Ask HN: Would Databases be different if more women would do programming? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering if more women would do programming, do you feel like there would more of types databases? Given that women organize information in their brain differently than men. <comment><USER2> Given that women composed a very large part of the history of Computer Science, I don't see their influence missing from the foundation layers. It's in more of the recent (30 - 40 years) time period, where we haven't been innovating nearly at all, where the influence of women is particularly lacking.

I think the more interesting thought experiment is if there is a correlation there. A lot of women leave this industry because the people in power tend, on average, to have limited emotional intelligence and lack the nuanced viewpoints of maturity, and that they perpetuate those power structures on to others with those same limitations, so you have stasis.

The bigger question, then is, how would databases and programming languages look if we had more people with complex and nuanced emotional frames, who can collaborate and hold ambiguity? I think the answer is _very_ compelling. These lost years (30 - 40 years) might not have had to be lost at all. Sadly, we'll never know.

</comment><comment><USER3> The idea that men and women organize information differently in their brains seems like an enormous assumption to me. I've seen far more variance between individuals within a gender - and similarities between individuals across gender - in terms of how they process information than any pattern of difference between genders.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you avoid distractive features while building a project? - <AUTHOR> While building something I find that a lot of things get added to the project which does not actually solve the core problem but is nice to have once the core has been solved. This happens at work and other places. What is a good way to avoid this kind of noise since it takes time away from solving the actual problem? <comment><USER2> Ask yourself are you doing this because it's needed, or because you know how to do it. Many programmers would rather rationalise "we need feature X" and then sit there and code, because they like coding, they know how to do it, and the alternative activity (e.g. Marketing or talking to customers) is harder, has more unknowns, and they're uncomfortable with the uneasiness of the unknown.

This was my problem for a long time, and I was in denial about it and over- emphasised the importance of features so I could code instead of sell.

But once I accepted it as a fault in myself, I could compensate for it, then I actually started making money.

I see this a LOT in my friends

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'm guilty of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When checking out a new branch or planning a new feature - ask yourself, if you would deploy it today and the customer sees it - will he notice it/benefit from it. Of course this does not work for all features/long-term things, but it helps to look at it from a customer perspective. First focus is: customer gets his job done (core features & UX) Second focus is: customer is happy using your product (these are all the other things that are nice to have + UI).

</comment><comment><USER4> Keep a list of things you want to add on once the core is done. Be ruthless about putting things on that list instead of into the product. The more exciting items you have on that list, the better motivated you'll be to put other items on that list instead of directly into the product so that you can finish the core product sooner and get to the fun features.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are tons of ways, but ultimate is up to you if you wanna follow any of them.

One is using the Pareto principle: Ask yourself if the feature you want to work on is on the 20% side which solves the core problem, or if it belongs to the 80% leftover.</comment>


Quick Website SEO Audit Recommendations - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2011/02/17/quick-seo-audit/

<comment><USER2> Nice article, Nick-

I think one more (and probably the last) important area to check would be:

Navigation structure, affecting how accessible (or otherwise) the site is to (both - human visitors as well as) to the crawlers.</comment>


Show HN: An introduction to Apache JMeter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ramunas/an-introduction-to-apache-jmeter-c59b7c58ff73

<comment><AUTHOR> My first attempt at writing a guide. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thank you</comment>


The compute and data moats are dead - <AUTHOR> http://smerity.com/articles/2018/limited_compute.html <comment><USER2> Moats and walls are pretty good analogies here. The magnitude of the barrier provided by a moat was considerable in the 1300's. By the late 20th century, it was far less.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWMrY49qqDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWMrY49qqDw)

In the 11th century, a wooden palisade or an earthen berm fortification could be held for something like a half year. By the end of WWII, it constituted a delaying tactic.

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

A phase change happened with military tactics in the lead-up to the 1st half of the 20th century, where the power of mobile mechanized armor and air support greatly reduced the value of fortifications.

That said, I don't think moats are dead. It's just that the time-scales have changed.

<comment><USER3> The timescales of the moats provided by the actual technology in the digital realm have always been short. That's why you see so much time and money spent on broadening and extending copyright and patents... that's the long-term moat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the PyData DE I just saw an excellent talk about GANs and data augmentation in image recognition:

[https://www.slideshare.net/FlorianWilhelm2/performance- evalu...](https://www.slideshare.net/FlorianWilhelm2/performance-evaluation- of-gans-in-a-semisupervised-ocr-use-case)

The authors were able to outperform Google ML by a large margin for a vision task that involved recognizing numbers from car registration documents. With just 160 manually collected training samples they were able to train a neural net that could recognize characters with 99.7 % accuracy. GoogleML performed very poorly in comparison, which I found very surprising because it didn't seem to be such a hard recognition task (clean, machine-written characters on a structured, green background).

<comment><USER5> Isn't this just the no free lunch theorem? Should you be expecting a more general framework to beat an specially trained algorithm?

Another concern is generality: just because it performs well on this dataset does not mean it will perform well on another.

<comment><USER4> It really doesn't matter that the model will probably not perform well on another dataset, as it was built for a specific task.

It's also about flexibility: If Google ML doesn't provide you with a way to train their algorithms specifically for your use case it won't help you that they work well for generic text recognition tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you are overegenralizing applicability of Neural Architecture Search etc. and cherry picking individual examples. There is an enormous gap between what gets published in academia with what's actually useful.

E.g. Compute wars have only intensified with TPUs and FPGA. sure for training you might be okay with few 1080ti but good luck building any reliable, cheap and low latency service that uses DNNs. Similarly big data for academia is few terabytes but real Big data is Petabytes of street level imagery, Videos/Audio etc.

<comment><USER7> Your last comment reminded me of this article [1] on "Google Maps's Moat", which discusses the _vast_ resources that Google has poured into collecting data at a global scale to make Google Maps what it is.

[1] [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps- moat/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Okay, I have a question about one of his assertions here:

> What may take a cluster to compute one year takes a consumer machine the > next.

Is that not partly because the hardware is ever improving? I realize this is a bit of exaggeration, but does not yesterday's cluster end up fitting onto the die of tomorrow's GPU? And then since it's all on a single die, is not the overhead of the interconnect drastically reduced? It takes less time to push information to the next core over when the interconnect is a couple micrometers of silicon instead of the couple meters of silicon, copper, and fiber needed when the next core is in the next rack over.

Certainly improving the model will help; who hasn't marvelled at how better his code ran when he fixed that On^2 hot spot? But I can't help but think improving hardware plays a role too.

Am I off base here?

<comment><USER9> Off base not, but most of this "one year effect" is really improved algorithms, not better hardware. Hardware doesn't improve that fast (1000x in one year).

<comment><USER10> One year effect? What exactly are they speaking about?

The only reason deep learning exists is because by now we've finally learned how to build GPUs fast enough to run the algorithm invented in 1983.

And let's be honest - most of the current, state-of-the-art algorithms only work today because they've got access to scaled up massive databases of data. You don't really need to be as smart here any more.

<comment><USER11> I don't mean to reduce the work of whichever researchers published in 1983 (are you thinking of Rumelhart et al 1986?), but gradient descent and reverse mode automatic differentiation are way older than 1983. Adaptive filters were being "trained" in the 50s using stochastic gradient descent.

<comment><USER12> And backpropagation (using the chain rule) was originally invented in the 60s in the field of control theory, IIRC.

<comment><USER11> > and reverse mode automatic differentiation

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two notes: 1\. This article is not talking about how, for neural networks, you can just have pretrained networks — where the cost of compute and data is incurred there — and then use them to classify images or what not on your decades old computer. Correct? 2\. Often times, some problems are "solved" in the sense that they become irrelevant. Is that also the case here. It seems compute and data were seemingly constraints, but technology (algorithms) just got more efficient. Should we not reframe this and say that algorithms are the constraint, then, and that's what we should aspire to improve? Usually throwing compute and data marginally improves gains anyhow...

</comment><comment><USER13> The real "moat" is more and better training data for commercially useful tasks.

You can write a lot of papers about Penn Treebank data but I can't imagine anything you do with Penn Treebank will be commercially useful.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like that we're getting these huge gains on tasks that can be made faster via better architectures, regularization, normalization, data augmentation, etc, such that he's right.

I just wonder if it will ever feel this way for reinforcement learning.</comment>


The Fusion Reactor Next Door - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/business/fusion-energy-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> Isn't there a new generation of nuclear reactors that promise to work exceptionally well, without all the negative outcomes associated with the earlier generations? Bill Gates has been advocating this technology of late.

From my limited reading it sounds like this does a pretty great job of solving energy and climate to a large extent.

Why aren't more people excited about this? I feel like this can be a very politically viable solution that pleases most of the clout wielding sides of the political spectrum.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> Fusion power is in between the research stage and the commercial stage. It's tough to find investors who are willing to put their capital up for something which has a good chance of _eventually_ succeeding, but where you have very little confidence in how long it will take to succeed.

General Fusion - one of the first private fusion companies - has been going for 12 years without revenue and might need another ten. That's a long time for venture capital.

<comment><USER4> >Fusion power is in between the research stage and the commercial stage.

The commercial stage ist decades away, there isn't even energy surplus generated in research. No reactor can run longer than some miliseconds, i think you are overly optimistic. Fusion is 20 years away since 50 years.

<comment><USER5> The story, for the last 40 years, has always been more "We'll have fusion in 20 years if you fund us" and as far as I can tell might have been true since the funding asked for didn't arrive until ITER was finally funded and it hasn't used up its 20 years yet. The big difference is that advances in superconducting magnets that spun off from MRI research have reduced what "fully funded" can mean, meaning smaller players are getting involved.

<comment><USER6> Humans aren't really capable of making 20 year plans to invent new technologies and implement them on a schedule. We don't know enough about how it works, we don't know what of many choices to make. What you can do is keep working to improve it and hope you'll get something useful. But it's silly, obviously not something you can do, to make such a large research project with a 20 year goal and so many unknowns and say we will have it with high likelihood.

Research has to work toward broad goals and investigate new areas. In 1900 could you have made a 20 year plan to invent cell phones and all the technology needed for what we have today? No one would suggest that, but you can invest in basic science and engineering and you'll get some useful things along the way, radios, maybe repeaters, ever smaller ones and better batteries. But you don't necessarily get a specific thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Top 4 reasons why nuclear fusion is an incredibly bad idea:

4\. The power density of the Sun is surprisingly low, it's about 276 W/m3 [1]. If we would ever be able to create fusion similar to the one that's happening in the Sun, we'd need a few million m3 to get to the power generated by a typical large power plant (1 GW). Imagine what type of containment vessel you need to enclose a few million m3 of hot (100 million degrees) stuff. For comparison, the largest oil tankers in the world can hold about 300,000 m3 of oil.

3\. Even assuming we can build such a humongous fusion based power plant, what happens if, you know, something goes unplanned? Anti-nuclear people point to Chernobyl and Fukushima, what could happen with a fusion power plant? You would not have radiation, that's true, but you would have an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like firecrackers. Why? All that hydrogen that is supposed to undergo fusion needs to first be heated to about 100 MM degrees. That's a lot of energy. How much? Here's very rough back of the envelope: density of Sun = 1 kg/m3; let's say we are looking at 10 MM m3 of hydrogen (we account for some power conversion inefficiency), that's 10 Megatons of hydrogen. At about 15 kJ/kg.K specific heat, it takes about 1.5 billion kj to heat one kg of hydrogen, or 1500 GJ. This is about 0.3 T TNT equivalent [2]. Overall, about 3 Gigatons TNT equivalent. That's 60 times larger than the largest nuke ever tried (the Tsar bomba mentioned before). Or 200,000 larger than the Hiroshima bomb.

2\. The accident discussed above assumes nothing goes really bad. It's simply a rapid release of some thermal energy. But what if instead of this, we have an accelerated fusion reaction? Then we have at hand many orders of magnitude more fusion fuel than all the thermonuclear bombs ever build. I don't want to do any calculations, but there's a chance that could be the end of the humans, or maybe all multicellular life on earth. 1\. All this hope for clean nuclear energy means a lot of people don't want to even consider practical solutions for the fission-based nuclear energy, such as waste reprocessing or next generation nuclear reactors (like Bill Gates's Terrapower). Why would they, if clean nuclear energy is just around the corner? That kills what is probably our most realistic tool to reduce carbon emissions.

[1] [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns- powe...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/370899/suns-power- density-compared-to-a-compost-heap) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent)

<comment><USER8> _> The power density of the Sun is surprisingly low_

That's because the Sun is very different from an Earthbound fusion reactor. It runs at a very different temperature and density, using very different reactions. The analogy you are trying to draw is invalid.

 _> you would have an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like firecrackers_

No, you wouldn't, because only a very small amount of fuel is inside the reactor at any given time. The inside of a fusion reactor is very different from a nuclear bomb. The analogy you are trying to draw is invalid.

 _> what if instead of this, we have an accelerated fusion reaction?_

You can't. If anything goes wrong the injection of fuel into the reactor stops and the reactor shuts down.

<comment><USER9> > That's because the Sun is very different from an Earthbound fusion reactor. > It runs at a very different temperature and density, using very different > reactions. The analogy you are trying to draw is invalid.

No, the analogy he draws is the correct one: the sun actually works. "Earthbound" controlled nuclear fusion doesn't in any meaningful way relating to energy production. There's no reason physics should cooperate with us and make it possible; "wouldn't it be nice" wishful thinking isn't good enough, and the results thus far are all complete and total crap. It isn't that we haven't spent enough: we simply don't know how to do this -there is no reason to believe it is possible. All the results from inertial confinement, tokomaks, fusors, whatever indicates we really don't know WTF we're doing.

His other concerns are legit as well. If you _can_ do controlled nuclear fusion, you have a really, really scary weapon.

<comment><USER8> _> the analogy he draws is the correct one: the sun actually works_

Under, as I said, very different conditions from those which Earthbound fusion reactors are attempting. The only meaningful similarity between the two is that both are fusion reactions. You certainly cannot use numbers for the Sun to make any valid estimates about Earthbound fusion reactors, as the poster I responded to was attempting to do.

 _> Earthbound" controlled nuclear fusion doesn't in any meaningful way relating to energy production._

It hasn't yet, but that doesn't mean it never will. If it does, it certainly will not be by reproducing conditions similar to those that produce fusion in the Sun. And if your criticisms of fusion power turn out to be valid and it never works, then everything the poster I responded to said is irrelevant anyway, since he was assuming fusion power _would_ work.

 _> If you can do controlled nuclear fusion, you have a really, really scary weapon._

No, you don't, because, as I said, only a very small amount of fuel is in the reactor at any given time--enough for a few seconds' worth of energy production. That equates to the energy equivalent of a few tons of TNT, not a few megatons. And since the entire system is designed to remove that amount of energy at that rate, concerns about even that few tons of TNT energy equivalent "exploding" are invalid--that amount of fuel undergoing complete fusion and liberating all that energy is what the reactor is _designed_ for, not an abnormal condition. And, as I said, all you need to do to stop energy production is stop injecting fuel, and the reactor shuts down.

Again, a fusion reactor is very different from a fusion bomb.

<comment><USER9> Yes, "earthbound" fusion reactors are attempting very different conditions from the sun: that's what I said. The sun is the only reason anyone thinks a sustained, controlled fusion reaction is possible: there are no other examples, and the idea that we can do arbitrary (and high) energy densities of sustainable controlled fusion is wishful thinking. All the results thus far are that we don't know how to do this. Nature may prevent it completely.

If we do figure out how to do this, _of course_ the possibility of a controlled fusion reactor can be used as an absurdly powerful weapon. You've basically invented something that can make gigawatts of energy appear in a small volume. Sure, a power-generating fusion reactor won't make as big a mess as a fission reactor if there is a fault. That's not the point. If you know how to do this, you can design a system where you can open a hole in one end and point it at things you don't like. And people most certainly will do this if they can. Making the non-proliferation aspects of such a postulated technology absurd. Imagine you could build a NIF type device that actually was sustainable, and you could fit into a truck. Just the neutron flux from the thing would be absurdly murderous, and even using NIF figures (~200MJ), being able to direct the energy of some fraction of a ton of TNT worth of energy at things you don't like, fueled by a tiny amount of hydrogen seems pretty dangerous to me.

<comment><USER8> _> The sun is the only reason anyone thinks a sustained, controlled fusion reaction is possible_

No, it isn't. We think it's possible because we have extensive experimental data on fusion reactions from Earthbound experiments. From those experiments we know a wide range of possible conditions that can produce sustained, controlled fusion. The conditions inside the Sun are only a very narrow part of that range.

 _> You've basically invented something that can make gigawatts of energy appear in a small volume._

You do realize that _any_ power plant that is making gigawatts of energy has the same amount of fuel energy content inside it as a fusion reactor, right? A coal plant that is making a gigawatt of energy has a ton or so of TNT's worth of fuel energy inside it at any given time, just like a fusion reactor. There is no difference between them in terms of weapon potential. It's true that the amount of fusion fuel needed to make a ton or so of TNT's worth of energy occupies a much smaller volume than the amount of coal or oil or natural gas needed to make that amount of energy, but so what? It's the energy content that matters, not the volume.

 _> Imagine you could build a NIF type device that actually was sustainable, and you could fit into a truck._

That means you're building a laser capable of short pulses of gigawatts of power that can fit into a truck. If you can build that, you don't need to include a pellet of fusion fuel with it to make it a weapon.

Also, nobody is talking about building gigawatt fusion reactors that can fit into trucks. They're large facilities, just like other power plants.

 _> being able to direct the energy of some fraction of a ton of TNT worth of energy at things you don't like_

We already have weapons that can do this, and are much cheaper than building a fusion reactor with a hole in the side of it would be. They're called missiles.

<comment><USER9> >No, it isn't. We think it's possible because we have extensive experimental data on fusion reactions from Earthbound experiments. From those experiments we know a wide range of possible conditions that can produce sustained, controlled fusion.

There is zero evidence sustained, controlled, above break-even fusion works at the types of energy densities people talk about for power plants. None; keine, zero, zilch: there is arguably as much evidence for this as the existence of ghosts or leprechauns. The models don't work! I ain't saying we shouldn't try, but there are by now reasonable arguments to be made that it's a big waste of time and money better spent on something boring that we know will work, like thorium.

To make another technological analogy from nature: if the earth's gravitational potential well were larger, we wouldn't have been able to achieve orbit using chemical rockets. The specific impulse of fuels which exist in the periodic table of the elements would have been insufficient to achieve this. For example: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04727](https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04727) -similarly, the properties of plasmas may make it impossible to achieve controlled, above break-even nuclear fusion in a conveniently small and dense volume. There is at present no evidence that it can be achieved. They've been working on it for 65 or 70 years now depending on how you count things, you'd think there would be some positive indications by now beyond optimistic press releases.

As for your wishful thinking that a controlled nuclear fusion technology _couldn 't_ be used as a weapon, well, there you go again with that wishful thinking. Controlled fusion is a non-proliferation nightmare. Should this actually come to pass and become routine enough to be a meaningful part of the power grid, it will be a hell of a lot easier to build a fusion howitzer than an ICBM with H bomb at the business end of it.

I mean, you're a nuclear physicist, man!

<comment><USER8> _> There is zero evidence sustained, controlled, above break-even fusion works at the types of energy densities people talk about for power plants._

This is just another way of saying we haven't gotten it to work yet. That's true, we haven't. The same could have been said about controlled fission in 1941.

 _> there are by now reasonable arguments to be made that it's a big waste of time and money better spent on something boring that we know will work, like thorium._

I agree there are reasonable arguments to be made about this. But comparing controlled fusion to ghosts and leprechauns is not one of them.

 _> it will be a hell of a lot easier to build a fusion howitzer_

I have no idea where you're getting this from. Again, I really don't think you've grasped the implications of the fact that the energy content of the fuel inside a reactor producing, say, a gigawatt of power, is _the same_ whether the reactor is fueled by coal, oil, natural gas, or fusion. So a "fusion howitzer" based on a fusion reactor would have no more explosive power than a chemical explosive howitzer (which is not based on a coal, oil, or natural gas plant anyway, it's a very different thing).

Nuclear fission is a unique case here because of the historical accident of fission power developing in such a way that multiple years' worth of fuel, containing orders of magnitude more stored energy than was being burned at any given time, was all inside the reactor core at once, instead of the reactor having fuel continually injected just in time to be burned, like every other kind of reactor. All of the downsides of fission--the possibility of meltdown, decay heat removal, huge spent fuel pools containing lots of long-lived radioisotopes, even an accident like Chernobyl--are due to this unique attribute. Newer designs like pebble bed reactors have shown that this is not a necessary attribute of fission power. But it won't be an attribute of fusion power at all.

<comment><USER9> People claim to have seen ghosts and leprechauns. Nobody's claiming to have seen break even. Only "if you give me enough money you'll see it." Which one could say about ghosts and leprechauns also.

The difference between the energy content of a coal reactor and a hypothetical fusion reactor: you can store a lot more gigawatts in the back of a pickup truck for one of them, and that is the one that makes enough neutrons to sterilize a city block when you burn them up. I mean, how many pounds of fusion fuel does it take to level a city?

<comment><USER8> _> Nobody's claiming to have seen break even._

Huh? That milestone was reached some years ago.

[https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches- mile...](https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches- milestone.html)

What has not yet been achieved is ignition--a self-sustaining reaction that does not require continuous energy input.

 _> how many pounds of fusion fuel does it take to level a city?_

We already know how to make a fusion reaction that will level a city. Having a working controlled fusion reactor would not affect our capability to level cities. So I really don't understand why you keep harping on this.

<comment><USER9> Because you can put the energy required to level a city in the back of a pickup truck, then level a city with it using the same technology has a hypothetical fusion reactor possible, that's why. I don't know why you _can 't_ see the destructive potential of a project Daedelus with the business end aimed at Los Angeles.

The NIF result created 35000 neutrons, and you should know that press release is the functional definition of a _scientific fraud_ -I wrote a couple of articles on it which you can go find if you care about fraud.

<comment><USER8> _> Because you can put the energy required to level a city in the back of a pickup truck_

Yes, we can already do this, it's called a fusion bomb.

 _> then level a city with it using the same technology has a hypothetical fusion reactor possible_

No, a bomb is not the same as a fusion reactor. A bomb burns a megaton of TNT's worth of fusion fuel all at once. A fusion reactor outputting a gigawatt of power burns the same amount of fuel in about a year. It's not at all the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "near limitless energy" claim of articles like these is very deceptive. The true destination is perpetual _heat_ generation, which is low grade energy and a potential pollutant on this planet.

The only thing we can do with such amounts of heat to produce the kind of energy we need and consume is build thermo-electric power plants to generate electricity. Here is the crunch:

> Thermoelectric power use has a significant impact on water resources and the > power sector is highly dependent on these water resources; the United States > Geological Survey (USGS) estimated on a national level that _41% of all > freshwater withdrawals in the United States in 2005 were for thermoelectric > power operations_ , primarily for cooling needs.[1]

[1] Operational water consumption and withdrawal factors for electricity generating technologies - [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045802/meta)

<comment><USER11> Heat pollution is a very minor concern. From "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" by David MacKay, pages 170 to 171:

"let's assume that in 100 years or so, the world population is 10 billion, and everyone is living at a European standard of living, using 125 kWh per day derived from fossil sources, from nuclear power, or from mined geothermal power. The area of the earth per person would be 51 000 m^2. Dividing the power per person by the area per person, we find that the extra power contributed by human energy use would be 0.1 W/m^2. That's one fortieth of the 4 W/m^2 that we're currently fretting about, and a little smaller than the 0.25 W/m^2 effect of solar variations. So yes, under these assumptions, human power production would /just/ show up as a contributor to global climate change."

[http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_170.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_170.shtml)

<comment><USER12> That's assuming that we use the same order of magnitude of energy.

If the promise of a technology is that we can use several orders of magnitude more energy per person, then that .1W/m2 could become 10W/m2.

If we don't increase energy usage, sure, no big deal, but the entire point of pursuing fusion is to enable fantastically more energy usage, at least as I see it.

So we also need a second revolutionary technology, direct conversion of energy rather than thermal energy conversion.

Fusion will never be a cost winner if it's using thermal energy conversion, anyway. Solar and wind will soon undercut the steam turbine lifetime costs, so even if the fusion part were free, there's no way for heat engines to compete on cost.

<comment><USER13> > If the promise of a technology is that we can use several orders of > magnitude more energy per person, then that .1W/m2 could become 10W/m2.

Depending on what type of energy you exactly have in mind.

It is totally possible to increase consumption of iee. electric energy and reduce overall energy needs. We burn most of the fuels and use them very inefficiently:

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

In short: you need to burn coal with 3x as much energy to generate 1x of electricity. So when you switch from coal to nuclear (or renewable) and increase 2x your energy usage you still come up ahead in total primary energy consumption.

<comment><USER8> This comparison isn't valid for nuclear; nuclear power plants use steam turbines to convert heat to electricity, just like coal plants do, and the thermal efficiency (fraction of energy from burning the fuel that actually becomes electrical energy) is about the same.

<comment><USER13> OK, I double checked and you're right. Nuclear is counted properly difference is only for renewables:

[https://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar- wi...](https://energypost.eu/iea-underreports-contribution-solar-wind-factor- three-compared-fossil-fuels/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper banned from cyber conferences for bad behavior - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/hacker-hero-is-said-to-have-used-cyber-conferences-to?utm_term=.utryBzBXm <comment><USER2> One by one, heroes, once respectable men, have the harsh light of society turned on them.

<comment><USER3> Weren't they all "respectable" only because knowledge of their long-term history of sexual harassment or abuse was suppressed, either by supporters who wanted to maintain the fiction that fame in one field implies general moral respectable, or by detractors concerned about negative personal repercussions of making these claims against those that others call heroes?

<comment><USER2> Yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Broken Promises: The Housing Market in San Francisco (And Ten Ideas to Fix It) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ztownsend/broken-promises-the-housing-market-in-san-francisco-and-ten-ideas-to-fix-it-8e9d43328fb9#.xl266hj2u <comment><USER2> Don't submit the same article on different domains. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398188)</comment>


Phoenix WebSockets under a Microscope - <AUTHOR> https://zorbash.com/post/phoenix-websockets-under-a-microscope/ <comment><USER2> Phoenix creator here. Happy to answer any questions. This article does an excellent job diving into the underlying details of Phoenix channels and pubsub.

For those that want a thousand foot view and are curious what makes Elixir and Phoenix unique compared to other solutions, think of Phoenix channels as trivial realtime communication that is distributed out of the box. With Elixir, processes (green threads) are load balanced on both IO and CPU so no single channel client will block another, regardless of the work you may be doing. Channels are also multiplexed on a single concrete connection so the same client can be doing intensive work in one channel while receiving messages over another. The runtime is also distributed, so process messages can reach any server in the cluster which is what allows you to `broadcast(socket, "event", msg)` in a channel and it Just Works across the cluster.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a ton for Phoenix :D Re the clustering support, I can see in your article here [https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/01/28/running-elixir-and- phoe...](https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/01/28/running-elixir-and-phoenix- projects-on-a-cluster-of-nodes) that the Erlang VM joins clusters on startup - any idea if it's easy or possible to dynamically join and leave clusters?

Sort of what you'd expect in a cloud environment: one or two bastion servers would have a known IP address, and the remaining would be expected to learn about the cluster when the joined with the bastions.

<comment><USER4> > any idea if it's easy or possible to dynamically join and leave clusters?

Don't know the specifics in Erlang, but in Elixir you can just use Node.connect/1 and Node.set_cookie/2: [https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Node.html](https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Node.html)

Edit: There's also stuff like libcluster ([https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster](https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster)) that allow for this at a higher level afaik.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are happy users of libcluster but there's also [https://github.com/mrluc/peerage](https://github.com/mrluc/peerage) for automatic node discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the highlights for Phoenix WebSockets came from the insights of one of my co-workers. I was having a problem where I only wanted to send websocket traffic up to 1 time every 3s (debounced essentially). I was struggling with this solution and came up with a hacky solution that would debounce on the event broadcast side (vs the socket side). This means it would be up to 1 time every N seconds per server.

Co-worker showed me that sockets are just processes, and that once the process exists, I can treat it like any other process. We wrote a fairly simple state machine for debouncing, and made it debounced on the socket side. It's awesome because it's debounced even in a distributed setup. Less than 25 lines of code for all of that!

<comment><AUTHOR> For some channels / topics I let the clients provide a `refresh_interval` parameter upon joining to tackle similar problems. I'm also curious to see your state machine, maybe it's something worth extracting to a middleware.

<comment><USER5> Put it up on a gist for HN [https://gist.github.com/sb8244/e6884ad08d91de8c4aa5bf3241855...](https://gist.github.com/sb8244/e6884ad08d91de8c4aa5bf32418557e1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The wsta is something I've been needing! It's like wget or curl for websockets!

<comment><USER7> +1 for wsta! I am using dwst, but a cli tool can be handy from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most awesome thing is that everything is opt-in. You don't want the channel mechanism? No problem, just write a handler yourself with your own logic and quirks. Here is a short tutorial on this: [http://benjamintan.io/blog/2014/02/12/phoenix-elixir-web- fra...](http://benjamintan.io/blog/2014/02/12/phoenix-elixir-web-framework- and-websockets/)

At the same time, if channels fit what you want to do, they're awesome. Adding collaborative editing is super easy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just to highlight - this is in no way related to the existing Apache Phoenix project, or to the ten other tech projects also called Phoenix. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix#Computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix#Computing)) This is a new one.

<comment><USER10> Well, relatively new. It was actually the one I was expecting when I clicked through (the Erlang/Elixir web framework). Give it had websockets in the title, I would have been surprised if it wasn't.

I'm surprised that any hacker news reader would actually think anything else, given how often this particular Phoenix has surfaced here.</comment></comment>


Oculus Rift Kickstarter backers to receive free Rift at release - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game/posts/1458224 <comment><USER2> Just got my email. Sadly apparently Greece doesn't exist but maybe I'd like a swag bag instead.

Disappointing I can't simply pay extra to ship it here; but I'll be routing it through Germany...

Still, very exciting they decided to do that and quite a big surprise actually, I wasn't expecting to get a new oculus at all!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really positive thing to do.

As an original backer, it makes me feel like they are genuinely grateful for the initial support.

There are many projects where the opposite happens and the initial backers feel like they missed out (or have to pay twice) once the final commercial product gets released.</comment>


Marissa Mayer Loves Paperwork, And It Is Driving Some People Nuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayers-slow-bureaucratic-hiring-process-is-driving-some-people-nuts-2013-3

<comment><USER3> She really doesn't trust Yahoo's own management, does she?

Wouldn't be surprised if she was right and Yahoo's current management is indeed mediocre at best, in which case all these 'weird' things she's doing might not be weird after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't think of that. You may very well be right. My initial reaction was that Mayer is a micro-manager & too heavily reliant on a bureaucratic process. Your comment, however, puts this approach in a different light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like Marissa is following the cargo cult of old Google. She wants to replicate Google's practices verbatim and I am not sure that is going to work. Google grew and developed some practices organically and some of them could not be scaled and had to be reworked, bringing them to a big company with its own culture and insisting on following them to the letter smells of disaster.

</comment><comment><USER5> The first 3 steps in the process - leading up to being forwarded to her - <USER2> pretty common for large companies. No, that doesn't make it better or worse than the previous system - but it _is_ common. Also, I think that having senior management on the interview panels can be a good thing, as long as the panel is not made up _exclusively_ of senior management. Senior management is more likely to have the "big picture" perspective than the interviewee's peers would.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yahoo! is hiring???</comment>


Ask HN: How do you gain weight? - <AUTHOR> Context: a skinny guy, 24 years old.<p>Currently, I am working at a startup. I am used to walk to the office. I don't do regular exercises, except walking and doing chores. I usually eat three times each day. No snack. <comment><USER3> Eat More. Eat more calories than your body burns. How much depends on your metabolism and activity levels. But if you're not gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Eat caloric dense foods like pasta and nuts. Eat more frequent meals. Drink milk and make shakes.

Lift Heavy. Stop wasting time with curls and flies. Do free weight, compounds like Squats and Deadlifts instead. These exercises work more muscles with heavier weight. They trigger more strength and muscle gains, and will make you go from skinny to muscular.

Be Consistent. The total calories you eat on a weekly and monthly basis must be higher than the calories your body burns. If you eat a lot today but then little the rest of the week, you won't gain weight. You have to consistently eat more than you burn to increase your weight.

Read more [https://stronglifts.com/gain-weight/](https://stronglifts.com/gain- weight/)

<comment><USER4> I am a tall, skinny 60-year old, who recently started crossfit, which emphasizes squats, deadlifts, and other barbell exercises. (Previously I did HIIT for several years.)

Crossfit just isn't working for me. At all. I can't squat deep enough, and my shoulders aren't flexible enough to keep the weights as far back as they should be. So I'm stuck doing remedial stuff to get to the point that I can actually lift anything. I've been trying this for four months now, and I'm really stuck on square one. Any thoughts on this?

<comment><USER5> The squat is a complex movent and takes years to master. Anyone telling you different is selling you a load of bull. I have been weightlifting for years with an emphasis on the big four (big 3 + overhead press) and functional, strong man style movements.

I am at the high end of intermediate/low end of advanced range with regards to how much I lift @ 180lbs. I'm still making imrpovements to my texhjique all of the time.

One issue with _some_ CrossFit outfits is that they throw you into these movements from day 1 with non trivial weight. Your CANS gets no time to develop the coordination needed and you can get discouraged or, worst case, hurt yourself.

Everyone can squat. Being a tall guy you will do it differently than e.g. a 5'5" powerlifter. You just need time and practice.

<comment><USER4> The trainers at my gym are exceptionally watchful and careful. Due to the two problems I mentioned, I'm using extremely light weights. So while I may be slowly getting more flexible, I'm not getting any kind of a workout.

<comment><USER5> That's good though; you should be using extremely light weights until you get the movement down. Most people want to rush in, but fitness is a lifelong thing, not something you achieve in three months.

If you look at any decent, beginner's weightlifting program with an emphasis on the big movements (i.e. not bodybuilding programs) they'll all start the same way; perform the movements often, start with little to know additional weight on the bar, and add weight progressively (linear progression.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In addition to the other advice:

\- avoid appetite suppressors (e.g. caffeine) and modulators (e.g. artificial sweeteners). "avoid" != "eliminate": sure, have a coffee or two in the AM, but don't drink it all day.

\- exercise will make you hungrier (it is an appetite suppressor for those whose body asks them to eat out of boredom, which is very common).

\- choose a healthy diet. You won't have the 24-y-o metabolism forever, so don't make habits you'll later regret (e.g. two croissants in the morning). This also means you'll be building weight through your body and not just adding fat.

At 24 none of these "rules" need be strict, so have a milkshake, etc; you have a great opportunity to experiment with what works and is enjoyable to you.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just wait until you turn 40. It's very difficult for some people to gain weight, even if you eat enough, and even if you lift hard.

How tall are you? How much do you weigh? How much do you want to gain? Who/what do you want to look like?

While you certainly can add muscle, you should be cautioned against trying any program to significantly change your basic build. If you're naturally thin, then you can be muscular, but you'll still be generally thin, and you probably can't ever be a tank. Being a tank is really more about your genetics ( bone structure, shape of your chest, overall length of your muscles ) than working out.

Not saying it's your goal to be a tank, just trying to provide some realistic counsel.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am 5' 6''. I want to gain 20 kg at minimum because I am too skinny. I have no reference or people to be a model.

<comment><USER7> You should be able to do this easily. Go consult a trainer and try working out 3x a week for 3 months. Learn how to eat enough and lift heavy stuff safely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of great advice to you has already been given. But one thing to add - <USER2> walking may be good for your heart, but it's burning calories. You need an energy surplus (more calories coming in than going out). If you are walking a substantial distance to work, more calories are going out. Again, I'm not here to discourage cardio activity completely, but that's not the exercise you need to focus on.

Saucisse is right - you need to eat more and more frequently. And to ensure that doesn't all become fat, you need to lift heavy - focus on compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench press. Stronglifts is a great place to start. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER9> Drink beer you'll put on weight in no time. There is a reason it was called "liquid bread" in the early part of the twentieth century. Why you would want this, over, say, muscle mass I"m not sure.

<comment><USER10> Eating peanut butter works great, too!

<comment><USER11> I had the same problem as OP. I fixed it by eating most of a small can of peanut butter a day, and working out (lifting, not a lot of cardio) 4-5 times a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be Me for a month. My metabolism is so lazy, i can gain weight, even eating less than 2000 cals per day. I can gain weight just looking at food, consuming less than 2000 cals per day, with moderate exercise.

</comment><comment><USER13> SemiOnTopic: Some people in the comments equate "fast metabolism" and being skinny. How is that supposed to work?

Metabolism is the conversion of energy from incoming food into stored energy (fat) or used energy (heat, chemical processes). The speed of metabolism does not appear in any equilibrium (of which body weight is a statistic). If you've eaten food and it is not stored, the energy has to be expressed some other way - in what way do "fast metabolism" people express it?

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're like me (skinny caused by fast metabolism) then you need to eat more often as a first thing. Like have a proper breakfast ( i know u coffie/cig junkies ; ) and then be sure to eat something (doesnt need to be a lot) every 2-3 hours. For me this works a BIT (i.e. slooww growth, but growth), in order to really gain weight I need to train 3x a week and eat gainer (carbohydrates) and then I grow.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why do you want to gain weight?

What kind of weight do you want to gain? I presume you want muscle rather than fat...

I'm a skinny guy, always have been. I gained a bit of weight when I got married, due to eating better. I gained more when we had our first child, due to lifting the kid, the carseat, and the diaper bag over and over. That's weightlifting, even though I wasn't in the gym.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to gain weight because I am too skinny. I want to fix my body shape. Sure, I would rather gain muscle than fat.

<comment><USER15> I've hit 55. I need to lose a whopping 7 pounds to get back to the weight I'd like to be. Don't knock skinny - in a decade or two, it will be your friend.

(I'm not saying don't try to gain some weight. I _am_ saying be grateful for your basic body type.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Eat more, or more caloricly dense, foods. I find I feel best using mostly fats, rather than carbs, on a high calorie diet. Seems to help joints and workout recovery too. Most hormones are synthisized from fats, so it may be related.

Also, paradoxically, working out will regulate your appitite and might help you eat a bit more, and store it in a way your body prefers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kings oatmeal: Make oatmeal. Add flax oil, coconut oil, hemp oil, butter, whole milk, and honey.

Eat an avocado every day.

Eat 3000+ calories per day.

Hit the gym.

</comment><comment><USER18> GOMAD + Starting Strength. Unless you're vegan and/or lactose intolerant, you are the ideal candidate for this nutritional plan. Don't stay on it for more than a few months.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all of you who have given advices. I will make an experiment and want to see the result. I hope I get the good result.

</comment><comment><USER19> There are mass/weight gainer supplements that you could try (maybe start with 2-3 servings/week) but I wouldn't use it without some sort of anaerobic training program to build muscle.

</comment><comment><USER20> Check your blood sugar and diabetes markers at a hospital. Unknown weight loss is a rather common symptom of Type 1 diabetes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Eat more, use a calorie counting app. Excercise regularly with weight lifting as the focus.

Eating is 90% of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> You already know the answer; eat good food, eat more of it, add resistance training to build muscle. You need to eat at a caloric surplus, at least ~250 calories / day. It's a simple concept, but doing it takes hard work and dedication.

</comment><comment><USER22> Eat chipotle burritos (source: NFL draftee Adam Shaheen)

</comment><comment><USER23> Can I ask how much do you weight and how tall are you?

<comment><AUTHOR> 20 kg at minimum. I am 5' 6''.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Get a girlfriend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why?

<comment><USER24> Everybody who I know and got a girlfriend, including me, got 10 more kilos in a year. Maybe your lifestyle changes, that's why

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Exercise, you don´t need fat, you need muscle.

<comment><USER26> You still need to gain weight in order to build muscle. Muscle development requires a caloric surplus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://www.xkcd.com/1744/](https://www.xkcd.com/1744/)</comment>


Picking BackType - <AUTHOR> http://vicngtor.tumblr.com/post/5648711507/picking-backtype

<comment><USER2> From afar, I think you made the best decision. BackType is probably one of the few companies in the valley tackling hard tech.

</comment><comment><USER3> Victor - I'm the co-founder of likealittle.com; Curious to hear about how you saw our growth, and your experiences in the dating market. Would love to get in touch: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> wtf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there something more about why BackType apart from "They are cool, Chris B made his own language, they work a lot"?</comment>


Show HN: Adblock to Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/owocki/adblock-to-bitcoin <comment><USER3> If your real objective is to get actually some income in place of the ad, I would highly suggest supporting traditional forms of payment _in addition to_ Bitcoin. Pick your battles and reduce friction for the user to donate. Although Bitcoin is interesting/cool/worthy of existence, 99.9% of users don't have a Bitcoin wallet, so you'll be missing out on a lot of potential income.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's worth testing. The reason we started with bitcoin is that traditional forms of payment charge a egregious fee (credit card, 3%) or require sharing private information (ACH). With bitcoin, I can send micro-payments trustless- ly.

<comment><USER4> Checkout what Slate.com is doing with their AdBlock mitigation messaging. They'll detect AdBlock usage and try to upsell you to their Slate+ membership (yearly credit card fee)

<comment><USER5> Yup, lots of sites do that - e.g. theguardian.com. The trouble is that paying for a yearly subscription is a _whole other_ prospect than paying a cent as a one-off or even on a per-article basis. Micropayments offer a much nicer business model, IMO - I am almost never going to pay for a subscription to a website, but I am totally willing to make one-off donations, and have done so.

<comment><USER6> I would gladly give nytimes.com $0.10 to $1.00 to read individual articles and probably do it scores of times in a given month.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $455 per year to read all them on any of my devices: [http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.html)

<comment><USER7> Hey Colin,

Cameron Schorg here with SnipBit. We are currently creating a platform exactly like what you are describing. Users would have a browser extension that allows them to pay for articles with one click and browse the web a la carte style -essentially solving the subscription problem and the annoyance of the paywalls themselves. You should definitely check us out at www.snipbit.io . In addition, i would love to have a longer chat with you to better understand our user base. If you would be willing, please reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An interesting issue here is that Creative Commons Noncommercial licenses permit use on ad-funded sites, but not on micropayment-funded sites. I'm thinking specifically of this: [https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127](https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127)

<comment><USER9> I think the idea of micro-payments instead of ads is that it covers costs. In that respect, and in general, if the site isn't turning a profit isn't that still non-commercial?

<comment><USER10> > if the site isn't turning a profit isn't that still non-commercial?

Wouldn't that mean Twitter and Facebook are non-commercial?

<comment><USER8> If Facebook is commercial, does that make it legal for you to post a CC-NC-BY document you didn't write as a Facebook Note? If it's legal for you to post it, is it also legal for Facebook to display it, thus drawing people into their site to view advertising? What if I set up a paid-subscription-only Facebook clone called Flone and you post it on Flone, so that you have to pay Flone to see the Note? Does it matter if Flone charges per pageview instead of per month? Does it matter if Flone charges more for certain pageviews? When Verizon sells you a data connection, are they in some way different from our hypothetical Flone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see a browser plugin that does something similar. I fill it up with a small balance of bitcoins, and it automatically pays websites when I visit.

<comment><USER12> This fits your description

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/protip-peer-to- pee...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/protip-peer-to-peer- crowd/obpohohcmdaklmaagjgdaldgjhohegak)

<comment><USER13> This needs to be more common. I'd put in a not unreasonable amount of money (~20$) monthly to automatically pay to the sites I regularly visit. Need this for firefox, stat!

<comment><USER11> One thing that prevents me from wanting to use this is that it just looks for bitcoin addresses on the page. If joe bloe posts on reddit begging for money with his bitcoin address, I don't want to automagically send him some.

<comment><USER13> I don't really care about the bitcoin TBH. There needs to be a technology to pay the publishers directly a cut for my '% time viewed', the technology matters less to me.

Perhaps Google contributor et al. could implement paying publishers based on '% of total time spent on the site' metric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Glad to see that blocking 3rd party javascript is still effective at blocking all of this

[https://i.imgur.com/8LbGk2G.png](https://i.imgur.com/8LbGk2G.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

Whats your motivation for disabling javascript? I _could_ create a javascriptless-version of this, but would you ever consider supporting/tipping a publisher via it?

<comment><USER14> I don't disable javascript. Just Javascript (and most resources) from 3rd party domains. I didn't come up with the idea, there's a browser plugin (uMatrix) that does it for me. And I selectively re-enable by domain or resource type. I like it because (1) it blocks just about every annoyance on the web and (2) it means that when I visit a webpage, the number of 3rd parties that the information about my visit is automatically leaked to goes down. It's like automatic blocking of ads, social buttons and just whatever new unpleasantry thing comes up next.

For example, this is what uMatrix displays on the demo:

[https://i.imgur.com/0mtkpXY.png](https://i.imgur.com/0mtkpXY.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting tool; I'm going to have to play with have that turned on my Chromium install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice little project!

The issue is, at this moment Bitcoin does not really support micro- transactions. There is a proposal in progress which will fix this though. Its called "Lightning Network" and it will act as aggregator of transactions which will prevent dust from hitting blockchain while correctly and safely counting every penny. This is not yet ready - they are working on safe and private payment routing in network consisting of open set of nodes, which is (IMHO) crazy hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The issue is, at this moment Bitcoin does not really support micro- > transactions.

Whats your source on this? I'd thought that the block size was large enough that even transactions around the size of $0.05 would go through regularly.

<comment><USER15> I personally use it for amounts starting from 30c.

But two questions should be answered. How micro is micro-payment? Popular fee right now is at 0.0001 BTC which corresponds to ~0.04USD, which could be considered not very "micro-fee". And other question. Single transaction real cost right now is around 10USD. Payment fees are low, only because they are hugely subsidised by block reward (25BTC every 10 minutes). What will happen when block reward will go down 2, 4, 8 times?

And finally, quote from LN whitepaper:

> If all transactions using Bitcoin were on the blockchain, to enable 7 > billion people to make two transactions per day, it would require 24GB > blocks every ten minutes at best

<comment><USER16> If the block size is increased, a lot more transactions will fit in a block, so transactions would get much cheaper.

And while it's a great goal to have all monetary transactions use Bitcoin, that is very very far from reality for now.

<comment><USER15> I agree. Increasing block size to 4-8 Mb is probably safe. And it would encourage more adoption. At this moment, unfortunately, confirmation times are close to unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like what your concept is a lot. I do not think a huge number of payments are going to be made using it, HOWEVER, I think this is just the beginning of a much larger movement behind micropayments for ad-free content. I've been wanting this for a very long time to read good quality articles online that are behind paywalls. I would totally pay with bitcoin, but refuse to sign up using any form of credit card.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I do not think a huge number of payments are going to be made using it

First, this is an experiment and I'll be testing different permutations of cost, copy, and invasiveness.

Curious as to why you think there won't be much volume. Could you elaborate?

> I would totally pay with bitcoin, but refuse to sign up using any form of > credit card.

This is an interesting data point. Was talking to a blogger about this project this morning and he asked why not use traditional payment methods. I presume (and hope) there might be more people out there like you than we all think.

<comment><USER17> > Curious as to why you think there won't be much volume. Could you elaborate?

My reason for this is entirely practical. By displaying a bitcoin payment address, there are at minimum an additional three or four clicks, with perhaps a copy and paste of the bitcoin address to complete a payment (this is even more difficult if the user's bitcoin wallet is on his mobile - unless a QR code is displayed). For me, it is more of a practical usability reason as opposed to the reader not wanting to donate their $0.01.

A solution I would love to use, would be to have a browser plugin with a pre loaded bitcoin balance of a few dollars and a single one click to accept a 1 cent payment to the content owner to proceed to the article.

On Bitcointalk.org, a forum dedicated to bitcoin geeks, people always leave a tip address in their signatures, look up the usage and you'll find it surprisingly low.

<comment><AUTHOR> > A solution I would love to use, would be to have a browser plugin with a pre > loaded bitcoin balance of a few dollars and a single one click to accept a 1 > cent payment to the content owner to proceed to the article.

Interesting feedback. Changetip or coinbase could likely provide a one-click button to tip content providers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This library looks good. But I wouldn't hold my breath that you will get any donations. I recently created a similar solution and the result after about a million few was nada, nilch, zero. If you now consider that by accepting donations you have to solve the EU VATmess it is not worth the effort.

<comment><USER19> Bitcoin transactions were just ruled exempt from Europe's VAT: [http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-is-exempt-from-vat-says- euro...](http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-is-exempt-from-vat-says-european- court-of-justice/)

That doesn't mean you don't have to pay the VAT just because you buy something with Bitcoin, it just means that bitcoin/dollar exchanges don't owe tax. I don't know whether VAT applies to donations.

<comment><USER18> The question is not if donations are excempt from vat, but if your tax collector will believe you that you are a non profit organisation.

<comment><USER19> So pay taxes on the income, it's still better than not having the income. If you are attempting nonprofit status, donations are less of a red flag than advertising.

But I don't see what that has to do with VAT, which you brought up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Killer App for Bitcoin :)

<comment><USER21> There are a few of these. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Big fan of changetip, which is IMHO the first implementation of cryptocurrency/micropayments that has truly taken off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really dig this idea, but would love to see two more features:

1\. Integrate with something like coinbase so that users can fund a wallet with fiat currency.

2\. Provide a feedback mechanism that shows the payments had a positive effect. For example, if a GPU review on Anandtech gets lots of tips, Anandtech could do another GPU review and publish that effect somehow.

I personally have a hard time spending money when the effect of that money disappears into a black hole. If paying a tip had some sort of feedback, I would probably do it more often.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

> 1\. Integrate with something like coinbase so that users can fund a wallet > with fiat currency.

Thats a good idea. The QR code gets us close to this implementation, but not quite all the way there.

> 2\. Provide a feedback mechanism that shows the payments had a positive > effect.

Yes, THIS. I'd very much like to include feedback into the system (author name, topic, title, etc) such that publishers know what their audience cares deeply about (paid for) vs just casually reads (pageview).

> I personally have a hard time spending money when the effect of that money > disappears into a black hole. If paying a tip had some sort of feedback, I > would probably do it more often.

Your comment reminds me a lot of tip jars I sometimes see in coffee shops in NYC. Tip in bucket A for "Star Wars', tip in bucket B for 'Star Trek'. Sort of a ruse in a way, but the staff gets more tips because they made a game of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You might also be interested in [https://github.com/kallerosenbaum/poppoc/wiki/Proof-of- Payme...](https://github.com/kallerosenbaum/poppoc/wiki/Proof-of-Payment), which will let you "login" by prooving that you made a small bitcoin transaction.

The disadvantage of this sort of microtransaction is that people may actually be willing to pay more through donation then through forced payment.

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</comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty neat, and gives me an idea that I assume someone has already made.

Do any ad blocking tools aggregate the total estimated amount of ad revenue that I've prevented across all sites that I block ads on in, say, the past month, or year?

<comment><AUTHOR> Op here.

> Do any ad blocking tools aggregate the total estimated amount of ad revenue > that I've prevented across all sites that I block ads on in, say, the past > month, or year?

I'm sure there's a programmatic way of finding that information, but one could plausibly create a tool that _guesses_ an ad spots CPM and then displays that information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks similar to what you can do with [https://satoshipay.io](https://satoshipay.io), but they allow even tiniest Bitcoin payments (down to a single Satoshi) using sidechains.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the basic problem is that people are not going to give you any money at all! Let it be bitcoin or their dollars. Or if this project works out, would be pretty interesting!

<comment><AUTHOR> Next step in the project is to gather some data to validate the project thesis. Here's how you can help if you care to be part of the experiment (not much downside as space is only used when Adblockers are on). [https://github.com/owocki/adblock-to-bitcoin#how-you-can- hel...](https://github.com/owocki/adblock-to-bitcoin#how-you-can-help)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490)

</comment><comment><USER29> This is cool, and it won't pester you about donating if you are using something like Google Contributor which is nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Would really like to gather some data about what kind of conversions this would get on a site with some scale. Thesis is that for brands that have a loyal following, we might be able to get close to PPC unit economics.

<comment><USER29> i havent used bitcoin for years, so excuse me if i'm asking stupid questions, but how many steps is it to donate from the time i see it to when the money flows?

Realistically i could only see myself doing this if it was less than 3 clicks and a grand total of about 30 seconds of time. Any more than that and i'm just not going to bother if i'm honest.

Also, this might go against what you are trying to do, but would it be possible to maybe keep a counter of how many of these "ads" were blocked (only on the client) and maybe update the suggested donation based on that?

I personally might be more willing to donate if i saw "You've blocked 384 ads on this site" or something like "you've visited this page 26 times over the last month" and an updated suggested donation to match the usage.

Ninja-edit:

And finally, is there a service that you could work with to allow easy donations via other currencies and have them auto converted to bitcoin? I don't have a bitcoin wallet any more, but if there was a button next to the donate button that took you to a 3rd party website that allowed me to pay in USD and have it converted to bitcoin and sent to the website I might contribute.

<comment><AUTHOR> > i havent used bitcoin for years, so excuse me if i'm asking stupid > questions, but how many steps is it to donate from the time i see it to when > the money flows?

There are no stupid questions, cryptocurrency is not intuitive in many ways :)

Steps on mobile: 1\. Open iPhone / Coinbase app 2\. Scan QR Code 3\. Input amount 4\. Press send

Similar process on desktop, but probably with a copy/paste code instead of QR code.

Realistically i could only see myself doing this if it was less than 3 clicks and a grand total of about 30 seconds of time.

It's definitely less than 30 seconds as long as your iPhone is across the room and/or you have coinbase.

> Also, this might go against what you are trying to do, but would it be > possible to maybe keep a counter of how many of these "ads" were blocked > (only on the client) and maybe update the suggested donation based on that?

Yes, data and testing of conversion percentages and unit economics is going to be important if this ever takes off.

> I personally might be more willing to donate if i saw "You've blocked 384 > ads on this site" or something like "you've visited this page 26 times over > the last month" and an updated suggested donation to match the usage.

That's a great idea! I'll have to add this copy to the 'to test' list!

<comment><USER30> I'd focus on how much value I've got out of the site (26 visits worth - <USER2> cow!!11!!!1!) rather than how many god awful adverts I've avoided - which is more likely to make me woot softly for adblock and move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This does not work for me. I'm using 'ghostery' to block ads though, not 'ad- block'.

<comment><USER32> Well I'm using Privacy Badger. It is not about the used technology. It's about the idea, the concept. If you don't want to see ads, you pay a small amount using bitcoins. I don't see it working unless it's forced upon you.

<comment><USER33> When I go have a beer in a bar, I often give between 0.2 and 1$ tips. Why? Because it really easy and require no effort. I would with no hesitation give 0.1$ to a interesting article if it were only one click away. I would easily give 0.5-1$ after a good episode of a TV show if I only had to do one click. Yes, that include pirated TV shows.

The problem is that there is no way to easily give a small amount of money to a content creator on its creations.

<comment><USER7> Hey teps, Cameron Schorg with a new startup called SnipBit. We are working on making a platform very similar to what you talked about. The main difference is that we would charge for the content on the front end and then offer a refund option if you didn't like the content. You should check us out at www.snipbit.io and if you would be willing, I'd would love to have a chat as we are ALWAYS doing customer discovery (email@example.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Really nice idea, might try this out for a project of mine :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please get in touch if you do. I'm @owocki on twitter and need some data to support what kind of results this gets.</comment></comment>


Black Holes, Quantum Systems, Superconductors and Planck's Constant Are Related - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/black-holes-quantum-systems-superconductors-and-plancks-constant-are-related.html <comment><USER2> The only connection to black holes that I could find is, that they use mathematics first developed for string theory [1], so it's bit tenuous to say superconductors are related to black holes. Once you read a few of these articles you start seeing the same tropes. I yearn for articles with less hype, and more honesty.

The main result of the paper seems to be Fig. 3B and Fig. 4B. The black line represents the limit set by the uncertainty principle, and they argue that all these superconductors lie right at the limit, which they call Planckian dissipation. However, I have a sense that a lot of cherry-picking data is going on. They claim this is a universal behaviour, but the paper doesn't even mention whether it applies to the most well-known and highest temperature superconductors like YBCO and HBCCO. I suspect because it doesn't. Another omission is NCCO, for which they have data for in Fig. 4A (from which Fig. 4B is calculated), but then they don't plot it in Fig. 4B. I am guessing because it again didn't match claim. I wonder how thorough the review process was, if at all.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence#Condens...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence#Condensed_matter_physics)

<comment><USER3> There is a symmetry between how quickly black holes can absorb matter/energy and scramble information and how quickly electrons in these materials can dissipate energy: Both do it as quickly as possible, with "as quickly as possible" being somehow related to h-bar.

Is it a red herring or a pointer to some deeper, heretofore unexpected relationship? That's the cool part, no one yet knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The blog post links to this much longer Atlantic article: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/planckia...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/planckian- dissipation-strange-metals-superconductors-electron-speed-limit/576484/) \-- the link probably should be changed to that instead.

<comment><USER5> And the Atlantic article is just a repackaging of the original Quanta magazine article: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/universal-quantum- phenomenon-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/universal-quantum-phenomenon- found-in-superconductors-20181119/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little hidden on the article, but source-

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0334-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0334-2)

<comment><USER7> It's not surprising that Planck's constant is important here, but this seems to have much more to do with crystallographic vacancy "holes" than anything even tenuously related to black holes or cosmology. I'm no physicist though.

> In cuprates, a perfect T-linear resistivity as T → 0 has been observed (once > superconductivity is suppressed by a magnetic field) in two closely related > electron-doped materials

This is pretty cool nonetheless.

<comment><USER5> Copying my reply to a different post:

From my understanding, they're claiming that the linear resistance-temperature curve with a slope of h-bar is evidence that the electrons are in something akin to a maximally entangled state.

Via the AdS-CFT correspondence, such a maximally entangled state is mapped to a black hole in AdS space in +1 dimensions.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks!

edit: do you think Legros et al. agree with that interpretation, or is the Quanta magazine -> Atlantic -> nextbigfuture article just using the Legros paper as an excuse to bring up the "holographic duality" views of Hartnoll and Sachdev?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "There appears to be holographic duality that mathematically connects systems of scrambled quantum particles, like those in strange metals, to imaginary black holes in one higher dimension."

Sounds like taken straight of a Sci-Fi movie.

</comment><comment><USER9> anyone with a physics degree able to weigh in? could this be used to narrow the search for high temperature superconducting materials?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps unification of QM and general relativity?

<comment><USER11> It did get me thinking about the 'cool horizons' paper again - [https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0533](https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0533)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Schwartzchild Proton</comment>


CIA using Skype in Homeland - <AUTHOR> http://brandsandfilms.com/2012/10/cia-using-skype-in-homeland/

<comment><USER2> What's wrong with skype? Isn't it encrypted P2P? Naive question I'm sure.</comment>


Flightplan – a Node.js library for streamlining deployments and sysadmin tasks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pstadler/flightplan <comment><USER2> Thanks for building this! I've think about this each time I modify my deployment shell scripts. I kept starting to work on something and just stalled out and went back to the scripts.

I even love your name and cmd `fly` :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It uses fibers which is nice.My favorite nodejs library,less ugly than generators.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this a joke?

</comment><comment><USER5> awesome job on the dsl :-D

<comment><USER6> I can't guess if you are trying to be sarcastic. But I would be. The DSL is over-the-top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I'm planning to add "with a dead serious DSL" to the introduction text.

<comment><USER6> That would do it for me :)

 _edit:_ I actually think this is an interesting topic. I like the way one usually tries to find a theme that fits the actions the program takes. But it could just as well have been called 'deploy' with 'local', 'remote' and 'setup'. Most administrators would instantly know what is going to happen without having a dictionary lying around.

If you really want to make it dead serious rename 'host' to 'terminal' and 'user' to 'passenger'. And stuff like that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists may have discovered the first planets outside the Milky Way - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/05/scientists-discover-the-first-planets-outside-the-milky-way/?hpid=hp_rhp-moretopstories2_sos-newplanets-6pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> _Dai estimated the distant galaxies contain 2,000 planets for every star. That means trillions of planets probably reside there, he said, consistent with the ratio of free-floating planets found in the Milky Way, which contains billions of planets._

Huh. Sometimes it creeps on my mind how big the universe is and that everything is meaningless, on large scale. How we are controlled by such mundane things and neural pathways that follow some useless pattern but are too strong for us to change by our own.

Oh well, guess I should get back to my drudgery.

</comment><comment><USER3> A look at the original paper ([http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb)) tells us that they found "frequent Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the gravitationally lensed quasar RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or 3.8 billion lt-yr away."

Going from 'line energy shifts' to 'DISCOVERED PLANETS in ANOTHER GALAXY!!' is way too big of a leap. This is click-bait science writing.

Getting people interested in good science is great, but slathering it in gooey layers of sugary crap will eventually lead to people tuning out of anything that doesn't SCREAM.</comment>