Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/12/06/the-future-of-nuclear-power-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom/ <comment><USER2> To make an an HN-relevant analogy: The FDA-hobbling of 23andMe pales in comparison to what it's like to work with nuclear regulatory frameworks and societal concerns regarding nuclear science. When I was an undergrad, DOE was willing to _pay_ the university the entire relicensing and operating costs of the on-campus TRIGA. The university declined, knowing that the requisite environmental impact study for relicensing would bring withering community backlash.

(For those who haven't seen one, here's what it looks like when the control rods are blown out of a TRIGA [1]; the reactor runs away momentarily, but then self-moderates when the fuel warms. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4) . The Cherenkov flash is a beautiful blue.)

Nuclear power can provide a safe, well-studied, and effective bridge to solar power. Almost nobody's dabbling in it because there's so much societal opposition. Working on a reactor in an old schoolhouse in a rural area? Someone elsewhere in the county will be willing to speak at every county governmental meeting to shut you down. Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

A simple, clear, and publicly-understandable regulatory framework in which both society and innovators can feel comfortable with small-scale nuclear experimentation would go a long way toward driving new startups in the field. Experimenters shouldn't get their hopes up too far: Some forms of radiation are extremely penetrating/hard to shield, and some hazardous isotopes live a long, long time. If you're dabbling in the field, please plan from the beginning to minimize and safely store your waste.

We only get one planet; I'd rather it not be too warm nor contaminated by our litter.

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

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you mean with litter, but isn't nuclear waste storage still an unsolved problem?

<comment><USER4> here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.

We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).

this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia. [http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls- ranger-u...](http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger- uranium-shut-after-major-accident)

<comment><USER5> This is just garbage. It doesn't matter where you want to put our nuclear waste disposal facility, some group will invent a story about how they're being exploited to have what they'll paint as "landfill" being put on their land.

 _Clearly_ a much better solution is what we do now, where we store all our low and medium grade nuclear waste in random sheds and basements at universities and hospitals all over the country!

<comment><USER6> not an invention: the people whose land is scheduled to store nuclear waste in australia are subject to laws that target them by race, and deny them basic social services (roads, health, housing, community safety) that others take for granted. the people on whose land uranium is mined (or was until this week's accident!) are subject to a specific federal law that compels them to abide the presence of this dirty industry on land they own.

it must be nice for you to live in this imaginary world where institutionalised racism, racialist legislation and the exploitation of indigenous land owners is 'garbage', but unfortunately for the rest of us, its your story that is mere invention.

(pete- throw away acct cos I'm away from my creds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My daughter was one of the operators of the TRIGA reactor at Reed college. Some of the students joked it was a Fisher-Price My First Reactor reactor :-) at only 250kW its small as reactors go, but also exceptionally interesting.

It is very disappointing how constricted the field of nuclear research is, as it is a demonstrably zero carbon footprint energy source. I understand the emotion that nuclear power evokes in people, I think the only way to combat the misperceptions is with improving results. I recognize I am a minority in that regard.

<comment><USER8> And the waste simply vanishes if you really wish for it very hard.

<comment><USER7> That is one of the emotions.

If you read the article you will read about two reactors that are actually _fueled_ by what we consider waste today.

That we don't completely burn the fuel used in a reactor is a 'bug', a misfeature if you will. That was expedient when the initial reactors were being brought online and now is a regulatory pain in the butt. There is nothing in the physics that requires a nuclear reactor complex to generate nuclear waste of any kind[1]. Only in the regulations.

[1] Nuclear incineration of even low level waste can effectively convert anything that was once radioactive into short lived nucleotide. Converting everything burned into its lowest energy stable state. But we don't do that either.

<comment><USER9> The fact that a reactor is _fueled_ by waste doesn't mean it doesn't _create_ waste or have a waste-disposal aspect.

In the case of _any_ nuclear reactor, the vessel and mechanism itself becomes radioactive and must be disposed of (the same process also leads to embrittlement and other issues with the vessel/structure itself). And the resulting fission products are also still radioactive and require disposal, though my understanding is that thorium designs tend to produce lower quantities with lesser radioactivity than other designs. Or at least, that's the PR / theory, as the designs haven't been put into production use.

Nuclear power in general has been a huge exploration of unintended consequences.

<comment><USER5> As opposed to coal, oil and gas fracking? I sure rest assured that when the local groundwater and aquifiers for my city are too toxic to drink, well at least I'll only be dying of organic and heavy metal poisoning.

<comment><USER9> _As opposed to coal, oil and gas fracking?_

Tu quoque fallacy.

No, I didn't say that these weren't.

If you want to know, rather than project on me, my beliefs, you could ask me. As it happens, my view is that humans, as with other life forms, exist to perform the function of exploiting low-entropy energy stocks and flows. The consequences of that ... tend not to be something we consider in advance. We've benefited hugely from fossil fuels, but have put ourselves well beyond the point of sustainability. Even _with_ , say, a practically unlimited energy supply we'd bump into the problems of heat dissipation within a few centuries to millennia at present growth rates. We've simply got to stop growing.

As to what's sustainable? Probably on the order of 500m - 2 billion souls if you want any sort of industrialized lifestyle. Hell, even if not, not much more than that.

The next century or two will be very interesting times. Starting likely within a decade or two, possibly less.

<comment><USER5> Sorry that was probably more hostile then necessary, but when it comes to nuclear power there is very much a "but what about the waste aspect!" used in a manner which implies all other fuel sources don't have very serious problems as well.

<comment><USER9> The law of unintended consequences has a damned long arm, that's for sure.

Perturbing systems creates long-lived ripple effects. Humans have been tapping into stored carbon equivalent to a few hundred million years of fossil deposits, and ... that's going to have some really long-lived effects. As to what the future holds, my sense is that we're simply not going to have the quantities of free, abundant, and fungible energy we've enjoyed for the past century or so. There are a few people who've arrived at similar conclusions (Dennis Meadows, one of the original _Limits to Growth_ team is among them).

The problem with nuclear waste for me (and others -- Hyman Rickover's criticisms of nuclear energy are revealing) is that the stuff is of such a concern for such a long period of time -- literally longer than written history. How the hell do you create a warning iconography that's going to be comprehensible in 10,000 years, or even 2000? Spoken and written English of even 700 years ago (Geoffrey Chaucer) is barely comprehensible today. And structures to contain it? The very oldest intact buildings we know of are massive stone monuments and even they are both heavily weathered and have long since been plundered (pyramids and other archaeological sites).

The primary problem with oil and coal are simply the quantities we've been consuming of them. If human populations hadn't grown, and they simply substituted for the biomass which was being consumed in their stead prior to the Industrial Revolution, they'd be far less consequential.

I should try figuring out how large a population could be supported at, say, 50% of US rates of energy consumption...

<comment><USER5> See the way I see it, that's asking the wrong question: _who cares_ what civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it's lost sufficient record and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?

Even a language change, if accompanied by a technologically advanced civilization, would remember to change it's signs.

Whereas, it is much more likely that if we _don 't_ use nuclear power, we'll create catastrophes that lead to that problem to begin with. I'm much more concerned with what happens over the next 10,000 years then at the end of it.

<comment><USER9> _who cares what civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it 's lost sufficient record and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?_

It's possible to retain a knowledge of _what_ nuclear waste is (at least in a mythic sense of "very bad juju") while 1) losing track of where that waste is and 2) being unable to detect or determine where it is.

Humans have no senses which detect radioactivity (one possibility is that such a sense evolves, though I suspect this is unlikely and would take a very long time). Radiation detectors require some level of technology -- silver nitrite films which fog on exposure, cloud chambers, Geiger counters, exposure badges. It's fairly easy to lose track of where radioactive products are; there's already history of radioactive decay products being incorporated into building materials and otherwise going astray (the Mexican truck hijacking this past week is only the most recent of many civilian-use accidents).

So: a future civilization, which _does_ have a written or oral history of nuclear waste and its hazards, but no means of determining _what_ is radioactive, could definitely have some issues going on. What the outcomes of _that_ might be are an interesting question. It's possible there could be a civilization reboot, or humans could make a long-term slide to obscurity and/or extinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My employer (Eastman Kodak) had one of the few industrial research reactors built for neutron activation analysis (NAA) from 1974 to 2007. NAA provided great trace analysis of impurities that caused problems with photographic film and solid state devices. The reactor was located in the basement of the research labs, next to my electron microscopy lab. I spent close to 20 years next door to this.

There were two main issues that caused the company to decommission the reactor. 1) replacement of the californium source would have been prohibitively expensive. 2) Because the neutron source also contained isotopes that could have been weaponized (with great difficulty,) we had to maintain 24x7 security - at great expense. The press reported on the removal ([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear- react...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear- reactor_n_1515463.html))

During my tenure as "next door neighbor" to this, I was more concerned about falling on ice in the parking lot during the winter than any concerns from the reactor. The staff in the NAA lab were well-trained scientists who were quite careful and they monitored constantly for activity.

</comment><comment><USER11> If anyone is interested in investigating nuclear reactions, there is a wealth of publicly available data from a huge number of experiments; and simulation software is available.

For example: EXFOR (Experimental nuclear reaction data [https://www- nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm](https://www-nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm)) is an international collection of more than 20000 nuclear reaction experimental results dating back to the discovery of the neutron.

ENDF (Evaluated nuclear data library [http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/](http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/)) is the current best evaluation of the most up-to-date data available for many nuclear reactions that have been seen experimentally.

FLUKA ([http://www.fluka.org/](http://www.fluka.org/)) "is a fully integrated particle physics MonteCarlo simulation package", partially developed and used by CERN.

Beware that all of these require some knowledge of nuclear physics to use and understand (obviously!), and can be somewhat archaic in data formats and computer languages used (think FORTRAN).

But it is truly wonderful how you and I have such easy access to such high quality and complete data.

</comment><comment><USER9> The dynamics by which nuclear reactor design cease to be "fun" resonates very strongly with yesterday's post on creativity, and in particular on simonsarris's mention of John Cleese's video on creativity. The how to kill creativity bit at the end in particular.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240)

I've got my own thoughts and doubts over the ultimate viability of nuclear energy and of the net potential of technology, but brakes on creativity itself, whether introduced or intrinsic to the system, are of concern.

<comment><USER12> And what about the guy who though up the Higgs boson saying that he would be kicked out of university these days because he doesn't meet the arbitrary bureaucratic metric thought up by small-minded administrators. I.e. he does not publish enough papers.

These are a few examples of the idiocracy taking root. MBAs running companies into the ground because they fundamentally do not understand the domain in which their business operates. Police incompetence manifested as an increase in paramilitary actions coupled with a decline in common sense. And what about the TSA?

<comment><USER9> That too. There's been something of a confluence of posts on this topic in the past few days. Not that it isn't a topic that has some attraction here.

Another datapoint: a recently posted (here?) interview of Richard Feynman, shot only a few weeks before he died. What really got me was the mischievous nature he displayed: constantly smiling and joking. Einstein was somewhat similar. God may not play dice with the Universe, but each of these two was, I think, toying with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Freeman Dyson's book, Disturbing the Universe, which is quoted in this article, is a great read. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sure they do:

 _The Boy Who Played With Fusion_

[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who- played...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played- fusion?nopaging=1)

</comment><comment><USER15> Probably because it's easier, safer, and cheaper to just purchase one or visit your local university if you have enough interest.

You're very unlikely to invent a new nuclear reactor improvement in your basement (50 years ago it would have been plausible).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S)

[http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel- Cycle/Power-R...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power- Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/)

[http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors- th...](http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-the-future- of-nuclear-power)

<comment><USER16> This isn't actually the point that the article is trying to make.

The submission title for example can be reinterpreted in two slightly different ways. The first is the way that you interpreted. The problem is that -nobody- out of the general population chooses to make nuclear reactors as a recreational activity of some sort.

The article however poses it in a different way. It rather seems to mean that nobody goes into the field of nuclear engineering with the expectation of experimentation and "having fun" while working. It has nothing to do with expense, danger, illegality, working with universities, doing it in your basement, or any of that. It has to do with commercial interests not supporting their engineers in experimenting with possible designs.

<comment><USER15> Mini reactors are becoming a big industry.

For cities or countries (or large ships) that can't afford a full-scale nuclear reactor there are smaller and cheaper ones that can replace fossil- fuel power plants.

I'm sure most people go into the nuclear field to experiment, few people expect to sit around with a checklist and watch a dial.

This company is working on similar goals: [http://terrapower.com/](http://terrapower.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just talking about America. Perhaps the people having fun building nuclear reactors are now working in Russia. Interestingly enough Russia has recently invested a lot on new kinds of R&D facilities including a suburb of Moscow being modeled on Silicon Valley. And they are reforming their whole system of doing science and science research, moving it away from the old bureaucracy in which it became embedded in the Soviet era.

In life, usually when the pendulum swings to an extreme in one place, there is another place where the pendulum heads in the opposite direction, and in nuclear reactors it would not be surprising if Russia is the place where nuclear innovation is happening these days.

</comment><comment><USER17> A few years ago, Jim Sanborn (also the Kryptos sculpture guy?!) built a fission device based on an early Fermi/Bohrs/Teller experiment from 1939:

[http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations](http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations)

I got the impression from his talk that he was more worried about DHS than NRC cracking down while working on it.

It wasn't ever turned on while it was in the museum, but just getting near the device probably left me with a greater sense of awe than even the Apollo 11 capsule. On the shoulders of giants, certainly, but _one guy built this_.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is one reason I've started to think fusion might be more promising than advanced fission. The regulatory barriers are so light that high school students build reactors and run them on deuterium fuel just like most of the big projects, and it's perfectly legal.

There's quite a lot of work being done on small-scale alternative reactor designs. I wrote up a bunch of them here: [http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...](http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304168)

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, "environmentalist" movements have gotten way out in front with opposing the ITER project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There were a couple of IAMA's on reddit with some teenagers who (supposedly) build nuclear reactors

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_wh...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_who_built_and_operates_an_iec/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming_freshman_beginning_to_work_on_a/)

<comment><USER20> These are impressive, but they aren't fission reactors, but fusion reactors. They do not generate power, but they do convert hydrogen to helium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just one of the problems with kids these days, don't have any 'ppreciation for the skill and craft of building a hobbyist nuclear reactor in their parents basement.

</comment><comment><USER22> It'd be cool if some serious makers made a LFTR reactor :-)

<comment><USER23> There is a company trying to model it by 2015. Check FLiBe Energy out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure the last few times people built reactors for fun, people with large guns appeared to ask them to stop what they were doing.

[http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy- scout...](http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Barring some exciting breakthrough in physics that gives us either a new energy source or high-efficiency solar and the ability to store it, eventually nuclear will come back. It is the only viable civilization-scale power source that can keep the heat, lights and computers on once the oil runs out.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, there's this company:

[http://generalfusion.com](http://generalfusion.com)

VC-backed, too!

</comment><comment><USER27> You sound like it is a bad thing...

</comment><comment><USER28> David Hahn did.</comment>


Ask HN: Best API / tools for finding local attractions - <AUTHOR>

Hi
Are there any decent tools / API's out there (paid or free) that will allow me to provide either a postcode/zip OR lat/lng and get back a list of local businesses / attractions.
I would like to say. Get me a list of all cinemas within 5 miles of xxxxxx.
Is there such a service? <comment><USER2> You probably should to check out <http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/></comment>


Black Market Ride-Sharing Increases in Austin - <AUTHOR> http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/23/black-market-ride-sharing-uber-lyft/ <comment><USER2> As an Austinite, the whole think looked more like a childish pissing match rather than some real debate on regulation vs the free market. Austin City Council took up a fight where there wasn't a problem, and Uber paid 9 million to fight something that they are already doing 3 hours down the road. [http://www.driveuberhouston.com/fingerprint-background- check...](http://www.driveuberhouston.com/fingerprint-background-check/)

The whole thing makes no sense to me. The City Council won a fight, but gained nothing, Uber/Lyft lost a market but will happily move on to some other place. Meanwhile, the only real losers are the people living in Austin who are stuck in some of the worst traffic in the nation and now have a worse on demand ride system. What a waste.

<comment><USER3> Taxis, traditional, or Uber-flavoured, actually make traffic worse. Unlike a private automobile, they add to congestion because they need to travel to their pickup point.

If you actually want to fix traffic, tax cars, and add some buses/trains.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps there are situations where this is true, and I'd be open to studies on this, but my experience says otherwise.

I know people who did not own a car and instead mostly used buses and/or bikes to get around Austin. They knew they always had a reliable Uber ride to fill in the gaps. Taxis adjust to demand terribly in Austin so they are not reliable or pleasant to use. So, now these people are using cars more often because they don't have a reliable way to fill in the gaps.

2) Uber reduces the need for parking which means more parking lots and garages, which pushes business further away from each other, making walking between places more difficult. As far as I know, increasing density is a reliable way of reducing traffic because it makes alternatives more attractive.

3) I would love to see more buses and trains in Austin. Unfortunately, Austin has failed to pass much on that front largely due to incompetence in government all over the place. If I had my way, we would be investing heavily in buses, trains, walkways, all of it. Uber is a great way to fill in gaps between these. I see the fingerprinting battle as a giant distraction from real traffic problems.

<comment><USER4> > I would love to see more buses and trains in Austin. Unfortunately, Austin > has failed to pass much on that front largely due to incompetence in > government all over the place. If I had my way, we would be investing > heavily in buses, trains, walkways, all of it. Uber is a great way to fill > in gaps between these. I see the fingerprinting battle as a giant > distraction from real traffic problems.

Looks like its time to get involved in your local government! Have you considered campaigning and running for the next city council seat that goes to election?

<comment><USER2> I definitely plan to be more involved in future elections. That doesn't change my opinion that Austin is headed towards being a rather dysfunctional large city instead of the unique interesting medium sized city I've lived in for years. I'm not saying there isn't democracy or that there is some great injustice going on. I'm just mostly sad that a nice place to live is being slowly replaced by a poorly run place and it doesn't seem to be able to solve it's own problems. This Uber/Lyft deal is just one small example of moving in the wrong direction and fighting the wrong fights.

<comment><USER4> Consider that Austin citizens who have been there longer than tech workers might have thought they had a nice place that is turning into a poorly run place due to the tech scene influence. Not an insult, just a consideration. Something to consider for anyone who decides to move to a new locale.

<comment><USER5> Yes yes, we all hate the outsiders and the terrible ideas they bring. We must protect ourselves from them!

<comment><USER4> I didn't say that, I said consider an idea.

Some people like the way things are where they live, and if those people make up the majority, you're SOL. That's democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is inflammatory and slanted. It seems like the author cares less about reporting than about driving an anti-regulatory agenda.

<comment><USER7> Slanted is an understatement. The following words are from the article, written by the author, and take the article out of the realm of actual reporting, and into the realm of bullshit --opinion--

>hilariously

>The City Of Austin Is Embarrassing Itself

>ham-fisted

>absurd

>un-ironic cluelessness

>senior correspondent for The Federalist.

That last one was an insult.

<comment><USER8> This link was originally dead but I vouched for it as I was just a few paragraphs into reading it. If I read all the way through, I would have left it dead.

The content started just fine but progressively gets worse and worse with the authors opinions and vitriolic anger coloring the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So a tech company is "facilitating" a "BLACK MARKET" for ride-sharing... what? Was Uber a "black market" too?

The Federalist view generally only has an inkling of the truth to whatever fits their conservative narrative. So if there is a story here, I doubt it is the full message

I find it hard to trust anything on the site when one of its founders, Ben Domenech, plagiarized articles while working at WaPo and had to resign. This was also on top of him lying and saying he had permission from one(?) of the authors.

Not that I support the Austin's City Council about the Uber/Lyft situation. But at the sign of anything happening they instantly write an article to reflect how "bad" the city council's decision was. See also: anything about Seattle's increased minimum wage.

</comment><comment><USER10> In Baltimore, the black market cabs are called "hacks". They exist mainly because people don't have enough money to afford cabs and there aren't enough bus routes.

"Hacking" involves driving along popular roads looking for people who use their index and middle finger to claw at the air ("hawkin'") to indicate they'd like a ride. Fares are hashed out before the ride begins, usually a flat rate, and well under the price of a cab. These illegal cabs sometimes take advantage of the riders because they can't complain to the police. Though in many cases one might develop a relationship with a particular hack and call them directly for rides.

<comment><USER11> Can genuinely say that back when I was in Austin for a couple years, partying hard and occasionally linked up with some other go-getters, most of them had business cards for Taxis or Town Cars that would cater to well-to-do individuals, mostly college-aged party scene people. This was about a decade ago and I thought it was quite useful at the time.

<comment><USER10> That's traditionally called a "black car service", a sort of independent contractor fancy taxi. Different from a limousine or executive car service. [http://www.allstarlimo.com/All-Star-Limo- Blog/2013/8/Executi...](http://www.allstarlimo.com/All-Star-Limo- Blog/2013/8/Executive-Car-Service-Vs-Black-Car-Service)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The decision by Uber and Lyft to temporarily abandon Austin (game theory suggests that both will be back, I suspect within months) may backfire on them, as the drivers discover that they _really don 't need them._ All the drivers need is a dispatch service to coordinate the data from their phones. What makes an Uber driver? A sticker and an app on your phone? That's precious little value to deliver for the large bite Uber takes out of the driver's earnings. My prediction is that dispatch services like Uber and Lyft will become commodities, and the events in Austin will only accelerate that process.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pardon my amusement at the observation this conflagration is eerily like the City of Austin imported more California culture than it wanted - oh sure, everybody likes tech start ups, but the whole wasteful socially progressive government style that appartently tagged along isn't so loved. Hm, funny that.

<comment><USER4> Startup culture is more libertarian than socially progressive. Socially progressive would be Austin providing a robust public transportation system, thereby removing the need for ridesharing.

Wouldn't it be more efficient for public transportation to be provided via taxes and user fees versus Uber and Lyft siphoning off of the flow of transportation payments for their shareholders? _That_ seems inefficient to me.

<comment><USER13> More efficient? By what measurement? Certainly not the consumer's time nor the taxpayers' money!

Billion dollar light rail trains that roll empty are not a terribly efficient use of money. Buses are more flexible, but waiting for a bus then having to walk from the bus stop home is apparently an unsatisfactory use of time to many passengers.

A system that connects a passenger with the nearest available driver and doesn't take too much for their part in the transaction would seem to be efficient in time and money for both the passenger and driver. In addition, it provides a source of employment for people who are looking for work and meet the criteria.

Not saying that Uber, Lyft, and other "ride sharing" services are all on the side of the angels, but their success points to a need which they are meeting.

<comment><USER4> You're post makes a whole lot of assumptions about ridesharing.

1\. Uber drivers are compensated sufficiently for their time and expenses (research has shown this isn't true, Uber drivers scrape by just like cabbies)

2\. That a consumer's time is more valuable than having public transportation available to everyone (Ridesharing > Buses/bike shares/etc)

3\. That expensive rail is one of the only options.

The solution is a mix of buses, bicycle sharing, and electric self-driving cars. How we get there is the tricky part.

<comment><USER13> Didn't assume either 1, 2, nor 3. 1\. Perhaps your definition of "compensated sufficiently" doesn't jibe with those of the thousands of drivers who voluntarily choose to drive for Uber and similar services. 2\. SOME consumers consider their time too valuable to take public transportation as you have defined it. 3\. I mentioned light rail AND buses in my decidedly non- encyclopedic comment about efficiency of ridesharing. Those are two of the main options currently available in Austin.

Definitely, "the solution is a mix", but the components and proportions of that mix are best left to the consumers, not solely to central planners, whether in governments or in large corporations. Indeed, since the vote, local rideshare companies have sprung up in Austin, perhaps better suited to the needs of Austinites.

<comment><USER4> > Indeed, since the vote, local rideshare companies have sprung up in Austin, > perhaps better suited to the needs of Austinites.

So what you're saying is a regulated free market is driving innovation. Go figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Uh huh. Listen. I've been around the world doing "black market ride sharing", where the ride is actually _shared_ , for years. There aren't any regulations on it, other than "don't stand in the road asking for a ride". Government regulation isn't preventing anyone from _sharing_ anything. It _may_ give you some extra rules to follow if you're _running a business_ though.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this is great. However, if you are Austin and you're idea was to strong arm Lyft & Uber into allowing background checks to make ride sharing "safer", one would imagine spawning a comleteley unregulated black market would be "suboptimal" to the desired outcome.

</comment><comment><USER16> The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The free market interprets regulation as damage and routes around it.

Wanting to control either of both is an exercise in futility.

<comment><USER17> Gun owners see gun control as damage and routes around it.

Business owners see labor laws as damage and route around it.

<comment><USER15> correct. I agree with you as well as parent to some degree. However, chiefly, it shoud be noted that

Business Owners and Gun Owners operate _in the free market_ and presumably _use the internet_. Wherease everyone who is operating within a freemarket or active on the internet may not be a _gun owner or business owner_.

The parent is talking about at a system level. You are talking, at least my charrachterization of it, about a layer of abstraction within a system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Arcade City, the "Uber killer" ride-sharing company, as it's known, says > it's developing a peer-to-peer ride-sharing app that will connect people who > need a ride with people who have a car, and eliminate "concern about red > tape or corporate BS—just people providing people a needed service."

I like water, meat, and medical services, but prefer some amount of regulation on them. I'm sure there's a fine line between reasonable regulation and protectionism or irrationality when it comes to these things.

> Here's the big idea: We can cut out the corporate middlemen — and make > government regulations obsolete — by transparently providing rider and > driver with clear information about the other party to each transaction, > including a strong reputation and ratings system where riders and drivers > 'level up' after community-vetted good behavior on the platform.

Who's going to take a chance on the drivers and riders with no reputation?

<comment><USER19> Regulation is necessary for health and safety reasons. Need for regulation beyond health and safety is quite small. Not zero, but on a relative scale quite small.

Uber and Lyft's track record for safety in the US is quite strong. As is the willingness of riders and drivers to participate in the system from no reputation.

The need for regulation has not been justified. Regulations shouldn't be passed unless there is a clear reason to do so and measurable way to declare that regulation a success or failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Didn't Austin get rid of Uber and Lyft because of the entrenched/encumband 'taxi' industry and the big finance industry owning and financing taxi 'licenses'?

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/cab-medallion- own...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/cab-medallion-owners-sue- nyc-blame-uber-for-ruining-business/)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/09/08/wish- yo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/09/08/wish-you-could- invest-in-uber-and-lyft-heres-a-clever-way-to-get-rich-off- rides/#146ff825772a)

</comment><comment><USER21> The author can't seem to keep his story straight. In paragraph 3 he makes this claim:

> When a ballot proposal that would have replaced the city ordinance failed, > Uber and Lyft left town as promised. Since May 9, there have been no ride- > sharing services available in this city of almost a million people.

and then a few paragraphs later makes this claim, directly contradicting the above claim:

> The city's response is only making things worse. Last week it held a job > fair for out-of-work Uber and Lyft drivers, at which it encouraged drivers > to get fingerprinted and sign up for the only remaining ridesharing company > in town, a local app called Get Me.

</comment><comment><USER22> "My sense is we were innovating too quickly for Uber and Lyft. You get to be a big company, you're less nimble. But these companies have to expect disruption."

Gold. Reminds me of how Slowgle is getting disrupted by Paris.

</comment><comment><USER23> "The City Of Austin Is Embarrassing Itself."

I wouldn't go that far. They're not handling this very well, but this article is a bit of demagoguery in the skin of "news".

<comment><USER24> How so, by requiring background checks for Uber drivers? When I lived there, they required the same livery license for pedicab drivers as well -- which was basically getting fingerprinted and paying a $25 fee.

Uber and Lyft were the ones who pulled out. The regulation that Austin passed was in no way overbearing; it just required fingerprints. They claim this "destroys the ridesharing economy" but in my experience, Uber is basically a part-time job for most drivers. Most people will go get fingerprinted for a part-time job. Very few people are ridesharing; but maybe this undercuts the argument that Lyft and Uber use for the drivers not being employees...

<comment><USER25> Were Uber and Lyft being required to perform a level of background check beyond what was required of existing taxi cab drivers? Or, were the new set of regulations simply bringing Uber/Lyft drivers in line with other professional drivers?

The whole thing is weird to me. I've used Uber a few times and the car that showed up has always been a licensed limo (just dumb luck, I suppose). Pretty sure I'd turn down a ride in some clapped-out Civic, should that be the car that showed up (but, perhaps that's why I usually use car services and not Uber).

<comment><USER24> They weren't even bringing them up to the same level as taxi drivers; they were just requiring a livery license -- which is a rubber-stamp process in Austin and again, is required even of bicycle-taxi drivers who are only allowed to work for tips.

Uber and Lyft threw a hissy fit because it undermines their complete control over the driver ecosystem. Best I can tell, they're afraid that licensing drivers would cause them to expect to be treated like employees, while making it ever-so-slightly harder for Uber/Lyft to recruit drivers. IMO it's more about labor relations than regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd predict some decentralized service will fill that market need. Anything that works better than craigslist and is hard to take down.

<comment><USER27> Problem is, Craigslist is full of spam/scams. It's hard to filter through, and takes time and effort. Not something I want to do via mobile at $arbitrary_time when I may or may not be in a hurry.

And decentralizing eliminates one of the best things going for Uber/Lyft, the background checks and tracking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Since Uber was not allowed here (Black was I guess) in Germany, I wonder how does insurance work on Uber or those black market ride sharers in the US?

<comment><USER13> Not sure about Germany, but in Austin, Uber wanted their drivers to carry auto insurance, although the company also has its own policy to cover drivers--many personal auto insurance policies explicitly do not cover accidents while the insured party is driving for hire.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is LinkedIn so broken? - <AUTHOR> I wrote a little script in python which uses selenium to unfollow everyone on LinkedIn. After a certain amount of unfollows, LinkedIn stopped showing me the people that I follow. The total number of people that I follow remains ~50, but the page doesn't return any more results. I should be able to see those 50 people in my follow list (so I can click unfollow button). Something this simple shouldn't be broken. <comment><USER2> It's not broken, you're just doing something horribly forbidden and bannable and LinkedIn would love to make automating your browser a felony.

NB: This is mildly in jest, but also not really.

<comment><USER3> Yep, the only concession that LinkedIn makes to automation is that they let people download the email addresses of their connections.

I still get spammed by people who say they found me on linked in long after I deleted my account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LinkedIn's sales pitch is basically a connected professional network of people that interact with each other, topics. and companies a lot.

Their second strong point is the fact that they have valuable data hidden in their social graph.

Automating a browser to unfollow companies basically undermines both of their valuable assets, so they are not interested in making this process seamless.

Good thing they are hit with lawsuits that make it a precedent to allow them to be scraped.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another approach that I sometimes follow (adapted to your scenario):

\- go to your follow list (manually, via Chrome or whatever browser you are using)

\- execute your unfollow script in the dev console (so, yes, it must be rewritten in JS)

\- go to your next follow list page (or refresh the page, or scroll down... I don't actually know how the follow list page looks like in linkedin)

\- have some patience and you'll end up unfollowing everyone on linkedin

It's what I call pseudo-scraping: yes, there is some automation (the JS script) but it requires manual intervention (manual scroll down, clicking next page, etc.). So far, it has always worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would be interesting if that fifty are paying for linkedin membership

<comment><USER7> I swear that I've had recruiters contact me, who I assume are paying, and without me even doing anything they end up as a 1st connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is likely a bug, some cache needs updating somewhere. I had similar issue with Twitter. I used some sort of extension to delete my old tweets. It removed all of the tweets but tweets count didn't change. I am sure count is cached somewhere and when a job or some event triggers update, it will go down.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do thieves steal? Why do fraudsters commit fraud? Doesn't matter.

Once you know, you'd be smart to no longer trust them, no matter how enticing.

I deleted my account years ago, nullrouted their email, and haven't looked back since.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was very annoyed with facebook like wall feed. So I figured I'll unfollow everyone except for few really important colleagues. I guess I can't control what's on my feed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Remember, when you say 'LinkedIn' you're really saying 'Microsoft'. That's most of the answer to your question.

<comment><USER11> They were like this long before MSFT came along.</comment></comment>


Do iPhone Users Face a Draconian Future? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/05/do-iphone-users-face-draconian-future.html

<comment><USER2> They sure as hell have a draconian present.

<comment><USER3> I don't really have any stake in this, but if you contrast the ethos of their 1984 commercial with some of the stuff happening now . . .

[Written on my MBP while listening to my iPod.]

<comment><USER4> To quote guest InstaPundit blogger Stewart Baker ([http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/did-apple-reject-a- polit...](http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/did-apple-reject-a-political- candidates-app-because-it-defamed-henry-waxman-%c2%a0dear-steve-jobs/)):

" _Dear Steve Jobs: If you're ever making a presentation and see a really fit blonde woman running down the aisle with a hammer,_ get off the stage. _She's definitely looking for you._ "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see a draconian future ahead of me as an iPhone owner. I just installed Android on my 3G last night (as a test; it's nowhere near ready for day-to-day use yet, but it dual-boots, so you don't lose the iPhone OS), and can see a very nice option for my "outdated hardware" coming in the next year. :)

Ref: <http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Overall I liked the article, but "draconian future"? Somebody at Google needs to spend some quality time with their dictionary.

<comment><USER4> Well, a minimum of politeness in public is expected.

Me, I might have said "near totalitarian present", echoing in part ryandvm's comment. What really gets me, and could by many be counted as a final straw, was Jobs saying "the platform needs a HyperCard" and then his personally disproving RunRev's version: [http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev- blog/revmobile-and-appl...](http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev- blog/revmobile-and-apples-iphone-sdk-agreement/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious as to why Google's OTA music and app sync didn't get people more interested yesterday. I was watching the keynote and all I could think was "oh man, that's awesome. I never have to use posTunes again!"

<comment><USER8> For me, its because I am happy with how I handle music, the same way I have for the last 10+ years: share mp3s with friends, buy the CDs online I like and rip them to FLAC, or purchase download directly from some great artists.

Then copy the files between all my devices, as much as I like, using the usual methods (USB, FTP, SCP..)

<comment><USER9> What a seamless experience! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> yes as well as a present</comment>


Refugees in Greece need internet – stop riot to let WiFi guys work - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/711529/refugees-in-greece-need-internet-so-badly-that-theyll-stop-a-riot-to-let-the-wifi-guys-work <comment><USER2> WiFi is their phone line back to home and relatives around the world.</comment>


Export SwiftUI code from Figma designs - <AUTHOR> https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/784879032180068427/SwiftUI-Inspector <comment><USER2> Been using SwiftUI pretty in depth for a side project. It's been 80% awesome and 20% super frustrating. I can do so much more with SO much less code, but there are definitely a lot of gaps & annoying issues (particularly around documentation and in depth customization).

Fortunately it's easy to fill in the gaps with UIKit & there are some amazing people out there doing documentation (shout out to the guy at [https://swiftui-lab.com/](https://swiftui-lab.com/), you've saved me so much time!)

Per usual with Apple its a fantastic product launched in a buggy, incomplete state. Still a great option if you're willing to deal with the kinks.

Hopefully 2.0 will make it an even more solid (if not de facto) choice for all iOS devs!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think SwiftUI will be stable until another two years or so. Swift 1 and 2 were alpha and beta tests, Swift 3 code kind of was the final language where 4 and 5 were cleaning up the API's and syntax and incrementally improving the language. SwiftUI has the same roughness to it and I expect the same kind of breaking changes.

Good luck supporting this code until then!

But really nice. Once SwiftUI starts working properly it's true WYSIWYG in Xcode and exporting it from Figma really could help speeding up the front-end process.

<comment><USER4> I've ported my apps to Swift in the first year. Looking back it was not the best approach, but for new applications it makes perfect sense to start with swift only. Regarding SwiftUI, I will wait at least 1 year :).

<comment><USER3> I still maintain applications that were started in Swift 1.x. But it looks a lot more like my old Objective-C code, it really took a while before my approaches changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is insane. If the exported code is somewhat read-able, functions correctly, and the library gets updated as SwiftUI evolves, this is a game changer for iOS devs.

However, these are big IFs. Handling navigation, view hierarchy, and view category identification may be very hard to solve.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is absolutely the goal. Not to mention bringing this to other design tools. Sketch, Adobe XD, etc.

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Excited to see where this goes! Keep up the great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice project, shapes and vectors would be extremely cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks nice.

Figma to Flutter would be super awesome.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's Figma?

<comment><USER9> A design tool: [https://www.figma.com](https://www.figma.com)

<comment><USER10> I believe they were referring to the Ligma meme, in humorous reference to the fact that Figma is only one letter different to Ligma. e.g.

A: "Did you hear about ligma?"

B: "No, what is ligma"

A: "Ligma balls, haha"

(Ligma being an alternative pronunciation of "lick my", similar to gunna / going to)

<comment><USER9> Oh, I guess I wasn't looking for that on Hacker News…</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 <comment><USER2> Ironic he also had to type out the entire thing in 140 character segments each of which bounced all over the world rather than sharing a simple text file write up.

</comment><comment><USER3> From a purely UI perspective that may be true (neglecting things like incompatible file systems, lack of networking outside large institutions, and the difficulty of doing simple things like sending email attachments), but that would be true irrespective of the adware. Text-based UIs are more efficient that GUIs, and mobile GUIs are a study of inefficiency.

On the other hand, it could take weeks to learn a nontrivial UI well enough to make it fast.

</comment><comment><USER4> This was already posted and had a large discussion here earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's probably already a phrase for this, but I wonder how much of this is due to powerful machines making more room for bad programmers?

This guy is beating on GUIs, but I'm not sure that's the problem. I've used rock-solid GUIs on machines that ran @1MHz with less than 1MB of RAM that absolutely _screamed_ performance and were a joy to work with.

<comment><USER6> > making more room for bad programmers?

That reminded me of

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox)

and

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An easier-to-read version is here: [https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296](https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296)

(also, for some reason Twitter thinks that Firefox on Linux is a mobile browser … why Twitter why?)

<comment><USER7> That didn't help. It's still unreadable, but the problem isn't the formatting.

I guess it depends on what we mean by faster. Certain kinds of interfaces were more responsive when they didn't have to deal with a lot of graphic overhead. If you were working on a DecWriter with a 300 baud connection to a mainframe, it wasn't that fast. Need data from the disk drive? Way slower. And of course, in 1983, no pc's had any kind of multi-tasking.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention his entire rant on maps losing search items when you pan is just wrong.

Or fuck it, lets talk about the fact that I have an application that has zero install time that will literally display the roads/geography/business locations of basically every civilized place in the whole freaking world, and it's almost always reasonably up to date.

And the biggest irony of all, he chooses to format his entire fucking lunatic rant in messages capped at 140 characters, when there are lord knows how many better options available.

This man is walking proof that nostalgia is real, and that people are generally idiots whenever they talk about "The good ol' days"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Search far and wide. Search for cities and then click around inside them. > Read reviews. Do street view_

> _When you 're all done, you go back to your plotted trip and start laying > out the chosen locations and optimizing your path.

> _You can do this with a paper map. You can't do this with gmaps. So you just > don't do it.*

Yes, it's so easy to "click around cities" and "do street view" on a paper map. It's amazing that Google Maps even exists given the magic paper maps we already had.

<comment><USER10> You missed the point entirely. Nicely done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've never heard that from anybody who _actually used_ computers in 1983.

Latency problems in the web/app world are the result of adware/bloatware/trackers/etc. and/or poorly-implemented frameworks and stacks, not modern hardware or O/S.

<comment><USER12> I did (well nearly, started in 1984 on 8-bit home computers), and the only thing that was dramatically slower than today in normal day-to-day tasks was loading data from cassette tapes, floppy disks or via modem.

Since I've been on computers with hard discs (Amiga 3000 early to mid-90's) it's definitely true that responsiveness either hasn't improved much, or got even worse (I remember how confused I was when I first saw an application with a splash screen, to hide the long startup time). This sort of carelessness has been spreading like a plague since then.

<comment><USER13> I still remember adding a kind of splash/waiting screen to one email application because The Most Important Feature was executing too fast and users wouldn't feel that it really works. Sometimes latency is caused only by management.

<comment><USER14> That exists now on TaxCut software - when it says "checking your return for possible errors or red flags" or similar. It has some blinky lights animation or arrows or such that runs for about 10 seconds. It was probably done before Windows could bitblit the image to the screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Indirectly related...

I am the one-man team for the CLI (Command-Line Interface) for a new cloud computing PaaS.

This is a small project (10+ employees, mostly software engineers) on a more extensive company (500+ employees).

Sometimes I have a [really] hard time dealing with management and co-workers because they expect me to mimic the behavior of our GUI console (web-based) with a high fidelity level that many times is just inappropriate for the CLI or not what you want on a CLI.

Most of this is caused by lack of experience on both using and writing CLI tools (I happen to have way more experience than them in this field because I am a long-term heavy Unix user - since a kid, besides having a greater understanding of Unix programming in general). I wish they at least read "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric Raymond to better respect some design decisions I made.

I am very open to criticism and even enjoyed the unexpected help I received from the project UX / UI designer, that was enlisted to help me out (except for things I clearly decided against but were kind of forced on me).

Here is an incomplete list of things I had to deal with related to performance/usability:

* (lesser problem) backlash against language: Go was my language of choice for this, many of the team would instead use Node.JS

* lack of understanding that I have to support a vast amount of configurations: BSD/macOS/Linux/Windows + different shells + terminals (and it gets worse / weird when you talk about Windows), and that somethings that look nice in one system, might not look the same in most terminals. Also, many times it is difficult to predict with accuracy what terminal is in use (I am looking at you Windows Subsystem for Linux, that pretends it is xterm-2565, while not supporting most things of it).

* colors, colors, colors. The designer wanted colors everywhere. Foreground, background, Alpha-RGB. You can not imagine how hard it was to convince that we better stick with ASCII standard 16 colors and that alpha channel didn't even make much sense, at least while I am alone

* Explaining why we better stay away from new UTF-8 icons "that only renders nice on macOS iTerm"

* Explaining why colors look different in other terminals (say, Hyper)

* Explaining that I have no control over the screen background of the user whatsoever and can't even detect it appropriately / would not be nice to do so

* Animations, animations, animations. Why do they expect animations everywhere? How do I explain to them that if I try to open an URL on the browser it opens kind instantenously, and it needs no animation because the user wouldn't even see it (and then being told to just put a small delay before opening for it to appear to happen... fast)?

* Decorations, decorations, decorations. I lost this battle and the error handling mechanism prints a weird symbol on every line of error. I am actually stripping the decorations a few pieces at a time and intend to eventually get rid of it just by being a rebel and removing it kind of "accidentally" (especially when it gets in the way).

* Lack of understanding of Unix software programming patterns (filter program, pipes, redirections, etc -- see The Art of Unix programming) [and why I don't accept passwords to be passed as an argument as this is... soooo easy to use™!]

* No respect for spacing on a listing of entries: hard to defend that tabular data must be presented as tabular (even though it might get repetitive) or at least have easily parsable separations. One example is a proposal of listing services while showing their projects, and only print the project name on the first line of service [and assume the project above for all others]. This is a deal breaker for pipping or filtering out data most times, and people just want me to ignore it and feel disappointed with me when I do the right thing (ignore their opinion instead).

* I was demanded to add heuristics to a status system due to lack of proper feedback about remote actions such as deploying/restarting/stopping services. This would never work very well because of many things, such as concurrent calls, eventually request just took longer or happened in practice in 'the wrong order', and so on. Took more than six months until I got a decent API change where I could trust the status and more six months for a more CLI-like approach of not doing more than one thing at once to be agreed upon (instead of always trying to replicate the GUI [blocking] behavior).

Many of these things above I managed to ignore, did in a way that was easily revertable, or just accepted for the sake of my well-being [and wished/planned/plan to move to a more sane approach soon].

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes some things feel slower today, but not all programs and it's not always an apples-to-apples comparison. For example, you should not compare programs that edit local files without any network involved with those that have a network connection used to send or receive data. You could as well say that it took hours to get flight prices 1983 since you had to go to a travel agency and ask for help. Now we can do it from our phones. And we have another difference right there, there were a limited number of travel agencies and agents. Maybe there were only 100 users on the mainframe that asked about flights at the same time. Today it may be 10 000 users at the same time. But if we are talkning about UIs then it is interesting to also look at how many things you can show on the screen and change quickly.

I will go on a little rant here. About 5 years ago I wrote a little web application for phones. I think Samsung Galaxy S4 was a common phone at that time and it is a lot slower than the modern phones of 2017. We used Angular 1 (React was not released publically) and created a single-page-application with offline storage in the browser using IndexedDb. The response time for most things was fast enough to not cause any real complaints from our users. Switching between views was fast and changing contents in list was also done quickly. Actual saving to the server took some time (could be a few seconds or up to about 30s) and we had to build a progress bar to keep users calm but they only had to use that once every 15 minutes or less. Some reasons this worked was that the offline storage was much faster than the network (3G or 4G gsm) to the server and the fact that a mobile screen only can hold a limited amount of data at one time. It was still html, css, js and the DOM, all running on a slow phone. These things _are_ slower then some more native technologies but you can get enough performance for many apps even with html and js if you avoid networks or hide the latencies.

Another project, even earlier, used server generated html and a relational db. When we ran that, including the server, on the developer laptops which were much slower than todays laptops the response times for simple save-calls was below 100ms. It was so fast that we feared that users wouldn't understand that the data was saved. We added a simple timestamp that was shown when the save was done to make it more clear. This was once again without network (for our trials).

Some UIs are harder to get good performance from. A word processor with WYSIWYG might have to reflow almost all text when something at the top of the screen is changed and games might have to repaint a lot of small items on the screen at once. For these types of systems html+css might be a bad fit but for most enterprise and productivity applications it should be possible to get good enough performance today. We might not always get this, partly because we are optimizing for development time instead. To develop offline storage solution might take more time and if you make many network calls in a way that freezes the ui it will be noticed by the users.

And as I started with, if you only have 100 users the backend might be very responsive even if you don't optimize is much. If you have over 10 000 users at the same time you might have to do a lot of optmization on the backend also.

</comment><comment><USER17> cpus are faster but they also have the nsa inside of them.

there was a point where mhz stop making a computer faster, it was multitasking I recon. at 100mhz as DOS application/game was blazingly fast. but also nothing was bound to the network, it would just spin a cdrom to get the information, and at 150kb that was faster than most internet connections.</comment>


Show HN: URLColors – Chrome Extension to Visually Distinguish Envs Based on URL - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/urlcolors/jjccpcminoppplpmcfghflolejbdkekm <comment><USER2> Ugh I need this in Firefox! For "Reasons" I don't use chrome for my different environments but this is super useful!

<comment> fej-snikduj [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Po...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension)

I don't use Firefox, but looks like it may be a relatively easy process to port it over?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. I wonder if we can do the same thing in terminals(iterm/terminal) when we connected to prod hosts via SSH.

<comment><USER4> That's one of the reasons I made the switch to iterm: [https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-automatic-profile- switc...](https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-automatic-profile- switching.html)

The actual automatic profile switching can be a bit of a pain because you need to install the integration on each machine you ssh into. But iterm also gives you access to a bunch of proprietary escape codes, so I was able to just wrap ssh in an alias that would automatically change my terminal colors and display the ssh command as a badge in the corner to keep my dumb ass from accidentally screwing up a server.</comment></comment>


Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/preorder-your-very-own-fusion-reactor <comment><USER2> If Rossi had a device that actually worked as advertised, the first thing he would do would be to set up multiple peer-reviewed demonstrations that would prove his claims in an undebatable way. As soon as incontrovertible evidence was provided, Rossi would become a media superstar, make history, and receive billions in pre-orders from all over the world. And if the physics was on Rossi's side, it would be very easy for him to provide the "extraordinary evidence" required by his extraordinary claims.

But years have passed and the validity of the E-Cat is still an open question. There have been some demonstrations, but results are still very much under discussion. There is no undebatable experimental evidence that the device works as advertised. So either Rossi prefers mystery over fame and billions, or the E-Cat a scam in some form or another.

<comment><USER3> I followed this closely 2/3 years ago, skeptical, yet very excited by the possibilities of the outcome if true. I followed the heated debates on ecatnews.com, had a lot of fun but after almost 2 years of postponing a serious test, came to the conclusion it was a scam. I'm afraid this is yet another episode of a serie that just can't die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, I did my own research about 2 years ago on this mysterious e-cat device, and I found out there is a surprisingly rich history of unexplained effects in nickel-hydrogen systems: heat that cannot be explained by theory. I am almost convinced Rossi and the few other (competing) scientists who are studying this effect are onto something HUGE. See my post: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61](http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61)

Unfortunately the scientific community is very hesitant to review/reproduce the experiments because the words "cold fusion" have had an extremely bad connotation since the Pons and Fleischmann 1989 fiasco.

<comment><USER5> Scientific community would love to test his claims, except he didn't (or couldn't) tell exactly how it works.

I understand that if he actually discovered something that HUGE, he wouldn't want to tell anybody, I know I wouldn't.

But please, don't blame it on "scientific community", that's what conspiracy theorists morons say.

<comment><USER4> Rossi refuses to divulge many details, but other scientists give all information necessary to reproduce, see Piantelli's research for example.

At this point the blame fully lies on the scientific community for ignoring these.

<comment><USER5> Two groups tried to reproduce Piantelli's "discovery" and couldn't.

I still blame the conspiracy morons.

If you can reproduce it, why not revolutionize energy market and make billions? Let's hear your made up reasons why you can't.

<comment><USER4> Your attitude (aggressive tone, insults) is _precisely_ why research is not advancing as fast as it could! You are part of the problem, not researchers who desperately work on reproducing the effect and who try to have their results taken seriously.

Also, I meant Celani, not Piantelli (sorry!). He has published a lot of information in the last 18 months, you should check it out, see:

\- [http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/files/Poster/Grimshaw.pd...](http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/files/Poster/Grimshaw.pdf)

\- [http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates- excess...](http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-excess-heat- from-nickel-hydrogen-reactor-at-niweek/)

\- [http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Francesco_Celani's_LE...](http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Francesco_Celani's_LENR_/_Cold_Fusion_Cell)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Many skeptics were left unconvinced. But the customer that the E-Cat was > being tested for—which Wired UK says was rumored to be the US military's > DARPA—was satisfied, and purchased the unit.

This doesn't mean that DARPA is not a sceptic. It means the unit has passed the simplest test of "not a cardboard box covered in tin foil with a guy going 'Beep Boop' next to it". Now DARPA can buy a single unit and tear it apart to see if there's anything interesting there.

A £1m gamble on interesting is not much for military budgets. I don't think I'd have spent the money - it feels like a scam or a sad delusion - but maybe there's some interesting chemistry even if cold fusion isn't there.

<comment><USER7> If I were a military organization, I'd pay for the device in an escrow account with funds to be released upon validation that the device worked properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember watching the first E-cat "test". This is one of those things that is either an incredible breakthrough or a "the bigger the lie" type scam. The key thing to remember is that Rossi is not doing this to advance some scientific field, but to invent a product for commercial sale. To that end, any tests or data they release is not intended for rigorous scientific review, but to convince potential customers that they've got a viable product.

That being said, it definitely seems that they have some sort of energy breakthrough. Whatever fuel they have in the e-cat outputs more energy per density than any conventional fuel source. What is not clear is if this is a battery (like hydrogen) or genuine fuel source. They have been shown to produce a lot of energy over a period of several hours, but I haven't heard of any week or month long tests being conducted.

[http://phys.org/news/2013-05-rossi-e-cat-energy-density- high...](http://phys.org/news/2013-05-rossi-e-cat-energy-density-higher.html)

<comment><USER9> What i wonder about is how this scam holds for so long being so easy to test. You attach a simple electricity meter to this and run a lightbulb for a couple weeks, and when you reach the energy spent per unit of device's mass akin to gasoline (say 10 KWh/kg), you are onto something real.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you should read the paper conducting exactly such tests, where researchers concluded the energy density is at least one magnitude above conventional sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It might be interesting to know that Andrea Rossi has a history with "breakthrough" discoveries and inventions.

His former company Petroldragon was disbanded after they dumped over 70.000 tons of toxic waste (and probably their method of recycling oil didn't work at all).[1 -wikipedia][2- italian source].

Most of the tests that were done violated very basic scientific rules and can be considered demonstration more than anything. The paper on arxiv.org was done by a scientist who was very close to Rossi (Giuseppe Levi) and some of its methods are questionable according to [3 - german] and [4- shorter/incomplete English version].

A real independent proof of the claims made by Rossi is still to be delivered.

While I hope that Andrea Rossi has found the next BIG thing and that he is just paranoid and incredibly bad at communicating, I seriously doubt it and go with "It's a big scam" for now. With some luck history will prove me wrong.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_%28entrepreneur%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_%28entrepreneur%29) [2] [http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2004/novembre/27/Riciclag...](http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2004/novembre/27/Riciclaggio_rifiuti_tossici_Assolto_Andrea_co_7_041127020.shtml) [3] [http://www.psiram.com/ge/index.php/Focardi-Rossi- Energiekata...](http://www.psiram.com/ge/index.php/Focardi-Rossi- Energiekatalysator) [4] [http://www.psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi- Rossi_Energy-Cata...](http://www.psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy- Catalyzer?COLLCC=880073171&)

EDIT: Typos (at least the worst ones)

</comment><comment><USER12> What I find amusing about this is the fact there willing to turn these things on in an unshielded environment demonstrates they know it will fail. 1MW of the cleanest fusion we know about would still kill everyone in a large room before you could blink.

PS: If it's enough power to heat a cup of coffee you needed serious shielding.

<comment><USER13> Considering it doesn't emit that much radiation, and the one it does is shielded by lead (afaik) it's ok. I've been reading about the Ecat for quite some time...at first I had my doubts...but after being peer reviewed, several tests and running in self-sustain for around 6 months... it is safe to assume it is going to work.

<comment><USER9> You can't easily block neutrons with lead. It takes some material with high content of light atoms such as hydrogen or helium. For example, polyethylene works well. And it has to be thick. Not box-sized, not even room-sized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a big scam. Note that Rossi has previous experience with similar scams [1].

Note that basically any and all information on ECAT is distributed through a big spam network of SEO sites. I have been following this campaign (along with Steorn) loosely from the very begining.

All the usual telltale signs are there. The project is alway bound to be released in the next 4 months.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_%28entrepreneur%29...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_%28entrepreneur%29#Petroldragon)

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone interested in the subject should read this paper describing two experiments conducted by outside researchers.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3913v3](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3913v3)

</comment><comment><USER15> The article says that the exact nature of the reaction (e.g. the catalyzer used) remain secret. At the same time, Wikipedia claims that an Italian patent was granted for E-Cat.

However, isn't the point of the patent system that the discoveries are made public? Does this mean, since the catalyzer was apparently not patented, that someone could (independently invent and) patent it instead? Or do I understand patents and law in a wrong way?

</comment><comment><USER16> Hacker News + science is often a very bad mix. Any evidence this is actually a fusion device, not a chemical energy converter or a brick?

<comment><AUTHOR> As you can see from the other comments above; the jury is firmly out on that one, but it's still an interesting story considering the "secret" test customer (which Wired UK says was DARPA[1]).

[1] [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi- success](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Andrea Rossi is a scammer. You can search the full story of his previous scam on Google ( searching Petroldragon ). It should, however, spend a few more words to talk about his academic qualifications: Andrea Rossi graduated in PHILOSOPHY and has also acquired a fake degree in chemical engineering from the "Kensington University," a university-scam that was closed by court order years ago. In this fake university has "graduated" even Kim Il-Sung from North Korea ... :-)

[http://news.newenergytimes.net/2012/01/11/rossi- engineering-...](http://news.newenergytimes.net/2012/01/11/rossi-engineering- school-shut-down-for-fraud/)

<comment><USER17> An interesting article that appeared in Forbes two days ago:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/29/why-im- ce...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/29/why-im-certain-that- the-rossi-e-cat-doesnt-work-as-advertised/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like people with the appropriate qualifications have their doubts about this machine. [0] [1]

[0] [http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/05/tommaso-dorigo- impressed-b...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/05/tommaso-dorigo-impressed-by- cold-fusion.html) [1] [http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the- e-cat...](http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat-is- back-and-people-are-still-falling-for-it/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm reading this: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally- ind...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent- testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after- all/)

<comment><USER20> How long will this keep returning? Of course the device works, with a minor glitch: it heats the water with same efficiency as any electric water heater. Because it's an electric boiler with some mumbojumbo attached. I doubt, however, that any person foolish enough to spend $1.5M on that will ever admit being fooled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> actually on the ecat.com site :"Leonardo Corp guarantees a COP of 6 for the ECAT, meaning that it takes a required 1 kW of input power to produce 6 kW of heat", which is, granted, quite an achievment.

</comment><comment><USER22> Berkeley, California is a "nuclear free zone" as the many signs scattered around the city will announce to those that enter. I guess this machine will not be allowed for sale here.

</comment><comment><USER23> It says you need to provide it with hydrogen. Doesn't extracting hydrogen from water require energy? How much hydrogen and nickel are required for how much output? (If it works at all)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is really going to be an amazing decade.

</comment><comment><USER25> How much does this reactor cost? Can't someone buy and review it, test if it works, etc.?

<comment><USER26> I could mention something about feeding the trolls here...

<comment><USER25> Maybe, those that skim the article, but definitely not trolling. I just don't get excitement/anger around ECat.

NDA however explains why there is no test.

<comment><USER27> You misunderstand. _Rossi_ is the troll. Buying the device encourages him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's got to be a prediction market somewhere I can bet against this thing.</comment>


10x Programmers Must Collect 10x Paychecks, but They Don't - <AUTHOR> https://www.yegor256.com/2019/01/22/10x-paychecks.html <comment><USER2> I do not disagree with the general assertion the author made.

I will observe this is a direct artifact of how we currently devalue people en mass. That shit does roll up hill.

There are many people who "should" earn more than they currently do.

Perhaps leaving things largely to markets, which really do not value people intrinsically, instead only concerned with max output for minimum input...

Perhaps going so far down that road just isn't wise.

That race to the bottom isn't just about "those other people."</comment>


Microsoft May Build a Copyright Cop Into Every Zune - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/microsoft-may-build-a-copyright-cop-into-every-zune/ <comment><USER2> Dup. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183499>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More fuel for the "Media Cartel Hates Apple's Strategy" fire.</comment>