Show HN: PressureNet – The Weather's Future - <AUTHOR> http://pressurenet.io/?newsitehn

<comment><USER2> From the top of the about page ([http://pressurenet.io/about/](http://pressurenet.io/about/)) -- "Our mission is to dramatically improve weather and climate forecasting."

How does this have to do with climate? It seems like your time scale doesn't overlap with typical climate models. I guess it feels like a speculative claim (better pressure measurements -> fine-grained model improvements at small temporal scales -> better climate model outcomes).

Also, I wonder if you have a link to a paper or presentation that details how these measurements could fit in with the assimilation models that are used in weather forecasting? I see a link to Cliff Mass' blog (as a whole), but I'm more interested in a specific reference. In particular, I wonder if it's possible to quantify how much a perfectly-accurate ground-level pressure field could constrain upper atmosphere dynamics. Has there been a session at AGU ([http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2014/](http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2014/)), for example, examining how this could work? Or is it too new for this yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent questions. Regarding climate: there are many indications that measurements of atmospheric pressure are useful in forecasting longer-range trends. For example, the pressure over the Tibetan plateau can have a large affect on El Niño. Additionally, we've collected atmosphere data over a period of years, and we expect to find interesting climactic trends as well as shorter-term weather trends.

Here's a paper by Cliff and Luke regarding dense surface-level pressure observations: [http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1...](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1?af=R)

> I wonder if it's possible to quantify how much a perfectly-accurate ground- > level pressure field could constrain upper atmosphere dynamics

Yes it is possible and we're working on this currently. There are some neat math techniques that we can use to estimate what kind of forecast accuracy increase we'll get with a dense network - but the only way to actually know is to scale up and start running experiments to find all the thresholds for improvements and diminishing returns.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the _MWR_ reference. It's really great you've got people within that community so interested.

"...we've collected atmosphere data over a period of years, and we expect to find interesting climactic trends..."

Hmm, multi-year-scale trends in pressure data, as seen through a temporally- evolving sensor network subject to many kinds of extraneous variations (hardware changes, spatial sampling changes)? Color me skeptical on that one.

But that's typical HN "yes, but" skepticism. What you're doing sounds great and the case for weather is clear. Best wishes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've gotten into the habit of not installing applications that ask for access to my Google accounts. I'm also curious as to why this application needs to prevent my phone from sleeping ... wouldn't waking up every 15 minutes and taking a sample be enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't ask for permission for your accounts at all actually - we just ask permission to use Google Maps, which Google unfortunately lumps together. The app is open source on GitHub so you can verify that we don't do anything weird. For example, here's our AndroidManifest.xml file that shows the permissions we list in code: [https://github.com/Cbsoftware/pressureNET/blob/master/Androi...](https://github.com/Cbsoftware/pressureNET/blob/master/AndroidManifest.xml)

READ_GSERVICES is the permission in question and is required for Google Maps. I'd like to switch to an open mapping tool but it's not a top priority right now.

As for the sleeping mechanism: you're correct, an in fact we do only wake the phone up every x minutes. It's off ~99% percent of the time. We require the wakelock to ensure that the phone stays on long enough for us to measure the barometer and store/transmit the data. We don't keep the device on for any longer than absolutely required.

<comment><USER3> READ_GSERVICES being so "wide" was one of my major complaints about Android ... and while I'm sure you guys are ethical, there are a lot of applications I'd like to have that insist on having this permission.

Once you've granted the permission, any future version of even an app you've verified can expand its use of that permission into data I'm not willing to share. I know it's not your fault but you still end up being the victim (of my effort not to be a victim).

<comment><USER4> Google's permission model is fundamentally flawed.

Google in it's insanity has required an "all or nothing" approach to permissions. Because of this, the vast majority of all users must accept all permission requests up front, and developers are highly motivated to ask for more than they need up front to prevent asking for more later.

The far, far superior model for permissions is for basic permissions to be granted at install, and each new permission to be requested at run time.

But, how can the majority* of your apps download personal information, hijack your contact list, and spy on your location if you have to explicitly give them the permission to do so when they begin the function...

* I'm being hyperbolic, but we have very few ways of actually knowing how many apps abuse their permissions. Generally, one or two popular ones get "called out" for doing what everyone is doing, and everyone descends back into feigned ignorance at permission abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the idea; naive, noobie question: since your sensor density presumably depends very much on population density, how does this affect your model? I was under the impression that regularly-spaced measurements were important but presumably not so much? Or is this still better (or will be eventually) than the national network?

<comment><AUTHOR> Population density is indeed a problem for us. Some of the most severe weather like tornados and supercell thunderstorms (and hurricanes for that matter) don't happen in high smartphone density areas. What we're finding is that in cities we are already reaching the density required for useful weather forecasts, so we're fine for now in terms of density....for now.

However, as we grow and expand it will eventually become important to start building drones and buoys to help us collect this high-res data without smartphones. The end vision is a high-density network of sensors all over the globe to continuously feed live data to models. We'll solve this however we have to, and I think the solution is eventually a roaming drone network. We'll see.

<comment><USER6> How is a roaming drone network better than simple low cost sensors powered by sun/wind? (ie what's already in use)

Another question: how do you intend to tackle sensor inaccuracy? What about manufacturer biases that cannot be averaged out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'm not sure that a drone network would be better - it's just a hunch. We have so much growth left inside the smartphone world that our focus is exclusively on smartphone sensor acquisition right now (through our SDK platform approach). Stationary sensors are in our horizons too, definitely.

In terms of sensor accuracy: luckily, one of the most valuable metrics we're watching is actually pressure tendency over time and not necessarily absolute pressure values. This means that even offsets of 2-3mbar are okay as long as the trends are visible (which they are).

Absolute pressure is valuable too, so we're developing some techniques to deal with corrections for altitude noise as well as manufacturer bias - none of this is live yet, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed looking through your blog ([http://pressurenet.io/blog/](http://pressurenet.io/blog/)). Do you perhaps have a rss/atom feed for the blog or plan to have one at some point?

</comment><comment><USER8> 404 on the "Read the full documentation" link under "API" on the API page. (Edit: I see you already found the broken link and the file is yonder [http://apps.cumulonimbus.ca/PressureNetDataAPI-v2.pdf](http://apps.cumulonimbus.ca/PressureNetDataAPI-v2.pdf) )

Do you have any examples/links to research being done with the data currently? I poked through the blog quickly and didn't see anything in depth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a recent paper being published by Cliff Mass and his students and colleagues: [http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1) That's a good comment though: we should have more details and visualizations of the active research. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there any concern about people spending most of their time inside, which might have a higher pressure than outside because of climate control?

<comment><AUTHOR> Inside vs outside isn't really a problem actually, the pressure is effectively the same. The bigger issue is altitude changes, which even small amounts can cause noise...but there are ways to filter that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any chance the Netatmo weatherstation will be able to supply data in the future? Quite alot of them out there [1], and I would love to contribute.

[1] [http://www.netatmo.com/en- US/product/community/station#view2](http://www.netatmo.com/en- US/product/community/station#view2)

</comment><comment><USER11> Game Oven Studios posted this Vine yesterday about why it's so hard to develop on the fragmented Android platform: [https://vine.co/v/MgWLMmmwUQQ](https://vine.co/v/MgWLMmmwUQQ) Do you guys not run into this same problem with pressure sensors?

<comment><USER12> The Vine you link to isn't necessarily a problem with Android itself. Sure, Android runs on several different devices from lots of different vendors that all use different hardware (which is a good thing), but the compass sensor shown here is notoriously finicky. Simply having the devices near other metal (like other phones) will cause completely erroneous data.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oops, the API page has a link to documentation that's 404ing right now, we'll fix that ASAP. Here's the file: [http://apps.cumulonimbus.ca/PressureNetDataAPI-v2.pdf](http://apps.cumulonimbus.ca/PressureNetDataAPI-v2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there information anywhere about what, if any, license (CC or otherwise) the data is/would be under? All I saw was that the SDK is MIT.

</comment><comment><USER14> isn't this similar to weathersignal.com ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's more like weathersignal is similar to this - we launched our project a year or two before theirs.</comment></comment>


Dvorak keyboard layout for the ErgoDox EZ mechanical keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak <comment><AUTHOR> I've been using the Dvorak keyboard layout since ~2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for many years and then since December 2017 on an ErgoDox EZ mechanical keyboard.

Here is the Dvorak layout I made for my ErgoDox EZ keyboard and which I've been adapting over time.

(The initial versions of the layout are not included in the git history, because I only made a git repo for the layout at a later point. The most recent version of the layout is the one that is of interest anyways.)</comment>


Can Gradient Boosting Learn Simple Arithmetic? - <AUTHOR> http://mariofilho.com/can-gradient-boosting-learn-simple-arithmetic/ <comment><USER2> I hate to be the source of all the bad vibes in the room, again, but I'd be careful with claims about "learning arithmetic". It's obvious that the trained model in the article is only memorising its training data, rather than actually _learning_ arithmetic functions, in the general sense. If you gave it any numbers outside the range it was trained on, those graphs would start to look real silly. This is probably the (actual) reason why no testing split was used- because the model is too weak to generalise to held-out data [1].

The point to keep in mind here is that addition is a recursive function [2] and as such cannot be learned by learners that cannot model recursion, which is basically all statistical machine learners. The best thing that can be done is to approximate it within some range, at which point you're only memorising which pairs of numbers X and Y map to which third number Z - like the model in the article does. And it doesn't even do it very well, hence the need for noise (which allows it to luck out and cover more XYZ triples).

So let's say that a better title would be "Can GB approximate arithmetic functions over a tiny range of numbers?". Which is not that exiting, for sure [3].

____________________

[1] The only good reason I can think to not validate on a test partition is that you only have a single example. I can think of one use case, trying to learn plans from examples of starting and goal states. But arithmetic? How can you claim to have learned "arithmetic" when you can't show that your model works on even one pair of numbers it hasn't seen in training?

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms#Addition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms#Addition)

[3] This is also a good example of the limitations of statistical machine learning, in general. Having "learned" addition, a strong learner should be able to use it to learn the other three functions. Except, statistical machine learners can only learn one concept at a time, and they can't reuse their models as features to learn new concepts.

<comment><USER3> It seems like the big question is how can the gap between statistical and symbolic ML be bridged. How can the same architecture both learn to e.g. recognize cats in images, and perform logical inference on symbols?

<comment><USER2> The δILP paper from DeepMind did something like this using one architecture, trained end-to-end:

[https://deepmind.com/blog/learning-explanatory-rules- noisy-d...](https://deepmind.com/blog/learning-explanatory-rules-noisy-data/)

They have one experiment were they learn the less-than relation between _images_ of digits. Pretty cool stuff.

However- my preference would be a system that combined statistical and symbolic learning. For machine vision specifically, the statistical learner (a CNN most likely) would extract features and these would then become the universe of discourse for the background knowledge of the symbolic learner. This is highly speculative and I haven't done any sort of practical work towards that but I've discussed some of the complications with coleagues and I think that they can be overcome.

<comment><USER3> I have only briefly looked through their long paper, and it looks like what you suggest is pretty much exactly what they do.

Their main contribution seems to be that they have incrementally improved on a symbolic learner. They explicitly tell it to search a predefined set of programmes. They use pretrained MNIST CNN classifiers as inputs into it, which already know that e.g. MNIST has 10 classes.

What I was talking about is symbolic reasoning somehow 'emerging' from a connectionist approach, without being explicitly designed. The cool thing about deep nets is that they are both kind of biologically and evolutionary plausible (except back-propagation, I suppose), and are able to achieve great performance on a bunch of traditionally difficult perception tasks (vision, hearing - again, with some caveats).

But how such a system could develop symbolic reasoning is not at all clear. Are any other biological systems apart from humans capable of symbolic reasoning?

Of course, planes don't flap their wings and so a practical system will probably have a symbolic reasoning engine designed top-down rather than emerging from some neural net. But it is still an interesting question that would give us more insight into how our brains work.

<comment><USER2> I see what you mean- thank you for the clarification.

Well, I'm not really the right person to discuss this issue since I can't claim to understand how the brain works. However, I do understand a few things about connectionist methods and it's my understanding that they are not very good models of the way the brain works at all (am I misrepresenting your turn of phrase, of "biologically plausible"?). In that sense, I doubt it's possible that a neural net would develop symbolic reasoning by dint of being in some way similar to a biological brain.

In general, my experience with neural nets and gradient optimistation techniques is that unless a great deal of effort is spent directing their learning, they are prone to learn whatever is convenient, which is very often not what the human users want it to.

For instance, see the following collection of anecdotes of evolutionary algorithms lerning whatever they please, rather than what the researchers were trying to teach them:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453)

Or the descriptions of the difficulties of training Deep Reinforcement Learning models in this article:

[https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl- hard.html](https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html)

Also, while I'm a staunch symbolicist myself, I'm not 100% convinced that symbolic reasoning is "natural". I think it rather took a lot of effort to develop such systems and most people still have a great deal of trouble using them with precision. If you meant to say that symbolic reasoning should arise spontaneously in a neural network, I see that as very unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's actually quite obvious why gradient boosted trees don't work on the synthetic dataset, if you know how they're trained. I guess it's a testimonial for their usefulness as black-box predictors that the author didn't realize that.

For gradient boosted trees, you first need to grow a single tree. That tree starts with a single leaf and then needs to be split to try and improve performance. But because the data is perfectly antisymmetric, no suitable split can be found. So the growing process terminates. Gradient boosting can't help you, because the residuals to train the next tree on are identical to the original data.

If you add even the slightest amount of imbalance to the data, e.g. by sampling random positions instead of using a grid, the problem disappears.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your comment:

I opened an issue on Github. This didn't seem obvious to many people that read the article, so it's nice that now we can keep this in mind while using the model:

[https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/issues/4069](https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/issues/4069)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's really interesting that XGBoost failed when ran on a dataset that had no noise. I've also seen a similar thing occur with the Adam optimizer when training neural networks on perfect synthetic data [1]. Always interesting to take a dive down and understand why this is happening -- it gives you a glimpse into the internals of your algorithms.

[1]: [https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/25024/strang...](https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/25024/strange- behavior-with-adam-optimizer-when-training-for-too-long)

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't call that comparable -- Adam gets 99.99% of the way, and this person is wondering why it doesn't go all the way. The answer of course is that it wasn't designed to. In this case XGBoost fails to do anything at all, which seems like a major bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Friedman's gradient boosting machine paper from ~1999 is worth a read: [https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.aos/10132034...](https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.aos/1013203451)

</comment><comment><USER8> Possibly silly question: what would happen if one were to extrapolate? I mean, using the trained model in a larger grid.

I should do it myslef but have no background in applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will very likely fail to predict new data. The model can approximate the interactions over the range it saw on training, but we need to show it larger ranges if we want to predict for a bigger grid.

<comment><USER9> So, Betteridge's Law of Headlines is supported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting read. Thanks for posting! It reminds me of a simple find the equation (symbolic regression) problem encountered in genetic programming. (see Koza's first genetic programming book).</comment>


Why Apple Keeps Falling - <AUTHOR> http://www.dividend.com/blog/?p=56507

<comment><USER2> > _During the third quarter of 2012, Apple shipped 14 million and Samsung > shipped 5.1 million of the 27.8 tablets shipped during that period._ > Trailing behind them were Amazon, shipping 2.5 million _, and Asus, who > shipped 2.4 million of their tablets._

Has Amazon started releasing their tablet sales numbers, or is this a guess? It seems rather low, considering Amazon sold >1MM (confirmed by Amazon) last December.

</comment><comment><USER3> cmd-f steve: 0 results

We've come a long way!

</comment><comment><USER4> > _Revenue also increased from the previous year, coming in at $35 billion. > However, analysts expected much more for the quarter, estimating EPS of > $10.35, and revenue of $37.2 billion._

So,let me get this straight:

1) Apple consistently gains more revenue and profit, and even beating it's own estimations.

2) The only ones who get it wrong are BS "analysts", with their over the top estimations.

As a crude example:

Apple earned say 10B in 2011, prdicts it will earn 15B in 2012 and ends up earning 17B.

Now, just because some idiot analysts expected earnings of 25B, Apple is somehow "failing"?

All the while, with Google and Facebook that make money with far less diversification, far less revenue, and far less profit than Apple being overvalued as hell?

Right...

<comment><USER5> The title actually says "falling", which if taken as a reference to their stock price is true over the past few months.

That said, I agree with your points and as a long-term investor, I am thinking of buying some more Apple stock right now.</comment></comment>


Death of a Professor - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Original reporting following up on this story:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6407321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6407321)

The story turns out to be much more complicated than what was originally circulated.</comment>


Norway is building thorium reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/norway-ringing-in-thorium-nuclear-new-year-with-westinghouse-at-the-party/6421 <comment><USER3> If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy.

Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.

Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second- largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.

<comment><USER4> >nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad

Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.

That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.

OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources#Estimates)

<comment><USER5> > Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a > nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.

I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.

Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.

[0] - [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_33....](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_33.shtml)

[1] - [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_167.shtml)

<comment><USER6> I always wonder why people disregard nuclear like its low efficiency. It is taking elements that are inherently (in the case of uranium / plutonium, any passive nuclear power source) or situationally (thorium) emitting radiation (photon emissions, a kind of light, which is a form of energy) and using that heat energy to boil water.

And these unstable atoms were made by exploding _stars_. It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just _get_ to hydrogen burning that it seems ridiculous to not take advantage of the dense energy gifts of destroyed stars.

<comment><USER5> > It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in > so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning

Yeah, that's why a hydrogen bomb uses an _atomic bomb_ as a _trigger_. But getting a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction would quickly recoup for initial energy investment.

Unfortunately, as for the third reaction, I don't see much future for us using annihilation large-scale, at least in the coming centuries. It's simple: we don't have any antimatter around in significant quantities [0] and making it is a terribly inefficient process.

[0] - maybe it's fortunate; pure antimatter is probably the most dangerous source of energy out there; one mistake and we'd kill ourselves with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't one of the fancy liquid fluoride thorium reactors that people immediately think of. It's a scheme for incorporating thorium into the fuel mix in existing reactors. Still very cool.

<comment><USER8> awww, i got all excited :(

<comment><USER9> Still a step closer.

I'm not a genuine nuke geek, but hopefully there are a few around who can shed some light into what sort of impact the commercial use of thorium as a fuel is on the viability of the fuel in the long-run.

<comment><USER10> A good starting point is Bill Gates TED Talk Innovating to Zero. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I>

<comment><USER9> Great talk.

Gates's foundation has made a handful of bad investments (generally small) but I'm generally really impressed with the thought they put into where to invest and why.

While it's a little bit scary that Japan and Germany are both trending (more than trending) away from nuclear, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. Neither country will go for coal. Both countries will need to invest in other technologies (some basic, some consumer-oriented) in order to meet their emissions reductions goals.

But I get scared about the possibility of additional countries backing away from nuclear.

<comment><USER11> I'm more scared about countries who start using nuclear power.

<comment><USER12> I'm curious why that is? I remember a table that showed the deaths per terawatt-hour of each energy source [1]. Coal was the highest, and nuclear was the lowest (below all the renewables even). I don't know if this data is accurate, but assuming it is, I can't understand why nuclear doesn't have more support.

[1] [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy- so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)

<comment><USER11> It is not so much a meltdown. Those meltdowns are rare. And most people don't die at the point of the meltdown but from the long term consequences of the meltdown. But many Nuclear supporters doesn't accept those death as consequences of the nuclear meltdown. BTW, not knowing data is accurate but assuming it is, is like finding a gun and assuming it is not loaded.

What I'm really concerned about nuclear power is the problem of waste. The dream of fuel recycling has been dreamt for 40 years now and those existing plants are everything but clean. Currently the idea of a closed fuel circle for nuclear power is just a dream.

Also citing new reactor designs is pointless. Old designs are still running. Old Russian designs are still running, and I don't speak about Chernobyl like reactors. And it would take decades to replace those reactors and you still have to deal with the old ones. E.g. Germany shut down all Russian WWER reactors in the East after the reunification, those reactors are still there, the deconstruction of those reactors has just started a few years ago.

In that time frame you might just as good replace nuclear power with a decentralized system of renewable energy. I really wonder, why people who love the internet, love freedom, love markets don't root for that. Decentralized renewable energy are much less likely to create a monopoly for electricity. It is much more likely that you could have an autonomous energy supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend this video on liquid- fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P9M__yYbsZ4#)!

I passed the video by my uncle who was an expert/engineer dealing with control and safety of water cooled reactors. This is what he had to say:

"I found the video very informative technically, as well as being effective in countering many of the the arguments of those who profess to be against nuclear power in any form. I also found the details of the design of the liquid thorium fluoride reactor intriguing. To become an advocate for further investment in this concept, I would have to learn more about how the concept deals with the safety issues involved in the handling of fluorine gas and fluoride materials."

<comment><USER14> I just watched that video (2 hrs!), and I have to agree with NatW on his recommendation. Really, really well done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems this has sparked some debates on nuclear vs renewable energy so I thought I'd add a ted talk that explains some pros/cons of each for those interested: [http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_ren...](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> The title is misleading. They only test thorium in an already built conventional reactor. Meanwhile in Germany they developed a conceptionally more safe reactor type powered by thorium, built a test reactor (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor>) and an industrial reactor (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300>). They're both shut down now, partly because of safety concerns: Water leaking into the cooling circuit can lead to explosions (which happened in small amounts)

So I guess only time will tell if new reactor types really are better than current ones.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly this has already been done in the U.S. kinda. Back when I was working on Indian Point Units 2 & 3 I found a paper about Unit 1 where - <USER2> 30 years ago - they mixed in some of the fuel bundles with Thorium to see how well the neutron flux would turn it into Uranium and possibly breed more fuel. It was really fascinating but, although they had some success, there was really no need for it in the U.S. because Uranium is not in short supply and as this article points out, solid fuel reactors kind of dismiss all the advantages of thorium.

<comment><USER18> Even prior to that in the 1960s the US _invented_ Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge.

They were shelved not because of the abundant supply of Uranium, but rather because they could not be used to make weapons.

<http://energyfromthorium.com/history.html>

<comment><USER17> Yup. And we had a running MSR at shippingport PA for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While germany is getting out of nuclear power altogether... their "Energiewende" plan is very ambitious but i wonder if its not better to invest into nuclear power to make it saver instead of getting rid of it completely. I dont know much about it though, what do experts think?

<comment><USER11> Is that an offer to pay all the external costs of nuclear power? I mean, all of them. From final deposit, over insurance policies in case of a meltdown to environmental consequences of the entire nuclear supply chain?

Nuclear power is just too expensive for an economy. Nuclear power is limited, there is just not endless amount of uranium on the planet. Also globally nuclear power is pointless, IIRC nuclear power has a global market share of 6% for primary energy. Too believe it could solve our energy needs sounds weird to me.

Also nuclear power is inefficient. Efficiency is usually way below 50%, since nuclear power plants are far away from anything you can't usually use the heat an nuclear power plant produce for anything productive, so it's lost.

But of course there are new and better plants in development, they are safer and bigger and produce less waste. But the old plants still exist. You can't replace them within a few years, it takes decades. And the costs for such a programme will be very high.

Since 2005, there is a nuclear power plant being build in Finland, called Olkiluoto III. The reactor was priced at three billion euros, currently the price increased to about six billion. The reactor might go online in 2015, a decade after the construction started.

The reactor will provide 1600 MW of electrical power. For comparison, in 2011 alone wind power plants were build with the combined power of 9600 MW (Europe wide, Germany about 2000 MW, GB about 1300 MW).

I know, this is not directly comparable but it gives you a hint, that you could have easily get the 1600 MW in ten years with renewable sources.

Nuclear power might be an interesting technology, but for me it is just a steam machine, which leaves a huge pile of waste behind. Nobody knows how to handle it, and people got it wrong. Search for Asse II if you want to know more about it. For Germany it will be very hard to find a safe final deposit for all the nuclear waste.

<comment><USER20> I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!"

That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not?

Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar to wind to nuclear. Then let the market do what it does best: figure out the best way to allocate capital to produce goods.

Nuclear certainly needs proper regulation and safety requirements, but contemporary designs are much lower risk than the Fukushima reactor from the 1970s or the ancient design of Chernobyl: despite that, they're nearly impossible to build. I've heard it wouldn't even be allowed, in the current regulatory regime, to replace those old plants with new ones. Something's broken there.

<comment><USER21> Dear fellow free market enthusiast,

I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it.

If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste storage, so far. And it will be society paying for it, not the companies.

<comment><USER22> The US had a ban on reprocessing nuclear material and the industry is currently not commercially viable. However, other countries (France and Germany) do recycle their nuclear material. This can help reduce the amount of nuclear waste.

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

<comment><USER23> That's nice and all, but "help reduce" doesn't really equal a "solution for waste storage", and does not change the fact that society, not the companies that built, run and extracted profits from these plants, will have to pay the costs (which we cannot even calculate as long as we don't even have a storage solution, which makes shrugging them off even more criminal -- yeah, _maybe_ it won't be so bad, but we shrug it off because we'll be dead by then, not because we _know_ , and that's rather weak at best, disgusting at worst).

In that wikipedia article you linked, Germany only occurs only once on that page, with a facility that has been out of operation since 1990 - WTF?

<comment><USER24> That's kinda beside the point, you know. We already have all that waste. We already have to deal with it somehow. There is no avoiding it. So we might as well add to it.

<comment><USER25> Ah, the "in for a penny" school of thought.

A very sensible and reasonable approach to something that could affect the future of our entire species!

<comment><USER24> Don't be so overdramatic. If we were to use modern technology we would likely no greatly increase the amount of waste, if not decrease it.

The costs are already there. The costs are mostly fixed. The marginal costs are minimal. It's in for 99 pennies, in for a pound.

<comment><USER25> Why do some people on this site immediately jump all over the rep button over disagreements?

What's wrong with just having a good old argument?

You think I said something stupid, call me an idiot and tell me why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Kalpakkam, India has already been in works for years! The design for it according to wikipedia had been started in the 80's.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Ractor is as safe a unit as is possible. Look it up online. Much safer, cheaper, and more versatile than a bulky CANDU. It can be throttled and scaled which is a huge advantage. There is plenty of easily accessable thorium worldwide. It also can generate radioisotopes that are extremely useful and much more readily extracted from the reactor than those currently used. Time to begin building these.

</comment><comment><USER28> Peter Thiel's class had an interesting part on Thorium: [http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23787022006/peter- thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23787022006/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-14-notes-essay)

</comment><comment><USER29> According to an article in a norwegian newspaper[1], there are much bigger challenges in extracting the thorium from the ore in Norway. The thorium in India is supposedly easier utilize.

The technology today requires use of a lot of nasty chemicals to extract thorium. I think this is a big issue for the government in addition to running nuclear reactors.

[1]In norwegian: [http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Gigantisk-energikilde-i- Te...](http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Gigantisk-energikilde-i- Telemark-7055485.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> There's no insinuation in my posting this link, and it's not directly pertinent to Thorium reactors, but the free PDF downloadable from here is a good reference for these kinds of discussions, I think. Helped me with perspective anyway.

<http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html>

</comment><comment><USER31> "I think from a long-range standpoint--I'm talking about humanity--the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too." - Hyman Rickover, January 28, 1982

</comment><comment><USER32> no way!

</comment><comment><USER33> Awesome.</comment>


Carp – a statically typed Lisp, without a GC, for high performance applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eriksvedang/Carp <comment><USER2> As another data point, ITA software took steps to avoided gc-ing: "Because we have about 2 gigs of static data we need rapid access to, we use C++ code to memory-map huge files containing pointerless C structs (of flights, fares, etc), and then access these from Common Lisp using foreign data accesses" [http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html)</comment>


A Hong Kong real-estate tycoon wants to build a new city in Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/hong-kong-real-estate-tycoon-wants-new-city-in-ireland-2020-7 <comment><USER2> If Ireland won't have them, I'm sure other commonwealth regions would be glad to have this kind of investment. Caribbean nations with a history of financial services might be another option. Regions where this kind of investment brings a larger negotiating position could be another option. Guyana might work.</comment>


The Great Start-Up Stagnation - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/the-great-start-up-stagnation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29

<comment><USER2> Looks like he's talking about "small/new businesses in general" rather than "startups" in the more Silicon Valley sense of the term.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I would guess that the needle is moved more by trends in people opening restaurants, shops, auto mechanics, etc. There aren't enough Silicon Valley startups with non-founder employees to account for a very big chunk of that 400,000 new companies per year figure. I believe VC-funded tech startups are only ~500/year or so, for example. Presumably angel-funded startups are several times that, but I'm not sure enough times it to be noticeable in the aggregate trends (especially since we can only count angel-funded companies who've hired non-founder employees).</comment></comment>


Tinder? I'm an addict, says hook-up app's co-creator and CEO Sean Rad - <AUTHOR> http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/tinder-im-an-addict-says-hookup-apps-cocreator-and-ceo-sean-rad-a3117181.html <comment><USER2> Reading this interview is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.</comment>


Foam swords, electronic scoring (54% backed after day one) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/levelup/sabertron-foam-swords-with-electronic-scoring These are like laser tag but with swords. Already 54% backed in less than 24 hours. <comment><USER2> awesome. pledged.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, appreciate. Which sword did you choose?</comment></comment>


Online Courses Don't Live Up To Hype - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/online-courses-failing-moocs-97031.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting example of journalistic framing choices having a huge impact. Obviously, the jury is still out on these, and there are lots of people yelling loudly from both sides. But this story presents the pessimistic view only. It's also amusing how two years is treated as such a long time -- "they should have caught on by now." How many paradigm shifts happened in less than two years?</comment>


The UK's Conservative Party fill Facebook with Boris Johnson ads: 554 versions - cirrus-clouds https://twitter.com/rowlsmanthorpe/status/1154153775541751810 <comment> cirrus-clouds Related BBC News report:

 _Flurry of Boris Johnson adverts tested on Facebook:_

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49114147](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49114147)</comment>


The Joke Is On Us: How Ruby 1.9 Supports the Goto Statement - <AUTHOR> http://patshaughnessy.net/2012/2/29/the-joke-is-on-us-how-ruby-1-9-supports-the-goto-statement

<comment><USER2> "The goto statement is one of the most infamous and troublesome features of old, archaic languages like Fortran."

"It allowed programmers to quickly create spaghetti code that was confusing and impossible to understand"

C still supports goto, and it does have its place. It can actually make code more readable.

But Linus Torvalds, Robert Love, Rik van Riel and many others make the point much better than I ever can. Argue with them if you like:

<http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131>

</comment><comment><USER3> All those different languages might support the goto statement, but what programmer in his right mind would dare to use it? <http://xkcd.com/292/>

<comment><USER4> I can tell you what programmer would NOT dare use it:

a programmer that doesn't bother understand programming and when each feature can be used, and instead relies on conventional wisdom and old wives tales (sometimes called "voodoo programming") to tell him what is acceptable and what is not.

Notice how the guys repeating the "goto is evil" mantra, like they guy in this thread:

<http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131>

are young as it's highly improbable that they ever had to deal with actual goto spaghetti code. So they just repeat what they heard somewhere.

This guy, e.g writes:

 _However, I have always been taught, and have always believed that "goto"s are inherently evil. They are the creators of spaghetti code (you start reading through the code to understand it (months or years after its written), and suddenly you jump to somewhere totally unrelated, and then jump somewhere else backwards, and it all gets ugly quickly). This makes later debugging of code total hell._

Which, as I read it is clear that he has never actually witnessed in real life the kind of code he worries about ("I have always been told", "I have always believed" etc != "I know from experience").

I consider this more embarrassing than using goto.

<comment><USER3> There are things in life that one doesn't has to try in order to know that they are bad.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

But there is nothing like those in programming, math, painting, etc.

And even if it where, goto wouldn't be one of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


$123,000,000,000,000* - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/123000000000000?page=full

<comment><USER2> That seems to conflict with this: [http://mpettis.com/2010/02/never-short-a- country-with-2-tril...](http://mpettis.com/2010/02/never-short-a-country- with-2-trillion-in-reserves/)</comment>


Russia to Ban VPN and Proxy Use - <AUTHOR> https://themerkle.com/russia-to-ban-vpn-and-proxy-use/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait or the author just copy pasted this from somewhere.

The bill does not ban VPN or Proxy in any way. The bill is about dealing with companies providing VPN or Proxy services. From when the new law comes into power they will have decide - either they a blocking resourses from the Roskomnadzor's list or they will blocked too.

That being said it has no direct influence on the end user. You can use whatever you want os long as you know how to. For example hide.me is blocked right now, still - I'm still using it with no technical or legal issues.</comment>


Ask HN: 5 years 20k unique a month shut down or pivot?  - <AUTHOR>

My friend and I have started a independent analysis aggregation site about 5 years ago gold-speculator.com . Basically just for us and see what happens with it. We publish other analyst research and also aggregate with rss feeds.<p>We don't see any growth and it takes about an hour a day to post all the articles and it's not worth the amount of time we put into it. Should we just kill it or redo it and make it all automatic with rss feeds kinda like hacker news. What do u think? <comment><USER2> You're averaging < 11 people a day. It doesn't sound like this is something that people want - I wouldn't invest more time in it. Just my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> ops sorry it's 20k visitors a month about 800 unique visitors a day

<comment><USER2> Any monetization or signals that monetization is possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> we don't have a product it's basically a free research site so the only monetization we get is from adwords which requires very high traffic to make any money

<comment><USER2> so i guess it depends on what your goal is. Is it to make money? To be a highly trafficked site? To be a resource for a niche?

Money sounds rough unless you can get to some form of productization. I'm don't know the size of the potential user base for what you are offering, so I don't know how realistic a high number of users is or isn't. It sounds like you're already a resource for a niche, and if you like that, then take the burden off of yourself and automate as much as possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Delay Gratification in a World of Immediate Distractions - <AUTHOR> http://finchsells.com/2013/05/14/how-to-delay-gratification-in-a-world-of-immediate-distractions/

<comment><USER2> It seems like the focus of the article shifts around. Are we talking to affiliates or entreprenuers in gerneral? Nope, now we're talking to the entire U.S. population. Suddenly we're talking about how kids need to be taught about money? In an article about delaying gratification?

There are some good points to be found in the article, but they're only brushed over. The lack of focus just makes the article longer while undercutting the usefulness.</comment>


996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening - <AUTHOR> https://chanind.github.io/china/2019/04/10/github-996-china-digital-workers-rights.html <comment><USER5> Previous discussion around the 996.icu website: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620)

</comment><comment><USER6> > At the time of writing, the 996 website isn't blocked in China, but greedy > tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent's Wechat refuses > to open the site, as does Alibaba's UC Browser and Qihoo's 360 browser.

This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…

<comment><USER7> I've been saying this for years: censorship, like many things, has been privatized. Things like the First Amendment in the US are inadequate for the modern age, because the majority of our discourse touches multiple intermediary businesses on its way between individuals.

There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, mass communication wasn't easy back in the time the First Amendment was written and the problem was "we don't have enough free communication". You could just as well argue that it wouldn't exist if written today.

There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.

<comment><USER9> You can't have a policeman in every house, but you can have an Amazon Alexa.

I think the privatization of surveillance is much scarier than the privatization of censorship. To escape the latter, I can just visit my local library, whereas the former is growing at such alarming rates that it might just make that impossible very soon. The chilling effects are real.

<comment><USER10> This is exactly the problem.

Imagine if every single law on the books is enforced 100% of the time. No leeway, no margin for discretion.

<comment><USER11> No country does that, they just set examples of people who break draconian laws, which is effective as long as you don't count all the people trying to leave the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some Silicon Valley VCs seem to love 996.

\- An article from VC [https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+moritz+ft+996&ie=UTF-8&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+moritz+ft+996&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en- us&client=safari) (first result; paywalled, but okay to read via google search results)

\- A 996 podcast from VC [https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/996-podcast-by- ggv-capi...](https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/996-podcast-by-ggv-capital- ggv-capital--QaJrlmxpS1/)

Edited: update the FT article url

<comment><USER13> The FT article is paywalled, but accessible if you search the title and click through via Google.

It's as sickening as one might expect. One more thing to think about the next time the VC crowd decides to remind us of the supposed evils of unionization and labor movements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The term for this strategy is "collateral freedom":

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

<comment><USER15> And collateral freedom converges to no freedom. That wikipedia page used to have list of available working "domain fronting" list, and not it's all gone.

People seems don't to remember Github was blocked several times in China before. Each time the developers united to file complaints to central government to get it unlocked.

Still today all gist.github.com is blocked. http is blocked. God know when will github be totally blocked.

<comment><USER16> That wikipedia page never had any domain fronting lists according to its edit history. It does and seemingly has always had a link to the Domain Fronting page in the "See also" section. Looking over the Domain Fronting page I also don't see any proof in the edit history that any list has been removed.

Maybe you were confusing these two for a different page that still exists?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would like to see something similar in the U.S. Unfortunately, I don't see a path to resolution anytime soon, both for U.S. and China. In the past 20 years, I have only seen society become more and more corporation-friendly.

<comment><USER18> ... we do not have the same problems. Every single software engineer I know does not work 996 even if they work at a fast-paced startup

<comment><USER19> I don't even understand what the point of 996 is. I work normal hours and I find by the last hour I'm mentally done and I become totally unable to do anything more, staying extra hours would get nothing extra done.

<comment><USER20> There is no point other than opportunism. The same reason kids were working in textile mills last century and why housing costs are multiplying now in the western world.

<comment><USER19> But a greedy company acting purely in self interest wouldn't want this because you are getting less productivity by making sure your employees are constantly tired and never getting anything done.

<comment><USER21> To get the full picture you need to shift perspective and see humans more as resources. When a resource doesn't produce enough anymore it gets replaced.

<comment><USER22> How can you possibly develop a product when none of your developers have been around for more than a few months?

<comment><USER23> If the entire industry is less productive, it's not a business problem.

Overworked employees a probably cheeper per hour too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those of us who employ developers remotely and ask for a sane number of hours per week (usually 40), does this mean there's an opportunity to hire great developers from China who would like to have better work/life balance? Where would I start?

<comment><USER25> I think hacknews is good place. the barriar is english. chinese developer who visit hacknews pass the english requirement and usually are interested in software development.

<comment><USER26> I agree. I work for a Chinese company in Shenzhen. There are a few software developers I cannot speak with face-to-face, but almost all are decent through text and patient enough when I need clarification. And if they are actually visiting sites like HackerNews, or contributing to StackOverflow they likely are more than proficient enough to work with.

Just be sure to double check their comments and documentation to be sure it's readable. My coworkers have always appreciated when I've helped make their stuff more readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slightly more readable companies blacklist (website URLs extracted): [https://pastebin.com/rP4YHr0s](https://pastebin.com/rP4YHr0s)

Huawei is #1, with hours even worse, labeled as "9106". Alibaba is #2. Xiaomi is also there.

</comment><comment><USER28> When I visited in 1999, my friend's mom had to work on saturdays, and pretty late everyday at that. This mostly went away but popped back up in Chinese tech industry for recent times.

Many Chinese tech companies even have time cards for salaried employees to make sure they are in the office enough, as well as cheer leaders and such to keep them motivated past dinner time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I didn't know they had a phrase for long working hours until I read this.

I have done 996 for a while in china, and it wrecks your social life, as now all of a sudden you have no free evenings and only one day in the weekend to balance fun stuff with weekly chores. Meeting friends outside of work is nearly impossible. Also, when near a release, expect to 'give your best' for the company and work on sunday as well.

You do however get 2-hour lunch breaks (i.e. nap time for your chinese colleagues), and about half a hour for dinner which you can also get at or near work.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow, that's a brutal work schedule. Hard to believe it's the norm. Isn't there enough demand that tech workers could elect to work elsewhere if their employer enforces this?

<comment> munk-a I was never on a schedule this bad but when I was doing regular overtime (~52 hrs/week, the worst weeks coming in at 60) I found that my work drained me physically to the point where I just lost all ability to enjoy my life and do... anything - I just sort of collapsed through a work day into the next work day with a blearily remember transit ride and face-stuffed-with-pizza home time between it. As one of the two back-end developers I put my foot down regarding more OT and got out of that job as soon as I had a solid alternative.

My life is not a way to transform calories into money for someone else, nobody's should be - stand up for your rights.

<comment><USER31> +1 for "tranform calories into money," it brought me a small chuckle.

<comment><USER32> That was an old joke with caffeine instead of calories.

I worked seven days a week for two months. We were paid double salaries and some perks, but no amount of money would have convinced us to keep that schedule longer. It was absolutely crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The working hours is one thing. What I am most curious about is does more hours being put in mean more/better work output; ie does the 996 work culture actually means a higher output, even if by a slight margin?

Personally my opinion is that coding is not like the assembly line where more hours mean more things that's produced, but more lines of code can mean absolutely nothing (sometimes can even be a negative). However, looking at the recent progress in China, I am wondering what percentage of that is attributed to the 996 working culture, or is it to do with something else?

<comment><USER34> 9am-9pm really is the period of presence in office. It's always that way in countries where the stats show high "working hours".

It is also traditional in Chinese work culture to have a nap after lunch, which provides a break and helps with staying later. Dinner is also usually early (6pm) so 9am-9pm days mean a lunch break and a dinner break.

Working 6 days a week has been quite standard in Asia. I remember Korea moved to 2-day weekends only a few years ago, and it's hard to change work culture.

It's probably also compounded by the fact that in China there is no day off for shops, restaurants, banks, etc. Everything is open 7 days a week by default, which is great as a consumer but probably means pressure on staff.

<comment><USER33> So a 40 hour work week does not mean 40 productive hours. Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your work time, then 40 hour work week means 16 productive hours per week, whereas 996, 72 hours a week means 28.8 productive hours per week.

Now my question is, is the assumption of productive hour ratio real or does it start high and end low? And if my assumption of the flat productive ratio is true, then does it actually yield any good results?

<comment><USER34> > Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your > work time

That's not the case. Hourly productivity decreases at some point.

The law of diminishing returns is at play here. Working longer hours leads to higher overall output up to a point as the marginal increase diminishes.

Then, at some point you are too tired and produces bad software that will cost to fix.

If your employer pays you a flat rate then it is profitable to make you work long hours up to the point when you start screwing up. If they pay you by the hour or if they pay you overtime, rationally they shouldn't push you beyond the point where your hourly output is too low to justify your pay.

<comment><USER33> Look, I completely understand what you are saying, because it's something I believe as well. However, what I am trying to find out more is whether this belief is correct or not and whether anyone has done any actual studies.

<comment><USER34> This is the way it is. Anyone who's worked in the industry (or any industry?) knows from experience that this is the way it is. I'm sure that there are data available.

A quick Googling for "productivity vs hours worked" led me to this:

[http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/10/hours-worked- an...](http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/10/hours-worked-and- productivity/)

<comment><USER33> Unfortunately there are quite a few problems in the report: 1\. it measures productivity by GDP, which itself is not a great measure 2\. it compares Greece vs Germany, and fails to mention that they rely on completely different industries; Greek - agriculture, Germany - <USER2>

But what we are talking about here specifically is the software development industry, where quantity does not always mean quality. So herein lies the problem that potentially a lot of our beliefs that "more hours worked means diminished return" could just be based on bad data analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There is a reason why companies cannot just lower employee's salary and hire more people instead of pushing people to work more time: that is, once you give people these option, people will go to choose to work for companies with higher pay and more overtime. That's a choice. There is a reason your salary is a lot higher than any other people, and there is a reason it is a developing country.

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting observation from Germany: I have encountered some reports about 996 in main-stream media in the past weeks. However, the spin was that Chinese workers are proud to work 996, or demand not to work MORE than 996 - <USER3> essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with their productivity.

<comment><USER37> > in essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with > their productivity.

996 isn't a matter of productivity (other than perhaps indicating exceptionally poor productivity). Productivity is closer related to how much output you generate in a given unit of time.

Brace yourself Chinese, the Germans are smashing you when it comes to productivity with their $48,000 GDP per capita and 30 hours per week of work.

A balanced mixture of high value output and quality of life (fewer hours worked) is the ideal. If China had an epic GDP per capita, it'd be worth considering the merits of how they're doing things. As it is now, they're still losing horribly. The premise properly should be that 996 dies - <USER4> becomes an absurdity, a relic of development - as they push up the economic ladder. If they can't escape the middle income trap, that may never happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Go ahead, China. Why wouldn't you block Github?

</comment><comment><USER39> Triangle Boy...

[http://www.webrant.com/safeweb_site/html/www/tboy_whitepaper...](http://www.webrant.com/safeweb_site/html/www/tboy_whitepaper.html)

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

</comment><comment><USER40> Do Chinese workers not have the flexibility to avoid working for companies that force these schedules on them? I know next to nothing about working life in China, but wouldn't workers generally gravitate to the companies that value work/life balance?

Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?

<comment><USER41> Yes, and no. IT development is one of the best paying professional jobs in China, commanding 3x to 8x a typical office worker's salary.

If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a F500 without too much difficulty. Normal 9-6, 5 day work week, public holidays plus 10-15 days discretionary holiday per year, stability over fast-pace, middle class income (8,000 Yuan per month for 0-2 years experience, 20,000 per month in a Tier-2 city for 5 years experience; for reference rent for a newish 2 bedroom apartment within 20 minutes walk to the office would be about 3000 Yuan per month).

The BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) pay more, 2x or 3x, and are the glamorous places for fresh grads to work. Good luck getting in though.

Want-to-be BATs are probably the worst employers. They lack the pay and prestige of BATs, lack the stability and sane working culture of F500s, and tend to have terrible management that lack conviction and realistic goals. Without a BAT or F500 early in one's career, it's hard to break away from want-to-be-BATs.

I know nothing about Games development, so no comment there.

There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic. Working in a Tier-1 city will mean rents are way higher, purchase of property probably unattainable, and wages probably less than double those mentioned above.

I hope that answers part of your questions.

<comment><USER42> >There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic.

Is product ownership or management seriously considered a better job in China? At almost all places I worked at in EU middle management/product ownership is considered a less desirable position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, if the work culture in China's tech industry improves after this, it's time to seriously consider moving back to China :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Actually, I don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge. Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.

<comment><USER45> > First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china > would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge.

Good. Oppression should make a country less succesfull.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers' rights > movements and unions are extremely uncommon

mind-boggling.

<comment><USER47> China is not a communist country, it's a "communist with Chinese values" country. I don't know what it means, but every time the topic is brought on the table, this is the official stance from the Chinese Communist Party.

I guess it means you owe loyalty to whatever authority you get: father, teacher, employer, emperor. Respect them, or they will crush you.

<comment><USER48> China was a pure communist country before the reform.

To keep the name, they had to attach it to a different interpretation.

when it comes to respecting the authority,

「王侯將相,寧有種乎!」is a pretty common value to Chinese people. can be partially translated as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?--John Ball".

<comment><USER49> > "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?--John Ball"

Could you take another stab at translating or explaining that?

<comment><USER46> The quote was from this historical event in 秦, China.

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

The people who was drafted for army was moving to the designated place. But due to the flooding, it is obvious they can't reach the place by the deadline. The penalty to miss the deadline is, by any means, death.

By facing the certain and unfair death penalty ahead of them, they decided the uprising. Saying.

王侯將相寧有種乎, "The king, loads, generals or ministers, Is there the seed for them?(no it isn't)"

In the end, they(the leaders, 陳勝 and 呉広) couldn't complete the the revolution. But the uprising movements continues and 秦 era was ended soon after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I don't see this going anywhere. Anyone seriously pushing this will just be replaced. Chinese companies will probably take the US approach and just ignore/cover up the whole thing, or make some handwavey pithy gestures.

I'd love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER51> China is a communist country - shouldn't be the workers rights one of its top priorities?

<comment><USER15> China has their own definition of "worker" e.g. Party members with some engineering background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge. Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.</comment>


Laser-sculpted aluminium purifies water with the power of sunlight - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248683-laser-sculpted-aluminium-purifies-water-with-the-power-of-sunlight/ <comment><USER2> "When one end of the panel is placed in dirty water, it draws a thin layer of water upwards, which evaporates in the sun, purifying it. By placing the panel inside a glass box, the team collected the evaporated water for use, separating it from the dirty water with a layer of insulation."

3 cm^2 of the material produced 5 ml of water in 2 hours. They don't say what it cost to make.</comment>


The Future of User Interfaces: Data Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_user_interfaces_data_visualization.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4dd20b3d7c1d9428%2C0 <comment><USER2> I disagree with this article, and agree with the reviewer. The application is not useful at all, and what could have been an excellent UI, given a little more thought and power, is unfortunately just lipstick. Tracks and artists are grouped in 3D space by name alone, and their arrangement and spacing is meaningless. This makes the app a pretty, but useless skin of a simple playlist.

I think the design lends itself to music discovery, not playback. Hooked up to rdio or Spotify, this could be a fun way of exploring new music by proximity. Like this song? Here's 5 other similar artists nearby.

To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's useless. Useful and simple will hopefully win over beautiful but impractical. You can't start with beautiful and add useful later.

<comment><USER3> > To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's > useless.

I think it's worse than that: poor visualisations are counterproductive.

Visualisation techniques are practically valuable when they let the user understand something that would not otherwise be clear. For example, a tool might analyse a complex data set and use a visualisation that highlights facts that are relevant to answering a particular question.

In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. It doesn't appear that any use is being made of the extra visual degrees of freedom offered by the astronomical metaphor, and extra visual degrees of freedom (spacial relationships, colours, sizes, shapes...) are usually what makes a good visualisation technique effective.

<comment><USER4> _In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't._

To extend your theme with an example-- with a tabular interface, one could sort by song title, in order to listen to covers of a favorite tune. This star-planet-moon interface apparently locks the viewer into sorting only by artist, then by album. That, even more than the wasted opportunity, makes it actively counterproductive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." ...With all due respect, that critic is missing the point.

No, he didn't miss the point. He hit the nail on the head. The purpose of data visualization is to help the user quickly understand complex data. This planetary visualization just adds another layer for my brain to parse while giving me nothing in return.

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe the future user interfaces are going to be minimalistic and non- patronizing (like Hacker News).

The interface shown in this article (and similar) have a very high learning curve and are counter productive (generally).

<comment><USER7> That really depend on what the goal of the interface is. For quickly finding the song/album you want yes, for exploration not necessarily.

It would be a stretch to call HN the future of interfaces unless you refer to the underlying algorithms.

<comment><USER6> What I meant was that the trend would be more towards minimalism and simple metaphors rather than 3D realism. I don't say that highly visual interfaces don't have their place.

I would say the difference is like the difference between a the UI of a book (minimum visual representation) v/s a movie (highest visual representation). If I have to take an honest pick, and I believe I can be wrong, is that most user interfaces will have more abstraction than specific representation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are entering an era where the consequences of our interaction with machines won't exist in a one to one relationship but rather in a one to many and many to one.

Attempts to manipulate or browse large amounts of data will require much more from the machines than from the humans controlling it.

Any routine initiated by the user will be have to be followed by a very large set of sub-routines in order to provide feedback. It might even have to anticipate what kind of feedback the user want.

Visualization is going to be the feedback but I don't believe the interface is going to be the screen.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you can change interface, but you can't fundamentally change our sensory organs or how we process information (at least not with an app). We have a biological bias to certain interfaces.

<comment><USER9> To some extent you are right, but our biological systems are also highly adaptable to new interfaces - e.g. keyboards, home appliances, cars. Interaction design does need to support user perception of how to interact with a device/system, but these affordances can be combined and developed into highly original and useful interactive applications.

I agree with others that Planetary does not address these design challenges effectively, but it's important to recognize the adaptability of our sensory systems to fundamentally 'new' ways of interacting with the world.

<comment><USER8> >but it's important to recognize the adaptability of our sensory systems to fundamentally 'new' ways of interacting with the world.

I'd say in most cases, good design asks us to adapt less, rather than more. Keyboards have finger-sized keys, arranged in a heuristic manner informed by linguistics. The keyboard minimizes effort between the brain and text.

I agree that Planetary is not effective, and here's why: Planetary arrangements don't map onto music collections naturally, and they do little to inform the organization. Planetary asks us to learn more, to do less. A better music collection interface IMO, would be one where dimensions were informed by music and song information, not planetary physics.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux Assembly How To v0.7 published - <AUTHOR> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Assembly-HOWTO/index.html <comment><USER2> I've meant to get back into assembly for quite some time now. This might be the motivation I need. I don't really have any need to build anything since I work on extremely high level stuff but assembly always had a neat "oh cool look what I can do" feel to it.

I always preferred AT&T syntax but Intel is the wide spread one. From quickly browsing the site it seems they provide examples for both which is cool.

If anyone has any interesting ideas for some smallish to midsize just for fun projects post away :)

<comment><USER3> Writing a quine[0] is always a fun starting project when picking up a new language... :)

[0] <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?QuineProgram>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you prefer a book on the subject of assembly on Linux, Programming from the Ground Up (2004)[1] is freely downloadable and still relevant.

[1] <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Sweet, I'm also learning masm, may as well learn gnu assembly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a single page / pdf version of this tutorial?

<comment><USER7> There's both: <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Assembly-HOWTO/> <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/pdf/Assembly-HOWTO.pdf> <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/text/Assembly-HOWTO>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent, should be an interesting read.</comment>


Forensic Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.forensic-architecture.org/ <comment><USER2> Oh! How odd for me - I did a teensie tiny wee job for FA a couple of weeks back and then had to leave town for a few days so entirely forgot to check up on what they actually DO after I returned.

Thanks for the reminder - here's to another hour or so lost on a Sunday! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I encountered Forensic Architecture last year, but didn't look into any of their other work until now, so thanks a lot for posting this! I got to witness a presentation about their analysis of a murder carried out by the neonazi terror group National Socialist Underground:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUA8AK02Zlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUA8AK02Zlw)

> Presentation of Forensic Architecture on the Case of Halit Yozgat and the > question if German secret service agent Andreas Temme´s testimony was > truthful. Presented at the people´s Tribunal Unraveling NSU-Complex, May 18 > 2017. www.nsu-tribunal.de/en

Truly remarkable work, the other stuff too.

<comment><USER3> Here's also a presentation on the project itself, at last year's 34C3: [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9276-forensic_architecture](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9276-forensic_architecture)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Huddle – Mini-masterclass meets roundtable - <AUTHOR> http://doahuddle.com/home <comment><AUTHOR> Small group video calls led by brands + influencers! Built this as a side project, people ended up really liking it.

The magic happens when it turns from "ooo this is a mini-masterclass with my favorite influencer!" to "ooo the people in here are pretty cool, am I becoming friends with them now?"</comment>