Ask HN: What's your way of saving/recollecting important career notes? - <AUTHOR> I read a good amount of articles every day and whenever I find something useful I note them down digitally. Once a week I go over my notes and filter out the ones I want to retain and look back after a while (let's call them 'important-notes'). My 'important-notes' are filled with 'mistakes-not-to-repeat', 'career-advice', 'motivational-stuff', 'quotes', 'things-experience-taught-me' and so on.
When I am starting out on new things (like learning a new framework), or just lacking motivation, or looking to improve productivity I go back to my 'important-notes' and read them over.
This has been super helpful for me. I can give a bunch of reasons as to why it's helpful but they all boil down to this: It helps me avoid repeating mistakes, and to avoid stupidity.
In theory, it's perfect but I do not execute it well. I do not go back to them every week to filter. I do not read the 'important-notes' often. A lot of times I still make mistakes which I should not because I have clearly written about those in 'important-notes'.
Anyone else in similar situation? Do you take notes that you want to go back and read? If yes, what's your model to deal with this? Any tools that you found helpful? Any better solution to the whole idea of 'important-notes' and going back to them? <comment><USER3> This might be off-base, but i think your problem is not about storing information, more about keeping all that info in your mind so you can apply it. I tend to have an itch to catalogue and store information, but it quickly reveals that the constraint is time and what I can keep in my head rather than the info i have squirreled away somewhere.

The key is to understand that organizing/filtering the relevant info is a separate task from cataloguing. I spend a little time every week doing that.

Tools -

[https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/) \- hierarchial lists, very useful! to keep track of important todos/things to remember in the week.

ultra.work/lights-generator (thats a URL) - to track habits that i want to do every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. I do not have problem storing information. I use workflowy already.

Thanks for sharing lights-generator. Checking it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd recommend looking into Standard Notes. Cross-platform, and mobile. I really like it.

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

<comment><USER5> Looks great. I wonder how it compares with Evernote. It looks lighter, which is nice.

<comment><USER4> It definitely doesn't have all the whistles and bells of Evernote, but maybe all the OCR and stuff isn't what you're after?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do almost the same thing with pocket and GitHub. I use Pocket to save articles. I slack in tagging them but sometimes sit down and tag all the untagged items at once. About going back, I have recently started taking notes from them in a Github readme so that I can just go back to the readme and find the appropriate one to see. I have only recently started doing this as the number of saved articles have become overwhelming.

It works out well, if not perfect. Usually, articles are not to be re-read completely, only the important parts or the gist is enough.

[https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes](https://github.com/m2n037/learning_notes)

Please let me know what are your thoughts regarding this. May be we will both find a better way to deal with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is similar to what I do, save brief notes about important stuff. I hardly save links. Mostly it's a line or 2 from the link that I save.

<comment><USER6> You can always put the link along with the lines so that you can still access it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most articles are saved to pocket. If I really like it, you can "favorite it". When I'm bored from time to time, I'll scroll through what I've favorited. A good chunk of the time I'll prune stuff I no longer appreciate.

If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A.

Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of SSDs as cheap memory, not expensive disk" \- This was from an article from High Scalability about Reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have always looked at pocket like 'read it later' (it's previous name as well). Save -> read -> archive.

However, looks like a lot of people use it like a bookmarking tool.

and thanks for sharing your flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Filters and labels in Gmail.

Any email I send to myself is automatically marked as read... then based on what's in the subject line a label is automatically applied. For example, if I have an idea for a design I send an email with a subject of "Design - <USER2> blah" and whatever text in the body. The filter I set up in Gmail looks for the word "Design" in the subject, marks it as read so I don't get notified of a new email, and then applies the Design label. From there, I usually start an email thread on that subject line as I have more ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome.

But it should soon become overwhelming if you have a lot of content coming in. If you want to have a glance at all your saved quotes, let's say, you have to expand into each mail to read them even if they are just 2-3 lines.

I can see how this works nicely for half-baked ideas in mind. You can simple reply to the thread each time you have more points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use DevonThink for full text indexing of PDF, web links, docs, RSS feeds, etc as part of a local knowledge base. Syncs to mobile as well, so I have access to key info when traveling. I organize content into logical groups for various projects or research areas.

[http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonth...](http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonthink- pro.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody think it would be a good idea to use AI to automate reminders of the information when it becomes relevant? How would something like that be implemented?

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I keep a digital commonplace book —

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

In practice, this ends up being a huge markdown file (so I can store readable code) with entries prefixed by tags to make for easier searching.

</comment><comment> m-s-sripati I use tagging heavily with any note taking application (like One Note / evernote). I use voice recorder to record any useful ideas / lessons that my subconscious brain tells me. I then push it to my note taking application with appropriate tag and push it to my cloud drive. I review them once in a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am assuming you will not review them all but only the important ones. So you probably have a tag called 'important'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Take a spring cleaning day every quarter. Review notes, think, use mind maps or outlines to distill whatever you are thinking of.</comment>


Dissertations on His Dudeness... (Big Lebowski) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/books/30lebowski.html

<comment><AUTHOR> After all the talk about what hacker news really is, I hesitated to post this. But, I really enjoyed the article so I figured that's at least one hacker who thinks this is interesting news, and maybe one is enough. So enjoy, or not!

<comment><USER2> I thought the NYT article wasn't very interesting, so I won't upvote the OP, but I must point out that I'm part of the Lebowski cult and I appreciate the intend in posting this.

<comment><USER3> Same. But if anyone wants to see more Dude-oriented information, here's a good starting point: <http://dudeism.com/> Follow the `links` section to find everything from bowling Jesus action figures to quite serious texts on Buddhism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Totally pwned by the money quote:

 _He and his co-editor "immediately cut out all the papers celebrating the Dude as a hippie hero in a postmodern landscape." That's a sober choice. Admirers of the Dude are already dangerously close to becoming Internet-age versions of Parrotheads, the weekend-warrior Jimmy Buffett fans who tip back margaritas -- and embarrass their children -- while wearing flip-flops, board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras._</comment>


Ask HN: Handy B2B SaaS Development Resources? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> <none>

<comment><USER3> Some gems in here I hadn't seen before. Thanks for sharing</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Full remote position requirements? - <AUTHOR> I've heard that in general only mid-to-senior level developers are entrusted with full remote positions (or at least 80% or so). Do you find it true in your environment?<p>The term mid-to-senior level can means different things in different countries. I understand that 3 years of experience is the minimum for a mid level and 5 for a senior one. I can be wrong, thought. <comment><USER2> From my experience, everything depends on company policy and direct line manager.

In my previous job even I had few years of experiences and positive job results I was allowed to have home-office only 7 days per month (company policy). Now, in my current company I am working in full time home-office mode.

I my current position is delivery divided 60 % is internal customer, 40 % is external customer. My presence at meeting is not required. I can report what i did to manager and other co-workers are not interested in my job/issues. Everything can be solved via phone/skype for business or email.

In my previous job was 100 % external customer. But we were required to be presented at long and boring meetings where discussion was focused on customer side (business, technical issues) and internal side (process, benefits, vacations, co-worker issues and other never-ending stories).

In total I have various IT skill gathered during last 9 years. Hard to say if skill-set or years of experiences are important to get into full remote position (probably not). I observed that good relationship with managers, do your job with great results and communicate properly is enough. Managers are especially sensitive to proper communication about progress and possible delays. They need report to higher places so if they have info what do you do, how it goes and have something to talk about they don't bother if you here or there. But it still depends on certain line manager. Colleague of mine had manager who was very sensitive to coming 8:05 to office and leaving 16:29.</comment>


Game industry vet draws ire from developers for defense of 80-hour workweeks - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/18/11452564/would-you-want-to-work-for-this-guy <comment><USER2> Alex St John glorifies the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words, describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference [1]:

"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman "orgy" and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with."

"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a "senator" or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a "specimen", if the audience wouldn't pay the price the slave would be "thrown to the lions". We had configured a "pit" full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the "victim" was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party."

[1] [http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate- pt-2/](http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/)</comment>


Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@suzhinton/lessons-from-my-first-year-of-live-coding-on-twitch-41a32e2f41c1 <comment><USER3> I've streamed myself programming on Twitch, and can echo some additional knowledge in addition to what's shared in the article:

Don't expect anyone from Twitch to randomly discover your stream and have any idea what you're doing. Programming anything that isn't a video game on Twitch will be totally unfamiliar to their primary demographics. That said, use Twitter or something else to BRING YOUR OWN AUDIENCE. Be prepared to stream for a few hours or else you will likely never build up traction in your chat.

As this post says, vocalizing your stream of consciousness is vital; think of it like pair programming with the chat. I try to engage the chat without getting totally nerd sniped and ending up off topic.

I think the best way to really kick the tires on Twitch programming content would be to stream podcasts and/or have a joint channel of shared programming content and have many different programmers participating either via a shared account or Twitch Teams[0].

[0]: [https://twitchtips.com/twitch-teams/](https://twitchtips.com/twitch- teams/)

<comment><USER4> > a joint channel of shared programming content and have many different > programmers participating

I like that idea a lot -- have been wanting to team up with other devs on live twitch projects. If anyone is interested in getting this set up be sure to PM me -- I have 14 years of dev experience in a plethora of languages:

\- Python \- C# \- Ruby \- PHP \- Javascript (front and backend) \- HTML / CSS

<comment><USER5> I would be interested in joining! I'm working on (among some other things) a compiler right now that could be fun to live stream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So my kids watch people streaming non-stop. At first I had no opinion. Then it seemed like they did it way too much and I fought it. Then I started paying attention and found it interesting as well. For them it's gaming, game discovery, and seeing personalities they enjoy regularly.

Something like this... I would really enjoy. Bookmarking this page so I can have a look at all your streams. I would like to do this myself. It would be interesting to be able to share exactly what it is that I try to get done on a daily basis. It would be useful to show my colleagues and management interests. I don't know how much they would pay attention, but even being able to point back to a video at a specific time to share something would be useful.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solo office, so figuring out a regular location to stream from will be a challenge, but that's neither here nor there. I can do it from home a few times without bothering anyone to figure out all the logistics before I actually try to do anything real.

<comment><USER7> I wanted to see what imaqtpie's hype was all about and he ended up being my morning coffee routine. That man is wholesome.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious. Please, what's so "wholesome" about him?

I like him, he's fine. But I'm curious what converted you to stream-watching in him.

<comment><USER7> Few reasons off the top of my head:

He works incredibly hard, is one of the best LoL players on the planet, he loves his cat (SMOL CAT WHAT YOU WANT!?) & gf, I enjoy his wit, love when he reads his new subscribers list, and so forth.

I like his personality, plain and simple. Couldn't care less about league of legends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> wow, author here. I didn't post this to Hacker News (I didn't even have an account on here until 30 seconds ago), but thanks for the thoughtful comments everyone! Is it weird if I address some of the questions in here or is that odd etiquette? :)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for writing the article! It was really helpful for me.

One technical question: How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available for this?

I was doing JS development using OBS and couldn't find a good way to make the IDE show when it had focus and make the Browser automatically show when it has focus. So I was frequently showing the wrong window to my viewers.

<comment><USER9> > How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to > look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available > for this?

I keep things as lazy as possible, and just stream my entire desktop (with slight crop) instead of a specific window. I have my browser window lined up and positioned on the left so the webcam doesn't cover up anything. I then can just CMD-tab to it quickly.

The benefit of this is that folks also see your development flow in a more realistic way, as switching scenes can look slick but departs from how you normally work.

<comment><USER11> Forgive my focusing on the unimportant things, but: what's the slight crop for?

<comment><USER9> Sorry that probably sounded confusing - I was being pedantic in my description. In the article I explain that I want private areas on my desktop for watching chat and alert activity hence the crop of my desktop :)

<comment><USER11> Oh yeah I see that now. I was thinking that was all done in the scene devoted to privacy but that makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if you could include all keystrokes like Ctrl-x in the screencast, maybe even a timeline of the keystrokes; I imagined it to be "running" along the screen like in Guitar hero. Nevertheless this is a great effort in distributing latent/implicit knowledge, which I think coding to be heavy on; for example, how would a terminal user know that Ctrl-R is reverse-search? (don't get me started on finding out about going back to a _previous_ match...) I remember how I found out about Tab by accident... While being ignorant of these epistemes are not barriers, they do slow down/kills joy.

<comment><USER13> Most people who create Blender (a 3D graphics app) video tutorials use an addon that includes the keys they are typing on the screen. It is very useful, and would be interesting especially for emacs or Vim users who use a lot of bindings.

<comment><USER14> I made a Twitter account called @emacs_gifs a while back and used a modified version of KeyCastr (on Osx.) to display keystrokes...

Results were quite acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I started streaming a few months back and I absolutely love it.

Some solid tips on here and OBS is a surprisingly good piece of software but it can be a resource hog at times.

The hardest thing about it is to keep the schedule and be emotionally available when the stream comes on. I wrote about it here [1].

What I like the most is working through a project in stages on the stream. People can connect with the project and also contribute to it. Working on one- offs tutorial style did not really work for me.

I stream full stack content. From Node.js to Golang and even Devops. [2]

The screen to not show the desktop when doing secret things is good, however, as mentioned here I would definitely recommend a second screen. It changes the way you work a lot.

[1] [https://fullstack.network/announcing-my-most-ambitious- strea...](https://fullstack.network/announcing-my-most-ambitious-streaming- project-yet-4813a1b79cce)

[2] [https://www.twitch.tv/kensodev](https://www.twitch.tv/kensodev)

<comment><USER16> _> Some solid tips on here and OBS is a surprisingly good piece of software but it can be a resource hog at times._

"Hog" implies bloat to me? Video's _hard work_ , though, and OBS will chew a CPU but it really needs to (unless you use a GPU encoding solution like NVENC, but there are quality concerns there). I have a second PC--actually a pretty nice 4U rackmount in a 6U wheelie with my audio interface--dedicated to video crunching and audio mixing for when I do livestreaming events for folks.

<comment><USER15> I use a 2017 iMac 5K with 32G memory and quad core and OBS is absolutely a lightweight for this one.

Before, I was using a 2015 MBP and it was having a VERY hard time handling the streaming at 1080P (mind you I was running 2 screens off of it).

I am not sure it's a hog because of bloat, it's just that you need a more than average computer to stream with good quality.

Funny story is that once I clicked stop on the stream and it kept streaming. Showing me having a phone call, going on Facebook and just continuing with my day. I had to just shut down my computer because OBS would just not stop.

On the new iMac I had absolutely zero issues with it and I am running it with 2 screens and 5K on the main screen.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough. I also run an NDI sync, a browser overlay, and a _bunch_ of cameras, which probably adds to the load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a game developer on twitch that uses his VODs (video replays) as a versioning system as he doesn't use anything. "Wait, what and why did I do this? Lemme look at yesterday's vod".

It suprisingly works quite well and is more entertaining for the viewers to see what and how bugs get introduced.

<comment><USER18> Sorry are there actually developers who don't use VCSs in 2017?

<comment><USER19> Yup. And it horrifies me every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have live streamed some stuff before when coding, and I must say most of the people who come into a channel doing coding are really nice people who ask really insightful question, or offer good solutions. It's like Mob Programming with the internet (or as the author here says an "MMOPP"), and it also makes me a better programmer because before I even think about writing any code I'm thinking about how it will be perceived by someone else peering over my shoulder (akin to the pro arguments for TDD).

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice writeup. I think the people who are good at twitch streaming are charismatic and/or funny. Being entertaining is awesome, but isn't necessarily the same as being good at reasoning through problems or engineering good software.

As a watcher of such streams, be they game session I wonder how people don't see something and go crazy because they can't actively participate - <USER2> author does mention that some people will have contributed pull requests by the end of the session. :)

<comment><USER22> I suppose that makes the twitch stream an important learning experience for both parties. You can participate in the chat and make suggestions, ask questions. If you are driven mad by someone doing something differently or making a mistake well then it might be healthy to try and overcome that.

<comment><USER9> this is a great answer. I have had viewers come in and become _very upset_ that I'm writing javascript in ES5 (usually this is because I'm maintaining a library I wrote many years ago). I have a chat macro to explain why I'm not upgrading the library to ES2015/2017 and hope folks can stay pragmatic and respectful. Besides, I welcome pull requests ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hey! I do this too on twitch.

I mostly stream myself doing algorithms though. Basically I do the Google Style interview questions, and almost run my stream like I am doing an actual interview.

[https://www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos/all](https://www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos/all)

The reality of the livecoding scene is that most "real life" coding is actually pretty boring to watch.

In order to be actually interesting, you have to be talking and explaining what you are doing the entire time. I am glad that other people out there are having success!

<comment><USER24> Watched your most recent algorithm video. Good quality stream!

P.S.: Sieve rhymes with live, as in "I live in California." :)

<comment><USER25> But sieve also doesn't rhyme with live, as in "Live from California".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I want to do this but I'm afraid of two things:

1\. Show how horrible my code is.

2\. Accidentally leaking sensitive stuff.

<comment><USER15> 1\. Stop 2\. Just use a part of your screen that is off the recording. Never open `.` files on the stream. Never login on the screen, always off of the screen. If you are showing AWS cli console stuff, make sure you hide the public IPs and public DNS of things.

<comment><USER26> 2 is related to 1 - there are credentials hard coded all over the place.

<comment><USER27> Clean up your code before you start.

Maybe this exercise will make you a better programmer.

<comment><USER4> I do this sometimes -- however I also think that cleaning code on stream is even more beneficial. Teaches you to code under pressure and scrutinize your code more-so than when you're alone sometimes. Also its fun for people to see how to reduce 30 lines to 5 etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is an interesting topic to me, as I'm giving a talk with some coding in two weeks and a major concern of mine has been making sure that what I'm doing is interesting and more importantly followable. Normal coding for me just is a flurry of vim activity.

Questions for anyone who does this or views these sorts of streams:

Do you find that people can follow what's happening in vim well enough? I've considered just using plain VSCode because I'm concerned jumping around too much as I do normally might be hard to follow.

Do you feel that this might be good interview practice as well, since the process of explaining code as we write it doesn't come naturally to some of us?

Any additional tips to make sure what I'm doing is comprehensible would be appreciated.

<comment><USER15> Talk!

Just talk your mouth off, seriously. It's the best tip I can give you to make it interactive.

You gonna open a file and do something, say it, don't just do it. When you are thinking of a problem, ask for suggestions from the crowd/viewers...

Also, ProTip. Vim is a problem if you navigate really quickly along splits (like you should), people lose focus and will just stop following.

I switched to Atom for my last stream (I hate every minute of it) but it slows me down enough so people can follow better.

Hope this helps

<comment><USER29> Huh, that's very good advice. I would never have thought about slowing myself down, but now that you mentioned it, it makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER30> Just act like you're sitting next to a new coworker, teaching them what you're doing.

<comment><USER15> Act like you're voice controlling your fingers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you are programming, especially in a live studio environment, you should really invest into multiple monitors.

<comment><USER32> if you're trying to present to viewers, two monitors will make keeping them focused into a ridiculous chore.

That is like telling a speaker to prepare two slide decks and switch between them during the talk.

<comment><USER33> Using a second monitor for live streaming is more useful for things useful to the streamer but which do not need to be shown on screen to readers (e.g. frantic Stack Overflow research when the code breaks, or analytics as the article mentions).

<comment><USER34> While it may not work for everyone, Casey Muratori (of the Handmade Hero referenced in the article) shows pretty much his whole desktop, including the times he is looking up documentation. Granted, he's not searching SO, but actual API documentation for Windows OpenGL or CPU instructions, he goes through his whole thought process including the time and effort it takes to understand and interpret documentation.

Then again, he also doesn't interact with chat at all while programming and only looks back at the end and answers questions afterward. So he breaks a few pieces of advice others might say are essential for a stream.

<comment><USER9> I think showing your process is really important and helpful to those watching your stream. I always show what I'm looking up in my browser. Folks at home are really great at helping me read it, as I'm often talking while trying to skim the docs quickly - not a good combination!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm really inarticulate, so my biggest fear would be people not able to understand what I'm saying...

<comment><USER36> Then live coding might be a way to improve that skill and get over your fear! Nothing feels quite like facing a fear head on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Very interesting, however as comfortable as I am after 20+ years with some degree of coding in front of others (pair programming, fixing something with the boss breathing down my neck) I couldn't imagine doing this as strangers watch on; it's, at least for me, sharing a too intimate or personal experience. I also have a long-standing habit of using four-letter comments as attention-grabbing and transitory 'to-do' markers, which would likely be in breach of any kind of streaming service's TOS.

<comment><USER38> There's lots of bad language on twitch. Racial slurs are not acceptable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Been learning the serverless framework and found a couple of videos on YouTube from people live coding on Twitch.tv.

I'm not a gamer and would have never thought to look on there for tutorials. Their search isn't very good and I've found YouTube is the best place to find out who is using Twitch. There are guys with a thousand followers who don't show up on search! Still a very valuable outlet that I bet most coders don't know about.

</comment><comment><USER4> i do this a lot at twitch.tv/mdmnk (less so recently due to losing a job and moving to a new state, then getting a new job and once again moving to a new state).

It was stressful at first... had to deal with trolls (and also about 80% sure hackers that were trying to get me to root my system live). After I got the hang of it all though it became a lot of fun.

I stream game development which is a hobby of mine (software engineer for the interwebs by day). Being that it is a hobby I am still learning. I've been able to make some internet friends, pick up techniques and learn more about C# thanks to twitch streaming. One day I would absolutely love to transition to full-time independent game development and do it all live on Twitch.

Another thing to note - although I have 14 years of professional experience, I used to get nervous coding in front of people, thanks to streaming on Twitch that went away -- I'm no longer afraid to fail or mistype. My overall confidence has improved. I strongly recommend live coding.

edit: I've also gotten MUCH better at talking through my code because to maintain an audience on twitch you have to talk and explain what you're doing almost the entire time.

<comment><USER40> I haven't tried but it seems like a good way to linearize my thought process at times and give myself some form of accountability to prevent getting distracted as often.

However, I'd be worried about accidentally revealing a system password or credentials by accident.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Suggestion: include a link to your twitch channel, in the first paragraph of this blog post.

It's good advertisement, and it lets people have a look at the results of your streaming. For all we know, your stream could be great, good, bad or not at all. We don't know.

Without that information, it is hard to know what to make of the rest of the blog post.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the advice! I went ahead and did just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It would appear that the author is trying to post as noopkat and has been declared dead (new account?)

<comment><USER43> New accounts that post a lot right away sometimes get their comments killed automatically, yeah.

You can vouch for a comment to resurrect it by clicking on the "2 hours ago" or whatever (to get to the comment's page), then clicking "vouch". (Vouching requires 30 karma, according to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326108) .)

<comment><USER9> thanks to those for resurrecting me! I'm new around here :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I started the twitch.tv/aws stream and we've seen some success. I like these tips!

One issue I have is the balance between high quality broadcasts that don't have the opportunity for frequent audience input - or lower quality broadcasts that are more interactive.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thanks for this — I've been thinking about doing the same thing and this is super helpful.

</comment><comment><USER46> liveedu.tv (formerly LiveCoding) has a coding audience orders of magnitude larger than that on Twitch at this moment.

<comment><USER23> I don't think this is really true.

Right now there are 300 live viewers watching people in twitch Game Dev.

And going to the website of liveedu.... well it is aweful hard to find a list of live streams ordered by number of currently active viewers. It almost seems like they are trying to hide the number of active viewers, perhaps because they are so low.

The closest thing that I found to a list of active live streamers shows me that there are 2 streams running right now, with a total of 15 users watch.

<comment><USER47> It could have changed within the hour, especially if - as others said - it's a morning routine thing. In that case almost all users/streams could stop across a one hour period.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's Encrypt Everything - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/lets-encrypt-everything/ <comment><USER2> > But post Snowden, and particularly after the result of the last election > here in the US, it's clear that everything on the web should be encrypted by > default.

I agree, however, https only barely protects against this, as state actors can easily get a hold of a root cert. You need key pinning if you really want to stop a state from reading your plain text traffic, and even then, traffic analysis and metadata are often enough for them.

<comment><USER3> Some countries are pretty straight forward about this. See Kazakhstan: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232689](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232689)</comment></comment>


Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51233444 <comment><USER2> _> Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed._

Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.

<comment><USER3> baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth before thinking of space exploration.

<comment><USER4> I think space colonization is an even bigger fantasy than relying on "future tech" that will magically terraform the earth and reverse climate change. We can have a tiny structure housing 10 or 20 people somewhere in our solar system for the price of millions of pounds of fuel and billions of dollars.

Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about what we don't know now than we did then

<comment><USER5> Nevermind the hocus pocus, and I agree as far as "travel", but all that's really needed for (fairly dystopian attempts at) space colonization is surely artificial wombs?

Which aren't far off.

We don't need to break the laws of physics, or have cryonics or singularity shit work out to eventually consume the universe. All the nodes will just be real isolated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm amazed that the industry is still propagating the mistake made in the early nuclear age of using PWR and solid fuel. The more I read about nuclear the more convinced I become that SMRs for next gen plants are safest and most efficient using the Thorium-U233 fuel cycle and employing molten salt to transfer heat. It's automatically safe since if a runaway reaction takes place the fuel will drain into a tank and reactions will stop. This happens if no action is taken so all the humans at the plant and all the machinery could be incapacitated and a meltdown automatically stops. It uses a cheaper fuel of which we have a virtually endless supply of and enrichment is not needed as it is with U238-U235. There's less waste as well and it's less problematic waste (decaying in hundreds of years instead of millions). Operationally it's easier to load up fuel and wastes are easier to remove. Is it just "this is how we always do these things" or is there something else going on here?

<comment><USER7> Plumbing is a problem for hot radioactive molten salt. It's one of the few things that will erode ordinary stainless steel.

<comment><USER8> Does titanium hold up to radioactive molten salt?

There are a bunch of places I've found where the difficulty (and therefore cost) of working with titanium is really holding humanity back. If we could find cheaper techniques for working with titanium it would revolutionize a lot of industries, as it's plentiful, light, strong, non-reactive, and melts at high temperatures. But the same attributes that make it hold up under the stresses of use, make it very hard to shape.

<comment><USER9> A _radioactive_ fluoride salt might just be one of the most corrosive substances on the planet. Titanium might hold up a little longer but not by much.

Any material that can resist the corrosion will be bombarded by neutrons until it is transmuted into another material that can't, even with "slow" neutrons.

<comment><USER8> Okay, what's the solution?

The Wikipedia article[1] says, "A 2011 MIT study concluded that although _there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle_ , with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits." What did they know at MIT in 2011 that we don't? Or were they just wrong?

If really no material will work for this, I can only imagine some sort of mag- lev design that keeps the molten salt out of contact with other materials, but that seems kind of far-fetched.

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

<comment><USER10> _"I can only imagine some sort of mag-lev design that keeps the molten salt out of contact with other materials"_

If you were to build that, how would you transfer the heat out of the molten salt?

<comment><USER8> I have no idea! Like I said, farfetched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's missing is a $/kwh quote. It's important because renewables are the cheapest option on the market right now and nowhere near done dropping further in price.

If the last ten years are any indication, an order of magnitude further drop in prices before the end of the decade is not unreasonable considering mass production of batteries, solar, and wind is still ramping up and considering the enormous amount of R&D currently being spent on reducing cost and increasing efficiencies further.

In the UK it's going to be hard to compete with wind (Scotland exports more of that than its total energy consumption already) and people installing solar panels on their roof and putting batteries in their house and cars (which can power a house for several days).

<comment><USER12> No, renewable are incredibly expensive, on the contrary. Why is that? Because renewable produce when wind blows or sun shines, and not when we need power. That's the first point, we need to produce exactly as much energy as we consume, at any time. Renewables fail utterly at that, and that's why renewable energy appears so cheap when you simply consider the price at which it's sold on the markets: production occurs at random times when it isn't needed, pushing market prices down in the toilet. But that's an undesirable side-effect, and not a good thing.

Renewable produces only a fraction of their nominal output (typically 15-20%), and at random times. So typically a huge, sprawling 12km2 900MW solar plant produces a small amount of power during the year, in the best case (in the desert) 1.4TWh, while a 900MW nuclear reactor produces typically (actual numbers) 6.5TWh every year.

You also need to complement renewable production with an equivalent amount of steerable power (usually natural gas), or a large amount of batteries which multiplies the price by 5, 10 or more. So you can't consider the renewable price alone; you must take into account the price of the substitute power source, too... And its environmental price!

So renewable energy is cheap because it isn't worth much. It puts extra pressure on the grid, it forces nuclear plant to run at reduced capacity, which reduces the yield, and artificially lowers their profitability for no good reason at all.

In fact, renewables, by reducing profitability of nuclear power, has another very undesirable side-effect: making nuclear power companies cut corners on safety to save money.

Renewable power is better than coal; but it isn't, by large, as good as nuclear.

<comment><USER13> Do you have any sources for your claim of batteries multiplying the cost for renewables by "5, 10 or more" in a realistic grid scenario? Did you take into account that most energy storage is done with hydro, not batteries?

I haven't had time to carefully review the literature, but there seem to be quite a few papers that claim that storage for a 100% renewable grid would not be such a big issue.

<comment><USER12> Basically renewables produce 15-20% of the time (30 to 40% for offshore wind). Let's be generous and start with 30% of the time. You need storage to provide 70% of the demand. So for every GWh or required power, you need 700MWh of storage. The famed Tesla Mega battery is a puny 129MWh...

You must account for the fact that there could be no sun or no wind for several days, therefore be able to store incredible amounts of power, far beyond the scale we know of.Then the sheer space required for renewable power is staggering. As I said, the biggest solar plants are 600MW to 1GW and occupy tens of square km. Now imagine supplying 10s of GW this way.

As someone joked on twitter, if you covered the whole Fukushima exclusion zone (250 km2 or so)with solar panels, it wouldn't come close to the Daishi nuclear plant annual power output.

For a detailed discussion on these matters, see [https://jancovici.com/en/energy- transition/renewables/100-re...](https://jancovici.com/en/energy- transition/renewables/100-renewable-electricity-at-no-extra-cost-a-piece-of- cake/)

<comment><USER13> Your calculation does not make much sense (GWh isn't even a unit of power). One would have to look at actual power production and consumption curves in order to estimate the required storage capacity. Battery storage is still very exotic, pretty much the entire capacity is provided by hydro nowadays.

Current-gen solar panels average about 30 W/m² over the year in Japan's latitude and climate. So a solar park the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone would produce around 7 GW on average which is more than the combined nameplate capacity of the six reactors (5.3 GW). Supplying the entire country with electricity (~114 GW) would require about 3800 km² of solar panels, or about 1% of Japan's area.

<comment><USER12> GWh _is_ the most relevant unit: the quantity of energy we need around the year. GW of nominal output is relevant for nuclear or fire-based power that can produce 24h/24 365d/year, but completely irrelevant for wind and solar that provide power only part time.

A 1GW solar plant outs 1GW once every sunny day, at noon. The rest of the day, it produces less, and nothing at all 12 hours a day. A 1GW solar plant roughly produces 3GWh a day. OTOH, a 1GW nuclear plant produces _on a yearly average_ 800MWh every hour, every day and night. So at the end of the year your 1GW solar plant produced a grand total of 1100GWh, while your 1GW nuclear (or coal-fired, or gas-fired) power plant produced 7000GWh.

Plus your solar panel will provide energy mostly around noon, need it or not. While the nuclear (or gas, or coal) plant will provide power _exactly when you need it_.

Wind is even worse than solar, because production yield isn't even particularly predictable. So when wind blows, electricity goes into the grid without any consideration for the need for it. That's why its price drops to negative at times: _because we don 't need it_. That's not because wind is wonderfully efficient or something. It's because building wind farms is a fantastic misallocation of resources. We're literally spending money for electricity worth almost nothing, and it won't ever recoup its costs.

That's why Germany, after having dumped 300 billions euros on wind farms in 20 years, stop building them altogether in 2018. At some point some accountant did the math.

<comment><USER13> It is completely obvious that renewables require significantly more storage capacity than other power sources. However, a lot of experts seem to believe that this is not nearly as big of an issue as you are implying.

As for wind energy, you are completely wrong. In 2019 25% of Germany's electricity was generated by wind (compared to 13% nuclear). This has significantly reduced the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

The main reason for halting construction is that conservative politicians have passed idiotic NIMBY regulations that now make it very difficult to build new on-shore wind farms. Somehow they even managed to convince a signify fraction of the population that wind turbines are somehow dangerous (probably the same fraction that believes in electro-smog).

<comment><USER12> If Germany had invested 300 billions in nuclear instead of wind, they would have 0 emissions electric power right now.

It makes relative sense in Germany because they still rely a lot on coal for power generation. If they hadn't stopped nuclear power in its tracks, they would have achieved a much bigger reduction of their emissions, too.

If you take the example of Spain you can easily see that they fired up 1GW of gas plant for every GW of wind farm. Because some days there isn't any wind. You can't lower your emissions to zero with wind and solar.

Europe has very little room left for hydro storage. Most dams that could be built have been built long ago. That drastically limit the efficiency of more wind and more solar power. Nuclear, on the other hand, doesn't need much backup. In fact in France it needs less than 2% of backup (EDF has the know- how to modulate power very accurately to match consumption entirely on nuclear power) so it would already be possible to do 0 emission with 95% nuclear and 5% hydro and nothing else.

Oh, look what I've found: [https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected- nuclear-poweran...](https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear- powerand-deadly-emissions-spiked/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right- rail-popular_94bea38e-f8f2-4d71-9871-01f2a8f97481_popular4-1)

<comment><USER13> I don't see any credible source for the "300 billion" claim. The official statistics list 168 billion since 2000 for all renewables combined: [https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage...](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage/entwicklung- der-verguetung-nach-dem-eeg-seit-2000/)

On the other hand, nuclear power has been subsidized with about 200 billion as well without ever producing more than one third of the electricity output: [https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-...](https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-2010.pdf)

The other elephant in the room is that nuclear energy relies on having cheap sources of Uranium available. This works fine for the almost negligible amount of nuclear energy being generated today. Scaling this up to a significant fraction of the world energy consumption would require usage of breeder reactors which nobody has been able to get to work at the required industrial scales.

<comment><USER12> Nuclear energy is capital-intensive, but not resource intensive. The cost of the plant dwarves the cost of uranium to run it. In this way, it's similar to wind.

France had 2 working breeders reactors, Phénix and SuperPhénix, and they worked at industrial scale. They were cut off for purely political reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really wanted this to be about Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited rather than Rolls-Royce Holdings plc. A nuclear-powered Rolls-Royce Phantom would be incredibly boss.

<comment><USER15> Would a nuclear powered EV _ever_ need refuelling?

<comment><USER16> I remember Toshiba having a decay-based laptop battery in development (at least 10 years ago, maybe 20). You wouldn't have to charge, ever. Now that would be something!

<comment><USER17> When I was five or so, I had a watch with a radium dial.

I read in a kid's science book that if you went to bed and waited until your eyes were adjusted to the dark, and then held the watch dial against your closed eyelid, you would be able to see the sparks as individual radium atoms decayed.

I did this, and it worked! I could see each spark!

<comment><USER18> Radium is primarily an alpha emitter. Alpha won't cross through the glass of the watch face, or even your skin. Maybe you were seeing the much more rare beta decays.

<comment><USER19> I doubt it was from the betas, they are all fairly low energy for typical radium. It was probably from the gammas produced by Ra-226. Ra-226 produces a 186 keV gamma in 3.3% of decays. Cherenkov radiation flashes in the eye are observed by patients undergoing clinical radiation therapy (see this interesting paper where this was explored and tested: [https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(19)33947-1/ful...](https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016\(19\)33947-1/fulltext) ). The test done in the paper was with much higher energy gammas, but it is feasible that the 186 keV lines could cause the same effect.

I've never observed this when working with radium, but then I don't stick it in my eye.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _" Production line mistakes may lead to generic defects that propagate throughout an entire fleet of reactors and are costly to fix," (person from University College London) warned._

Wouldn't the knowledge gained by fixing a large one-off reactor be of limited transferable value, as compared to expensive knowledge that could be used to upgrade an existing "fleet" plus improve subsequent versions?

<comment><USER21> The point is that every mistake propagated over 10 reactors has to be fixed 10 times. If you have a single reactor, you just fix it once.

<comment><USER22> That's a massive benefit. That means there 10 opportunities to optimize the process.

<comment><USER23> 10 opportunities to charge for the fix, 10 opportunities for a broke buyer to decline the fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sure why not, but let us not get carried away and think THIS is the solution to global warming. It is unproven, it will be too late, and not scale up quick enough.

By unproven I mean that the economics of it is unproven. We have no proof that SMR will be cheaper than large reactors. The article points this out as well.

By late I mean at current fast pace of development a lot of will happen with wind and solar in the 10 years it will take for this to get online.

<comment><USER25> And the US at least has a long way to go before wind/solar even come close to being the majority sources of our energy production - [https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having worked in the industry, I like seeing companies pledging to get involved with nuclear power.

However, there is a dearth of people experienced with the design and development of new reactor technology. The development pathway of building up the supply lines, understanding the complexities of the various systems, etc. is long.

I laughed at first many years ago when I saw some new reactor designs taking 10years but it turns out in a lot of cases that's optimistic.

It's a shame, because development in the mid 20th century was a LOT faster. And the people involved moved from one new reactor design to the next, bringing valuable experience.

Much of the work force entering this industry are entirely green and need an understanding of existing reactor technologies and why some designs were made a certain way before trying to reinvent them. Looking at the development in Russia and India could be very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Personally I'm all for having mini reactors if it means we can generate reliable energy with minimal pollution. Anything that helps reduce emissions should be considered.

But this would need to be a fail save type of reactor and with a clear plan(s) all the way down to how the waste is handled till it's no longer active.

<comment><USER28> TerraPower [1] seem to have a good alternative with its Traveling Wave Reactor. It can be run on nuclear waste we already have and provide energy to 10bln people with US per capita power consumption for basically eternity.

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

<comment><USER29> Always be wary of grandiose claims like this that amount as much to facts as to marketing material.

<comment><USER30> These are well-known properties of any fast reactor, like Terrapower's.

Only about one percent of high-level nuclear waste is fission products, the broken-apart atoms left after fission. The rest is U238, unused U235, plutonium, and other transuranics produced by absorbing neutrons without fissioning. Fast reactors can fission all of these. That's why they can run on nuclear waste.

For the same reason, they can get over a hundred times as much energy from the same amount of uranium ore. Conventional reactors can only use the U235, which is 0.7% of natural uranium.

That's a great start, but with such efficient use, it's practical to get the uranium from seawater. We can do that now at five times the cost of mining; if we only need 1% as much uranium, then total fuel cost would be 5% as much as nuclear reactors spend on fuel today. Fast reactors fueled from seawater would last for millions of years.

<comment><USER31> Breeders and seawater would likely last even longer than that, as U in seawater is in a pseudo-equilibrium, constantly leaching from bedrock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I long said that "mini" reactors don't make sense when 1.7GW reactor and a mini one both have dramatic minimal cost for a single unit, initial startup cost, and operational costs.

Only if mini-reactor gets cheaper than the coal plant, can they get competitive.

<comment><USER33> On the other hand the huge projects like Hinkley Point C are so big they might never come to fruition.

If Rolls Royce can get good at building these ractors they could be making them quickly and cheaply enough to make a big difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The natural reserve of radioactive material, like that of fossil fuel, is finite. We cannot count on it in the long run. On the other hand, we are awash with the huge amounts of the free solar energy. We just need better batteries, which is a purely technical problem.

<comment><USER6> If we moved to Thorium the supply is virtually endless.

<comment><USER35> Of which we have not a single working reactor. Just saying. We in Germany spend a lot of money on it and did not get it to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've been thinking about this for a bit and had a similar model in mind. You build small nuclear reactors in a containers - similar how Google builds their DC. You find an abandoned coal mine shaft and put them deep in the ground. The cost optimizations come from:

\- economies of scale

\- no decommission costs - you just leave them to decay.

\- fewer security measures.

<comment><USER37> Wouldn't you need a water supply for steam turbines? And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport radioactive particles out.

<comment><USER36> Yes, you need to exchange heat, most likely water since it's most cost effective.

> And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport > radioactive particles out

You need to pick a really deep and isolated shaft (Some gold mine shafts can reach 4 km)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> RR have a good background in this tech, having manufactured the reactors that power the UK's nuclear deterrent: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls- Royce_PWR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR)

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish them luck, but the projected price of £70/MW hr sounds very expensive. I gather the retail price in the UK is about double that. That must put them right on the edge of profitability now, and the things have a design life of 60 years. If they have to hit that 60 life to get that £70/MW hr they must know they are already screwed, surely?

</comment><comment><USER40> When a read the title i thought that maybe they were going to put tiny nuclear reactors in everyone's home.

</comment><comment><USER41> an aside: why d nuclear reactors have to be built on the coast? does that not make them more vulnerable to natural disasters

<comment><USER42> They rely on water for cooling so are built near a source of it, be it the sea or a river.

<comment><USER22> Rivers tend to have different flow rates over the course of the year. If there is a heat wave the plant may not have enough water for cooling. The ocean is more dependable.

<comment><USER43> France has some nuclear plants that are on rivers where this problem has been seen.

<comment><USER44> I believe the problem in France wasn't the flow rate of the river, but the maximum temperature the power plants are allowed to leave the river at

During the heatwave the rivers were so warm the reactors weren't allowed to dump any more heat into them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> That sounds like a very bad idea. Although I am confident that the tech has evolved since Chernobyl, terrorism has evolved as well. It just takes a bunch of assholes to destroy a small town.

And yes, I think they will be pretty well guarded. But if you have lots of them some of them will have security flaws.

<comment><USER46> > terrorism has evolved as well

I stopped worrying about terrorism when I realized that they could easily take out most of the European power grid with a few well-placed bombs on the central very-high-voltage power lines. Yet for some reason, they don't.

If terrorists were really hellbent on killing as many enemy civilians as possible, the world would look very different. What actually seems to be happening is that they use the smallest possible intervention that causes sufficient fear (and, conversely, sufficient support on their home turf). So I don't think they'll be blowing up nuclear reactors anytime soon. That would be unnecessary overkill (literally).

<comment><USER47> Interesting idea. I'd say they are just not intelligent enough to really figure out how to kill as many as possible. If they where intelligent, they would understand that terrorism rarely works in achieving its stated goals and do something more likely to work out in their favor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Lol, a technology we can't make work economically WITH economies of scale and on site experts will now be offered without those benefits.

<comment><USER49> Is this not what we expect from technology? That over time it becomes commodified and increasingly easy to operate?

<comment><USER48> No, in a word.

You expect a technology to be made to work first, then to be made to work profitably, and only then commodified, miniaturised, etc.

Nuclear works, but no one has made it work profitably. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable.

Quite the opposite in fact: nuclear has big fixed costs. That's why you usually see multiple reactors build close together on single sites. The more profitable (less loss making really) sites are the biggest ones.

This is why the first computers were not laptops.

<comment><USER49> I believe you have not disagreed with me, but you have introduced additional intermediate stages and conditions with which I disagree.

I disagree that it is necessary for technology to be made profitable before becoming commoditised. I would argue that some technologies only become profitable _when_ they are commoditised.

 _There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable._

I cannot see into the minds of Rolls Royce, but I would hazard that they think it can be done. They suggest that if they can export this technology overseas as well, they can turn a profit on it. While I don't know if they're correct, they clearly believe it's possible.

<comment><USER50> He's also failing to identify hidden costs like destroying the global climate that we're most likely going to absorb at the government level despite what greedy lasseiz-fare capitalists want to admit

<comment><USER48> Betting on a world wide, full funded program to reduce carbon is... Courageous. Betting it will use nuclear and small nuclear and rr's small nuclear and that they will get it ready on schedule and deliver it in time to make any difference? Let me sell you some magic beans I have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Nuclear reactors' biggest drawback is the cost and danger of dismantling and disposing of them after their working life is finished. Up till then they are clean and cost-effective.

<comment><USER52> Why does no one ever factor in the cost of dismantling other major projects, like the Hoover Dam, or the Three Gorges Dam? ...or thee solar plants being built, or the wind turbines?

Why does nuclear power have this _enormous_ additional requirement that literally no other power source seems to have to account for?

<comment><USER53> > Why does nuclear power have this enormous additional requirement that > literally no other power source seems to have to account for?

Because no other power source has the inner components become radioactive during normal operation. Normally these radioactive parts are fully contained, but that's no longer the case once it's dismantled. That makes dismantling a nuclear power plant not only much more expensive, but also a requirement (you can't just abandon it, otherwise it will gradually break down and lose the containment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> We shouldn't be using nuclear energy for power. Solar, wind and batteries will solve that.

What we should be doing is using nuclear energy for HEAT. We need a LOT of heat for a variety of chemical and industrial processes, not to mention heating of homes in colder climates. For these uses nuclear fission has massive potential.

<comment><USER55> Why not both ? With cogeneration you raise the efficiency from only electric generation from 40% to 80% with heat, but in summer you can still generate electricity only. And SMR are better positioned than classic reactor because the smaller size and inherent passive security from surface to volume problem (heat raise with volume in power of 3 and cooling only with surface in power of 2) make them easier to build them near populated cities.

<comment><USER54> I should have been more nuanced: we shouldn't be building out the current design of fission power in order to decarbonize our electricity production. The biggest reason is that it just takes far too long to build: we're talking 15-20 years. Wind and solar can scale far more quickly than that.

Closing existing nuclear power plants like they're doing in Germany is absolute lunacy.

For heat that timeline is acceptable given that it can be "decarbonized" by switching to burning biomass to cover the transition.

If we could build safe nuclear electric plants within a reasonable timeframe and cost then we should absolutely do it (this would make so much sense in huge countries like the US or China because you can have the reactors located well away from large populations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> We'll soon have the magnetic engine which will produce endless electricity. So there won't really be a need for any new nuclear reactors anymore.</comment>


Pro-Russian Bots Take Up the Right-Wing Cause After Charlottesville - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/pro-russian-bots-take-up-the-right-wing-cause-after-charlottesville <comment><USER2> As someone that was once replied to two tweets in on Twitter by some MAGA bot, I've seen the bots there first-hand. So. Many. Retweets. Nearly all happening on a weekend between midnight and 4 AM. Often days after the original tweet. Sometimes with a followup a week later and then two weeks after that.

Those absurd Twitter accounts with no actual person associated, a grab bag handle (chosen from Mom, Dad, Christian, MAGA, ForTrump, ForAmerica, Patriot, random red state name, etc), 10s of thousands of followers, and never post anything outside a specific set of topics... are nearly all bots operating on about the same schedule.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like there's this major unseen propaganda war between us and Russia for the minds of Americans..and sadly we're losing... in a BIG way...

It's so sad that people can be compelled by propaganda so easily.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for issue tracking? - <AUTHOR>

Google Code's issue tracker is great, but can't be used for closed-source projects.  What simple (not bugzilla) issue tracker do you use and why? <comment><USER2> I use Redmine (<http://www.redmine.org/>) on a VPS (RimuHosting). Pretty easy to setup even for a Java developer who's barely looked at Ruby or RoR (like me).

</comment><comment><USER3> This question has been asked before: you might have a look at the archives. I use Redmine, github's thing, Google code... depending on the project. It doesn't matter all that much. If you want something in-house, Redmine or Trac are both ok.

</comment><comment><USER4> FogBugz: <http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/>

It's free for students and startups and has a lot of extras: wiki, discussions, etc...

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.bitbucket.org> (because I use mercurial as my SCM, and bitbucket is fast, cheap and solid)

</comment><comment><USER6> We use a combination of Tender for front-end support and Lighthouse for issue management. Lighthouse has nice integration with Tender and Github.

</comment><comment><USER7> JIRA (<http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>)</comment>


Pretty cool way to create links - <AUTHOR> http://flinkr.heroku.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. However there are two parts in this idea: 1\. The idea of adding very simple metadata to links (to enrich the web).. 2\. The usage of this metadata. Eg. like Flinkr does.

The Flinkr implementation simply reformats the data to do a search that it thinks is most relevant. Eg.

"wiki:george w bush" will redirect you to a wikipedia search. "movie:the matrix" will do a search on imdb. "book:lotr" will use the Amazon API and redirect you to the result.

Other searches use 'Google I'm Feeling Lucky'..

</comment><comment><USER2> This is very, very cool! However, are you willing to share the source code or otherwise clarify how it's implemented? I love this and think it's a great idea, but I would not feel comfortable using it extensively unless I knew how it worked, what its limitations are, etc.</comment>


Most people are bad at arguing. These 2 techniques will make you better (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2016/11/23/13708996/argue-better-science <comment><USER2> If you are arguing with the goal of changing your opponent's mind, you're already doing argument wrong. These techniques will not make you better.</comment>


What do CEOs discuss at dinner? An insight - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@episode1/what-do-ceos-discuss-at-dinner-an-insight-ae2058f1ef0c <comment><USER2> I've always wondered what executive coaching lessons are like.

Could someone who has taken advantage of them chime in on what you were hoping to get out of it, how you made it happen through those sessions, what the structure of sessions was like, and whether the information you gleaned through them impacted your decision making afterwards?

I assume they're generally positive experience as I've heard a number of people speak well about them, but I haven't really had the chance to dig deeper into what they're like.</comment>


Should I work for free? - <AUTHOR> http://www.shouldiworkforfree.com/

<comment><USER2> Previously submitted and discussed at great length here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098332>

<comment><AUTHOR> I had missed it - my bad.

<comment><USER3> So had I. I enjoyed it. So don't feel too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> well, it is not very clever to host the jpg version on dropbox. she is not getting any (back) link juice this way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a link back to the original: [http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=78...](http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=780)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why would anyone ever work for free? Even for a nonprofit?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for your diagram, This is a lovely way/checklist to consider the possibilities of working for free.

</comment><comment><USER8> No never</comment>


Will Obamacare Hurt Jobs? It's Already Happening, Poll Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100825782

<comment><USER2> If you can't afford an employee who can lead a decent life and take care of himself when sick, you can't afford an employee. Don't expect the public to subsidize the cost, and don't blame voters for your poor decision-making. This is how it always should have been.

</comment><comment><USER3> Important to note that the sample size here is 603 businesses.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Forty-one percent of the businesses surveyed have frozen hiring because of the health-care law known as Obamacare. And almost one-fifth—19 percent— answered "yes" when asked if they had "reduced the number of employees you have in your business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.""</comment>


Show HN: Learn R by Example - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/photonlines/Learn-R-by-Example <comment><USER2> I had to use R in previous times, to analyze time series. It was a huge pain in the ass. It is more fun to write a GNU makefile, then trying to learn the arcane logic behind R's interface. Kudos for anybody, who tries to soothe that pain.</comment>


Google catches Bing copying, Microsoft says "so what?" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/google-catches-bing-copying-microsoft-says-so-what.ars

<comment><USER2> Ugh, we already have posts from Google and Microsoft and no one else has any new information. There have been a slew of blogposts etc that have covered every possible angle to this story. We do not need _everyone's_ opinion on this. Let's please just slow down until someone with real information provides an update.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google could sell a new operating system called Google-7 (for $100) which contains a Cracked Windows 7 Ultimate CD. When Microsoft complains about profiting off of MS labor, Google says: So what? Epic mirror attack.</comment>


Most "truffle oil" is fake; most cooks don't realize it - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/dining/16truf.html?ei=5090&en=e3d30cb996ae6247&ex=1336968000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> WTF is a truffle oil article doing on ycnews? Take it to Reddit or something.</comment>


Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520131/data-discrimination-means-the-poor-may-experience-a-different-internet/

<comment><USER2> Isn't this the least of their problems? They already experience a different legal and education system.

<comment> the-swa The article title isn't very accurate. It's more about how big data and analytics (whether coming from online sources or not) impact our day-to-day lives.

"[Kate Crawford] and a colleague propose a system of "due process" that would give people more legal rights to understand how data analytics are used in determinations made against them, such as denial of health insurance or a job."

The only reference to social status in the article comes at the end, citing situations where social media may be used to prioritize relief from natural disasters (if a particular neighborhood does not have this technology, there will be no data, even though there may be a larger need for assistance.)

<comment><USER3> This is already a huge issue, where the working class don't have time to attend govt meeting to discuss issues like his route planning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read the article and I don't get where the source of the title comes from. There isn't anything about poor people being censored from the internet, it's just another technophobia article.

Data science shouldn't be feared. It's just making more accurate predictions about things. Which is a good thing. And insurance companies for example have been doing this since forever. Not much has changed. I don't know if they've ever been required to explain to their customers how their statistics work, and if they were that's kind of ridiculous.

People fear discrimination. They imagine a bigot that arbitrarily _hates_ some group of people and refuses to do business with them or employ them, even when it's in his own best interest. They don't imagine a completely unbiased computer algorithm weighing _thousands_ of different pieces of information and spitting out very accurate predictions. That when it says it's 99% sure of something, it should be right _nearly exactly_ 99% of the time.

For example, using tweets to deploy resources in a disaster. Yes it will make mistakes, but if it's more accurate on average than a human, then it will still _save lives_.

</comment><comment><USER5> For being the title, this didn't really explain at all how the poor might experience a different internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well shouldn't they?

I mean, a lot of the web is driven by commerce and it makes no sense at all to try to sell them stuff that they can't afford.

<comment><USER7> Did you read the article?

The title seems to imply that Google will show the poor one SERP and the rich another. However, the article is actually about a proposal that, if you apply for something (e.g., insurance, a job, credit) and are denied, that you should have the right to an explanation of any role "big data" analytics may have played in the adverse decision.</comment></comment>


An easy way to talk to your customers without going outside - <AUTHOR> https://www.feedbackswap.com/business <comment><USER2> Looks cool, can I do this in the US?</comment>


Ask HN: Who is hiring with an H1B from scratch? - <AUTHOR> A lot of US-based companies indicate in "Who is hiring?" that they would sponsor a visa, but would they really try their luck at the lottery, or would they only transfer existing H1Bs? The H1B application deadline being just around the corner.. who would play the lottery? <comment><USER2> Larger outfits can usually hire you into their European offices.</comment>


The easiest way to learn HTML - <AUTHOR> https://randomhtmltags.tech/ <comment><USER2> Cute idea, but by no means suitable for learning about HTML. It's like proposing to learn some programming language by randomly introducing keywords and functions of the standard library. If you click often enough, you "have seen it all" but still don't understand anything about syntactic markup (or programming in my analogy).</comment>