><comment><USER44> Personally I started to use valentina studio, it has diagrams which I love. But mysql workbench is a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm seeing a blank site.

</comment><comment><USER46> Screenshot? Demo?</comment>


Chinese Factory Replaces 90% of Humans with Robots Sees 250% Production Increase - <AUTHOR> http://monetarywatch.com/2017/01/chinese-factory-replaces-90-human-workers-robots-sees-250-production-increase/?doing_wp_cron=1484942344.6884350776672363281250 <comment><USER2> _One of China's first unmanned factories in the city of Dongguan recently replaced 590 of its workers with robots and the results were astounding. While the factory used to be run by 650 employees, only 60 of those people still work at the factory and their primary job is to make sure the machines are running properly, not working on manufacturing._

 _Since the shift to robots, pieces per person per month has risen from 8,000 to 21,000—a whopping 250% increase. While some may argue that quality of the product will decrease with the use of robots, this doesn't appear to be the case either. The number of product defects has decreased from 25% to just 5%._

So the old useful-output production per month was 650 * 8000 * 0.75 = 3900000 pieces. Now it's 60 * 21000 * 0.95 = 1197000.

Useful output in pieces per month is now only 31% of what it used to be. The much lower defect rate might save a lot of money, but I wonder if profits actually improved following such a dramatic output reduction, even considering savings on wages and defective parts.

<comment><USER3> Good find - I would have missed that they are speaking about pieces per person and just asumed they really increased their output

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is no reason to assume the 590 workers were replaced 1:1 with robots. The number of robots is unknown. The known values are FiredWorkers:590 CurrentWorkers: 60 PiecesPerPersonOLD: 8000 PiecesPerPersonNEW: 21,000 DefectsOLD: 25% DefectsNEW: 5%

Using this data it would appear that the factory produces less as philipkglass's math indicated. dingleberry's math assumes a 1:1 ratio of persons turned into robots. The article never says this. It only says "pieces per person." Robots are not yet persons.

A better written article wouldn't require this reading between the lines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Replicator make me a Cell-Phone</comment>


Kodak shares soar by 570 percent - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/kodak-soars-another-40percent-after-trump-announces-deal-to-manufacture-generic-drug-ingredients.html <comment><USER2> Kodak shares had a lot of short positions, possible most of the move was due to short covering.</comment>


Pinterest's Buy it - <AUTHOR> https://about.pinterest.com/en/buy-it

<comment><USER2> I am sure they would much prefer purchases go through their site instead of a (third party) affiliate code then eh?</comment>


Steve Case Is Right About the Third Wave and the Blockchain and IOT Proves It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jrodthoughts/steve-case-is-right-about-the-third-wave-and-the-blockchain-and-iot-proves-it-2beaecb7afe8#.wv3v5dhcr <comment><USER2> Am I missing something or is Blockchain as a service kind of defeat the purpose? If we all trust XYZ to provide the service wouldn't we just use them as a central repository for our transaction data? Even if you only have a few companies running your blockchain you still would only need a very small number to compromise your data.

<comment><USER2> I certainly won't be hosting my illegal activities or rebellions on their servers.</comment></comment>


Did Apple Just Ban Location-Based Ads in iPhone Apps? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/did_apple_just_ban_location-based_ads_in_iphone_ap.php

<comment><USER2> "But what's with this language about how location can only be used to 'provide beneficial information?' Who makes this decision ..."

Apple.

Has RWW not been paying attention?

"... and where on earth does Apple get off making a policy like this?"

It's Apple's platform, Apple's app store, Apple's game, Apple's ball, Apple's rules, Apple's car, Apple's house.

How can there be any surprise?

Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple.

Apple.

'K?</comment>


Capitalism: The "Software Craftsmanship" movement excludes people - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wchinfeman/status/1056321295762243585 <comment><AUTHOR> My contributions to the discussion start here: [https://twitter.com/FagnerBrack/status/1056332739434041344](https://twitter.com/FagnerBrack/status/1056332739434041344)</comment>


Forget Product/Market Fit; It's All About Product/Market Balance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.meatinthesky.com/forget-productmarket-fit-its-all-about-produc

<comment><USER2> Wow, that article was piece of crap. What those numerous pictures of blocks are supposed to tell us? It could all be said in one sentence: startup needs to get it's product, positioning and pricing right.

<comment><USER3> I thought the blocks were pretty good visuals of what the article is trying to say. I guess you didn't understand that.</comment></comment>


The Future of Invention (1879) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1879/08/the-future-of-invention/305170/ <comment><USER2> > Unfortunately, no one has as yet devised a satisfactory machine for > automatically sweeping and scrubbing floors, and it is likely that these > labors will be generally performed by hand to the end of the chapter. But > the toil has been lightened by improvements in the implements used for such > purposes, and there will undoubtedly be further advances in that direction. > The number of patented mop wringers, for instance, is very considerable, and > rotary floor sweepers, like street sweepers, are already in use.

Sure enough, the modern vacuum cleaner would arrive less than 30 years later, invented by department store janitor James Murray Spangler in 1907, who sold the patent to William Henry Hoover.

<comment><USER3> > It must be remembered, also, that labor-saving devices, and indeed > inventions of all kinds, often absolutely lessen demand instead of > increasing it. Suppose, for example, that the many attempts at producing a > satisfactory traction engine should result in success; is it not evident > that the number of horses in use would be greatly diminished? This would > similarly reduce the demand for horseshoes, horseshoe nails, currycombs, and > harness of all sorts, every one of which now forms the centre of extensive > manufacturing interests, employing many men.

Also prescient, John Froelich got such a tractor working 14 years later!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a feeling it was awesome to live in America in the 80s and 90s. (1880s of course). This article hints on the zeitgeist of the era.

But I'm mostly reminded by this when I walk over the Brooklyn bridge. That bridge was completed in 1883 and somehow is still heavily used today. At the time, nothing that big was ever built. Nobody even knew if a suspension bridge that long would be feasible.

Also by 1882, NYC had it's first electricity power plant thanks to Edison. Imagine the benefits of electricity over gas burning light. Reminds me of Arthur c Clarke's quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

<comment><USER5> Oh I dunno antibiotics, vaccines, and water treatment plants sure beat cholera pandemics and polio.

A/C is pretty nice too

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Vast sums are continually changing hands in the litigation upon them. They have probably made and unmade more fortunes than all other agencies combined." He was spot on with patent lawyers!

</comment><comment><USER7> The apps of yesteryear: [https://www.bissell.com/about-us/our- history](https://www.bissell.com/about-us/our-history) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuller_Brush_Company#Early_yea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuller_Brush_Company#Early_years)

</comment><comment><USER8> One should not equate patents with inventions. There has not been a one-to-one relationship between the two for quite some time.

<comment><USER9> This was written in 1879.

<comment><USER10> Today it's even worse. I still say if you add the requirement for a working patent prototype (like they did pre-1880 [1]), that the number of rediculous patent issuances will drop signficficantly.

1.) [https://invention.si.edu/patent-models-and-prototypes- displa...](https://invention.si.edu/patent-models-and-prototypes-display)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow I didn't know that the Atlantic has existed (and been awesome) for since such a long time. Apparently the newspaper was founded in 1857. Quite remarkable!</comment>


BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrency <comment><USER2> I understand the argument regarding power consumption.

However, if we're going to green wash ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing)) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption.

Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubious to assert such.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar- pow...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-power-to- grow-sixfold-as-sun-becoming-cheapest-resource) [2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for- cheap...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest- power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar)

<comment><USER3> I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles.

AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs?

I feel like China probably has the right idea of dumping a bunch of R&D into LFTR and whatnot instead of riding the Eco Friendly TM train.

<comment><USER4> > AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio.

Does that include the uranium miners?

<comment><USER5> More importantly, does that includes the projected fatalities due to power plants being destroyed and nuclear waste being unearthed and released in the environment?

Given the half life of waste, ignoring that risk is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC.

People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed.

People want banks, or at least a subset of what banks do. People want insurance, people want chargeback. People want to get loans to buy houses and cars.

Bitcoin solves a tiny portion of the service provided by banks.

A lot of what bank does is getting automated anyway, now you have banks that are only available online who probably need a lot less personnel and obviously fewer buildings. Armored vehicles and printing money can be replaced by credit and debit cards, no blockchain needed. I personally use cash less and less, and I know it's a trend in many (albeit not all) countries.

<comment><USER9> The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity, both paying and receiving are as simple as scanning a QR code, many people already do that when paying with the European Ideal system. As for safety, central storage with insurance and a police that understands cyber crime will still have a role in a BTC(-like) economy.

<comment><USER8> >The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity

Simpler and more convenient than Visa? What if I buy something online and the other party scams me by not delivering the goods?

There's more to the economy as a distributed ledger. If bitcoin was to replace fiat entirely it'd still need 3rd parties to settle disputes, provide insurance, distribute the risks etc... In other word banks, or "central storage with insurance" as you prefer to call them.

The cost of the PoW algorithm is on top of all of that, not an alternative to it. It's not the problem it's solving.

PoW is there to solve the "distributed ledger without trust" issue. Except that if you end up having to trust your bitcoins to a "central storage with insurance" anyway I'm not sure I see the added value over the current solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything.

With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either...

Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

<comment><USER11> > flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything.

I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi- covert-00](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00)) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees.

This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.

<comment><USER12> > Why won't you complain about monitor pixels

or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is

<comment><USER13> Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc).

It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

<comment><USER15> The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be that).

While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the _lowest_ cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the math).

Edit: punctuation

<comment><USER14> Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense.

When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens.

Curious to read about and see how that works

<comment><USER16> My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for this, I'm planning on watching Bram's talk but haven't had the time just yet. It's definitely an interesting idea, so I'm eager to see how it plays out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a copy of Burstcoin[1], this "inventor" had many other "ideas" in last years that all were copies of other people ideas and were total disasters, he is riding his reputation he got from bittorrent. It will probably end with ICO, people will invest money treating that just as financial instrument that you can speculate on, then when implementation will come it will end like all those others alt coins.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited.

Watching [https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...](https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/) I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this :)

<comment><USER19> Hey, I was there at the event (I did the lightning talk at the beginning). Would love to answer any questions about Chia that anybody has, that I learned first-hand from Bram.

<comment><USER20> Going to watch the video in a bit but I've got a question: could I turn my home NAS into a farmer for this blockchain simply by reserving some of my storage space for it or does it still require a lot of computing power (CPU/GPU)?

<comment><USER19> That should work :) although it would need to be connected up to the network so it could reply to proof queries and "thread the needle" of the time servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue.

* As others have asked, how much is bitcoin _supposed_ to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure?

* We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ([https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-impo...](https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-important-as-saudi-arabia-at-1-79%c2%a2-kwh/)) incredibly low bids for solar projects were submitted in Chile at 2.15c/kWh. That's insanely cheap. We're not there yet in having ubiquitous cheap clean power obviously, but neither is bitcoin "there" in being able to replace much of traditional financial infrastructure. But the point still stands: will bitcoin's energy usage still matter in the not-too-distant future?

<comment><USER22> The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block (i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be (approximately) equal.

Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go up accordingly.

The reward amount will decrease over time and mitigate this, but not enough by a long shot IMO.

<comment><USER23> This is a key observation. Now apply it to the "eco-friendly" and PoS schemes. The same economics apply. For Bram's coin and PoS systems, the costs spent will rise to equal the block reward. So, you are basically doing something more complicated to end up with the same amount of economic waste. In the proof of space version, maybe you will be building millions of hard drives, running them to failure and then throwing them away.

<comment><USER24> This answer written by the Ethereum team addresses why cost spent won't necessarily rise to equal block reward in their PoS formulation. [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake- FAQ#doe...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doesnt-mc --mr-mean-that-all-consensus-algorithms-with-a-given-security-level-are- equally-efficient-or-in-other-words-equally-wasteful)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> « _A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week_ »

This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use.

For example the transaction rate could double tomorrow, without increasing energy consumption.

[¹] Also, this metric is derived from Digiconomist, which is flawed as it overestimate consumption by a factor of 2: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious- faults-in-beci/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/)

<comment><USER26> You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power consumed in a block.

It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost of a CD is equal to its mass- or volume share of the cost of the truck delivery, and indeed, that's how you'd correctly quantify e.g. the environmental cost of Netflix's DVD-by-mail (it doesn't work to just say "one more disc doesn't cost any more so the environmental cost is zero"):

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2008/08/video_stores_vs_online_rentals.html)

<comment><USER25> But the limit in the number of transactions is not a _technical_ limit, it's a _political_ limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption.

Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

<comment><USER26> >But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption.

It's at least _partly_ a technical limit, because there are technical issues faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of transactions/sec you think it can handle. Each scaling solution has its tradeoffs[1][3], and therefore, to the extent that there's no "free [scaling] lunch", then there is inherent scarcity to what the miners can support, and therefore transactions _should be_ attributed their proportional share of that limit when accounting for them.

It only appears as a political limit because a) users generally don't want a fragmented network, and b) there's persistent disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable when scaling.

>Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

What is that responding to? The issue was how to account for the cost of one unit that takes up a scarce slot in a known-cost thing. The fair (IMHO) solution, per previous comment, is "blame" each unit for its share of the total cost.

How does an increase in the truck's capacity refute the analogy? The same logic would hold: if trucks could carry more Netflix DVDs at the same [environmental or whatever] cost, it would be reasonable to say that the cost per DVD shipped _also_ went down. If trucks had infinite capacity, _then_ it would be fair to say that the DVDs have no cost, since the cost inputs are independent of problem size (number of DVDs to ship). But -- per [1] and above -- we don't live in that world.

[1] For example, if you simply said "each block can hold as many transactions as miners are willing to tolerate" [2], that risks making the ledger (blockchain) freakishly large. Since each node has to store the full ledger, that blowup, in turn, risks [excessive] centralization, where only a few miner-datacenters can run nodes, defeating the (or a major) point of Bitcoin.

[2] which you think would make transaction capacity non-scarce

[3] Wiki page for discussing the issues: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

<comment><USER27> The limits are primarily political, as there are other blockchains doing thousands of times more transactions.

<comment><USER26> Which ones are you talking about? Litecoin and ETH, the closest PoW competitors, are on the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin. (Ripple might do more but is not PoW.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sounds like IPFS.

Why do we need an ICO. Can't we just do it like bitcoin and download a client to start 'mining'?

<comment><USER29> Because nobody skilled is going to build this without payment? this thinly veiled criticism of ICOs has that obvious logical flaw.

Computational proofs take a long time for the development team to get funded, and this delays go to market strategies. Look at the graveyard of mineable projects before this year's ICO boom, broke underfunded devs with no ability to mobilize a community to fund the tiniest things. Pitiful bounty systems where the payouts can't even motivate the imagined Indian developer.

If you don't think current ICOs align economic incentives well ENOUGH, then discuss that particular nuance instead.

<comment><USER30> Also, mining implies PoW, whereas this is not always guaranteed to be the case. It's my favorite, but it's falling out of fashion, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What are "proof of space"/"proof of work" ? How do they compare to proof of work/proof of stake ?

<comment><USER32> "Beyond Hellman's time-memory tradeoffs with applications to proofs of space" [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf)

<comment><USER33> Any ideas about the proof of time which Bram references?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there as well!

<comment><USER35> In the long run it will make them both cheaper.

<comment><USER36> YAY a GPU from a year ago that had 100% GPU usage for full 11months with cheap cooling is on sale now for 20% of its initial price!

<comment><USER37> I think s/he means more volume leads to lower prices (in the long run)

<comment><USER36> and we see that on GPU marker were prices are going up all the time since 2 years ago...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Relevant talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw)

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't see how this is better. It sounds like we have to waste power running hard drives now. Isn't Ethereum's Proof of Stake better?

<comment><USER40> I thought so too until I read this [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is- a-work-independent-protocol-possible) and, maybe there's counter arguments? But it seemed like a pretty good argument to me.

<comment><USER41> Your linked argument is poorly formed. It's true that any system which periodically emits value will cause people to work towards achieving that value. However, it's not true that the work in question will necessarily be wasted in an arms race.

Specifically, a (well constructed) Proof of Stake system will cause people to work to get a piece of the value by having them purchase the coin used for staking. This will cause the value of the coin on the open market to rise, which will increase the equilibrium market cap of the coin in relation to the world.

Because "money is a veil" [1], this won't create or destroy any actual goods or services. It will just transfer value from some persons to other persons. Therefore, Proof of Stake is more efficient than Proof of Work, because it moves cryptocurrency from negative-sum (electricity wasted) to something that's approximately zero-sum.

Another way of saying this is that you can't PRODUCE value by creating any currency with zero intrinsic value. However, you can WASTE value in this activity, and Bitcoin, as currently constructed (along with all possible Proof of Work systems) is wasteful. Proof of Stake wastes less value than Proof of Work.

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

<comment><USER42> How does proof of stake prevent double spending if there are no miners to validate blocks? I must be missing something here...

<comment><USER43> Stakers take act like miners, but instead of staking computation time through proof-of-work, they stake an amount of cryptocurrency which gets burned if they ever double-vote (and maybe if they vote for the losing chain, etc, depending on the scheme).

It's not very obvious how exactly a proof-of-stake scheme should work though. Many past attempts have been pretty flawed. I'm excited to watch Ethereum's progress in this area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The incentives seem designed to make it not-so-profitable to have big rigs with lots of hard-drive space. That design seems to be an effort to keep the mining fairly decentralized so that it happens across a greater number of commodity machines.

But if available drive space and, as Bram says in his talk, even unallocated space, can be efficiently leveraged to back this cryptocurrency, this suddenly creates an incentive for the companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or even Symantec to start doing shenanigans in the background in order to mine Chia coins on billions of machines.

The only thing currently stopping them is the egregious resource-usage of extant POW-based cryptocurrencies. Plus, there are already cases where all those companies take advantage of users resources like screen real estate, installers, usage data, etc., when the resource usage is minimal (or, in some cases with Windows 10, even above minimal).

So if you make a fungible cryptocurrency that consumes less power and targets commodity machines, aren't you essentially asking the big players to battle it out to control the unused space across billions of machines? Imagine the annoying oscillation between browsers for default primacy, except that battle is now between language vendors, os vendors, device vendors, etc.

</comment><comment><USER45> Paper on proofs of space: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER46> so we are going to go from spending energy for "work" to spending energy producing drives for "space". Time to buy some digital storage stock ;)

<comment><USER47> Or gridcoin. At least Science is advancing with hydro bills there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Filecoin and Burst already do that

</comment><comment><USER49> If you think video cards are more expensive due to Bitcoin, just wait and see hard drive prices skyrocket if this cryptocurrency gains popularity. It isn't exactly eco friendly because hard drive manufacturers will try to fill that demand by producing more drives that will end up empty.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm trying to understand...

"The three best proofs of space rapidly the propagated through the whole network and proofs of time servers start working on top of them."

Should that read, "The three best proofs of space rapidly propagate through..."?

<comment><USER51> ... rapidly _get_ propagated ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is there an incentive to store the blockchain itself? A proof of space might be derived from the blockchain history. The would create an incentive to store the blockchain. That way the proof of space is a useful use of space.

</comment><comment><USER20> So could I run a node on my Home NAS/server thathas some TB left for storage? Or would it still require a decent GPU and or CPU to make it viable?

Is there any site with more technical details?

</comment><comment><USER53> So... One thing I missed is, how do you mine Chia? Do you mine it? How much will there be... these are the questions, is it technically a cryptocurrency or just a digital currency?

</comment><comment><USER54> The power needed to create a HD need to be accounted for and the metal supply that it lowers could create issues that needs electricity to make up for, just a theory.

</comment><comment><USER55> Fun to see the heated Bitcoin discussion and imagine that much of that heat comes from people having invested previously and now defending their decision.

</comment><comment> c-smile Can we just use IP addresses (or similar finite at time set) as coins then?

And torrent alike distributed network that will support proof of ownership and transactions.

Like I am owning 184.108.40.206 address and tons of peers nearby know that...

</comment><comment><USER56> This sounds like what Richard proposed for Pied Piper in the HBO series Silicon Valley?

Instead of power, use storage instead. Get a cheap PC, install Linux on it, get a 16T hard drive to store the Chiacoins and blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER57> If this is open source, I'll use it and if it's not I won't.

</comment><comment><USER58> I could have started mining Bitcoin back when you could mine them on a desktop PC, but never did.

I think I'll try my hand at Chia farming until I have 1,000 or so on the off chance it hits $7,000 one day too.

</comment><comment><USER59> So instead of running through circuits that are stateless you'd run through circuits that are stateful. I don't see how this would assuredly reduce the total energy used.

</comment><comment><USER60> He should make a coin backed up by how much data miner shares through bittorrent.

</comment><comment><USER61> What is the advantage (if any) of this over proof of stake?

<comment><USER18> <snark>it might actually work</snark> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Proof of work is conspicuous consumption economics.

</comment><comment><USER63> > A bitcoin transaction wastes

^H^H^H^H^H^Hcosts -- FTFY. It's not a waste if you actually got something for it. e.g. your chemical ICE in your car produces heat that is useful in cold weather. Not waste heat if it has utility. Electric cars have to spend electrical energy to generate the same heat.

That said, the fact that this keeps coming up would indicate that there's definitely a marketplace for a coin that costs less energy/emissions for the same features.

<comment><USER64> Waste: use or expend carelessly, _extravagantly_ , or to no purpose.

<comment><USER63> IMO it's none of those, and I think I'm being honest and fair here -- not just a bitcoin fanboy.

What's the baseline for a corresponding transaction? Maybe that's a credit card which will cost (not waste here either) 1-2% of the purchase price. But even that's not quite fair because the merchant is taking some risk on this purchase that usually amounts to some additional cost. Also credit cards can't be used to secure transactions of >= millions of USD (and if they did it would be at a significantly higher cost). Bitcoin transactions at the low end of that spectrum are prohibitively expensive, though.

<comment><USER65> Bitcoin doesn't replace credit card transactions or system. You have to judge it by it's actual value, not what it pretends to want to be

<comment><USER63> Yes, fair enough -- it is truly unique and difficult to compare w/credit cards.

But to further the debate, how would you evaluate it in these terms ("waste"/"extravagance")? Would you stipulate that it has value or that it at least has utility? What sort of analogy or baseline would you compare it to, so that we could evaluate how efficient or wasteful it is?

<comment><USER65> My personal opinion is that bitcoin originally was meant as a transaction medium, and that could have been very valuable. However, as it stands, it's obvious to me that bitcoin cannot become that, as scaling is proving to be very difficult, and for more reasons than technical.

Also bitcoin has heavily failed in its "decentralized" dream, as most of the hashing power is under the control of very few individuals.

This seems to leave its only purpose as some sort of strange "HODL" and speculation machine, and I don't believe that is worth burning an entire small nation's worth of power to promote. In fact, my opinion is that such a system is actively harmful.

Even if you believe that bitcoin is not some eternal pump and dump, that just leaves it as a valid investment vehicle. I don't consider a single investment vehicle to be worth the energy spent to maintain "trust" in the chain

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> There already is delegated prove of stake algorithms that solves the power consumption problem.

<comment><USER67> I have never understood what stops POS algorithms from being havens for opportunistic cheating. There is no punishment for spending energy on attacking the network unsuccessfully because you are still also playing good with the majority.

In POW schemes you can only use your mining power on a single chain; in POS it seems like you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously.

<comment><USER68> Ethereum's Casper uses the solution that while validator A could double-vote for multiple blocks, validator B could take those multiple vote messages, and submit them as cryptographic proof of A's dishonesty. By submitting such proof, the protocol would allow slashing A's stake, and giving some portion to B as a reward for catching them. Thus validators are _strongly_ incentivized to only vote for one block at the end of the chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> www.chia.network

</comment><comment><USER19> I met Bram just last week (and had the honor to do a lightning talk before his Chia presentation _!), and I want to clear up some things that people seem confused about:

1\. Power consumption. Bram brought up a good point if we take Bitcoin to its ultimate extreme, that it will be people with access to nuclear energy (aka governments) that will take over mining bitcoin, since that is the cheapest route. This does not look like a decentralized future, exactly the opposite.

2\. Proof of Time. There are attacks that can happen against purely storage based proofs. Bram's brilliant addition here is a proof of time to get around those problems. I can explain more if people want. NOTE: Filecoin's "Proof of Time and Space" has nothing to do with, nor is remotely related to, Bram's.

3\. Decentralized Storage. Despite Bram's prolific work in decentralized storage systems, Chia has nothing to do with storing end user data (like Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc.). The data that is stored is junk, but that is okay (see below).

4\. Storage waste. One of Bram's points is that this will start an arms race to build better harddrives. If people are successful at that, this will only make Chia better, and also make storage in general cheaper for everyone. So sure, maybe the proofs are wasting storage space, but it will make storage in general more economical.

Anything else I can answer in more detail?

_Here is the presentation he (and I) did at Berkeley:

[https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...](https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271)

<comment><USER70> One fundamental question, whose answer I must have missed:

What's the incentive to process transactions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> "Capitalizing, Capitalizing, Capitalizing." Paraphrasing Fake Yoda (Mel Brooks) from Space Balls

</comment><comment><USER72> So it's nothing new. Ethereum and Peercoin and Nxt do proof of stake.

<comment><USER73> Slight correction, Ethereum _may_ do PoS in future, it currently does not, it is a PoW CryptoCurrency like bitcoin. Because of the state of miners ETH right now, I suspect it may take a long time to migrate, with several contentious forks. I suspect bitcoin will always be PoW.</comment></comment>


The "Computer Science" section at Barnes and Noble - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/devevangelist/status/301864866287845377 <comment><USER2> I know. I went to Barnes and Noble in Baltimore and was directed to a bottom corner of a small section near the magazines. 'We don't have much' was the answer when I enquired. One book on arduinos and no others on hardware or engineering at that level. The section on math next to it wasn't much more varied either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Haven't been there lately, but I don't think that "for Dummies" is entirely what is there. It isn't a great technical bookstore, but I have seen some good books in the computer science section (even if the books aren't that computer- scientific).</comment>


We Discovered Helium 150 Years Ago. Are We Running Out? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news-helium-mri-superconducting-markets-reserve-technology/ <comment><USER2> The atmospheric noble gas concentrations, in ppmv:

Helium 5.24

Neon 18.18

Krypton 1.14

Argon 9340

Xenon 0.087

[http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Fundamentals/AtmosphereComp...](http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Fundamentals/AtmosphereCompIII.pdf)

Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium (by molar/volume concentration), though more abundant by mass. Krypton is commercially produced by atmospheric separation. I would therefore expect helium sourced by air separation to cost _roughly_ 1/4-1/5 the cost of krypton production, per liter, or 4-5 times as much per gram. A quick search on Google shows krypton at 65 cents per liter in the early 2000s (according to an article about windowpane gas filling). An Alibaba search indicates that 10-15 cents per liter may be more typical now.

If those krypton prices are accurate, and I haven't made any major mistakes with my helium ballparking, I would expect that applications like helium filled hard drives would see only a tiny cost increase should they be forced to use helium separated from the atmosphere. I think that most cryogenic cooling applications would have to move to closed-cycle reuse of helium. I don't know about welding and leak testing.

EDIT: "The Energy-Related Applications of Helium", 1980 report from Los Alamos National Laboratory, specifically considers helium production from atmospheric separation and from lean natural gas streams in section X.

[https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5141581](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5141581)

 _A.W. Francis has discussed the recovery of helium from the atmosphere by conventional methods. He predicts that, for helium produced from the atmosphere as a by-product from air separation plants, the cost would lie in the range of $200 to $300 per Mcf in 1973 dollars (over ten times present cost).

...

To go further and separate helium by similar techniques but with helium as the primary product would raise the cost by more than another order of magnitude to about $7000 Mcf in 1980 dollars. _

Apparently one Mcf is 28,317 liters in SI units. That's 24.7 cents per liter of helium from the atmosphere in 1980 dollars, or 80 cents per liter in CPI- adjusted 2018 dollars.

<comment><USER3> Helium is so light, won't it rise to the top of the atmosphere? Wouldn't that make it more difficult to extract from the atmosphere?

<comment><USER4> It's not rising to the top of the atmosphere per se, but rather that atomic helium is so light that at atmospheric temperature a significant percentage of individual atoms are moving at Earth's escape velocity. Usually they bounce into something else, but there's always some lucky few that make their way through the upper atmosphere... and keep going.

That's why, for example, Saturn's atmosphere is 25% helium and 75% hydrogen, but Saturn's moon Titan is basically all nitrogen-methane.

Which is also the real answer about helium. Hydrogen we have in near-infinite supply by breaking chemical bonds (e.g. in water). Helium doesn't react with anything, so so the small amount trapped in oil and natural gas deposits from Earth's radioactivity over billions of years is all we have. After that... we'd better start investing in outer solar system mining operations, skimming the atmospheres of gas giants.

I, for one, look forward to a future working the gas mines.

<comment><USER5> Why wait? Get started now!

[https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Gas_cloud_harvesting](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Gas_cloud_harvesting)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just get

Error reading 'isEmpty' on type com.nationalgeographic.componentry.sling.model.promo.BetaRelatedContentListPromo

Cannot serve request to /content/science/en_US/2018/08/news-helium-mri- superconducting-markets-reserve-technology.html on this server

Here's the latest Wayback Machine link for it: [http://web.archive.org/web/20180820221804/https://www.nation...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180820221804/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news- helium-mri-superconducting-markets-reserve-technology/)

<comment><USER7> I got that too, reloaded a few minutes later and it was fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a scuba diver I often use >2000 liters of helium on a single open circuit deep dive. I feel kind of bad about wasting a (mostly) non-renewable resource but with rebreathers still being expensive and dangerous there isn't any good alternative.

<comment><USER9> You're doing high percentage trimix deco dives and still see rebreathers as dangerous?

<comment><USER8> Yes there's a lot more that can go wrong with rebreathers. Open circuit is much more forgiving. As long as you can breathe you can stay alive. No single mistake will kill you and there are multiple opportunities to fix any problem. Whereas with a closed circuit rebreather there are failure modes which are essentially "silent" (or at least easy to overlook in a stressful situation) that can kill you quickly. Most rebreather deaths involve some sort of diver error, but I don't trust myself to be perfect every time.

<comment><USER9> I'd recommend giving them a shot - I honestly feel way better after rebreather deco than OC. Portable gas blending is awesome.

If you're using a rebreather properly and have sufficient bailout, they're pretty reliable these days. You can switch to OC for sanity breaths if you see an issue and use the draeger ball-gag mouthpiece if you're concerned about O2 hits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes this discussion arises, and as I remember it, there are two kind of "Helium" that should be discussed.

The first case is the common helium, used to fill up baloons and so on. It is mixed with many others gases, it is common, the price is very low, and despite being used to many things, it isn't running out, supplies aren't getting empty.

The second case is the "helium" as a pure gas, composed by helium and nothing else (except for traces of other gases). This is rare, this is expansive, this is hard to get (and it costs a lot to extract pure helium from the atmosphere). This is the helium that we are "running out", despite being able to extract it from sources, as the price might and will increase.

<comment><USER8> No there's really only one kind of helium, with varying levels of purity. Even balloon helium is usually almost 100% pure. Helium is never extracted from the air; there isn't enough of it there to be practical. We get it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction.

<comment><USER11> > Even balloon helium is usually almost 100% pure

Are you sure? I ask, because latex helium filled balloons slowly lose air as the helium leaks out - but after some time they stop, and stay a fixed size.

But they don't float when they reach that point!

If it were pure helium, wouldn't a: all the helium leak out, and b: still float if for whatever reason the helium did not leak?

Personally I suspect helium balloons have just enough helium to float when full and the rest is regular air.

<comment><USER12> Latex balloons deflate due to helium permeating the latex. IIRC this is proportional to the difference in pressure between the inside and outside of the balloon. (Because the rate is proportional to the difference in pressure.)

The balloon isn't going to deflate completely; eventually the pressure on the inside and outside will equilibrate. The balloon doesn't return to its original pre-inflated size because, I suspect, of some amount of irreversible deformation of the rubber as it stretches when inflated.

But anyway, balloon helium is quite pure, it's typically "Class 4" or "four nines" so 99.99% pure. At the local gas supply place, balloon grade and the stuff used for welding shielding gas are the same thing. While a lower purity might be fine for balloons, it presumably isn't worth it to them to either dilute it with cheaper gas or maintain separate product lines.

<comment><USER13> Welder here. I don't buy helium for welding any more because it's too expensive; most welders use argon nowadays. But in any case the whole point of using inert gases in welding is to keep oxygen away from the hot metal. If welding-grade helium tanks contained any significant amount of oxygen they would defeat the whole purpose. And yes, for filling balloons, you just buy a tank of welding helium and screw a special balloon regulator onto the outlet port. The gas is identical. Makes you talk in a squeaky-high voice if you breathe a little of it; kills you dead if you breathe a lot of it.

(Edit: I know somebody is going to ask why it kills you. Helium is not toxic, but it suffocates you if you breathe a lot of it without a break for -- you know -- real air.)

<comment><USER14> And it doesn't trigger the asphyxiation reflex that inhaling carbon dioxide does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If helium is "running out" then shouldn't we have some sort of embargo on wasted helium uses like balloons? Or are consumer product uses of helium not a significant dent in the supply?

<comment><USER16> Can we not let the market sort it out? If we don't interfere in the free trade of helium and plausibly commit to never do so, the current price will always be the best estimate of the future price that we have, discounted by the expected interest rate. And thus _if_ we are going to be running out _and_ that is going to cause a shortage, the price will go up now and incentivize conservation.

<comment><USER17> Markets cannot incentivize conservation. They are designed to maximally use all available resources. In most cases it's a good thing, but in few cases it is catastrophic. (Think about it - the more is the resource being conserved, the more relatively abundant it becomes, and the cheaper it becomes in the market. The conservation of resource can only be done if it's use and extraction is punished, and free market only gives positive incentives.)

(That's why the markets cannot solve global warming for example, and that's why free market fundamentalists are often unable to believe that global warming is happening.)

<comment><USER18> > _Markets cannot incentivize conservation._

This is not true. If you and I believe that the scarcity of a resource will rise tomorrow, we will try to buy it today so that we can sell it for a higher price after it becomes harder to get. All resource speculation (and boy, there is a lot,) is market-incentivised conservation.

<comment><USER19> Some of our medical machines were invented under the assumption that Helium would be dirt cheap. Once the price of helium rises those machines will become absurdly expensive to operate, and people will start dying of treatable diseases. Not your stated problem, but still a thing to keep in mind.

<comment><USER20> As the price rises, helium recapture and liquefaction will become more common. As recapture and liquefaction becomes more common, the price of the necessary equipment will tend to drop.

There is an experiment in our lab (ADMX, an axion search) for which it is already financially more expedient to re-liquify.

In addition, new cooling technology is becoming more prevalent. Closed-cycle pulse-tube cryocoolers are becoming common throughout physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was unable to find the actual breakdown of helium consumption by application, but I assume party balloons are pretty high on the list. Most of the other commercial uses (such as in medicine, welding, diving, etc.) tend to use smaller amounts of helium and do not lose the helium after one usage. This seems like a great example of something where market prices will sort make helium balloons obsolete before helium starts to become too cost prohibitive for its more 'important' uses.

<comment><USER22> I think it is the opposite. Party balloons are a relatively small consumer of helium.

[https://geology.com/articles/helium/uses-of- helium.gif](https://geology.com/articles/helium/uses-of-helium.gif)

It is lumped into the "other" category on this chart.

One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases.

So party balloons may become unaffordable but that won't affect the total demand very much. Or maybe we'll have far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.

<comment><USER23> > far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.

Far more exciting, of course, because the balloons will explode. My kind of party!

<comment><USER24> Only if you bring them near a flame.

<comment><USER25> Birthday party. Candles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought we recently discovered a huge amount of helium in East Africa:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/huge- helium-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/huge-helium-gas- tanzania-east-africa-averts-medical-shortage)

</comment><comment><USER27> Another interesting market is the isotope helium 3 [1], which has various medical applications, and which only industrial source is the natural decay of radioactive material in nuclear weapons, which need to be "purged" regularly to collect the helium.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3)

</comment><comment><USER28> An interesting thing I learned a few years ago, don't remember where exactly, is that when people say things like, "We only have x years of material y left", what they are actually saying is that the known sources of that material will last for the next `y` years.

There is almost always another way to get the raw materials, it just doesn't currently make sense to look for them because there are existing sources that are already available and meeting demand.

<comment><USER29> We know how to make Helium using fusion, so we'll never "run out". However we'll definitely run out of Helium that is cheap enough to fill your hard disk with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could the helium shortage spurt a race to mining on the Moon?

<comment><USER31> Unlikely. Even if it was easy and convenient to mine and transport as moonrocks (it isn't) the helium would have to be more expensive than gold to be worth the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Naturally Helium is produced due to radio active decay of radio active elements but all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product which can be captured (worse case most expensive scenario). I am also bit confused by the fact that Helium is so cheap and easy to buy, why haven't the price sky rocketed yet. You easily order a decent size tank of Helium for $50 online.

<comment><USER33> Haven't been able to verify your claim "all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product". While Helium manufacture is a given for about all forms of fusion (if fusion ever takes off we'll barely be able to supply our party balloon demand since there's so little material needed for fusion).

Fission (as one would find in a nuclear power reactor) does not appear to generate helium. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 appear to be the major products, the former eventually turning into Barium-137 (no alpha decay), and the latter eventually to Zirconium-90 (no alpha decay).

<comment><USER34> Poking around on Wikipedia, it appears that fission and its byproducts indeed do not generate alpha particles, but the enriched uranium and plutonium also undergo alpha decay, so simply collecting lots of fissile material in one place should produce a noticeable amount of helium.

<comment><USER35> That's how He is made < natural decay of alpha emitters getting trapped in NG wells.

It works on a geological scale, but not in industrial scales < the decay rate is too low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> one of the links in the article leads to congress's passing of the helium privatization act of 1996. could the fragility if the helium markets be a self inflicted wound?

</comment><comment><USER37> ...They say in high pitched voice.

</comment><comment><USER38> Well, concern about Helium consumption has reached a high pitch.

</comment><comment><USER39> This story seems to resurface every few months, and the answer to the question of whether or not we're running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still "No." It is true that most helium is the byproduct of natural gas production, and demand for Helium is rising while (hopefully) demand for fossil fuels will dwindle. It is also true that Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons. That is not the same as "running out" however, and we're not running out of it.

Maybe someday the media can honestly reflect reality in this case with a headline that talks about being less wasteful of a valuable resource so that it doesn't become painfully expensive, rather than framing in terms of actual scarcity on Earth. It's also one of those areas where the market can probably handle this because few people will be willing to pay big bucks for a single party balloon. Given that balloons are harmful to the environment to begin with, letting that tradition naturally die off seems like a win-win.

Edit: As another poster has pointed out, natural gas subsidies are a problem, which artificially depress the price of Helium. That is still not "running out" though.

<comment><USER40> >Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons.

Not to nitpick, but only a tiny fraction of all helium use is "wasted on party balloons". Most is used for cryo-cooling applications. Heck, we use more helium by far scuba-diving than on party balloons.

<comment><USER39> All helium that goes into a balloon is wasted, never to be recovered. In scientific applications it is typically recycled. I don't know about SCUBA, but I'd venture to say that it's a necessity for deep dives whereas in a balloon it's a novelty.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows Azure Service Disruption on Feb 29th, 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/03/09/summary-of-windows-azure-service-disruption-on-feb-29th-2012.aspx <comment><USER2> tl;dr

1\. On February 29, 2012, new certificates created with a one-year expiration date by adding 1 to the year. Since February 29, 2013 is an invalid date, VMs wouldn't start.

2\. After multiple attempts to restart failed VMs, physical hosts marked as failed, and VMs migrated to other physical machines -- the problem propagates.

3\. Management services disabled to prevent customers from starting more VMs, compounding the problems.

4\. After leap-day bug fixed, secondary failures caused by mixing up incompatible versions of a networking plugin, so VMs had no network access.

5\. Total duration of outages: about 16 hours.

6\. 33% of a month's service to be credited to all customers, regardless of who was affected.

<comment><USER3> Why is it that they think a single customer would be happy with 33% of a fee which is likely to be only a very small part of what their downtime cost them?

Not to mention that 16 hours time to fix is insane, unless all your datacenters had been blown up or war had broken out.

<comment><USER4> > Why is it that they think a single customer would be happy with 33% of a fee

Because most other providers would have refunded the customer 16 / (24*28) = 1 / 42 = 2.4% of the bill.

Microsoft paid out 10x that amount.

The type of an SLA that you are talking about (that pays out to cover all loss of business) does not exist anywhere, and if it did, it would cost you more than $10-$100/month hosting account that you'd normally buy.

<comment><USER2> Not exactly. For big outages like this, both Google and Amazon provide bigger refunds.

When Amazon's elastic block store was down, they credited back 10 days of service.

<http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/>

And Google offers a 99.95% SLA for App Engine which refunds 10%, 25% or 50% of the total monthly bill if uptime falls below 99.95%, 99.00% or 95.00% respectively.

<http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _cough_ <http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/DATE_NOT_FOUND.aspx>

And this is why you always use your framework's or language's date arithmetics library and never try to hack up a solution on your own. Date calculations alone are hard enough with the basic irregularities of month lengths. Add the leap years and it becomes even harder.

And don't get me started on times, especially once time zones and summertime comes into play.

Likely your particular hacked-together solution will fail at some point. And if it doesn't: was it worth all the effort you put into making it perfect, especially considering that somebody has already done it for your framework.

NIH at its finest.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem is that it's not obvious that (in Python, where I saw this first):

      datetime( now.years + 1, now.month, now.day )

_is_ a hacked-together solution. You have to really design an API _very_ carefully to suggest that this is a bad thing to do (I guess you could make now.years + int yield a type that datetime won't accept as the first argument, but I'm sure I wouldn't think of that before the fact and I consider myself a relatively competent API designer.

Not excusing MSFT here, as they have the resources and experience to get it right, but in general I think that following the rule of "don't DIY" won't solve the problem.

<comment><USER7> I guess that the fundamental problem is thinking of months and years as numbers (and representing them as such).

If they were purely symbolic constants, then the expression "January + 1" is meaningless and would throw an error.

So, with hindsight, I'd say that any Datetime api which represents days, months and years as numeric quantities (which is, probably, all of them) encourages these kinds of bugs. (Or at least doesn't discourage them).

Can anyone come up with a use case where you need numeric values for these things? (Which doesn't suffer from the same kind of bugs as this?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do you all generally handle leap days when doing time math? If you're selling a service for one year, are you selling 365 days (02/28/12 - 02/26/13) or do you just give away the leap day for free (02/28/12 - 02/27/13)? Do you pay your salaried employees one day extra on a leap year?

What other leap year bugs have people run into? Generally the libraries I work with (e.g. python's timedelta) don't let you add months or years because of their ambiguity.

<comment><USER9> The best approach is to treat Feb 29 as a non-day for purposes of adding months and years to a date, for example in Ruby:

      > t = Time.parse("feb 29, 2012")
       => 2012-02-29 00:00:00 -0500
      > t + 1.year
       => 2013-02-28 00:00:00 -0500
      > t + 1.year == (t - 1.day + 1.year)
       => true

<comment><USER10> Ugh, that's terrible! A type that doesn't obey basic arithmetic identities -- that's almost certain to result in bugs like the one we're discussing.

<comment><USER9> Different approaches, different bugs. The seconds from UTC approach results in 1 month from Aug 31st being Sep 1st, and 1 month from Jan 31 being Mar 3rd.

I much prefer spelling out plainly the intention.

<comment><USER10> Well, a "month", unqualified, is not really a unit of time. You have to know not only which month you're talking about, but in the case of February, what year it's in, to know exactly how long it is. The same goes for years, if you want them to consist of an integral number of days.

So I think as a matter of API design, Ruby has made a wrong choice by making these operations look like arithmetic on known values. It's too tempting to think that they'll obey the arithmetic identities, when they don't. If you want to have an API function "same date N months later", I have no problem with that at all; then it's much less tempting to think that it's just doing addition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Working at Microsoft (in Windows Azure), this was the first outage since I joined the org, so I did not know what to expect from the company in terms of transparency on this outage. However, given other presentations or papers on the Windows Azure technology and how open they were publicly, I expected a good job here.

Bill Liang's post confirmed how transparent Microsoft wants to be with its customers, what is really nice. And I appreciate how seriously Microsoft is attempting to learn from these incidents and putting measures in place.

</comment><comment><USER12> The article really is worth a read if you build complex systems. My takeaway from this is that you shouldn't schedule maintenance work during "weird" times.

Had they not been deploying new code on leap day (UTC), the outage would have been substantially less severe. Code that uses dates and times will have bugs, because it's hard. Don't complicate things further.

So from now on, no more leap day, daylight savings time, or new years maintenance. It's worth postponing a day just in case.

</comment><comment><USER13> That seems to be incredibly well-detailed, much more than Amazon's or others' responses to their outages so far.</comment>


Serverless Computing - le-mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing <comment> le-mark Why is this such a controversial term?

> Despite the name, it does not actually involve running code without > servers.[1] Serverless computing is so named because the business or person > that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent or provision servers or > virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.</comment>


Project Meshnet - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.projectmeshnet.org/Getting_started

<comment><USER2> I had an idea but lack the understanding and skills to verify if its useful or not.

Could you set up the Hyperboria layer with a built in crypto coin payments system, so people that need to leach of the Hyperboria layer can pay some small amount of Bitcoin or Litecoin and this fee is distributed to the nodes that are carrying the traffic.

This might give an incentive that would get more people to sacrifice their power/electricity/bandwidth to become a node if they received a small donation in return.

<comment><USER3> > Could you set up the Hyperboria layer with a built in crypto coin payments > system, so people that need to leach of the Hyperboria layer can pay some > small amount of Bitcoin or Litecoin and this fee is distributed to the nodes > that are carrying the traffic.

Hocnet resembles that:

* [http://www.reddit.com/r/Hocnet](http://www.reddit.com/r/Hocnet)

* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osU8vnuOW1eV3hdYMxg8hDh7...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osU8vnuOW1eV3hdYMxg8hDh7E6kZLvf05uKvgYAE6SU/edit)

<comment><USER4> Hocnet is pretty dead curretly, but the main developer of cjdns plans to implement the Hocnet idea using OpenTransactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another interesting group, these guys seem to be doing more on the hardware side of things and have some infrastructure and organization set up:

[http://thefnf.org](http://thefnf.org)

<comment><USER6> Yep. Stallman, Gordon Cook and other interesting names are on their advisory board. They have equipment running in KC and Austin, I believe.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and apart from the fnf (I meet Isaac and Gordon a few weeks ago here in Spain), there is also the guifi.net project that is operating mainly in Spain. We currently have more then 22000 active nodes. The Model is the same: A parallel network with services, but also with exit nodes to the internet.

The project is currently working with the bmx6 project to create a new firmware called qmp which can be installed on any device that supports openwrt. The great thing about this mesh software is that it automatic. Once the antenna detects any other device, it will configure the connections etc automatically. It also auto detects any internet connection and announces it to the mesh. The system natively uses IPv6 for the mesh with IPv4 tunnels on top.

Here are the links with more information:

www.guifi.net/en

www.qmp.cat

bmx6.net

Regards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should take a look at the Meshbox.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshBox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshBox) [http://locustworld.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&...](http://locustworld.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6&page=1)

<comment><USER4> [https://fund.meshwith.me](https://fund.meshwith.me) is pretty similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These guys are also on a similar path, and would probably love to collaborate!

[http://project-byzantium.org/](http://project-byzantium.org/)

Recently, they have been working with Rasp-Pi repeaters, and TCP/IP over amateur radio.

Great stuff, hope to see more soon!

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing!

We have made a lot of progress recently and have seen a surge of new users.

</comment><comment><USER11> joined just a couple days back, I'm impressed: IRC, Jabber, Social Network and a bunch of cool sites. Not perfect, but very usable!</comment>


Plasma Wayland and Qt 5.9 and beyond - <AUTHOR> https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/07/plasma-wayland-and-qt-5-9-and-beyond/ <comment><USER2> Users of GTK+ complain that GNOME developers do whatever they want with GTK+, breaking it every new version so they can add/modify/delete features from it so it can be used with GNOME.

KDE developers complain that Qt developers ignore them.

Looks like both options come with their problems, but by now I'll stick with GNOME...

<comment><USER3> Are you referring to the 2->3 breakage, which was years ago and obviously breaky due to the change in major version, or is there regular breakage within the 3.x releases?

<comment><USER4> probably referring to the theme api being broken multiple times during 3.x. I don't think it was ever an officially stable API though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" The only other option is to compile Qt, but that is hardly an option as it's really difficult to compile an actually working Qt with all components. The last times I tried, I failed, wasting days compiling."_

Is there any chance that Qt will ever be split up and modularized the way xorg has been?

<comment><USER6> It actually is pretty much as modular as it can get. I'm not sure what issues Martin has with compiling Qt, but I consider it a fairly straight-forward experience.

<comment><USER5> It's straight-forward. It just takes a very long time because it's so gigantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who is the primary customer for Qt? It's not KDE?

<comment><USER8> Not remotely. KDE is not a customer (they're not paying) and is insignificant software in general.

<comment><USER9> KDE is not a customer but it is possibly the largest project that uses qt, I wouldn't call it "insignificant".

<comment><USER10> KDE is a large project but in the scheme of things... nobody uses kde except a minority of enthusiasts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elixir is again in the spotlight. This time – flight booking - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalnatives.hu/elixir/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not in any way connected to DigitalNatives or promoting their work. It's just interesting to read about one more successful Elixir use case.</comment>


WidgetLaboratory Strikes Back At Ning Where It Hurts - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/23/widgetlaboratory-strikes-back-at-ning-where-it-hurts/ <comment><USER2> I always grimace a little when I hear about a business that is built entirely on being in the good graces of another company. I don't know the story here, beyond what's in the article, but I know that I'd never want to be in that position.

Facebook apps, Ning and MySpace widgets, iPhone apps. All are closed platforms, and for that reason alone, dangerous ways to try to make a living. I'll probably build an iPhone app, and a widget or two, but I'd never base the core of my business on it.

<comment><USER3> Windows developers were not faring too badly (at least in the past before the web phenom arrives)

<comment><USER2> Unless they happened to build something _too_ successful.

There was a time when the leading word processor was not Word, the leading spreadsheet was not Excel, and the leading web browser was not Internet Explorer. These are merely some obvious examples.

Of course, this is one of the great reasons why the web is wonderful for consumers: No one can own the platform.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully no one will ever own the internet platform, but we know it could happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really seems that Ning was genuinely threatened by what widgetlaboratory was supplying on their site. A lot of sites on Ning relied on them and widget labs response was very much justified given the context of the situation(thousands of users unable to use the site they built because core functionalities are gone).

</comment><comment><USER6> Another example of how "platforms almost always win against the applications built over it".</comment>


WebKit devs on Blink fork: 'Two can play that game' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/04/webkit_to_purge_chrome_code/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this whole mess starting to sound like a childish slap- fight, probably over one or two specific features?

<comment><USER3> Only because of how the media is treating it. The split makes fine sense from a business and technical perspective. I'm not sure why people are assuming that it's because of some internal spat - there's zero evidence from inside the Webkit project that this is the case. It's just professionals doing their job.</comment></comment>


Failure of a 46-cent chip almost caused a nuclear war - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/07/08/the_fear_factor?page=full

<comment><USER2> Would you like to play a game?</comment>


BP prepares for 'Top Kill' procedure to contain oil spill - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26spill.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Anybody know what the "heavy drilling fluids" are composed of?

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_fluid>

I'm more interested in how exactly can the density/gravity work against pressure, as I assume this works. So, they will pump in the fluid into a gushing stream against it's own pressure...? Shouldn't that cement pump after it work really fast or something? I don't see how fluid itself can stop the pressure from gushing out everything, and possibly damaging the equipment further. Then again, I'm no expert on any of that.

<comment><USER4> I think most of the experts are just as clueless at this stage as most of the armchair oil tycoons so you're in good company there.

Let's hope not _all_ of them are and that this will work or that they find something else that works real soon.</comment></comment></comment>