Japan building 1GW, $21bn solar power station in space - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aJ529lsdk9HI

<comment><USER2> I seriously doubt this will ever be completed, but I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of interesting technology developed and independently successful as spin-offs of this project.

It is extremely ambitious, the article puts a possible date of operation around 2030, which is about 5-7 years after ITER should come on line.

If you can make a 1GW (1000 MW) energy plant for about 1.5 billion terristrially then to pay a 14 fold premium to put the same thing in space (but renewable) as well as a whole bunch of very serious problems to overcome (microwave radiation can be 'tight' beamed but that 'tight' is not as sharply delineated as you'd want to for an application like this, there are serious technical issues there) is a pretty brave thing to do.

I hope they will succeed with this, and that if they do not that we will gain lots of useful knowledge.

<comment><USER3> _If you can make a 1GW energy plant for about 1.5 billion terristrially then to pay a 14 fold premium to put the same thing in space... is a pretty brave thing to do._

If Richard Branson (to pick a random spacefaring billionaire) was fronting a few billion dollars of his own money, that might be _brave_. Spending _other people's_ money on boondoggles that are wildly unlikely to produce a positive return is _not brave_.

<comment><USER2> If we'd follow that to its conclusion space shuttles wouldn't fly, the moon visit would have never happened, the computer you are writing on would not be connected to the internet, highways wouldn't exist and so on.

Plenty of infrastructure projects have started either as military or pure research projects. Eventually we all benefit, even the countries where the spending did not take place.

<comment><USER3> _moon visit would have never happened_

This is my favorite example of this type of argument, because the moon visits _should not_ have happened _when_ they did. A handful of government employees spent a few days on the moon (at an enormous cost to other Americans) at least 40 years before there was any useful reason to get there. The evidence of this is that we haven't gone back.

As for your other examples, your claim is as absurd as saying that if it weren't for Edison we wouldn't have interior lighting or if it weren't for Bell we wouldn't have telephones.

If in 1978, we had diverted 5% of GDP for 10 years to building something like Google, we probably could have done it. But in 1988, it wouldn't have been terribly useful, and by waiting 10 years we got Google anyway at a much lower cost (and without coercively spending other people's money).

<comment><USER2> In 1978 google could not have been built simply because there was not yet a need for a google to be built. The need for a google came in to being by the combined existence of a large pool of accessible data called the world wide web and the frustration with the search engines of the day, notably altavista and inktomi.

Only when those conditions arose was a google possible, and in many ways inevitable.

To compare the invention of electric light and the telephone with the moonshot is to compare apples with oranges about as bad as I've ever seen it.

Compared to the amount of money wasted on various nonsense projects in their time, SDI comes to mind but there are plenty of other examples the moon saga was one of the high points in the history of humankind.

Sure the telephone and the electric light are great inventions, not a day goes by without use of them for a large portion of the people on the planet.

But they did not inspire a generation of kids to follow the path of science the way the moon episode did. We would most definitely be in a completely different world technology wise had that not happened, it probably was one of the best returns on investment in the history of man.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, your argument boils down to:

 _$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what was possible._

Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program. But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is _5 million_ startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]

Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money to get things that _you_ want. Someone else may not care about technology or the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?

Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not _brave_ , whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively affect their reputation, and may even get them called _bold_.

[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5 million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.

<comment><USER2> Space is really the next frontier, I see the moonshot as a taste of what is to come, generations of people have seen what _can_ be done, now we need to find a way to do it better and more cost effective. The rest is spin-offs, if you think the only things that came out of the space program were velcro and some inspiration then that is very sad indeed.

have a look here for some more perspective on this:

<http://www.spacecoalition.com/products.cfm>

<comment><USER3> _very sad indeed_

Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear.

For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared towards multi-billion dollar budgets.

Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.

(And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called _brave_ even if you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.)

[1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the space program.

<comment><USER2> Good points, and regarding velcro, nature had it long before we did :)

And I agree with you on the bravery when just looking at th e money side of it.

I wasn't really thinking as much about the money alone though your cut & paste made it look like that as on the combination of expense and technical obstacles to overcome.

Especially the latter will have lots of challenges, a project like this will require a fairly advanced degree of space assembly and/or manufacture.

<comment><USER4> I can't believe you left out Tang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a moment, ignore the commercial viability of this. Of course, in a free global market, this isn't viable. Think about this strategically.

Japan has roughly 40M barrels of proven oil reserved. They consume 5M barrels of oil a DAY. Without imports, assuming they could even get at all of their oil, they would run out in 8 days. They are the world's 3rd largest consumer of oil, and the world's second largest importer.

Half of their energy consumption is oil, another 15% natural gas (which comes from extracting oil). Coal and Nuclear make up the majority of the rest. Japan's mining is well beyond peak-coal. The _vast_ majority of their oil comes from the middle east. Japan is an island, they are entirely dependent on energy imports. This means that if their trade routes were cut off they'd be hosed. Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to keep the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically.

Space based power is useful strategically. You can beam it to an island. It is very difficult to cut off, regardless of the size of your foes' navy. You can beam it directly to a fleet in the middle of the pacific. You could use it as a weapon.

<comment><USER6> "Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to keep the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically."

It just means Japan can't get saber-rattly in the US's direction. There isn't a huge impetus for them to do so, so...

<comment><USER7> Considering where our cars and gadgets come from, I don't think Japan or the US would benefit much from cutting off oil shipments to Japan ;)

<comment><USER5> Many of those japanese cars are physically built in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Residential solar has a total installed cost around $8/W in the US right now. Prices are probably slightly higher in Japan, maybe $10/W. With the silicon supply problems of the last two years easing and a glut of modules in the last 9 months, prices are dropping faster now than at any time since 2005.

This is proposing a $21/W solution-- not a good idea. By the time it's built, terrestrial solar will likely be 5-10 times cheaper, i.e. around $2-4/W.

<comment><USER9> You're assuming that this is only about supplying electricity at as low a price as possible, which is a very narrow way to look at it. Consider instead the larger picture. This sort of project is going to require a lot of R&D which will both create jobs and lead to additional discoveries. The experience gained can used in future related projects and sold to other countries. If the project is a success then Japan will be the world leader in this sort of technology. So don't just look at the $/W look at the net effect of this investment on Japan's GDP over the next 20 years. From that point of view this is probably a lot better investment than simply buying third party solar panels.

<comment><USER10> Providing jobs _as such_ isn't a benefit to society. Otherwise, we'd all be better off if we stopped using computers and formed up an army of slide rule calculators.

The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of conventional solar. The companies building it have business plans that recognize the development work they're doing, and charge prices accordingly. And that's part of why it's cheap (relative to this proposal) and getting cheaper.

<comment><USER9> _Providing jobs as such isn't a benefit to society_

Indeed, but the type of jobs generated by these types of projects are hardly pointless ditch digging.

 _The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of conventional solar._

But only if the companies are Japanese. Otherwise Japan is not only helping grow another countries GDP they're also helping them gain a further technology lead. Doing everything 'in house' is probably more inefficient in the short term, but might offer more long term benefits.

<comment><USER10> You seem to believe that the world economy is a zero-sum game. This is emphatically false.

In this case, certainly the whole world would benefit even if a better solar energy technology (conventional or outer space) were invented. The polio vaccine helped the whole world; the reason that most of the revenue from it came to the USA is that the rest of the world thought that having those shots was more important than giving up their money.

And in economic terms, if tilting the economies of scale makes Japan a better manufacturer of solar power tech, then the law of comparative advantage allows other countries to benefit from supplying the goods that Japan will shift away from as it moves resources to the solar tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was SimCity 2000 never translated into Japanese or something?

<comment><USER7> Refernce to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000#Scenarios_Vol._I:_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000#Scenarios_Vol._I:_Great_Disasters)

 _Silicon Valley: The high-tech society of the 2010 Silicon valley is hit hard when its futuristic power source goes awry - microwave beams transferring solar energy from an orbital satellite miss their intended receiver and instead incinerate many businesses and people in the area._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a cool hi-tech venture. But the opportunity cost is way too high.

For Japan, I think $21 billion investment in windmills in the ocean would lead to more energy than creating a solar power station in space that sends back electricity in the form of microwaves.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but the windmills don't get you a 1GW energy weapon in space.

<comment><USER2> I'm assuming it is geosynchronous, you could only blast down to your own country with it, any place else the angle to the atmosphere would be too oblique to have any chance of reaching the ground.

It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though.

Sort of a satellite born seppuku.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Well, you could also target your immediate neighbors. I bet most of the richest and most industrialized eastern china would be right inside the viable target area.

Also, think anti-ballistic missile defences -- no need for adaptive optics and all that jazz when you can swat the missiles with lasers from their most vulnerable position, right at the top of their trajectory.

<comment><USER2> One gigawatt is a tremendous amount of energy, but what microwave radiation would do against an incoming ICBM is an open question. It's all about how concentrated the beam will be and how fast you can direct it (ICBMs move pretty fast and even at the top of their trajectory they are hard to pinpoint because they do not exactly carry homing beacons).

Also, in all of the following keep in mind that we're talking about a re-entry vehicle here which has extensive heat shielding anyway just to survive its inevitable contact with the atmosphere.

It is more about energy density if this could be used as a weapon against an ICBM or not, the receiver of the energy would presumably be a fairly large patch of ground with a 'safe zone' around it in case of minor misalignment.

If you'd want your gigawatt to be concentrated in an area of 100x100 m under 'normal 'conditions you will not be able to quickly reconfigure to something on the order of a hotspot as produced by a battle laser (this is _not_ a laser!).

In normal operating conditions and assuming they can beam as tight as 1,000,000,000 Watts per 100x100m patch (which remains to be seen) you'd have about 100KW / square meter, or about 10 W / square centimeter assuming absolutely perfect (so lossless) transmission and 0 reflection.

Microwave absorption of the ICBM would then be the deciding factor if anything happened to it or not, 10W / square centimeter seems a lot but it really isn't, the question is how long the beam could be focused on the incoming ICBM and how steady it could be held.

With lasers this appears to be possible, see this [http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817](http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817) but it was an aircraft at subsonic speeds vs a stationary ground target.

Shooting stuff down that moves very fast is not that easy, especially not if your normal mode of operation is for energy transmission instead of destruction.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Who was talking about shooting icbm's with microwaves? If you have a gigawatt power generation platform in space, putting a couple of free-electron lasers up there is hardly more than an afterthought. With a big enough laser, you can stop having to worry about the heat shielding/reflectivity of the target, and just trust that the second you hit something, it's surface is going to ionize (= blow up). And as for hitting the targets up there, at the apex of their trajectory ICBM's are 1) ballistic 2) slow compared to the other parts of their flight. While hitting is still not exactly easy, other than hitting them on the launch pads it's the easiest way to do the (hard) task.

<comment><USER14> Why would it blow up? Nuclear bombs don't blow up when they get hot.

All that would happen is you would make a hole in it, but since it's on a ballistic it would keep on going. (Ballistic means gravity is controlling it, it's not powered.)

Even if you blew it up, at best you would spread nuclear material all over the target area.

You need to hit these things during the boost phase, where a: you can stop it from going ballistic and make it fall back into the launching country, and b: you have something volatile to blow up (the fuel).

Also, it's easier. When it's at the apex it's moving horizontally very quickly, and it's at it's closest to you. Which is the most difficulty when it comes to aiming (since the angle of the shot is moving the fastest at that point).

When it's moving vertically toward you is much easier to aim, since you barely have to move the laser.

<comment> Tuna-Fish I'm not saying the bomb will go nuclear when heated.

A high-powered laser won't just heat stuff up. If you can pump enough energy to small enough surface area in small enough time, the outer layer of the object being hit will be ionized. The laser will pump even more energy to this cloud of electrons and ions. For all intents and purposes, this cloud can be called an explosion.

Yes, I'm saying that when you hit a piece of garden-variety steel with a strong-enough laser, it will blow up and disintegrate into small pieces.

And even if the missile is moving very fast horizontally at the apex _the movement is entirely predictable, even minutes into the future._ All you need is two rangings, then you can just point the laser at where the missile is going to pass trough.

<comment><USER14> My point about the apex is not prediction, but dwell time. You have to move the laser very fast, and very accurately to match the motion of the missile.

And anyway, you can predict the motion as soon as the motor is finished, you don't have to wait for the apex.

It's very difficult to aim the laser that well - even if you know exactly where it's going to be. Even if you were perfect in location and control, random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

The only practical way is via feedback loop, and when the angle is changing so fast it's very very hard to do.

You want a place where the angle doesn't change much, and all you need to do is adjust it based on feedback.

As far as destroying the missile - you need to pump enough energy into it to vaporise the entire thing. Normally an explosion will fracture the object near it. That cloud won't. You are moving very fast in air (even at the apex), and any ions will be blown away, plus they are only moving away from the missile, and not toward it, so they will not damage it. (They are moving away because they came from it, when they vaporized they bounced off the surface and away from the missile.)

You have to vaporise the entire thing layer by layer. And the energy in the cloud will not help you - since it's moving away from the missile it won't heat it, in fact it will insulate it (until it's blown away by the air) because all the energy of the laser will heat the cloud, and do nothing to the missile.

It's too easy to defend against a laser anyway. A small amount of water in the nose, released when it detects a laser will produce a cloud of water that will absorb all the laser's energy.

<comment><USER2> > random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

Not in a space based laser aiming at an ICBM at it's apex, it would be about 500 to 700 km depending on the trajectory, and doing about 14,000 km / h.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nobody would say nothing about the Dyson Sphere? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere>

It's like the first step. Right?

</comment><comment><USER16> For powering up an army of Evangelions in defense of Tokyo-3 against the attack of Angels? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelion_(mecha)>

</comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't any gained efficiency be wiped out by having to transmit the power via microwaves? And couldn't you build a vastly larger solar panel array on earth for the same price?

What happens when a plane flies underneath the beam?

<comment><USER2> The plane would be in the beam path for only a short time: 900 Km/hour is 250 meters / second, if the beam were to be sent down very tightly the effect would be stronger but the duration would be correspondingly shorter.

A 100 meter diameter beam would take 0.4 seconds to cross, the energy density would be 12.75 W / square centimeter.

The kind of effect would also be quite dependant on the wavelength used, longer wavelengths would be harder to 'tight beam' than shorter ones.

A typical microwave oven 'beams' 1KW or so across an area about 15 cm radius, that's roughly 1.3 W / square centimeter.

How tight the beam is really is the crucial question to answer here, 35000 km up the beam will be very tight right under the point of emission, near the surface of the planet (an airliner flying 10 Km up) it would be much more dispersed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bad luck for the guy having his house under the solar panels. He will have no sunlight even if there are no clouds on the sky ;)

<comment><USER19> 4 sq km 36.000 km out in space is a very very tiny shadow.

<comment><USER20> or for all intents and purposes none at all. i could be wrong but given the relative sizes of the sun, the solar array, and the distances involved, the amount of sunlight that is blocked by the array from any observer's point of view on earth would be negligible.

for example planes flying at 35k feet don't cast visible shadows.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the distance really matters in the amount of blocked sunlight. The sun is very far away compared to the satellite. The atmosphere scatters the light so it would cast a more diffuse shadow than if it was closer to earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one that immediately thought "This is what happens when a nation's raised watching gundam ^_^ " when I read this?

</comment><comment><USER23> "beaming the electricity from space through the ionosphere"

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope they remember what (almost) happened to the Ringworld.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to chip in my own "this is silly" perspective. You see, Japan has a history with futuristic flops:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer></comment>


Using predictive analytics to reduce churn - <AUTHOR> http://www.madkudu.com/blog/use-predictive-analytics-to-reduce-churn-by-20-in-2-days-with-3rd-grade-math/ <comment><USER2> I'm the author of this post - please let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER3> Title is misleading. The article only describes univariate analysis (screening of independent variables).

One can build a model to predict churn from those independent variables (e.g., by just adding them up), but then there's out-of-time and out-of-sample validation, monitoring, and other boring, but important things.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any reading on that?

<comment><USER3> Online material on this subject is scattered, but there are good books like Regression Modeling Strategies by Frank E. Harrell and Credit Risk Scorecards by Naeem Siddiqi.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chinese tech giant Huawei has developed its own operating system as a 'plan B' - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.in/Chinese-tech-giant-Huawei-has-developed-its-own-operating-system-as-a-plan-B-in-case-its-barred-by-the-US-government-from-using-Google-and-Microsoft-products/articleshow/68433984.cms <comment><USER2> Actually Huawei is doing research in micro-kernel based OSes.

[https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/microkernel_e...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/microkernel_era_of_datra_centric_computing/)

[https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/hardware_software_co_...](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/hardware_software_co_design/)

How much it relates to this news, no idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it a bit curious that they are not using an effort such as lineageOS. In fact companies that don't want to rely on Google, why don't they rally behind an effort like that?

</comment><comment><USER4> No mention of Linux in the article, but if I was trying to urgently replace Windows and android I would consider using something like Ubuntu mobile as a starting point for my plan.

</comment><comment><USER5> If they released it with an open source license, it would increase my confidence in Huawei considerably.</comment>


Taxreform.gov: Comprehensive Tax Reform - <AUTHOR> https://taxreform.gov/

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant article from the Economist:

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578389-despite- ranco...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578389-despite-rancour-over- scandals-big-reforms-are-still-possible-how-save-obamas-second-term)

"Two lawmakers are trying to reform the code: Dave Camp, a Republican, and Max Baucus, a Democrat. Mr Obama should lend his weight to their efforts. Ideally, they would start afresh with no loopholes and much lower rates. Republicans should love this: if Congress were to scrap all loopholes and deductions, it could nearly halve income-tax rates and still raise the same amount of money. Democrats should like it, too: a more efficient tax system would let them pay for the same amount of government with less drag on growth. The snag is that voters define "loopholes" as other people's tax breaks. Their own, they rather like. Getting rid of particular boondoggles such as the mortgage-interest deduction may prove impossible. But capping the overall amount of deductions any individual can take should not be, so long as both parties have their fingerprints on the bill, thus sharing the credit and the blame."</comment>


What Happened in the UK Blackouts? - <AUTHOR> https://mitchoneill.com/blog/uk-blackouts-interim-report/ <comment><USER3> It's notable that this report is completely consistent so far with the way I would design a cyber attack to take out a countries power grid.

> The causes provided by RWE for the initiation of the trip of Little Barford > steam turbine (ST1C) was due to discrepancies on three independent safety > critical speed measurement signals to the generator control system.

A cyber attack would most likely, rather than directly take capacity offline, instead make the system less stable by attempting to make safety systems not work properly. That has the benefit that the attack will be triggered at th exact same time as another incident, increasing the impact.

Injecting false values for a sensor reading is a very good way to hide your tracks as an attacker - just inject a bunch of "0" values, and then uninstall whatever malware did it, and probably nobody will ever find out why that sensor randomly acted up.

<comment><USER4> An even more stealth method is to make the system work perfectly if everything is running fine. Like correctly reporting net frequency in the range 49-51 Hz but reporting false values when outside of that range. That way there will be no detectable errors until everything starts behaving erratically.

The best way for a society to prepare is to have a few small incidents that put the safety systems to the test on a regular basis.

<comment><USER5> _"Like correctly reporting net frequency in the range 49-51 Hz but reporting false values when outside of that range."_

You can't fake the system frequency like that. Anyone connected to the grid can observe/measure the system frequency trivially - you could do so right now at the nearest 10A socket. The attack you describe would require compromising large numbers of diverse, distributed generation and frequency response assets.

It would be like trying to fool everyone into thinking it's a hot day by hacking every single thermometer!

<comment><USER6> Yep. Once one meter starts reporting the wrong frequency vs the thousands of other ones. It'll simply be taken offline and replaced because it could just be a broken one. Depending on severity, the gig could be up if the meter is sent back to the manufacturer for "repair".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To understand how/why these cascading failures can happen, Grady Hillhouse (Practical Engineering on YouTube) recently made a video about substations and what kind of faults can affect them, interesting if you're not super knowledgeable about our electric grids already: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q-aVBv7PWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q-aVBv7PWM)

<comment><USER8> I always upvote grady. It's great to see his subscriber count finally starting to match the quality of his videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Frequency drops below 48.8Hz which triggers the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme (LFDD). Approximately 1GW (5% of total) of Great Britain electricity demand is turned off."

Is interesting as it highlights the importance of managed failure. Things fail, but the ability to see those failures and control how that fails is important. Had such an action not been taken, the result would of been a far greater outage/impact and more so an outage that you had no idea what parts it would impact.

<comment><USER10> The issue with this specific outage is that it was badly managed.

The main gripe people and authorities have with what happened is that key infrastructures immediately lost power. When (only) 5% of demand is turned off this should not impact railways, airports, and hospitals.

Beyond the initial loss of power other problems amplified the consequences: For example, trains could not just restart but required specialist staff to attend each of them to get them through a specific procedure, which turned a short power loss into hours of delays.

This highlights the importance of looking at systems globally. The grid is just one part of the system.

<comment><USER11> A lot of the headline grabbing stuff wasn't the grid's fault though:

* the railways didn't have traction power disconnected -- but one type of (new) train saw the within-specification frequency drop, shut down, and in many cases needed a fitter to go out and restart it. Everything else behind a dead train was stuck. I imagine the train company are discussing this with their supplier...

* Ipswich hospital had a power outage, but that was because their own systems disconnected from the grid when they saw the frequency drop, and then they had a problem with one of their generators.

*One regional airport seems to have been accidentally not on the list of key sites not to disconnect -- sounds like an admin snafu, and has now been fixed.

None of these seem like "bad management" \-- they are a collection of relatively minor, entirely unrelated, problems of the sort you're likely to run into if you have to activate an emergency procedure you haven't needed to use in a decade.

<comment><USER12> I read your list and see a bunch of 'technical debt.' Trains put into operation without the ability to survive a power transient without intervention. Life critical backup power system failures. The set of critical sites is not being maintained properly. In my mind these failures are are not entirely unrelated; reliable power is taken for granted and the testing and maintenance necessary to cope with power outages is neglected.

<comment><USER13> > Trains put into operation without the ability to survive a power transient > without intervention.

The trains were built to a environmental tolerance spec, and shutting down when that spec is exceeded seems like a reasonable thing to do. Having an expert test that all the safety systems are still working properly after they've been exposed to conditions they weren't designed for also seems prudent.

Do you think people should pay higher ticket prices / more tax to fund trains that can tolerate a wider range of input frequencies, given how rarely these sorts of events happen?

<comment><USER14> The GP says that the frequency drop was within-specification, not exceeding spec.

<comment><USER13> Which specification though? At the time they were being designed and procured, I think the specified tolerance for frequency change rate on the grid was 0.125Hz/s, but this was relaxed in 2014 to 1Hz/s (see [https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/10771/download](https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/10771/download)). How much the effects of relaxing this on existing equipment was considered, it's not clear.

Similarly, the grid's license gives them a ±1% variation around 50Hz (so ±0.5Hz from [https://www.nationalgrideso.com/balancing- services/frequency...](https://www.nationalgrideso.com/balancing- services/frequency-response-services)).

So we have a power anomaly where the frequency moved >0.125Hz/s and dropped well below the 49.5Hz license threshold. I don't know what the procurement spec was, but I'd be very surprised if this event was "in-spec" for the trains, so in the absence if this it's probably reasonable to say that GP is incorrect.

Transformers get quite unhappily melty if you drop the frequency too much, so if your cooling system isn't designed to cope with this, it's probably better to shut down than have an exciting fire.

<comment><USER15> The grid's license only requires them to be within ±0.5Hz of the nominal 50Hz for at least 95% of the time. Anyone designing a system which needs to operate reliably ideally ought to design it to operate over the full 47.5-52Hz range, or at least not fail so completely it cannot be restarted. Low frequency demand disconnect only starts at 48.8 Hz, ao any system that can't handle that is effectively setting itself up to be the first thing to fail when there's a power shortfall. This is utterly inexcusable for a train given the amount of disruption caused by multiple lines being clogged by failed trains in multiple places.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree that a train that can tolerate a wider range is desirable, but lots of things are desirable. It's also desirable to give everyone their own carriage, or have a free bar on every train. But at what cost?

* Wider tolerance means heavier electrical and cooling systems, increasing both capital outlay and operating cost for both track wear and maintenance.

* The trains procured were essentially "off the shelf" from Siemens and would have been designed and manufactured for other operators before the DfT put the tender together. A wider operating tolerance would have therefore either ruled out the Siemens trains, or at least significantly upped the cost as they would have had to redesign them.

An annual season ticket from St Albans to London is about £3,600. How much more should that passenger (as well as the taxpayer) be paying so that they can travel on trains that work when this type of event happens? How often does this type of event happen?

> This is utterly inexcusable for a train given the amount of disruption > caused by multiple lines being clogged by failed trains in multiple places.

People being stuck on trains for a few hours is pretty far down the severity list of "things that could go wrong" when the power goes out. That said, what I do think the outcome will be here is they'll figure out if/how the driver can self-reset this type of issue rather than requiring a fitter to travel out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most traditional generators (think CCGT, nuclear, hydro) run in synchronous mode. Which means the generators spins with rpm proportional/equal to the network frequency. For 50Hz that would be 3000rpm. When the total electricity demand exceeds the supply, the kinetic energy of spinning generators is converted to electricity which slows down the generator rpm, which reduces the frequency. All synchronous generators on a given network spin at the same frequency, so when the demand is too high all of them slow down a bit.

<comment><USER17> That makes me wonder, if you were standing next to these turbines would you be able to here them slow down?

<comment><USER18> Probably, although you are more likely to hear the 3000Hz to 2880Hz change in the generator RPM than the 50 to 48.8 change in the output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It actually sounds like this was really useful though, as a lot of the systems involved will be improved in the future.

I'm not sure if the grid is already doing this, but they should trigger failures randomly, including Low Frequency Demand Disconnection schemes from time to time to ensure that all downstream systems are also ready (like the hospital someone mentioned that had an issue with the backup generator, or the trains that stopped working when the frequency failed). A bit like caos monkeys in dev environments.

<comment><USER11> Triggering demand disconnection randomly is saying "we should provide consumers a service including deliberate random blackouts". That's OK in contexts like Netflix where the downstream systems are supposed to be able to be resilient to faults and failures are comparatively low-stakes anyway. But almost all grid consumers aren't resilient to power loss (would your house continue to be fully functional without noticeable ill effects if power to it went out? Mine wouldn't...) and even for industrial scale consumers who do have generators the costs of finding out in a deliberate blackout that their generator was faulty could be anything from expensive to life-threatening.

<comment><USER20> One of the hospitals affected by the blackout describe in this article had it's generators fail to come online cleanly, they had to go manual in ICU.

<comment><USER21> Why are they not on battery at all times in ICU

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What an interesting read! I had no idea that a blackout happened in UK recently, so I clicked out of curiosity and was rewarded with this delightful description of the initial events.

It's also interesting to see the interplay of automated and manual systems in such a complicated scenario.

</comment><comment><USER11> The article says near the bottom "At the time [the GT1A generator tripped] there was 4000MW of unused generation in reserve, and if only a fraction of this reserve was instructed to dispatch within 60 seconds of the initial loss it's very likely that load shedding would have not occurred."

My understanding was that having reserves available within 30-60s was pretty expensive, and that that would have been what was used to handle the initial frequency drop (the interim report PDF says there was 1000MW of this). Drax's page on this ([https://www.drax.com/technology/power-systems-super- subs/](https://www.drax.com/technology/power-systems-super-subs/)) says that even spinning reserve can be on the order of two minutes, and the next tier below that (STOR) is on the order of 20 minutes. So does anybody know what the 4000MW available within 60s but not called on was?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! (author of the article here). I'm not happy with how I phrased this with the 4GW of capacity -- and while I suspect generation could have increased by hundreds of MW within 60 seconds I may be wrong. I've updated how I've phrased it in the blog to hopefully give a bit more clarity to my position.

I don't meant to suggest that plants could ramp full within 60 seconds, it's that 4GW means there's a bunch of headroom, and that there was at least the physical possibility that dispatch instructions to increase generation/start- up (the reserves were "available") could have been sent out and plants could have started moving on an upward trajectory, creating even a few extra hundred MW of generation if many of the more flexible plants (gas, hydro) could increase their output even just a bit.

Here in Australia we dispatch on a 5 minute period, and there are some plants that are very slow moving and have to ramp over tens of minutes or hours, but moving grid-wide generation up and down many hundreds of MW within a 5 minute dispatch period is a common occurrence, and so this coupled with the relatively high amount of reserve makes me suspect it would have at least been physically possible to increase output and hasten the return to a normal operating frequency.

How you create both the systems and market structures/rules to oversee dispatch and coordination of something like that in a fast and automated way is very complex and infeasible to effectively do any time soon, but I think it's a system we should be thinking about and moving towards.

Overall though I'm just grumpy about the amount of manual, slow work that's still involved in grid operations (when we lose an inter-connector here in Australia it takes 3-15 minutes for the dispatch engine to become aware that there's no inter-connector anymore as it needs to be reconfigured manually).

<comment><USER23> I assume battery based grid power stations like the Tesla one in Australia are amongst the best in class to help in this kind of crisis situation? Compared to the gaz turbine the system it is simpler (no mehanical/heat/fluid parts) and depending on design will likely never be completely off since made of dozens or hundreds of independant equipement (batteries and inverters).

Thanks for the article and comment!

<comment><USER24> Yes, batteries are very fast acting, but that battery in South Australia is only 100MW and the grid lost over 1400 MW. [https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/inventions/eve...](https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/inventions/everything- you-need-to-know-about-teslas-battery-in-south-australia/news- story/a989f74cfccb8a1211de83f5becc60ed) Batteries have a lot of potential, but they are currently small in capacity.

<comment><USER25> > _but that battery in South Australia is only 100MW and the grid lost over > 1400 MW_

I hear this kind of misconception fairly often and so it is worth noting that you don't need 1400 MW of battery to protect from this event.

The initial 735 MW drop happened, as I read TFA, when a major generating source _took itself offline as a result of the frequency disturbance_. The later generator drops are cascades of the frequency disturbance earlier in time.

If a suitable battery had been present and reacting in milliseconds it could have stabilized the frequency enough, for just the very short period required, to avoid the whole generator trip in the first place. Thus you can use much smaller amounts of fast-response frequency support to avoid much bigger drops. This is how batteries can pay for themselves so quickly when placed in the right topologies w.r.t to the grid demand and generation resources.

<comment><USER26> If 200 MW of generation trips instantly, which is typical when electrical equipment fails, you need 200 MW to replace it in the next few seconds, and then additional generation to bring the frequency back to Nominal.

So far the largest battery is 40 MW? So not really going to help more than 40 MW can, even if it comes online instantly, when 200 MW trips off.

<comment><USER25> The point is to avoid the generator trip in the first place.

<comment><USER26> how much battery storage at what point in the system would have prevented this blackout?

<comment><USER25> Answering that question would take a detailed analysis which I am not aware of. It would be less than the instant load of the Eaton Socon - <USER2> transmission circuit that was struck by lightning.

It is basically a question of providing just enough frequency support, for long enough, for the remainder of the grid to respond to the frequency drop. In other words, let the frequency sag a bit so generators respond but not so much that they disconnect.

I think there's also some control system error implied in the wind farm's drop as I read the article. That perhaps shouldn't have happened at all and was an un-analyzed state that will be corrected.

<comment><USER26> >> but that battery in South Australia is only 100MW and the grid lost over 1400 MW

>I hear this kind of misconception fairly often and so it is worth noting that you don't need 1400 MW of battery to protect from this event.

I would be interested in any papers or literature that have led you to this conclusion.

as soon as (generation - load) <> 0 the frequency is going to change. If you lose 200MW of generation and have 100MW of batteries that are configured with 0 or very small amount of droop they see some small change in frequency and crank out 100MW to try and stop it from falling further. Then they are maxed out, there is still 100MW of imbalance for conventional generation with governors to take up, which they will as the frequency falls as if the trip had only been 100MW in the first place. How is this not a 1:1 relationship, 100 MW of batteries displace 100MW of lost generation?

For this event in the UK in particular it appears the issue is that the large windfarm, and 500MW of small embedded or distributed generation are en masse improperly configured or by nature are not able to ride through any small transient wobble in frequency. TFA didn't show us what voltage these plants saw.

Although a 200MW steam turbine also tripped due to the same lightning/transmission line trip event, so clearly it was subjected to something that exceeded instantaneous thresholds and had to trip immediately. And then that steam turbine tripping caused the gas turbines at the same plant to trip which indicates there are some design or operational issues at that plant.

Also is 20s reclose time for a transmission line standard? I've only configured distribution line reclosers but it was more on the order of 1s for the first reclose and maybe 7s for the second?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What affect does the frequency drop have to home users? Is there protection in the substations near to homes that will cut off the power completely if the frequency goes out of range?

<comment><USER28> The grid frequency itself doesn't matter much as far as consumers are concerned, the deviations mentioned in this article would not cause any problems for a home user directly (or even generators, but as mentioned below if it is too far out of range generators start to need to cut out) but it is a far better indicator of the general balance of supply and demand of power in the grid than any other metric, because it can be measured very precisely, isn't subject to local effects like voltage, and correlates well with the state of the generators.

One quirk of synchronous generators is you can think of the whole grid like all of the generators in it are geared together. If demand rises, the torque on the generators starts to increase and if the power plants don't feed more mechanical power in then they will start to slow down in unison. Likewise their speed will increase as the demand drops. So the frequency is the main indicator of the health of the grid and so the grid operators will monitor it closely.

<comment><USER29> > The grid frequency itself doesn't matter much as far as consumers are > concerned

So I thought and then we had a multi week frequency shift in the EU and various clocks started lagging behind. This does show up for consumers as well.

<comment><USER30> Generally grids try to average out to their target frequency over some period (24hrs, for example) because so many timekeeping systems rely on counting cycles.

So sometimes they will run slightly above target and sometimes they will let it run slightly below target. Ordinary daily demand cycles help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like this article as it gives a lot of advanced insights about what seems at first an easy problem.

Generators are tech from, what, 2 centuries ago? Keeping them in sync sounds boring, just talk together. And then, under the surface, looms an incredibly complex problem about working at scale, having engineering, political, organizational aspects.

</comment><comment><USER32> Simplifying, this is what I get:

(1) A lightning strike creates a transient voltage on the grid.

(2) Some power generators remove themselves from the grid to prevent damage to themselves from the transient voltage.

(3) Now there is too much demand on the grid -- too many people using power and not enough generators to supply it. (The line frequency dropping indicates that supply and demand are not balanced.)

(4) So the grid operator begins to (deliberately) remove some people from the grid to keep the supply and demand balanced.

What's not clear to me is what would happen if you didn't do step #4.

<comment><USER33> That's when you end up with a cascading failure ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure)). The remaining generators are overloaded by the demand and shut down to protect themselves as well, which further decreases the supply and causes more stations to shut off, etc.

The Wikipedia article about the northeast US blackout of 2003 is a very interesting read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> CityAM published a really interesting article about this [https://www.cityam.com/what-was-behind-fridays-national- grid...](https://www.cityam.com/what-was-behind-fridays-national-grid-outage- network-theory-not-conspiracy/amp/) It certainly fits the given explanation

</comment><comment><USER35> It was a few minutes of downtime affecting a fraction of people. The last large UK outage was 10 years ago. The uptime has a lot of 9s already, so even if they ensure this particular problem wouldn't cause downtime again, the next time it'd just be a different rare event that causes it.

</comment><comment><USER36> This to me suggests we need a hell of a lot more batteries in the system. Don't see anything else reacting fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER37> For a related read: the Northeast blackout of 2003: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)

</comment><comment><USER38> At one stage, they have to shed load (turn power off), and that sounds totally reasonable. How are these areas divided, how does one turn power off for a whole area, and how is it decided who to cut from power (temporarily)?

<comment><USER39> From the little I know UK settlements have substations that serve something like 1000 homes. Older ones are open air affairs, newer ones are prefabbed enclosed buildings. They're oil cooled transformers and switching gear. One serves the village where my parents live, in a city there are two within about 400m of me (serving different neighbourhoods). Sometimes a neighbourhood will trip out, like in a thunderstorm; or get turned off (maintenance). I assume that the central grid has a switching order for these to be turned off to maintain essential supply. Factories, hospitals, and such have their own substations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Isn't this kind of fault a good argument for synchronizing the UK grid to the rest of Europe? They seem to already have an interconnect that's of the scale of demand needed here, but it's a DC link.

<comment><USER41> If they were synchronized, it would mean that in the case of any larger failure that would draw too much current over the undersea link, the link itself would have to trip out.

<comment><USER40> That depends on the link size. But I guess it may very well be better to have a big enough DC link and have it automatically modulate power all the way up to maximum and then keep it there, instead of tripping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why does frequency drop when the system is overloaded?

<comment><USER43> Imagine if you are running on a conveyor belt at 60 steps per second. This belt is turning a crank that, let's say, moves water. You are the energy input (the sun for solar, heat energy for steam turbines, movement of wind for windmills, and so on), the crank is the generator, and the water is the load.

Now imagine the water is suddenly turned into vegetable oil (more load has come on). It is more difficult to move. For a brief moment, your energy input is still the same but you can't push as much of the new liquid so your pace slows down a bit, to 58 steps per minute. You increase your exertion (add more energy input) and your pace climbs back to 60 steps per minute.

Finally, imagine that you're running as hard as you can. That 60 steps per second to push that vegetable oil is as much as you can do. But the vegetable oil turns to heavy cream (even more load). You've put in as much energy as you can but your pace falters and drops to 49 steps per second.

That's why the frequency falls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> 9k</comment>


Clearview AI CEO: 'over 2,400 police agencies' are using its facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402978/clearview-ai-ceo-interview-2400-police-agencies-facial-recognition <comment><USER2> From everything I've seen and read about Clearview, I'm super uncomfortable and wish there was some hope of this being reigned in. I'm not hopeful though.

<comment><USER3> They make me uncomfortable, too [https://huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai- facial-recognition-a...](https://huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial- recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best protection we have for this blatant invasion of our privacy (and dignity) is CV Dazzle camo.</comment>


Ask HN: If you use keybase.io regularly, for what do you primarily use it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Shameless plug: I wrote a little guide[1] how to use keybase.io and GPG to sign git commits. It was posted on HN a while ago[2].

      "Ironically, only the first commit is signed."

[1] [https://github.com/pstadler/keybase-gpg- github](https://github.com/pstadler/keybase-gpg-github) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289481)

<comment><USER4> Meta-HN-Comment: Annoying how HN locks post voting & commenting and you can't repost the link either. Anyone know what HN's reasoning on this is, or for that matter, why there's not a meta-HN?

(If my use of meta is unclear, see how Stack Exchange uses it.)

<comment><USER5> I don't know why HN locks voting. I think it's about preserving history - <USER2> was the reason given for the short time available to unvote or undown a comment. (In this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) )

HN has a duplicate detector. You're allowed to repost things that are on topic and that didn't get much conversation, so long as you don't do it too much. That link got > 100 comments and > 200 votes, so that counts (I think) as substantial discussion. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7544123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7544123)

HN doesn't have a meta because META == DEATH.

I'm tempted to set up a totally unofficial unsupported HN Meta community on Imzy, but it's probably a bad idea.

<comment><USER6> Have you read Jeff Atwood's Meta is Murder, and his subsequent Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do? meta.stackexchange.com and its sister sites have as far as I can tell been very successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We use it at work to share tmate ([https://tmate.io/](https://tmate.io/)) sessions. I wrote a shell script to save the session to our mutual shared private keybase directory: [https://github.com/sukima/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.bin/tma...](https://github.com/sukima/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.bin/tmate- share)

</comment><comment><USER8> I use it to encrypt messages to friends / customers via Facebook messager, Slack, or public forums when I'm dealing with sensitive data.

A few of my friends use this (which I wrote): [http://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/](http://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/)

You may ask, "when do you really deal with sensitive data?" My answer, is a lot more often than you think... The cool part about encryption, is I can use it over an insecure line to communicate. For example, I can post encrypted text here and only people I wrote it for can read it.

<comment><USER9> You might want to be careful with intentionally publicizing encrypted data, since it might only be secure for a limited time. Computation becomes cheaper over time (making brute force more feasible) and new vulnerabilities in the encryption algorithm can be found.

<comment><USER8> Totally agree, I assume the average HN reader knows this.

Regardless, ill try to be more careful in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw keybase.io as a public key directory which makes it easier to find friends, family and colleagues public keys. That´s my intended use of Keybase.io. I haven´t actually used it yet for anything serious, although I´ve found ways to use PGP public/private keys to encrypt and decrypt local files on Mac and Windows, e-mails using mailvelope or keybase.io so that should take care of everything. But if people don´t adopt it I´ve got no use for it. And people around me didn´t take to Keybase as such it´s just sitting there so that maybe eventually I can use it. Right now it´s kind of useless.

</comment><comment><USER11> At my company we use Keybase to help us validate keys for new employees as we bring them into the fold, since the company is 100% remote. We also use KBFS for some tasks as well. You can see more in the article I wrote for our company blog about our using of GPG + Keybase + Git + Hub for commit signing + KBFS at [https://eligible.com/blog/commit-signing-with-git-hub- keybas...](https://eligible.com/blog/commit-signing-with-git-hub-keybase-and- gpg/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I used it once - to coordinate a project ownership transfer with a person not typically using pgp. Explicit message "this person is XYZ on GitHub" helped.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sharing secrets with remote co-workers. It's easy enough to use that I can expect pretty much anyone to be able to figure it out in real-time.

<comment><USER14> Ditto. Remote and non-remote, secrets and other slightly-less-but-still- somewhat secret files. Before that we handled it via 1Password, but it's so handy to just `cp` the files to the private/you,co-worker folder and do whatever you need with the files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sharing .env files full of secrets to bootstrap a project. Typically just dev credentials, not production, but still a nice way to hand those semi-sensitive data around easily, and without committing them to git.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use it to sign my git commits.

Never really thought about using it to share credentials but I might give that a try.

Feature Request: I'd love an easier way to find the keybase accounts for my friends on twitter.

<comment><USER16> Oh, one more feature request. I'd like to be able to verify the identity of people on Venmo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use it as the primary way to exchange secrets with others.

This isn't regular use as I don't regularly have secrets, but I've used it to exchange passwords, 2FA QR codes, and other sensitive data like this, with people with whom I'm remotely communicating with.

<comment><USER18> Internally (I work at Keybase) we use it even more for the opposite. We do use it for secrets, but very often we put public info into KBFS we want to verify.

As an example, a number of us use it to address pain points around SSH. I keep this: /keybase/public/chris/keys/ssh.txt (you can see them on keybase.pub/chris/keys/ssh.txt ), and I keep all my known hosts as a reference in another file (that one in my private directory)...so when I'm SSH'ing to a machine from a new one I never have to say yes to connecting to a fingerprint I haven't actually verified. If I don't recognize a fingerprint then in turn I contact the appropriate party using Keybase, get a confirmation, and then add it to my file.

I'm bringing up SSH because we're thinking of making SSH public keys an important part of Keybase and curious if others share the same pain point. You mentioned a bunch of team uses and wondering if this was part of your use too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, hello from [https://keybase.io/twitchax](https://keybase.io/twitchax)!

This is interesting, and I am super glad that you are here, haha. I am about to (in 2 hours) give a presentation on keybase.io for a MS-level cryptography course. I like all of the features, but I was curious what the primary goal was.

I see a lot of people mentioning the encryption tools (which are awesome and easy-to-use); however, I cannot help but think that keybase.io is really about identity proofs and signing. Would you say that this is the case?

If so, are there any plans to, say, add driver's licenses, passports, or other documents to a user's signature chain? There are some countries which actually give citizens public/private keys for cryptographic purposes like voting, etc.? I ask about this specifically because my professor is Josh Benaloh (author of the Benaloh cryptosystem [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benaloh_cryptosystem]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benaloh_cryptosystem\])), and one of his major passions is voting and identity proofs for internet users.

Thanks for joining in, by the way!

Bonus question if you have time: any thoughts about forward secrecy as part of the encrpytion stack in keybase.io?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We've used it a couple of times recently to share credentials with a remote team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting...any reason you chose it over other options?

<comment><USER19> Other options - like team password managers?

It was kind of ad hoc thing; it's free and was easy to setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was just curious if ease-of-use was one of your primary goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A run a small app development studio, and have a couple times a month where a client needs to share login credentials to iTunes Connect, Google Play Dev Console, Facebook, etc.

In those situations, I just give them my Keybase public encryption page, and have them enter the credentials and then send me the cypher text. Works fantastic, and much better than just sending via plain text over email or Slack.

</comment><comment><USER21> Allowing people to verify my message came from me without needing to setup PGP themselves. They can just use /verify and throw my message into it. By using the signature consistently it raises red flags when a post of mine isn't signed or doesn't verify.

Of course - this assumes Keybase has not been compromised, but that isn't an attack vector I worry about.

<comment><USER22> The point of keybase is to distribute trust in them across multiple (social) trust-statements, so you don't even need to trust them Their implementation is supposed to check all those twitter/github/dns trust statements to verify the message.

<comment><USER21> That only works if the message is coming from somewhere that can be linked with Keybase. Say for example I sign a message on Voat rather than Reddit. Then what? There exists thousands of sites that can't be paired with Keybase.

Pasting a message into /verify is a lot easier for people than installing GnuPG and verifying it themselves. Still faster and more user friendly even if they already have GnuPG installed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Offsite backups. I use duplicity to back up my ownCloud servers data directory to my kbfs private directory. There's not a lot of free storage from kbfs, but I don't need much.

[edit] Otherwise, I haven't really found a use for it since setting it up. Would probably be really useful if a tonne of people used PGP, but they don't.

</comment><comment><USER23> I use it as a simple way to share credentials over insecure channels.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use keybase.pub to host a whole hugo [1] site. It was very easy to put it together. Updating it is just a hugo + rsync to my keybase public folder.

I also stash some dotfiles in my private folder, and it's extremely handy for sharing signal desktop client safety numbers with other crypto minded friends. I use it for my ssh public keys as well.

I've also used it for snippets with coworkers (secrets or no, it's really nice to be able to sent python /keybase/private/foo,bar/test.py in a chat window, and it can be directly pasted without needing to share the script, or relocate the paths in the command.

I feel like I've naturally developed tons of ways of using it at this point. I'll probably come to depend on it, soon enough.

[1] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://xkcd.com/1553/](https://xkcd.com/1553/)

<comment><USER26> Publishing My Private Keys: [http://nullprogram.com/blog/2012/06/24/](http://nullprogram.com/blog/2012/06/24/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My previous company was looking into using it as a place to store the app's public key for that user and find other users of the app (with their public keys) while being able to verify them.

At the time, Keybase didn't have the appropriate APIs to allow third-party integration like that. I haven't checked if anything happened on that front since.

</comment><comment><USER28> I use it to authenticate and encrypt sensitive messages to friends online, over insecure channels.

</comment><comment><USER29> It holds my git-signing key. That's all I do with PGP atm.

</comment><comment><USER30> We use it to distribute public and private key pairs. The aptly-named "public" and "private" folders are quite convenient for such things.

</comment><comment><USER31> Off topic, but related: I have some keybase invites available, and I'm sure others do as well. Contact info in my profile if anyone would like one.

</comment><comment><USER32> just discovered it, looks like an interesting attempt to solve exchanging public keys. feels wrong to put public keys in a cloud solution like this---

<comment><USER33> Why wrong? Is there a difference you see between a cloud service like this and PGP keyservers?

<comment><USER32> you shouldn't put your private key in the cloud..? ..or maybe it is considered acceptable these days? theoretically--if you put your private key in cloud, and you pass the passphrase you give everything to the man in the middle for decrypting, but also give them the possibility to impersonating you.

<comment><USER23> You don't have to put your private key on Keybase servers to use Keybase.

<comment><USER32> I noticed that you don't have to, but what is then the benefit of this web site..?

<comment><USER34> Seamless secure file sharing with decent identity authentication - [https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs](https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs)

<comment><USER32> it's only secure if you can ensure that no one has tampered with your keys. if your keys are generated behind a service like this, how can you know that you are safe?

<comment><USER34> You can use Keybase without their ever seeing your private key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> kbfs is pretty sick but I mainly use it for my git signing key :)

<comment><USER28> It's a nice idea but not really well-implemented.

<comment><USER30> Why do you say that?

<comment> mike-cardwell Not the parent, but a major issue with it is, it's _slow_.

      mike@snake:/keybase/public/mickeyc$ time ls
      index.html

      real	0m1.156s
      user	0m0.000s
      sys	0m0.000s
      mike@snake

The current client is not a syncing client like Dropbox/ownCloud, it's a network fs client.

I don't know if the slowness is due to the requirement to access the network, or the crypto, or whatever, but it will remain a toy unless they do something about it.

I understand it's very much a beta though, so that's ok.

<comment><USER30> Okay, that's understandable, but how do we know this is an implementation- level problem rather than a fundamental problem?

<comment> mike-cardwell [https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs](https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs) \- "Performance: We've made no performance optimizations yet. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This isn't a zero-sum game - <AUTHOR> http://bluntobject.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/this-isnt-a-zero-sum-game/ <comment><USER2> How is it, I wonder, that so many people get bent around the idea of making an economic analysis out of this? We're talking here about a _playroom_ , the very nature and substance of which means that the teachers should be primarily concerned with making sure everyone has equitable access to the "resources" -- i.e. the toys.

I think one can argue whether or not the teachers are doing that in an effective and appropriate way, certainly. But I believe that this one underlying fact is nonnegotiable.

Personally, and as a parent, I find the repeated and forceful attempts to turn this into some kind of capitalist vs. socialist laboratory are both ill- conceived and ill-advised. Whatever else may be true of the situation, I believe it is certainly no place to institute a Lego-fied re-enactment of _Lord of the Flies_.

<comment><USER3> Are you talking about the teachers making an economic analysis out of the lego game, or the internet-comments making economic analysis out of what the teachers did?

If the former, then I can at least understand your point, though I would disagree (I think that going through a simulation like this is a very interesting way to teach kids about economics and power, and I wish I'd had teachers who spent that much attention on trying to teach their students things they felt were important in life).

If the latter, than it sounds like you misunderstood what the teachers did and why they did it. They were _not_ primarily interested in the organizing a system that would merely provide kids with equitable access to toys in the playroom. They were interested in teaching the children their own version of how economics and social justice should be understood _in real life_ , a version which many people (including me) take issue with for its fundamental lack of awareness of how wealth is created, and the effects of a system of organization on that wealth creation process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The kids in the post add value by building more complex structures out of the raw materials, no? Does the author of the article think we have an infinite supply of raw materials? I read the original article as an experiment into control of raw materials rather than an experiment of added value vs. zero- sum.

As much as economists may dislike it, these arguments seem to always boil down to 'who has control of the raw materials'; those that are empowered are happy with the current system, and those that are not empowered are not. The efficiencies of the market, and whether it's zero-sum or not, would seem to be a secondary concern for most participants.

<comment><USER5> Raw materials are less limited than most people think. The usual scenario is that as a raw material gets scarcer, the price for it goes up. With the price higher, firms are incentivized to spend more on technology to reach formerly unreachable raw resources, etc. This is why we've been running out of oil for about 100 years - the price goes up, technology is deployed, etc. And if we really did start to run out of oil, then the value of energy would go up creating demand for alternates as the price now pays for greater technological breakthroughs, etc.

So, to make a long story short, the idea that resources are a zero-sum game is also incorrect in the sense that the underlying value can be found given enough ingenuity unleashed with the profit motive.

So the lego example is in no way a reflection of the real world, and if I could give this blog post a larger up vote, I would.

<comment><USER6> This is why resource reserves are usually accompanied by a price per unit:

[http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/u/uranium- reser...](http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/u/uranium-reserves.htm)

 _The global uranium reserves with mining costs up to US $ 80 per kilogram amount to about 2 million tonnes_ ... _If mining costs of up to 130 $/kg are taken into consideration the global uranium reserves are increased by further 3 million tonnes._

At some price, it will become possible to extract trace uranium from ocean water, of which there is quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article: "It's plenty obvious that free commerce is not a zero-sum game. I go to the liquor store to buy beer. I buy five bottles of Staropolskie Zlote for about ten bucks. I value the beer more than I value the ten bucks -- else I wouldn't have given the clerk my money. The liquor store values my ten bucks more than the beer -- else they wouldn't have sold it to me. We both come away from the exchange happier: I have my beer, they have their money. We both get what we wanted. The world is, in fact, a better place after that exchange than it was before... at least for me and for the liquor store."

From the article: "One firm adds value by trucking the beer from the brewery to a port. Another firm adds value by shipping the beer across the Atlantic. A third firm adds value by shipping the beer across Canada, and yet a fourth firm adds value by providing a broad selection of beers in a relatively convenient place for my buying pleasure."

Congratulations. You've discovered Pareto efficiency ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency> ), the means by which goods are distributed.

<comment><USER8> I thought that goods were distributed with trucks:->

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I keep seeing comments about how the original builders of Legotown were unjustly punished for being successful little proto-capitalists. The argument goes something like: "They added value to their raw materials and created something great and beautiful. Then they were struck down for being better than their peers, and all the children were doomed to a life of uniform mediocrity."

To me, the story of Legotown was not one about capitalism. The questions about whether the builders added value to their Lego brick raw materials, and whether the trading game only allowed zero-sum transactions are irrelevant to the larger point of the story.

To me, the story of Legotown is about legitimate and illegitimate authority.

By what right did the original builders of Legotown assert their authority over the Legos? Why were they able to make the rules about who could use the Legos and who couldn't? Because they got their first? Because they built the best, most elaborate structures? Because they were bigger? There were no classroom rules that allowed them to claim ownership of the Legos. Instead, they took control of the Legos by force and simply asserted their right to make the rules about them.

Yes, capitalism requires adding value to raw materials and ability to trade freely, but it also requires the rule of law that is accepted as legitimate by its participants. If there had been rules about claiming ownership of toys in the classroom, then the builders could have followed those rules and then enforced their own rules about things that they owned. But, in the absence of such a governing framework, they cannot simply assert that they own something, and then expect others to accept their authority.

That's also the real point of the trading game. It wasn't to model capitalism. It was to show the children how it felt to be treated in a system ruled by arbitrary, illegitimate power. By what right do the holders of all the green Legos get to make the rules? Why should their power be considered legitimate? The answer is it shouldn't, because tilting the game in favor of the green Lego holders is obviously arbitrary and unjust. And, if it's unfair for the green Lego holders to make the rules in the trading game, how is that different than the original builders making all the rules about who can and cannot participate in Legotown?

In the end, the children earned back the Legos. But, it wasn't because they agreed to a more "Socialist" set of rules imposed by the teachers. Instead, it was because the children came together and agreed to a set of rules that reflected their values of fairness and justice. And, because the rules were the result of their input, the children considered them to be legitimate.

</comment><comment><USER10> but still, not even america is a purelely capitalistic society,you do have some socialism in the blend.and the 20 or so western nations with higher standard of living are even less capitalistic.so in the trade off between the two ideas i think america should move towards socialism.of course there are other nations that should do the opposite

<comment><USER5> It is the socialism in the blend of the US economy that drags us down as well as in other blended countries such as in Europe.

<comment><USER2> Please cite your evidence for how we are being "dragged down," and please cite a purely capitalist society that rivals our own (or those of Western Europe). I'm willing to consider evidence, but not an unfounded assertion like this.

<comment><USER5> The examples are numerous - please look around. Simple examples would include the rent control policies in New York and San Francisco. The intention: provide low cost rent for tenants at the expense of landlords. The reality: because of the rent control, the ROI for entering the rental business declined dramatically. This caused less development of rental units and rapidly increasing rents for the scarcer supply left. The result of rent control: chronically higher rents for all but those lucky enough to already be renting and a chronic under-supply of rental units. Other classic examples are the minimum wage which increases unemployment, medicare/Medicaid which drives up the cost of health care for all, excessive taxation to pay for all of the entitlements which is a disincentive to business, etc.

<comment><USER2> Despite which, the US economy remains one of the largest and most productive in the free world. Your examples do not support your assertion.

According to both the IMF and the World Bank, the world's 10 largest economies in 2006 were, in order, the EU, the US, Japan, Germany, the PRC, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain and Brazil. Very mixed economies, every one. I really don't see how this supports the idea that they're being "dragged down."

<comment><USER5> Do you understand the point that the result of rent control is less rental units for renters, higher prices for renters, and less profit for landlords? How is that not dragging down what would otherwise be a sphere of creativity of landlords going out of their way to provide greater value to renters (to increase their profits) if the regulations were removed?

Also, how does the fact that the US economy does well in comparison to other more socialist countries in any way show that removing the socialist controls we have now would not improve our economy even more?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I understand that.

I maintain that it doesn't support your argument that our economy is being dragged down. You may argue that it's not growing at the rate you think it would, and I can respond by arguing that the resulting society isn't one I'd want to live in -- that's a different discussion. But the general trend of growth year over in real GDP ([http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/Data/HistoricalR...](http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/Data/HistoricalRealGDPValues.xls)) is not evidence of being "dragged down." The trend is broadly up.

Regarding your second point, this is a canard. The fact that the 10 largest, most successful economies in the world (in fact, most if not all of the top 20) incorporate elements of socialism (most to a much greater degree than the US) demonstrates that mixed economies can, and do, succeed. Your initial argument at least implies that a mixed economy is not a successful one. If I read that incorrectly, please tell me, because by most metrics, mixed economies are not only surviving, but prospering.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automata by Example – build cellular automata just by clicking around - <AUTHOR> https://demos.samgentle.com/automata-by-example/ <comment><USER2> From the writeup, for those that wonder like me what's happening:

 _The technique, which I think of as rule generation, is something a little like direct manipulation, but with an additional generalisation step. You click the pixel you want, but instead of just setting the pixel directly, the system figures out a rule that would set that pixel and applies that rule globally. In other words, you determine the rule from the action, then use the rule to apply more actions._

[https://samgentle.com/posts/2017-01-14-automata-by- example](https://samgentle.com/posts/2017-01-14-automata-by-example)</comment>


Lavabit founder, under gag order, speaks out about shutdown decision (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/lavabit-founder-under-gag-order-speaks-out-about-shut-down-decision/ <comment><USER2> (2013)

<comment><USER3> Added</comment></comment>


What's happening in Go tip - <AUTHOR> http://honnef.co/posts/2013/08/what_s_happening_in_go_tip__2013_08_15_/

<comment><USER2> Cool blog idea.

 _One of the oldest issues on the Go project has been the request for preemptive scheduling (Issue 543). Until now, Go's scheduler has been strictly cooperative, with scheduling happening during specific events (channel operations and locks)._

I had no idea go wasn't (yet) using preemptive scheduling!</comment>


ASK PG: Got an acceptance email to Startup School, but confirmation was rejected - <AUTHOR>

I received an acceptance email to Startup School 2009, but the confirmation link says the application was rejected.<p>Maybe there is glitch that my HN username hasn't been entered into the accepted list or incorrect email was sent out. <comment><USER2> Sorry, bug; should work now.

<comment><USER3> Yep! Worked for me now.

<comment><USER4> worked for me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871073>

Just wait until the West coast wakes up and it'll be cleared up then.

<comment><USER6> I'm just hoping the glitch is on the side of the site, rather than the email sent.

edit: it was the site. Cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870796> (same thing happened to me and other folks)

</comment><comment><USER8> I forgot my password but there isn't a "forgot password" link for me so I couldn't sign in to RSVP. Can anyone help?

<comment><USER9> yea - same thing with me. this is my second account. help us pg! :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bummer, did not make it this year :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Yep, same here.

</comment><comment><USER11> Same here.

</comment><comment><USER12> Likewise.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ditto

</comment><comment><USER14> From people who went last year: do you think the information and experience justifies flying out from the east coast?

<comment><USER15> Experience: yes. I met a ton of awesome people

Information: In terms of the presentation contents, not as much. The actual presentations were all put online. I felt like I got a lot out of talking to the people, though.

(I'm from NYC, so I flew from the east coast, and am again this year)

<comment><USER16> I'm also from NYC; my partner and I are starting to look around to see what startup-related meetups / discussion groups / networks / etc there are in the city. Any recommendations for particularly good ones?

<comment><USER17> Me too.

There's a Hacker News meetup in NYC and a few tech meetups which are pretty interesting.

You can email me at myusername @ gmail if you want to chat.

<comment><USER14> I just moved to NYC as well. I would love to keep posted about all the HN happenings. Emailing you now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Opening a plane door mid-flight - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/a69fdc7e-7fb5-43ce-977f-1e88de99e0dc <comment><USER2> So it can only really happen at low altitudes, and at low altitudes, planes are designed so that an open door is not catastrophic.

I don't know about you but I actually find this story reassuring, despite the sensationalism.

tldr: if someone is about to open the cabin door mid flight, and it's actually going to open, buckle up your seat belt and you will be fine.

<comment><USER3> If the door is opened when armed, the evacuation slide will be inflated. When it breaks off the aircraft it can be sucked into the engine or damage the tail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am much more interested in what was going on with this guy. Appears to be a psychotic episode, and if so, brought on by what?

In high school, PCP was a thing and would generate stories such as taking a wine bottle to the head without effect. Maybe it's just morbid curiosity, but I fly a lot and am as concerned about mentally ill passengers as I am anything else...

If he had a tendency to behave this way, or a serious mental illness, was there any way to know before he boarded a plane? Did he take a prescription med and have an unexpected side effect? Or was it illicit combined with profoundly bad judgement?

Or did he just have a really bad day and decide to end it and take a plane load of souls with him?

Hoping there is follow up on this story with an explanation.

<comment><USER5> A lot of the "crazy drug strength" stories today seem to be attributed to "bath salts", "spice", and other legal hacks (chemicals which weren't illegal to trade, provided not for human consumption, to get around prohibition of far more well studied drugs.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is hard for me to believe is that other passengers didn't immediately respond to the conflict. Post 9/11 I assumed US passengers would use if anything too much force to respond to threats against the aircraft. While stuff like the UA fight club is happening too, once the aircraft is flying and something looks like it would either bring down the aircraft or cause a shoot down of the aircraft, a reasonable person would act to end a threat.

<comment><USER6> Multiple passengers did involve themselves, and got hurt in the process.

News articles don't say (it's not an important detail), but we may speculate that there were people on the sidelines who were waiting for an opportunity to enter the fray.

But also, everyone involved seemed to be continually surprised about how difficult it was to get the guy under control. Personally I'm not sure that, if I were on that flight, I would've bothered if I saw that three or four people were already engaging. The bystander effect (aka "someone else's problem") isn't always completely illogical.

It probably happened quite fast, too. As I understand it, happened in an area between bulkheads where there aren't any seats. The fight likely wasn't visible to everyone on board, and by the time enough people rose to engage, it might have been over. Again, just speculation.

Lastly, there's also obviously a limit to the number of people who can engage in a fight in cramped airplane cabin.

<comment><USER7> > an opportunity to enter the fray.

I'm a fairly large guy, and prone to have jumped in the middle of this. I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to navigate the cramped seats and isles, where surely everyone was gawking and rubbernecking, just to get to the galley, where 2 small people have a hard time standing side-by-side, and help in the fight. Two people tussling in that space is about all it's going to allow, and the troublemaker was clearly on something I ain't on, to take a beating with a wine bottle, and keep fighting. There's just no good answer here, except for the pilot to ask, over the intercom, if there's a Jackie Chan on board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do they suggest the plane was at a low altitude? It was an hour into a flight from Seattle to Beijing; by that time they will be cruising above 30,000 feet.

<comment><USER9> Where did they suggest that?

I read it as "If still at low altitude, the door actually would open". In othrr words, because they were at a high altitude, the door didn't open and everything turned out alright.

<comment><USER8> "at a lower altitude, and with the door being disarmed as it was"

The second of these two clauses refers to what actually happened; the first is counterfactual. But since they didn't put the facts about altitude in TFA the impression is that both are true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If the door had been opened by this lunatic and the slide then deployed (flight attendants normally disarm it when you taxi up to the terminal), my main concern is that it'd get torn off and be sucked into an engine. That'd turn a bad situation into a very serious one.

<comment><USER7> Jet engines can "eat" a lot of stuff before failing, and exploding, like in the movies. They're 3,000 degree incinerators with giant 30,000 RPM food processors in front and back. I'd be more worried about the slide wrapping over the wing, and fouling the control surfaces. Surely plane engineers have thought through this scenario though, and have some mitigation strategies in the design?

<comment><USER11> Flight 1549, which famously landed on the Hudson River in 2009, had its engines disabled by ingesting a few geese:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549)

<comment><USER7> Define "few" and I'll define "a lot". ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious about the motive. Was this guy just angry or mentally ill?

<comment><USER13> The local article from the day of the event makes it pretty clear he was having some sort of mental breakdown. This BBC article has a lot more generic details about opening a plane door but the local article has a few more details about the incident:

[http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/florida- man-c...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/florida-man-charged- with-interfering-with-crew-on-seattle-to-beijing-flight/)

> Hudek, who was sitting in first class and traveling on a "dependent pass," > ordered one beer before takeoff and showed no signs of intoxication, FBI > Special Agent Caryn Highley wrote in the complaint.

> About an hour into the flight, Hudek briefly went into the lavatory, > according to the complaint. He then went back out and asked one of the > flight attendants a question in the galley area, the complaint says.

> Hudek returned to the lavatory for about two minutes. After he walked out he > lunged toward the emergency exit door, grabbed the handle and tried to open > it, the complaint alleges.

<comment><USER14> Assuming that this was a mental breakdown, what can we as a society do to help these people or prevent this from happening? I imagine that the consequences for this will be quite severe, and I also imagine that many people know someone that could have had a mental breakdown like this and done something like this.

<comment><USER15> > and I also imagine that many people know someone that could have had a > mental breakdown like this and done something like this.

This kind of dramatic event is very rare. You could focus some attention on early intervention services that work with people experiencing first episode of psychosis. Ideally those services would be all age, but pragmatically I guess 14 to 35 would cover most people.

About 1% to 2% of the population has a psychotic illness. I think that prevalence, with the rarity of events like this is reassuring.

You're far more likely to come to harm on a plane from a drunk or drugged person, or from someone dropping their bag on your head as they get something from the overhead locker.

And this risk from drunk / drugged people shows perhaps another thing to target: phobias are very treatable. People don't know this, and can't afford the treatment, so they self-medicate with alcohol and meds and drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Headline is a bit misleading. Was hoping for a photo of chaos.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am somewhat disappointed that the BBC has to resort to clickbait titles now. At no point is the aircraft door actually opened, the title is completely false.

<comment><USER12> To be fair, they do describe what happens when a door is opened.

<comment><USER18> Yep, but the generic point on quality of current BBC stands nonetheless.

IF I hadn't just read this sentence on this article:

>Nevertheless, things wouldn't have been quite so dramatic as in Iron Man 3, where all the passengers get sucked out of a hole blown in an aircraft.

I would have never believed possible that it came from BBC, as well as - <AUTHOR> one or more bottles of wine were involved in the incident - the presence of a stock photo of two bottles of wine (unopened/completely full) and a half full glass, resting on a wooden crate is something that would be maybe appropriate to a wine related blog.

<comment><USER16> This is the BBC 3 part of the site rather than BBC News, so it's meant for a younger audience.

<comment><USER18> >This is the BBC 3 part of the site rather than BBC News, so it's meant for a younger audience.

Maybe, but I still don't understand why the younger should be fed with crappy "dramatization".

And younger as they might be they should know how a bottle of wine is made and need not an illustration of it (that continues making little sense).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't get it, so why can't they just put a $2 bolt lock on the release mechanism (the big handle thing) while in-flight and call it a day? What am I missing here?

<comment><USER20> Because the door needs to be opened in an emergency, and being locked would prevent that.

<comment><USER21> And also is meant to be opened be _everyone_, so the mechanism has to be very simple too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The guy wants to get off. I say "let him get off". Don't hand him a parachute and close the door (or land) after he departs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pro-tip: The best weapon you have available in such a situation is repeated full-armed swings to the head with a laptop, aimed in such a way to impact using the corner of the laptop instead of the flat. That's the most effective weapon you're likely to have with you on an airplane. Someone is _not_ going to be able to shrug that off like they will a wine bottle being broken over their head (which, in breaking, dissipates most of its energy).

<comment><USER21> I don't think that is a good pro-tip. Have you noticed lately that laptops are becoming smaller and lighter? I can't imagine an X1 Carbon doing anything to a skull...And hitting with the corner may be life dangerous, after all you don't want to kill the person, but incapacitate it.

No, the pro-tip would be ... box the hell of the guy. Your fist/knee is a very reliable weapon.

<comment><USER24> Using a weapon (any kind of, starting with a rolled magazine up to a laptop) is a much better solution.

You are likely to break your hand if you try to boxe someone out of the blue, especially if you hit the skull.

Kicking is a better option if there are no weapons.

The melee option is not bad either in the configuration they had (not much space to show off martial arts skills learned in a J Chan movie) - with a few people on him he is not likely to be able to move.

Source : 14 years of self - defence, had to use my skills only once, ran away twice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The repeated use of the word "stewardess" in the article is somewhat interesting.

<comment><USER26> Not really. That's the word for a female steward. It lets the reader know they were females. Yeah yeah patriarchy, why are gendered words even a thing in 2017, let me save you the trouble.

<comment><USER25> Flight attendants have pushed pretty hard to get rid of the term over a long time period, and have been pretty successful with it. For reasons beyond gender.

<comment><USER27> Google ngrams shows not a single occurrence of "flight attendant" in their British English corpus. [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Flight+attenda...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Flight+attendant%2Cstewardess%2Cattendant%2Csteward&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=6&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cstewardess%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cattendant%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csteward%3B%2Cc0)

<comment> vertex-four Err, yes it does? ngrams is case-sensitive by default.

<comment><USER27> Good catch, that's what I get for working on a phone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>