Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.apa.org/ed/schools/gifted/rethinking-giftedness.pdf <comment><USER2> One thing which stands as obvious to me is that we should, as a society, strive to provide the "special education for gifted" to everyone. Then we'll magically have more "gifted" children. At my kids' school, there's one day a week where all the "gifted" kids are going on "special program", where they do chess, some electronics, robotics, math, in a very free atmosphere. This should be the standard education, not some elite program for selected kids.

<comment><USER3> There is "gifted" children and then there are gifted children. To give you an example there are more than a million university students in Germany but only roughly 5000 are supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. You just won't find enough students with 3 sigma deviation in a typical high school. What is more a typical teacher won't be able to support them in any meaningful way because they quickly run out of things to teach them. Students like that are best supported individually by extracurricular activities and direct contact with PhD and Professors, as well as participation in competitions.)

I agree with your general point that normal education could be made much more interesting as well. Although it would partially defeat the purpose of education to not prepare students for the boredom and rigid schedule of ordinary work early on.

<comment><USER2> There's no point in designing schools for "three sigma". Schools should be designed to push the median upwards. "Three sigmas" should be homeschooled, any sufficiently large system will only inhibit them.

<comment><USER4> "Three sigmas" and above aren't distributed only in the population of people capable of home schooling very bright children.

<comment><USER5> Funny thing though - home schooling so easily beats the institutional kind, you don't have to be very good at it to school very bright children.

Further, if the teacher at school with their class of 30 did nothing but tutor the students, each student would get 10 minutes (in a 5-hour school day). You as a parent can beat that the 1st 11 minutes of your home-school day. That leaves you hours of the day for moving ahead of the classroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration and Nonacceleration" by Miraca U. M. Gross is an extremely illuminating long- term nationwide study of the exceptionally gifted and what differences result between accelerating or mainstreaming them.

[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf)

<comment><USER7> That hit home fairly hard, though it can be hard to talk about since most people respond negatively to claims of ability. I was identified as a gifted child in primary school and was transferred school to a gifted school where I completed my primary education. I graduated dux (top of the school) and was years ahead in every subject.

My parents then chose to send me to the impoverished local high school, a school with median grades well below average. It was horrible, in year 7 at age 12 I would help my 17 year old brother with his homework when he struggled. I struggled to make proper bonds with other kids and I was horribly bored. It led to a bunch of psychological issues that I didn't get sorted out until my late 20's. I was incredibly interested in computers but I was pushed away from them (this is the early 2000's) as they were a waste of time and I should focus on skills so I can get a trade. I completed a trade in my early 20's and was depressed due to social isolation. I had nothing in common with my peers.

My parents did the best job they knew how to, I don't hold it against them. To them, a trade sets someone up for life. I'm in my early 30's now and I am finally starting to live a great life. I've been studying for a few years and I am preparing to transition to life as a software developer. I'm finally meeting people that I share interests with!

I don't care about missing out on career achievements I may have possibly had. I do regret I missed most of my teenage years and all of my 20's to major depression. They are supposed to be the best years of your life. My 30's are turning out fairly amazing though, every year I become happier and happier with how my life is shaping up. The best decision I ever made was seeking help from a proffesional to identify why I was so unhappy.

<comment><USER8> My impression is that most schools don't like accelerating kids, because they can end up way too young among much older class mates in a completely different phase of their lives. The Dougie Howser idea is terrible; Dougie is not a doctor, he's a child and should get the chance to live as one.

Better is challenging children in other areas: find things outside the regular school curriculum to challenge them with. Robotics, philosophy, science, politics, or other projects that are interesting and challenging but don't make them bored about next year's school curriculum.

My son did skip a grade despite his school not being a fan, and he did so at a point where next year's curriculum would have been mostly a repetition of the previous year's. That would have been a recipe for boredom, so it makes sense to skip that. But other than that, he just does a bit extra in less time and gets other interesting challenging stuff to keep him occupied.

When I was a kid, my schools did nothing of the sort, and I ended up bored and demotivated. By the time I went to university, I still hadn't learned to do homework, because I never needed to. Turns out being able to work is rather an important skill in university. I plan to make sure my son learns it on time. But not by skipping too many grades.

<comment><USER7> The phase of the life issue is touched upon in the link. It discusses how the accelerated kids are often happy because they have new peers who have similar interests. It's a difficult issue to solve. A 7-year-old who is 4 years ahead of his age group peers has little in common with his peer group but is very much younger than 11-year-olds.

The study in the link appears to indicate that the accelerated kids ended up happier and more fulfilled as adults. I think that's a very good argument for acceleration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Being an expert violinist takes about 4 hours of "purposeful practice" per day from 5 until 18. Really even this just means "good enough to get into the school that can then maybe get you into the Berlin Philharmonic". This is also where Malcolm Gladwell got and then sort of over-simplified the 10,000 hour rule.

Of course, being a violinist takes that long because we have a well defined training platform that has been developed for 400 years. Being an expert cloud architect, a relatively new field, would take less time. Once someone gets into the Berlin Philharmonic and then plays for a few years, they are closer to 30,000 hours. Can't imagine being an expert of cloud architecture couldn't be done via 2 hours a day for 8 years, which is 6,000 hours. It barely existed 8 years ago!

<comment><USER10> > Being an expert cloud architect, a relatively new field, would take less > time.

This is non-obvious. It seems at least as likely to me that there are _no_ expert cloud architects yet.

<comment><USER11> You're both right. Being an expert (relative to other living humans) is easier, because the bar is lower. In 500 years I bet it'll take 15+ years of daily deliberate practice to be a world-class cloud architect too.

Of course, the bar will probably remain lower because there are far more jobs for cloud architects than there are for high-end professional concert violinists.

<comment><USER12> Your average violinist now is much more proficient than 100 years ago. The phenomenon is particularly evident in electric guitar where the average player now would have been considered a GOD in the 70s. The bar keeps getting higher, but our ability to teach is also getting better, especially thanks to youtube.

<comment><USER13> I don't know, name me an average guitar player today who is better than Jimmy Page?

<comment><USER12> Jimmy was an innovator but also an extremely sloppy player. I can play his parts note for note better than he ever could. That's true for a LOT of people playing the guitar for fun at this point in time. Take a look at this to get an idea of what's "technically proficient" nowadays:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0CjV1QxtQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0CjV1QxtQ)

these are almost all folks making youtube videos, not exactly rockstars (with a couple exceptions).

<comment><USER14> > Jimmy was an innovator but also an extremely sloppy player. I can play his > parts note for note better than he ever could.

Hard to argue with that. Except to say that ultimately it's not always the virtuosity that captures people's affections. Some have postulated that soon we'll have music made by machines. Perfect pitch and tempo. But it would appear that the irregularities in human performances actually produce the music we all enjoy listening to.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, but here we're talking about how difficult it is to become "technically proficient" and my answer to that is "not very with current tools and education methods". The biggest obstacle for most people is drive and interest. If you spend the time, you will get good at playing.

<comment><USER13> Good point, if you're talking technical proficiency rather than pure artistry you may be right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tyler- I think what is often missed in mainstream discussions on "giftedness" is those gifted but with disabilities.

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

These are students that are gifted, but due to their disabilities underperform. It isn't uncommon for them to not be identified as gifted, and thus never be put in gifted classes despite being very intelligent.

Imagine having someone 140+ IQ that is stuck in a standard classroom all 12-years of their pre-college education because they weren't ever identified. They typically are the students that enroll in special services and get exam accommodations in colleges.

At least colleges recognize these sort of students. For example Princeton has such services: [https://ods.princeton.edu](https://ods.princeton.edu)

<comment><USER15> I was in both disabled and gifted programs concurrently in elementary in the 80s and 90s. Public school, in California. Its not missed, so much as parents seem to pidgeonhole their kids faster than the schools do.

<comment><USER16> Same.

I remember having to be pulled out of my 'special needs' class to go to the auditorium for a small celebration recognizing the students who has scored highest on the standardized reading comprehension exams.

I won a pizza party for my english class because I had the highest score of any student in the entire middle school.

The two eighth grade honors classes had been competing to see which of them would get it.

They were pissed to loose it to the sixth grade remedial english class.

That was about the time I started to lose respect for the US school system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The original big push for gifted education in the US was primarily a response to the Soviet Union's scientific and technology advances after the 1950s. During these times, gifted programs were well-funded, and they provided smart but poor or unconnected kids vast opportunities that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

After these funding programs died down, the "gifted" label was usurped by upper middle class parents for obvious reasons. As far as I know, gifted programs today are much different than they were before the 90s. And, as Gifted has become a status label in upper middle class communities, one can see that politics has become more important than natural abilities. For example, in some large, well-funded school districts (like Fairfax Virginia), it's common for the number of students in gifted education programs to be quite higher than statistically likely. In fact, parents and students compete for these positions using test prep systems, cheating, political maneuvering, and even fraud. So, in my mind, gifted education in the US is mostly a dead concept.

</comment><comment><USER18> Gifted education is, I believe, an area that has rather too much funding compared to gifted mental health services. (Mental health services generally, of course, but often gifted children are functional long enough and just enough that debilitating conditions that have nothing to do with intelligence, but could end their life, are not identified in them.)

A lot of the gifted education policy discourse seems to treat gifted children as resources where the yield must be increased. But they are, like all children, humans and the primary problem of their condition is not "not achieving according to their ability", but indeed it is suffering. Policy should strive to address, first, suffering, and only then be concerned with achievement. (Again, as with all children. For example, this is what is done with education for children that don't have the intellectual abilities for regular schooling.) And I don't really wish to tell actual experiences here, but gifted children have plenty of suffering that is not simply due to being bored in school or not told they're smart often enough.</comment>


Ask HN: YC, transitioning to webapps, building a prototype - <AUTHOR>

In college I took a great CS sequence at Brown where we had to learn Scheme, ML and Java. After that I learned some python, and some C, although my main workhorse is R and I've mostly worked in the other languages to write more efficient R programs. My interests include a good bit of applied stats work on the side of my normal, mostly unrelated, job.
Every time there is a YC app due, a few friends and I brainstorm about ideas. Ya, ya, I know ideas are cheap, but working tirelessly building something is one hell of a dream/nightmare, and you better be pretty sure you believe in the idea. But none of them have ever been that good, even though we applied once.  Today though, for the first time, I came up with an idea that really struck me. Its the first idea I've had that I could explain to completely random non-technical friends and have them say 1) I get that 2) I'd use it and 3) I'd invest.
And then I realize, crap, I want to do this more than I've wanted to do anything in a long time. If I had any money I'd quit my job today, but barring that I'm going to make as good a prototype by March 20th as is possible. So my question is pretty simple: what next? Lets assume for a moment that I can program in some computation is beautiful and has always clicked for me, and I own a copy of and have implemented things from CLRS way, but that until about 12 hours ago I was always more fascinated with datasets sitting on my computer than web applications. I know I'm asking the impossible/ridiculous question, but lets assume I didn't sleep much for the next 60 days, what do I need to read? I assume I want to use LAMP (with python), what is a good introduction to MySQL? What libraries do I need to look at? Is Django the way to go? (I ask this because I want to do things right, not necessarily quickly, I'm skeptical of something like turbogears) Who is best for hosting Django projects since I need shell access, etc? I know partially I'm asking religious questions, and I also know that I will definitely ultimately relay on lots of guides/how-tos/instructions on everything, but HN seems like the perfect place to ask for that first push down the hill. <comment><USER2> I think you have to pick the tools that will allow you to get things done as fast as possible. Get you to something thats releasable (MVP) and allows you to test your assumptions. If you read a lot of the articles on HN you will see a lot are about how fast and cheap can you run experiments on your assumptions and execution. I think you are thinking in the opposite of what you need to be in saying, "I want to do it right, not necessarily quickly". So yeah my advice is .. if you know Java do Java, if you can pick up PHP fast, do it. Whatever makes sense and can get you a working prototype that clearly shows your vision.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of declaring that you are going to build this amazing idea, you should pose it as a question. Could one build this? How would I build the simplest version 1? Will I use it? Who among my friends or acquaintances might use it?

What is your idea anyway? Hiding it is the single best predictor that it's a dud.</comment>


Show HN: My brother built this to get rid of his RubyConf Australia ticket - <AUTHOR> http://ticketfall.com/92770b07e8

<comment><USER2> I am surprised this didn't get more upvotes. The falling price of a ticket every now is a genius idea. This on a wider scale could be interesting.</comment>


Darwinism at Your Doorstep: Why You Only Care About Amazon Now - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/19/darwinism-at-your-doorstep-why-you-only-care-about-amazon-now/ <comment><USER2> There are several good points in this article and while it's a bit longer than usual blog post it's worth reading.

However my grim prediction is that ultimately not many people will vote with their wallets for a change in Amazon's culture, especially in case of warehouses staff.

It's one thing to show some outrage in social media when you learn that white- collar workers ( you can easily relate to) are working in toxic culture. It's completely different thing to abandon low prices and convenience, because some people you never see or meet are working in horrible conditions.</comment>


NUMMI 2015 – Why are most American cars still not as good as foreign cars? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/transcript <comment><USER2> I worked for a connector company in Japan (JST) for my co-op during undergrad, and continued to work for them in Michigan for a couple of years. Without listening to the podcast, I can already say that the attention to detail and quality in Japan is incredible. American connector companies no doubt perform the same testing, but in Japan each employee has a very specific focus and will work relentlessly on that. They also have a large pool of contract workers to perform these tedious tasks, and sadly their job stability is not fantastic... In my 6 months there I went to at least 4 goodbye parties for laid off contract workers. On top of that, working 8am ~ 6 or 7pm minimum is the norm. While I was there I was the only one that would leave at 5pm (I was forced to) while everybody else would take a 30 minute lunch-like break then get back to work, sometimes until 11pm. Although, they at least would mostly all leave on Friday after a 30 minute clean-up period at 5pm.

American employees tend to have wider responsibilities and probably wouldn't be able to handle the relentless dedication to detail that is expected of Japanese employees. Even though my office in Michigan was the same company and had access to the same parts as Japan to sell to American car companies, our work force just did not compare to Japan in its devout dedication to the customer and making sure that parts are perfect in every detail, down to plastic packaging and boxing that they are shipped out with.

<comment><USER3> > our work force just did not compare to Japan in its devout dedication to the > customer and making sure that parts

That is true. But a big problem with Japanese companies is the insider/outsider mentality. Japanese employees are loyal to their boss and their company before any other person. These "other people" include the general public (and their safety) and the actual stockholders of the companies.

If something goes wrong, everyone in the company will hide it. Whistleblowing is completely against Japanese culture and obedience to authority.

This mentality showed itself in numerous cases, most recently with Takata airbags (employees know about the problem but covered it up). Japanese cosmetics giant Kanebo had a product that caused permanent blemishes on the face. Even after the company was well aware of the problem, they covered it up. Other examples include the Toshiba and Olympus scandals.

Japanese quality is good, but I would never trust Japanese products in any safety related thing (such as pharmaceuticals).

PS: IMHO, Japanese universities are mediocre. Japanese corporate success is mostly due to the exploitation of their employees.

/rant

<comment><USER4> This is a strange comment. USA companies also cover up embarassing failures, until caught our by the public.

You say that employees are not loyal to customers, but you don't disagree with "devout dedication to the customer" or the perfect-detail-obsession

How do you distinguish "safety" from "quality"?

What are the universities doing wrong, if they aren't holding back the worker from achieving results in industry?

<comment><USER3> > USA companies also cover up embarassing failures, until caught our by the > public.

I did not say that US companies are evil. But American employees are much less cooperative with evil companies.

Americans in general are much less submissive and obedient to authority figures. Americans also tend the view morally questionable things as wrong or right (evil/not evil), while in Japan it is more gray.

Furthermore, Americans can exit and enter the job market. If you are unhappy with how things are going at your company, you can quit and work somewhere else. That will not happen in Japan: top companies hire new graduates and someone who quit or was fired in middle age is unwanted in the job market.

In America, if your employer unfairly discriminates against you (for example whistleblowing\refusing to do morally wrong things) you can go to court. In Japan problems are solved via the existing power hierarchy, and courts are fairly inaccessible.

In America, a new CEO digs up all the wrong things that the previous CEO did and "cleans house". In Japan, new CEOs are the previous CEO's proteges and continue to hide their predecessors secrets (cf. Toshiba and Olympus scandals).

Lastly, in America, corrupt CEOs get send to jail (e.g. Enron). Three years after the Olympus scandal, everyone just retired.

(There is an exception: if you are a foreign executive in Japan, and you have 50 painkillers, you are held for 18 days without charge until you quit and return to your country).

<comment><USER5> I've never seen somebody hate Japan so much!

> Furthermore, Americans can exit and enter the job market. If you are unhappy > with how things are going at your company, you can quit and work somewhere > else.

If you're an auto-worker you have two competitors to go work for and they probably do business in almost exactly the same way. Other than that you have to leave the industry.

> In America, a new CEO digs up all the wrong things that the previous CEO did > and "cleans house". In Japan, new CEOs are the previous CEO's proteges and > continue to hide their predecessors secrets

In a Japanese auto-company the new CEO is likely somebody who's worked many of the jobs in the company and has an engineering background. In America the new CEO has an MBA and little idea what their new employees actually _do_. This is often stated as a bad thing.

> Lastly, in America, corrupt CEOs get send to jail

In America corrupt CEOs usually get golden parachutes. It takes extreme corruption or political enemies to go to jail.

In all of this you've failed to explain why the American auto industry, with our superior company culture, can't make competitive cars.

<comment><USER3> > I've never seen somebody hate Japan so much!

I don't hate Japan, I absolutely love it! This country paid for my PhD studies not asking anything in return.

But that does not mean that there are serious societal issues and it should not be criticized.

For example, the culture of forcing employees to work overtime. Is it good that so many men have no relationship with their children because of it? In what world is that good? Power harassment and maternity harassment in the workplace is absolutely sickening.

Corporate Japan's success is built on the exploitation of its employees. Traditional Japanese companies are absolutely horrible places for most people. Do you think that the level of suicide is normal in any functional society (1)? What about the phenomena of young employees dying of heart attacks(2)?

What about the treatment of woman as second-tier employees? Do you really think the function of a grown and educated woman is to serve tea for men?

Many people have an overly romanticized view of Japan and Japanese. But the fact is that Japan is in serious need of reform in many areas. In some areas Japan competes globally (e.g. autos). But in some areas are seriously dysfunctional. Examples of this is the dysfunctional university/research system. Second example is the small scale unproductive agriculture with its over-sized political influence. Third example it the legal system: 99% conviction rate, and the extreme difficulty of getting access to the courts. Until recently, the supply of lawyers were also severely restricted.

> In all of this you've failed to explain why the American auto industry, with > our superior company culture, can't make competitive cars.

I did not discuss the auto industry. One of the reasons that the American auto-industry failed was because of out of control labour unions (as the article states).

Clearly the Japanese auto-industry excels. That is due to many things, such as attention to detail and the responsible actions of employees at all levels. These are some really good aspects of Japanese culture. (Another is cleanliness, the ability to plan and timeliness. Just compare Tokyo's train system to Paris' subway).

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

(2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi)

<comment><USER5> The reason I accused you of hating Japan is you seem to idealize American business while focusing on Japan's weak points.

From what I've seen and experienced 60+ hour weeks and not knowing your family are common if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder in America. Forced overtime and working yourself into a heart-attack happen here, too. And here the company has no loyalty to you beyond what's forced by the threat of lawsuit.

No offense but maybe RTFA? A lot of it's about how through NUMMI GM learned from Toyota how to treat its employees better. Ctrl-f for _I saw a guy fall in the pit, and they didn 't stop the line._ So much of the article is about how the Japanese auto workers received more respect and how that translated into better cars.

If you want to be an activist why focus on the metrics you're focusing on? In Japan 72% of suicides are men, in America it's 78%. You mention maternity harassment but the alarming gender disparity in suicide is left out, and it's worse in America.

Japan's judicial system may be flawed, but we have 12 times their incarceration rate. In America about 1 in 100 men is in prison, in Japan it's less than 1 in 1000.

We can cherry-pick numbers all day, but I think it's safe to say Japan's engineering excellence is not simply a product of worker exploitation. They're doing some things better than us and we should learn from them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Comparison_with_other_countries)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anybody's curious about the real history of Toyota, and how it came to dominate the auto market, read this instead:

>Let me start my talk with a little story. In 1958, Japan tried to export this first passenger car to the US market. The company was Toyota, the car was called Toyopet. And, as you can guess from the name, it was a very cheap, small subcompact car, more of a four-wheels-and-an-ashtray kind of thing, which Toyota hoped rich American consumers could pick up as an afterthought, after finishing their grocery shopping with the changes left. Unfortunately, it was a total flop, so much so that Toyota actually had to withdraw the product. In the realm of failures, this is, like, the biggest thing. It's not just not selling well -- it had to be withdrawn from the market.

>This provoked a very heated debate in Japan. The free trade economists centered around the Bank of Japan, the central bank, said, "Look, this is what happens when you go against the theory of comparative advantage. In a country like Japan, which in relative terms has lots of labor and little capital, we shouldn't be producing things like motor cars, which are very capital- intensive in production." Of course, at that time, Japan's biggest export item was silk. So, case proven, already. And they said, "Don't tell us that you couldn't succeed because you didn't have help. You had 25 years of very high tariff protection. We kicked out all the foreign car makers 20 years ago and didn't let any of them in since then. And back in 1949 this central bank even injected public money into Toyota to save it from bankruptcy. So, please don't tell us that you couldn't succeed because you didn't have help, because you had all the help you can ask for."

[http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/chang030808.html](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/chang030808.html)

Toyota benefited for at least 40 years from the intentional suppression of the Japanese currency as well as subsidies and tariffs on foreign car imports.

This long-term mercantile policy corroded the US car industry to the point where it simply couldn't compete. The general use of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency didn't help either.

If Japan _hadn 't_ followed a mercantile policy, we'd probably be having a similar discussion today about why American business culture and attention to quality is superior to Japanese.

<comment><USER7> The flipside being that the Japanese paid this cost in various ways, such as sucking in and "wasting" (vs other opportunities) a lot of talent into things like car manufacturing whilst leaving other fields (like software) to free market countries whose assets were better allocated, and in the invisible taxation of the entire Japanese population that resulted from having higher prices, less consumer choice, less jobs (or lower value creating jobs), etc.

<comment><USER6> If Japan _hadn 't_ done this they would have kept their 1950s level per capita income. Which was about the same level as Brazil, Bulgaria and South Africa. They were poor as dirt.

Now, they're one of the richest countries in the world.

I don't think it was much of a trade off.

Being a 'free market country' is ok if you're already rich. If you're still developing, it's a route to continued poverty.

<comment><USER8> Japan has an unusually strong work ethic and cultural demand for quality work; I don't think you can simply paint their succcess as mere economic policy that could be replicated anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Another factor is that Japan is a "high trust" society, like the US, which has a major effect on the types and sizes of business we can do effectively.

The classic counterexample are ethnic Chinese abroad, where they tend to do things like trading companies, where putting relatives in high positions doesn't tend to hurt vs. e.g. Wang Laboratories, where founder An Wang crippled the company by promoting his unqualified son, as a friend working for them in their R&D lab at the time told us; per Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories#Decline_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories#Decline_and_fall)):

 _Dr. Wang 's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him contributed to the company's failure. Fred Wang was a business school graduate, "but by almost any definition," wrote Charles C. Kenney, "unsuited for the job in which his father had placed him." His assignment, first as head of research and development, then as president of the company, led to resignations by key R&D and business personnel....

One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. On October 4, 1983, Wang Laboratories announced fourteen major hardware and software products, and promised dates of delivery. The announcement was well received, but even at the time there were warning signs.... Very few of the products were close to completion and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late and some were never delivered at all. In retrospect this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement" and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.

In 1986 Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. However, the company's fortunes continued to decline. Unlike most computer companies that funded their growth by issuing stock, An Wang had used debt to avoid further dilution of family control of the company. By August 1989 that debt was causing conflicts with its creditors. On August 4, 1989, Dr. Wang fired his son...._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Today, of course, the NUMMI plant belongs to Tesla.

For a good book on the subject, see "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters", by GM's Bob Lutz. He was the one who insisted that GM improve their sheet metal fit and paint quality. Neither was really that hard, but GM hadn't focused on perceived quality.

Lutz points out that at one point, the NUMMI plant was making a model which shipped with both Toyota and GM badges. The Toyota model was getting better reviews on quality, even though it was the same car made on the same assembly line by the same people.

</comment><comment><USER11> Surprised how many people are talking about currency/government protection and so few people about engineering.

<comment><USER7> Good engineering has a cost and this cost has to be financed somehow. You cannot operate in an environment where all the other players have large structural advantages due to macro conditions and "play fair" and win.

<comment><USER11> Good engineering requires good processes, good planning and good decisions, something almost no-one is discussing here.

Let's get real... there's a lot to improve in the american engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a higher level, there is certainly a case that foreign manufacturers have more resources available per dollar per car. In other words they can afford to put more in a car for the same sale price. Trying to sketch my thoughts:

In Germany, it is thanks to European monetary policy that artificially depresses the Deutsche Mark, allowing for cheaper exports and lower costs for German companies, as well as a captive market whose currency is overvalued in exactly the same way destroying local industry (i.e. German loans pay for German cars to be sold to the Europeans but the other way round is much harder). Hello VW, goodbye Rover. On top of this Germany is absorbing East Germany which is a handy source of incredibly cheap labour (in the same way that illegal labour is in the US food and farm industry) AND massive subsidies for whoever wants to go take advantage of it (I know a company that opened a very, very expensive plant 200km from Berlin because the subsidy was such that they came out profitable even if the plant lost money for 20 years).

In Japan, it is both systematic currency devaluation and the keiretsu system (which I think is what drives the continuation of "Japanese corporate culture" rather than the other way round). Its effects are/were (til early 2000s, not sure about today): cheaper currency from systematic yen devaluation (same as the eurozone effect), lack of competition including collusion to keep wages down locally (tough immigration laws help), collusion to maintain very high prices effectively "taxing" the population with the money directly "financing" inefficiencies within keiretsu companies. These are all structural advantages to Japanese manufacturers.

Culture plays a part, no doubt. There are appeals in the Tokyo metro to buy Japanese bonds as a "patriotic duty", which is a form of voluntary further taxation (and just look at who owns the majority of JGBs). The Mittelstand culture, excellent education and long history of industry in Germany certainly help. But I think macro factors are equally if not more important, and much fewer discussed in "normal" circles (i.e. outside finance).

<comment><USER12> Am I in a time warp? Germany is on the Euro and hasn't been on the Mark for almost 15 years. And the Berlin wall has been gone for 25 years!

<comment><USER13> I was wondering the same thing and did some searching. It turns out the mark is still exchangeable to Euro, fixed at 1.95583 marks to EUR. As of 2012, there were billions of marks supposedly still in circulation. Not directly related to the GP comment, just interesting IMO. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043738045775209...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304373804577520930784840596)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They are right. It is about the trust to the brand today. It will take quite a long time for american car producers to gain that of the people again.

</comment><comment><USER15> ... and I thought the Germans build the best cars ...

</comment><comment><USER16> Great insights.

OT, but speaking about quality and the hidden interests of the people making the product: the page works very, very bad on iPhone and iPad. Is it better on other mobile devices or is it the case of developers developing on the desktops and just beleiving it's good enough on anything else?

</comment><comment><USER17> transcript is here: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/transcript)

<comment><USER18> Thanks! Url changed from [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/n...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/nummi-2015).

The submitted title ("Why GM cars don't have the quality of Japanese imports") doesn't seem to use language from the original source, so we changed it to use a sentence from the transcript. If anyone suggests a better title we can change it again.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Remotecamera.js for easily posting camera pictures - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/franciscop/remotecamera <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, I made this for including it in a Raspberry Pi project. I'll need to add a couple of lines more to handle the GPIO from the Raspi, but I think the library will make things way easier for anyone concerned in anything similar (I had to dig into the code/issues of 5-6 different libraries to be able to get here).</comment>


Stop "Disrupting" Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html

<comment><USER2> From the article: "...What makes disruptive innovations so deadly is they're not better than your product. They're worse. Anyone who needed a mainframe at the dawn of the personal computer era would find a PC to be an incredibly lame and underpowered alternative..."

I particularly like the statement above. I think the PC example is a good one, and then smartphones/tablets did the same thing to PCs.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely true. A tablet isn't as capable as a PC is, yet. Trying to do my taxes on my Nexus 7 would be a nightmare. But it satisfies a very good use case: a cheap, portable device for casual computing and media consumption. The only fundamental thing standing in the way of tablets completely eclipsing PCs is the input method. If we can get a good replacement for the keyboard/mouse on a touchscreen device, the days of traditional PCs could be numbered.

<comment><USER4> If you're talking specifically _tablets_ , then you won't get any extra input methods - when a tablet is used, your hands are in a position that only the touchsceen can be used effectively and your other appendages are not that useful for input.

So either we figure out how to make touchscreen+voice to work effectively for content creation, or we'll have to use something other than a tablet experience for that.

<comment><USER5> Stylus. 6000+ year old invention for increasing positional and pressure control on touch-sensitive tablets.

The hardware is there already, but the stylus-optimized software is thin in the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Let's disrupt the homeless problem by offering free HTML classes in shelters!"

(I have seen basically this exact sentence posted here)

<comment><USER7> Homelessness isn't a problem, it's an industry solution to leverage from labour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Words I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from common use: "Disrupt", "Hack", "Stakeholders"

<comment><USER9> Minor quibble: I think stakeholders is a fairly important word, albeit overused.

I have company X. I want to describe something that matters to the founders, the shareholders, the employees, and the clients. All of these people are stakeholders. In the greater sense, stakeholders refers to the people affected by what you're doing, and isn't that what we're all doing every day?

Ask yourself: What am I doing today, and for whom? Everyone is a stakeholder in something.

</soapbox>

<comment><USER10> So instead of "stakeholders" let's just say "people who care" (about X).

<comment><USER11> I agree. This idea is double plus good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could we HNers declare war on cliché?

Oh...... "war on". Doh!!!!

I'll get me coat...

</comment><comment><USER13> Wasn't there a post here last year entitled: "Let's Disrupt Waiting Rooms"? The average doctor's waiting room has plenty of room for improvement, but using "Disrupt" in that context is a little hyperbolic.

<comment><USER14> Yes, improve, just do not do it like my GP. Now all (sick) people have to click through a touch screen upon their arrival for an appointment...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645499)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks. Apparently the HN dupe detector doesn't know that 'slate.com' and 'www.slate.com' are the same site. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> and stop "hacking" everything

<comment><USER17> Never.

You're missing the point of what it is to be a _hacker_.

<comment><USER18> Making lots of money with web applications, apparently (or trying to, anyway).

 _Real_ hacking is non-commercial.

<comment><USER19> You're right. The term itself isn't bad, but it's misused very frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This will keep happening. The same way parallax sites were hip for a while. The same way everyone turned to flat UI, or how we made "painting x" with CSS alone.

And thanks to these patterns, every now and then, we get an awesome HN Parody site.

What a wonderful herd.

</comment><comment><USER21> 1\. Typical link bait by Slate.

2\. Site unreadable / unscalable on Galaxy S4.

</comment><comment><USER22> A-frigging-men ! One has only to look at the Hacker News feed. It's packed with new start-ups "disrupting" _everything_.

I launch Thunderbird and go "Here's yet another 'disruptor' hiring". Or "Let's revolutionize X". Come on (insert three exclamation points here).

The only thing this is disrupting is the power of that word. It got diluted, like every buzz word. And now everything is bleeding edge, disruptive, fantastic, agile and "beautiful".

Rainbows, and unicorns, and butterflies ! Oh, my!

<comment><USER23> Agreed. Whenever is see yet another HN link along the lines of "X is hiring, come help us disrupt Y!" I subconsciously read "come join our ill-conceived startup which is almost guaranteed to fail within a year!" It's cliche and I wouldn't even bother looking at such an add.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like you're not the epic rockstar ninja they're looking for anyway.

<comment><USER25> You forgot pirate.

<comment><USER26> What language do coding pirate's use for statistical analysis? Rrrrrrrrrrr.

<comment><USER22> I use MATLAB .. I guess I'll settle for the Royal Navy, then. My dream to be Jack Sparrow and have an excuse to be constantly drunk and awesome has just been shattered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I agree completely. Sometimes it's possible to great things without attacking an existing market from the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER28> Whenever I hear the word "disrupt", I despair.

</comment><comment><USER29> Stop "Stop Xing" everything

</comment><comment><USER22> Every time I see this, I imagine the guy being like this:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4)

</comment><comment><USER30> Man that is one game-changing article. It has convinced me to downsize my use of business cliches, going forward. It plucks the low hanging fruit. It has totally shifted my paradigm, acted as the tipping point for my disdain of faddish phrases.

<comment><USER31> I also appreciated how the author made his ideas dead-simple, and how his sentences were lovingly hand-crafted.</comment></comment>


Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details - <AUTHOR> http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details <comment><USER3> I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details.

Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They start by solving the easiest problems first, get some funding and hit the wall.

The main problem with any reactor design is how to handle the 14 MeV neutrons produced by the fusion reaction (no mention in the article). They tend to damage the reactor and make it economically unfeasible. At this point being able to create fusion reaction is not the main challenge. It's the sustainment and economics of limiting the damage. If they really have solved all the problems and demonstrate economically sound fusion in 5-10 years, they will be handed Nobel price in physics for sure.

<comment><USER4> It's always a safe bet that the top Hacker News comment will always be "won't work, it's too hard." It's like sitting around for a year trying to sell a project at my current employer, with everybody and their lead telling you "that'll never work," then you implement in a weekend and those same people start nitpicking what you've come up with. (What happened to it'll never work? "Well, your CSS isn't great.")

Honestly, those folks that stand back with their arms crossed watching you fail, and reminding you the whole way that you might fail, are the biggest pains in my ass in this profession. By a mile.

Maybe you can contribute your wisdom by going to Lockheed, instead of Internet commentary in which you bet against them?

<comment><USER5> That's hardly ever true. In my experience, Hacker News is full of people from the software field; folks whose professions are often unconstrained by physics,[1] and who have a generally optimistic "this can happen" mentality. That's why everyone here believes we'll have fully self-driving cars in 5-6 years.

In the rest of the engineering world, the answer to any question is: it'll be harder than you think it'll be (physics will beat you over the head at every step). You can cross your arms and say "that won't work" and you'll be correct 97% of the time. Fusion is something that some of the smartest people in the world, with enormous amounts of money behind them, have been beating their heads against for the last half century or more. Somebody will figure it out, eventually, but statistically, any given project is very likely not to be the one that does, and it will almost certainly take much longer than the optimists assume it will take.

Did you know that coal plants, which still make up the majority of U.S. energy production, are only about twice as efficient today than they were a _century_ ago?

[1] Although math can be a kick in the ass too if you're working in domains where you can prove there are no polynomial-time algorithms for whatever problem you're working on. E.g. there is a reason people have been banging their heads on the garbage collection problem since the 1950's and it's still an active area of research.

<comment><USER6> > Did you know that coal plants, which still make up the majority of U.S. > energy production, are only about twice as efficient today than they were a > century ago?

Did you know that wind and solar are already at grid parity in over half the world? And that in many large first-world countries (Germany, Australia) the price of energy goes negative during daylight hours because of the amount of energy produced by renewables?

<comment><USER7> To be clear, the price of energy goes negative because of government subsidies. For example, a wind plant with a $30/MWH subsidy can afford to run at a price of -$30.

Similarly, if you're in California and you ever wondered why your electricity bill is 2x that of any other state, it is because you are the ones footing the bill for those subsidies. Without subsidies, wind and solar are far more inefficient at a $/MWH basis.

<comment><USER5> Being able to externalize pollution is a subsidy. Accounting for externalized costs, coal is about parity with wind in terms of cost, though gas is ahead of both.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, but with the price of oil headed below $80/barrel, shale and other fracking operations that are expensive to operate are now going to operate at a loss (causing some producers to go bankrupt). You're going to see the cost of natgas dip down, and if enough producers go out of business, jump back up to new highs as production will have dropped quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.

<comment><USER9> Fusion physicists I know are very sceptical that this design can work. It's a variant on a known design with a known problem: the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment. It's also unclear why Lockheed would be publicising it this way at this point, unless it's a naked ploy for more funding from the DoD, and an attempt to bring in money (and possibly pressure) from non-classified sources.

That being said, if they've genuinely cracked it, the game changes so much as to be unrecognisable.

<comment><USER10> > the plasma leaks out of the ends of the magnetic containment

According to this link[1] posted by another commenter, they create a "axisymmetric mirror by positioning zones of high magnetic field near each end of the vessel so that they reflect a significant fraction of plasma particles escaping along the axis of the CFR."

[1]: [http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals- compa...](http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact- fusion-reactor-details)

<comment><USER11> When you're dealing with a plasma at 20 million kelvin, the leftovers from that "significant fraction" that _don 't_ get reflected can really ruin your day...

LLNL scientists almost tested a similar device (see 'MFTF') but the project was cancelled in 1986 before it was turned on.

<comment><USER12> It is possible though that though earlier attempts failed because the computational resources and the plasma dynamics modeling available at the time were not sufficient to design such a reactor.

I would guess that we have a much better understanding of plasma physics and faaaaar greater ability to model it now - that could lead to designs that can mitigate previously discovered issues with the concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have > large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

 _sigh_ To the extent this is true I suspect those "large fusion reactors" are tuned not so much for generating electricity and a great deal for annihilating whatever the carrying missile is pointed at.

But never mind fuzzy thinking at Reuters right now. This is _amazing_ news if holds up. Fingers crossed.

<comment><USER14> Unless I'm missing something, I think you're making a similar mistake.

Submarines and carriers run on a _fission_ reactor. And it powers everything - drives turbines for locomotion, electricity...

<comment><USER13> Maybe you're just less bothered than I about the writer conflating fission and fusion when the difference between them makes for a good deal of the newsworthiness of the article.

I'm well aware of the fission reactors in large military ships, but if there is any application of nuclear fusion on them then pretty much the only option today is thermonuclear warheads. It would be really nice if that's about to change.

<comment><USER15> Most warheads have hollow plutonium pits that are filled with tritium (right before implosion) triggering a fusion reaction from the high heat of the plutonium fission reaction. So no, it's not only the H-Bombs, though those are primarily fusion while tritium is only used to "boost" classic implosion fission warheads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Content-free article, but presumably it is this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor)

This is not the first time they have gone public with this - Charles Chase gave a talk at Google X last year, recorded and publicly-available:

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

<comment><USER17> I read the wikipedia link. How do they get the energy out? What are the byproducts? etc...

<comment><USER18> AFAICT, ²H + ²H produce ³H (which is the burned), H, ³He, and ⁴He, plus some neutrons and gamma rays. The latter must bring the energy out of the chamber, by heating some blanketing. Then it must be the same as with fission reactors.

<comment><USER19> From the article Flexie posted, for production they're planning to use deuterium-tritium, which produces helium and high-energy neutrons, which breed more tritium from lithium. Like most fusion projects they use deuterium alone for testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This might work. It's from Lockheed's Skunk Works, which has a very good track record and tremendous respect in the aerospace community. With the basic physics laid out, this is mostly an engineering and construction problem. Their plan is to build and test a new prototype every year. The Skunk Works can do that; they've been doing it for decades. They're a manufacturer of prototypes, and have in-house capabilities for building things fast. They don't have to contract out much, and where they do, they have a contracting operation and supply chain they can rely on.

<comment><USER21> > With the basic physics laid out, this is mostly an engineering and > construction problem.

That phrase has been accurate for nuclear fusion in general for more than 50 years. The engineering and construction problems are immense.

<comment><USER22> That's definitely true, and it's nice to have another set of brilliant engineers working on this problem from a somewhat different angle than that taken by previous brilliant engineers. Personally, I've become somewhat disillusioned with ITER after reading so much about their bureaucratic hurdles... but maybe they have enough talent onboard to pull it off anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on > the back of a large truck_

A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power.

I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per square meter of surface area.

<comment><USER24> That's an excellent point! Perhaps they intend the truck to be sitting at the bottom of a fast moving river.

But what gets me is that they are burying the lead. No fusion reactor of any size has reached sustainability...so why is the story here talking about size at all? Small size would be a very nice added bonus; fusion reactors that don't consume more energy than they produce are earth-changing.

<comment><USER25> Small size means you can build it easily. It's not a huge undertaking like ITER.

<comment><USER26> I think it is more a matter of tolerances than of size what makes ITER take so long. Also, it is experimental. That means that it is not just a matter of ordering stuff and putting it together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > could be ready for use in a decade.

That's the standard issue joke. "Nuclear fusion has been just ten years away for the last fifty years"

It is so common as a joke I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.

<comment><USER19> No, the standard joke is "thirty years away." Or at least it was. Strangely enough the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.

<comment><USER28> Plotting a "Year vs Years away" graph would then give us a good estimation on when we can expect to meet that expectation.

<comment><USER29> If xkcd hasnt made that chart yet, it should!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure why this article is focusing on things like whether the reactor can fit on a truck, where you get deuterium, and how many coal power plants it can replace - instead of the actual question which is how they managed to produce a stable exothermal fusion reaction.

<comment><USER31> As far as I can tell from reading various articles (including the Aviation Week article linked elsewhere in the comments), they haven't. The expectation is that they will have a prototype in five years. For that reason, I wouldn't get too excited about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Interesting when you compare to the recent dynomak paper announcement[1]. The pointer to 'superconducting magnets' doesn't get a lot of ink though. I went by Fry's the other day and they were out of them :-) I wondered about them because to date such things usually are sitting in a cryogenic bath (think MRI machine) and not next to a million degree hot plasma. Even in the LHC there is a lot of space between the beam and the ring magnets. Dr McGuire in the article suggests -- _"We should be able to go to 100% or beyond,"_ which is quite the challenge from the thermal management perspective.

It is however another great example that there is money going into lots of different fusion ideas. And that can only be a good thing as far as I am concerned.

[1] [http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion- reactor-...](http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor- concept-could-be-cheaper-than-coal/)

</comment><comment><USER33> This appears to be further development of the novel nuclear reactor approach described by Charles Chase at Solve in 2013 -- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY). The video provides a basic overview of fusion reactor designs and their breakthrough.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, and when they first announced it, they were predicting a working reactor in four years ("by 2017"): [http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk- works-promise...](http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works- promises-fusion-power-four-years)

A year and a half later, they're apparently no closer to that goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Makes YC's choice to invest in a fusion startup all the more interesting.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/08/14/vc- funding-y-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/08/14/vc-funding-y- combinator-power-up-nuclear-fusion-co-helion-energy/)

</comment><comment><USER36> nevermind, this is hype - buried in the article

 _The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built_

This falls under the xkcd 10 year plan:

 _" we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome"_

[http://xkcd.com/678/](http://xkcd.com/678/)

</comment><comment><USER37> >U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

I don't think so.

<comment><USER38> I'm guessing thats a typo

<comment><USER39> That is a pretty big typo if it is.

<comment><USER40> Just in case someone skipped out on the relevant day of middle school science, it should be 'fission'.

The difference is that fission is taking heavy elements, breaking them apart and using the released energy. Radioactivity, Thorium, Uranium, Plutonium, all the yucky stuff. Research has been going on for decades into making these reactors safer, and with breeder reactors and modern conventional designs that appears to have been achieved. Nevertheless, they appear on their way out anyway.

Fusion fuses together light isotopes and uses the energy thus released - <USER2> basically do what the sun does. And are clean. For various definitions of clean.

And if you're wondering how they are the complete opposite yet both work, it all pivots around iron. Copying from Wikipedia on iron:

> Its abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production > by fusion in high-mass stars, where the production of nickel-56 (which > decays to the most common isotope of iron) is the last nuclear fusion > reaction that is exothermic.

And yes, that means that everything in this universe will one gigayear end up right at the pivot between fission and fusion, ever onwards oscillating further towards it. Our universe is ever tending tiwards irony. A pivot that we're probably going to see humanity go through too, but in a different way. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 25 years ago my nuke professor used to scoff at some of the claims of the fusion researchers. The problem is the high energy neutrons flying out of the reactor will neutron-activate every material within the vicinity. He thought the radioactivity and nuclear waste of a fusion reactor could be _worse_ than a fission reactor. Also he thought that fusion researchers were vastly underestimating the problem of neutron embrittlement of the reactor structures and components. This is a very difficult engineering and material science problem that would have to be solved even if they did get the fusion process to work.

<comment><USER19> With D-T fusion you would have more activation of the reactor materials, because D-T produces such high-energy neutrons. What you wouldn't have is transuranics, which make up the bulk of our nuclear waste (and all of the really long-lived stuff), or fission products (the most radioactive stuff, like the cesium and strontium we heard about after Fukushima).

But D-T is only the easiest form of fusion. Next up is D-D, which has much lower-energy neutrons. Helion is working on D-D combined with D-He3, producing only 6% of its energy as neutrons. And several outfits are hoping to manage proton-boron fusion, producing very little neutron radiation.

<comment><USER41> Correct me if I am wrong, but each of these "steps" is a research project in their own right.

The AviationWeekly article mentioned D-T fusion for the Lockheed prototype and includes a diagram with the caption "blanket absorbs neutrons to breed fuel and transfer heat to turbines". This "blanket" will be tons of material that would be activated during operation and would have to be disposed of at EOL. Also, modern materials include many trace elements within the main molecular lattice such as cobalt, chromium, etc in steel and in some ways might be more difficult to process than used fuel rods.

I worked in the nuclear power industry decades ago and I don't recall the how the energy of fusion neutrons vs fission neutrons compared but I thought that in general fusion neutrons were significantly higher. Most power fission reactors also have neutron moderators which help to reduce the activation and embrittlement problems. Nevertheless, core components in fission reactors are already experiencing neutron embrittlement and has been a concern.

I'm not trying to be negative on fusion power but these overly optimistic reports have to be read with a critical eye.

<comment><USER19> Oh absolutely. There are people trying to jump right into the more advanced reactions, but Lockheed is just aiming for D-T right now. My point is just that D-T could end up being a transitional technology. Once any form of net- positive fusion is available, I'm thinking research will ramp up a lot.

I haven't seen any good quantitative comparisons of D-T waste to fission, now you've got me curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Based on the image of the machine, this is a magnetic mirror with neutral beam injection. Mirrors were some of the first plasma confinement devices. An issue they have is that they lose charged particles out the ends in a way that depends on the ratio of perpendicular to parallel velocity and the magnetic field strength. It may be that they think they can use the neutral beam injectors to inject the fuel in such a way that it's well confined in the machine...

Never mind, another linked article says that the injectors are only used for ignition.

</comment><comment><USER43> "The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built."

No doubt that Skunkworks is world class... but claiming a "breakthrough in fusion energy" before a prototype has even been built is pretty bold of them.

</comment><comment><USER44> > Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor > measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large > truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire said.

So that would power 50k to 100k typical houses in the US... not bad!

<comment><USER45> Compact is good, because until you can fuse helium-3, the reactor is producing neutrons, which will transmute the reactor and its shielding into other, often radioactive elements. So the entire thing will have to be regularly replaced and disposed of (which we can do safely, but too many people believe otherwise).

<comment><USER26> I do not see how compact matters much here. As far as I understand, the basic reaction used is the same, so that compact design will produce the same number of neutrons per Watt produced as a large one.

Wouldn't the effect of its smaller mass be that the container will have to be replaced more often, more or less in the ratio of the masses of the machines?

<comment><USER45> We really don't know the practical consequences of this systematic transmutation (for all we know, neutron liberating fusion reactors will never be economic). It's entirely possible the device will have to be replaced more often, I'm just pointing out the less mass in it, the less that has to be disposed of when that happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wrote about this when the project was first revealed, in March 2013: [http://lee-phillips.org/LockheedFusion/](http://lee- phillips.org/LockheedFusion/)

I didn't find much to inspire confidence.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sounds like the "Solve for x" talk from last year (2013-02-11)

[https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/charles-chase-on- energy-...](https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/charles-chase-on-energy-for- everyone)

</comment><comment><USER48> Meanwhile, work on an _actual_ fusion reactor continues; [http://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2020](http://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2020)

<comment><USER49> From the article:

"Until now, the majority of fusion reactor systems have used a plasma control device called a tokamak, invented in the 1950s by physicists in the Soviet Union. The tokamak uses a magnetic field to hold the plasma in the shape of a torus, or ring, and maintains the reaction by inducing a current inside the plasma itself with a second set of electromagnets. The challenge with this approach is that the resulting energy generated is almost the same as the amount required to maintain the self-sustaining fusion reaction."

<comment><USER48> _From the article_ ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "the first reactors […] could be ready for use in a decade."

I'm sure I've heard that somewhere before…

<comment><USER51> I have the link to xkcd 678 "Researcher Translation" bookmarked for those occasions. Quoting the appropriate row here:

        If a researcher says a cool new technology should be
        available to consumers in... -> what they mean is...
        [...]
        ten years -> "we haven't finished inventing it yet,
                      but when we do, it'll be awesome."

<comment><USER52> That would be [http://xkcd.com/678/](http://xkcd.com/678/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "The early reactors will be designed to generate around 100 MW and fit into transportable units measuring 23 X 43 ft."[0]

These reactors will be similar to the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and potentially only require refueling every 25 years through a process known as ROH.[1]

100MW capacity in the size of an international shipping container? The implications of this are massive if this technology can be brought to scale, and that is the key term - SCALE.

The cost of solar is plummeting and by the time fusion technology can produce 10% of our energy demand the cost of solar will be heading to $1/Watt, battery storage will be competitive and that is hard to beat even if the footprint is only a fraction of a solar farm.

[0] [http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals- compa...](http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact- fusion-reactor-details) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz- class_aircraft_carrier#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz- class_aircraft_carrier#Refueling_Complex_Overhaul)

</comment><comment><USER54> Two of their patents were published few days ago:

[http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301518.html](http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301518.html)

[http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301519.html](http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0301519.html)

Both have publication date 10/09/2014\. Maybe connected with the press release?

</comment><comment><USER55> It's exciting to see that fusion has gone from being perpetually 20 years away to being perpetually 10 years away. ;-)

<comment><USER56> We're 10 perpetual years closer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to know how they're planning on disposing of heat in the magnets themselves - most of the available high-current superconductors prefer to stay close to liquid helium temperatures, which is a challenge when you've set them next to a ten megakelvin plasma that's emitting a 100MW neutron flux...

</comment><comment><USER57>
        > Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad
        > market selloff.

Doh.

<comment><USER58> Any movement under 1% is noise. And if there is a broad selloff, you'd expect Lockheed Martin shares to drop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Crazy. Vernor Vinge has an excellent short story called "Bookworm, Run!" [0] that, among other things, discusses the effects of cheap, clean, compact power being distributed around the world. In particular, it describes a wide-spread economic depression. Kind of interesting to think about, and definitely worth reading if you're into sci-fi.

[0]: [http://books.google.com/books?id=tEMQpbiboH0C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA...](http://books.google.com/books?id=tEMQpbiboH0C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=bookworm,+run&source=bl&ots=UTPAJ0Ppbn&sig=dUdh7ABbXwkxVjxnCNMflKmq9To&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Utg- VKjKCdSIsQSBtoD4Ag&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=bookworm%2C%20run&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER60> The ".NET Rocks!" podcast did three GeekOut shows this year on nuclear fusion, which will probably make you only more skeptical of fusion research claims.

Fusion Power GeekOut: [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013)

Fusion Power GeekOut #2: [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022)

Cold Fusion GeekOut: [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037)

</comment><comment><USER61> As someone who still remembers the excitement and the disappointment due to Pons and Fleischmann (I was a teenager at the time), I'm going to wait for independent verification. But I can't deny I'm a bit excited.

</comment><comment><USER62> This looks like a real thermal engineering challenge in one respect. The superconductive magnet coils are exposed to the neutron flux that transfers fusion reaction energy to the absorptive thermal blanket. I don't know offhand the neutron cross-sections of likely superconductor materials at whatever neutron energy spectrum this reactor will produce, but I suspect energy absorption by the magnet structure won't be small. I wonder how they plan to keep the magnets cold. Never mind the other effects on materials of high-flux neutron absorption.

</comment><comment><USER63> I guess that's somewhat game-changing. This, however, would be much more game- changing (if we can get confirmation once and for all whether it's real or not):

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion- reacto...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor- verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy- density-of-gasoline)

<comment><USER64> The "or not" link: [http://news.newenergytimes.net/2014/10/12/rossi-handles- samp...](http://news.newenergytimes.net/2014/10/12/rossi-handles-samples-in- alleged-independent-test-of-his-device/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Aneutronic fusion would be lighter-weight, but it's good to see another concept we can learn something new from. There are two aneutronic fusion projects to look at. Polywell has become a Navy project last I heard and focus fusion (DPF) is working on an all-tungsten electrode, after which we might see the very first experiment without electrode contamination from arcing in the contacts vaporizing metal.

</comment><comment><USER66> From the article: Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff.

Shouldn't the market be a little more excited about this?

<comment><USER67> It's dangerous to read the market's mind, but my guess is that there isn't enough information for anyone to believe that this is anything more than a PR puff piece.

As much as I want to believe it I can't find any evidence myself, either. At this point I'm pretty much at the "show me the over-unity reactor" phase. There's so many research paths to fusion right now that are all "promising", but until one of them actually builds something that works in the real world I'm not personally interested in hearing any more vague promises.

By all means fund them and keep working on them! I'm just not interested in the PR pieces any more. Give me a report about how it's _working_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The article is completely wrong about US Navy ships having fusion reactors. They have fission reactors, not fusion. I wonder if they are even reporting the breakthrough right since they clearly don't know the difference. For all we know the breakthrough may be smaller fission reactors too, which isn't a big deal at all.

<comment><USER69> They issued a correction.

> U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have > large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Hmm, are they confusing fission and fusion?

<comment><USER71> Horse's mouth: [http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact- fusion.htm...](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

Lockheed Martin is, indeed, saying they have a workable fusion reactor. Author of this article is the one that's confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Makes me wonder if the modern Lockheed Skunkworks bears much relation to how Kelly Johnson ran it in the 50's and 60's.

Many companies have tried to set up a skunkworks since, but didn't have the guts to run it like Kelly did, and didn't get the results, either.

</comment><comment><USER73> So, they've come up with a way to make a fusor that produces more energy than it consumes? Also, I'd be interested in knowing what kind of scram mechanism they develop. If the superconductors were to fail, the expansion of the plasma would be catastrophic, right?

<comment><USER74> It certainly wouldn't produce a runaway fusion reaction, if that's what you mean. A hot plasma would dissipate pretty quickly once confinement fails, so the only energy would be that in the plasma itself. Might be bad for whoever is in the room, but probably not the county.

<comment><USER73> Right, I meant catastrophic for the reactor. Definitely not worried about blowing up the country. Probably shouldn't have typed that phrase. NSA is probably all over me now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I don't know much about fusion. It seems that the breakthrough they're talking about is that reactors are ~10x smaller. Why is this a big deal? Square footage is plentiful. I thought the problems are safety and how much energy it could produce.

<comment><USER9> Take a look at the footprint of ITER. It surprised me how massive the thing is planned to be. That's the competition.

<comment><USER76> > Take a look,at the footprint of ITER

Or any other power plant for that matter.

"If it sounds too good to be true..."

<comment><USER9> The area energy density of ITER is particularly low. The whole plant is only designed to produce 500MW, on a concrete platform 1000mx400m.

Compare that to this: [https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Barking+Power+Station,+B...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Barking+Power+Station,+Barking,+email@example.com,0.1148288,546m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47d8a5f3748dd567:0x950349063e836eef) google.co.uk

That's a 20 year old 1GW combined cycle gas plant, in a building roughly 50mx150m. _Anything_ they can do to bring fusion plants smaller than ITER is going to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> What a coincidence.. Few days ago has been released the report on the alleged LENR/cold fusion E-Cat reactor... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436419)

</comment><comment><USER78> Ready Steady (govt) Grant!

"Partners in industry and goverment". Translation: 10 years to product (but hey, prototype in 5) so please give us lots of dough. It's the technology of the future and always has been.

</comment><comment><USER79> On a tangent, is there any fundamental reason that reactors are always built to drive turbines rather thermocouples - do they simply not scale up to the amount of heat a typical reactor puts out, or what?

<comment><USER80> Steam turbine plus a conventional generator is vastly more efficient than thermocouples - 30-40% for steam versus <5% for thermocouples.

I suspect they are also much, much cheaper when you are talking about powers in the hundreds-of-megawatts range. I don't have specific data at hand to back that though. I never heard of any grid-level power generation being done with thermocouples.

<comment><USER79> That is in line with general impression. I just find it really weird that after all the high-tech nuclear stuff is working the next stage is an old- fashioned water boiler like on a steam engine of hundreds of years ago. (Well, obviously these turbines are not old-fashioned or simple boilers, but you know what I mean.) It just baffles me that we don't have a way of efficiently generating electrical current directly from particle radiation, eg through pressure fluctuations in a magnetic field, instead of through heat transfer.

<comment><USER19> The reason we'll need turbines for the first generation of fusion reactors is that most of their energy is released as neutrons. Some more advanced fuels release most of their energy as fast-moving charged particles, which would let us generate electricity more directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Can we assume that their reactor isn't energy positive? Because if it were, I would imagine that they would be announcing so--rather than this nebulous "breakthrough."

<comment><USER82> From the aviationweek.com [0] article, it seems it is a concept, and they don't even have a prototype. They are trying to get some fundings to build the PoC. What makes the announcement a bit strange is that they have very concrete claims "it will fit in a truck" without much substance.

[0] [http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals- compa...](http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact- fusion-reactor-details)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> IMHO the best thing is how they pitch this as a power source for carriers and military ships, that are mostly used to fight wars for oil. Well played, Lockheed.

</comment><comment><USER84> Does anyone know how to get around the paywall?

</comment><comment><USER85> Everything is always a decade away.

(And then it rarely happens)

</comment><comment><USER86> "Ultra-dense deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen" (1) ultra-dense?, (2) and tritium which is denser (but hardly ultra-dense) and also an isotope of hydrogen.

Ah science reporting.

</comment><comment><USER70> Hmmm, are they confusing fission and fusion?

<comment><USER87> I think they must write "fusion" instead of "fission" on the second to last paragraph ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> For christ sake fix the title.

<comment><USER89> Breakthrough Engery. Yesss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Mr. Fusion!

</comment><comment><USER91> Here is more on the tech, including a drawing: [http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals- compa...](http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact- fusion-reactor-details)

<comment><USER92> This looks very similar to the old Russian Gas Dynamic Trap: [https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/366958.pdf](https://e-reports- ext.llnl.gov/pdf/366958.pdf)

RF and neutral beam heated steady reactor with very high mirror ratio and superconductors.

<comment><USER93> What is the operating temperature of these superconducting magnets?

I can't see how heat energy is supposed to be flowing out of that plasma envelope yet the magnets are supposed to stay at near-zero temps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Here is a link with more info on the technology behind: [http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals- compa...](http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact- fusion-reactor-details)

</comment><comment> _-__--- This title makes me engery

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm happy if that is true, but guys: the first thing you think of is putting a potentially massive explosive on the back of a truck? Driven by humans? What could go wrong...

<comment><USER95> True, but we currently have gallons and gallons of highly flammable liquids hidden behind the cheapest #8 steel possible and something literally called a bumper, all exposed to whatever rust and rocks the nation's roads can throw at it. It's all about the level of risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> "McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work."

I'm guessing this means that they will try and maximize profit rather than maximize cheap and clean energy for the entire world. That is a bit disappointing if true.

<comment><USER97> Profit and good of the world need not be opposites. In fact they tend to go together if the company is going for the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very cheap energy means cheap war and lots of it. This could be bad.

<comment><USER86> Our main reason for war right now is scarce energy.

Cheap clean electricity means no-one needs to care about the Middle East for starters — most of the fighting there is superpower proxy fighting — e.g. Assad would be gone if not backed by Russia and China, so no Islamic State. No Oil, no Iraq war x2. No oil, no Hugo Chavez for that matter.

<comment><USER82> I would only be cautiously optimistic : even if our energy problems are solved, the construction of reactors, for example the superconductors, might require some rare materials. The grab for energy could become a grab for minerals. It will probably involved other regions of the world though and change the whole dynamic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Then the dilemma becomes: Does the USA share this with other countries? Or do we keep our clean, plentiful power for ourselves, become energy independent, have clean skies, and keep (exploit?) this technological advantage over the rest of the developed world for the next 20-30 years?

<comment><USER99> > have clean skies

You can't have clean skies if everyone else is polluting. That is what makes pollution such a hard problem to solve. Even if USA cuts its pollution to zero, China alone can make up the difference.

But yeah, having access to this technology for everyone would be a serious game changer.</comment></comment>


Reminding Starbucks that Beautiful Code Should Make Beautiful Language - <AUTHOR> http://aarondinin.com/2013/07/a-pro-grammar-nerd-reminding-starbucks-that-beautiful-code-should-make-beautiful-language/ <comment><USER2> As a grammar nerd, I call bullshit. "They" as gender-neutral singular pronoun has been part of the English language for centuries, and it's only in the last hundred years or so (give or take a bit, I don't have time to look it up right now) that prescriptivists have started freaking out about it. Yeah, it's a little awkward, but modern English NEEDS a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and "they" is the best we have.

It was good enough for Shakespeare, and it's good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I dislike the premise of this article.

All the alternatives have worse disadvantages:

\- repeating the name "Matt" is awkward

\- gender is an awkward requirement for sending a giftcard

\- assuming someone is male unless they are known to be female is awkward

\- "he/she" is awkward

And, crucially:

\- singular _they_ is widely used and understood and has significant historical precedent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they)

<comment><USER4> +1. This article is rubbish. Singular "they" is fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the outrage over singular "they". I agree that it's not particularly logical, but what part of the English language is?? It sounds natural, at least. It's certainly widely used, and will likely become a "correct" form within a few decades.

The OP suggests guessing gender from names. There are too many unusual cases and gender-neutral names to be able to guess gender from a name alone. Even ignoring non-english-speaking world, I know several guys named "Kelly" and "Kim" and I have a female cousin named "James" (she goes by "Jill", though).

Adding a gender field is often not feasible and a bad idea for other reasons (gender identity, etc). It's far better to sidestep the issue with commonly- used-but-not-quite-formally-correct grammar, i.m.o.

<comment><USER6> Singular "they" is a real thing. People who get upset about it are the worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
        Wasn't that easy?

No, because there are a reasonably large number of people, especially in Starbucks' home town, who want to be referred to as ze, zer, or one of a number of other gender-neutral, recently-minted pronouns. [http://www.warren- wilson.edu/~writingcenter/Gender-Neutral_L...](http://www.warren- wilson.edu/~writingcenter/Gender-Neutral_Language.pdf)

So now you either need to ask a user for their name _and_ preferred pronoun, or just refer to them as "they".

<comment><USER8> Did you read the article? The point he made was, if you don't know which gendered pronoun to use, just use their name!

"In a case like the generic email I got from Starbucks where the gender of the purchaser is likely unknown, the solution is even easier. Try this little programmatic trick:

        [$first_name] [$last_name] wanted to make your day so [$first_name] sent you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."

Or "this person" would work in many situations as well.

Also, what is "especially in Starbucks' home town" supposed to mean?

<comment><USER9> Bleh. I think his "correction" is as 'horrific a travesty against language' as the original:

"John Smith wanted to make your day so John sent you a gift card."

That is not even remotely elegant.

<comment><USER10> ^ This. Using a noun instead of a pronoun just because you didn't know what pronoun to use defeats the entire purpose of a pronoun and makes a ghastly sentence which would have been thrown out of my grammar class back in high school.

Honestly, I'm surprised that:

a) He's writing _this_ opinionated a post just to provide a solution which is _that_ horrible.

b) He teaches English at UMCP. Pronouns in language are a difficult problem to solve at the best of times, and someone who proposes this sort of a 'bulletproof' solution of "Well, just Replace It with a Noun when you're confused!" worries me as an English professor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the "I'm going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun" linguistic phenomenon. It's a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males_

That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well- established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in _Vanity Fair_. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)

The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.

(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)

People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the grammarians were so indignant about this that they petitioned the British Parliament to make "he" the legal standard. And people kept on using "they", because it works.

Edit: There are so many sources on this that you can't kick Google without stirring some up, but [http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular- th...](http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the- many-reasons-why-its-correct/) and [http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html](http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html) are particularly good and [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html) is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER12> Asking for a gender on a signup form with binary choice is a good way to end up at the center of a protest from the perpetually aggrieved. Repeating the sender's name in consecutive clauses is clunky and jarring. It would be much easier to just reconstruct the sentence slightly:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you..."

</comment><comment><USER13> Singular they was covered on an episode [1] of Lexicon Valley, which might be enlightening to anyone who opposes its use (and interesting to pretty much anyone).

[1] [http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/05/lexicon_valley_seeking_a_gender_neutral_alternative_to_he_and_she_.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> They isn't just plural, it's also gender-neutral.

Gender neutral pronouns: they're here to stay[1].

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk- gLk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk)

</comment><comment><USER15> This would require either a whole new field on the checkout form (gender) or some incomplete database lookup for gender-name mappings; neither is a good option. Using 'they' is pretty common practice to refer to someone gender neutrally.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is so fucking stupid. "They" has been a singular pronoun since the Middle English period (Linguist here).

</comment><comment><USER17> You could have called Starbucks out for things a lot worse than using a singular 'they'.

</comment><comment><USER18> For every Starbucks messing up he/she/they, I can count 10 websites that can't get this right:

      printf("%d %s in your cart",x,(x==1) ? "item" : "items");

      0 items
      1 item
      2 items

I could swear eBay printed "1 items" for the first decade of it's existence.

<comment><USER19> you'll have to revisit that for localization, you could use ngettext or similar right away.

<comment><USER18> That's a whole level of difficulty above this, my friend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
        Redeeming your eGift couldn't be easier. All you need to do is:
        1. Redeem your eGift
        2.
        3.

That doesn't really work for me, either. Surely steps 2/3 would never be reached - you'd end up in an infinite eGift redemption loop!

</comment><comment><USER21> Something a lot of people are missing: Not all cultures do [first name] [last name].

<comment><USER22> Indeed, and asking for (and subsequently handling) first-name/last-name splits can thus be awkward.

Also, while I haven't stepped through Starbucks' gifting flow recently, gift cards might be given by collective entities as well, like "Your friends on the swim team" or "The Middleton Book Club".

'They' works better for that, too.

Starbucks' copywriter (or copywriters) knew what they were doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day so Matt sent you..." is uglier and less pleasant to read than the version with "they've". I don't see any argument in the article for what's actually wrong with using "they" \- sure, it violates one of English's alleged rules, but the author acknowledges that those rules don't actually matter.

(Personally I think women should insist on being called "he" \- "she" is a grammatical diminutive which implies inferiority - but given that they haven't, singular they is the best approach available).

<comment><USER24> (I'm a woman and I really would rather not textually eradicate my gender, thank you very much.)

<comment><USER23> "poetess" has been more or less eliminated from the language, and "actress" and "policewoman" are on their way out - at the behest of feminist groups. So it seems your compatriots disagree with you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Using singular they is fine, but since too many people will jump on you and say you're doing it wrong, it's probably a better play to just restructure the whole sentence to avoid gender and the awkward double first name. Something like:

"$NAME wants to make your day with a $20 gift card..."

The author here is incorrect. I also dislike namedropping random startups / people I've never heard of, or actually just namedropping in general.

Also: [http://xkcd.com/326/](http://xkcd.com/326/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always tell my students. If the structure of the sentence causes so much controversy that it distracts from the meaning, change the sentence. Allow me to offer an alternative that solves everything:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."

<comment><USER26> > _" As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always > tell my students."_

The structure of that sentence irrationally infuriates me. I find it so distracting that I have been unable to glean any meaning from the rest of your post. You should therefore change it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _" the mistake is surely damaging the "high quality" brand Starbucks > cultivates in order to sell $5 coffee."_

I would _love_ to see the author try to seriously defend that assertion.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not only is singular "they" perfectly acceptable, but the author neglected to point out the missing comma in the first sentence.

</comment><comment><USER28> they can be used for singular. grammarians are, necessarily, several decades behind their actual language (but they never seem to want to admit it).

anyway, if Aaron Dinin really wants a fix, they (!!!) should've just removed the sickening and pointless, "wanted to make your day". so:

"Matt Hofstadt sent you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to...", blah blah blah blah blah.

</comment><comment><USER29> ha! this is awesome coming from super expensive coffee selling Starbucks, who just increased the price of their products, so they can pay for professional editing...lol, j/k

The author's solution about using the first name of the person should be the standard across the board. It hurts to read these sentences as much as reading bad code.</comment>