The pace of major breakthroughs has declined - <AUTHOR> http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/09/you-call-this-progress/ <comment><USER4> > "Should we succeed at controlled, sustained, net-positive fusion, we would > qualify it as a new face at the table. I might characterize it as the most > expensive way to create electricity ever devised (and electricity is not the > hard nut to crack)."

It's not even been developed, yet the author is convinced it will be 'the most expensive way to create electricity ever devised'.

The article is riddled with statements like that, that twist history to serve the author's narrative. In the list of developments unfamiliar to the person from the 19th century we have the toaster and the blender, listed as if these would be modern marvels. In comparison, the push into space over the last 65 years is downplayed, as if the fact we aren't all taking space holidays is some indication that the field has been stagnant. Whilst it's a shame there haven't been any manned missions to moons and planets since the 70s, there's been a ton of development in the field... satellites, telescopes, space probes, space stations, etc...

I'd also suggest that a lot of the developments in technology over the past 65 years have been too small to see. Semiconductor manufacturing, bio sciences, etc... Does it really matter if developments aren't immediately obvious to the eye?

<comment><USER5> If he's only looking at ITER he might have a point. He's ignoring much cheaper possibilities, ranging from conservative but more compact approaches like MIT's ARC design and UW's dynomak, to aneutronic designs like Tri-Alpha and Helion.

UW claims the dynomak would cost less than coal: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the- dynomak-a...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a- fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal)

Aneutronic fusion has the potential to be far cheaper than any other energy source.

<comment><USER6> I made some calculations.

The total cost of ITER is $14 billons (and going up :) ). The total production of electricity in the word is 20000TWh/year.

If we magically switch to 100% tokamak fusion production, and we want to recoup the inversion in one year, it would add 0.7 $/MWh to the production (and distribution cost).

A more realistic scenario is to generate only the mythical 1% using tokamak fusion reactors, and recoup the money in 10 years. With this modification the R&D cost is 7 $/MWh.

Just for comparison, the current cost of electricity is 50-150 $/MWh. So 0.7-7 $/MWh is not too much.

Anyway, the ITER project is not even close to make a functional power generator, so the final cost may be much bigger than $14 billons.

<comment><USER5> Sure but it's not mainly the R&D, it's the capital cost of such large, complex reactors. MIT's ARC, to take the most conservative alternative, is also a tokamak, but with much stronger superconductors it can be built a lot smaller and cheaper.

MIT has a lot of experience in this area since they already have a tokamak with the strongest magnetic fields of any in the world. They've made at least one fundamental breakthrough with it, not too long ago. Of course Congress is about to cancel their funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure, if you cherry-pick what you consider "progress," you can manipulate the numbers to show we've slowed down our rate of progress.

Also, don't belittle "refinements." Sometimes it's figuring out how to make a single airplane fly that's the easy part -- it's "refining" that idea into a global network of safe air travel where the real hard work and innovation happens.

Anyway. This article is silly.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention his dismissing computers as "interactive televisions", for example, is absurdly reductionist in an attempt to force his point.

Agreed, terrible article.

<comment><USER9> I thought that was the stupidest part of the article until I saw this:

"But consider that the amount of funding poured into medical research has skyrocketed in my lifetime, so that the progress per dollar spent surely is going down."

Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_ (read: every society).

<comment><USER10> This argument is actually correct when it comes to pharmaceuticals. The number of drugs discovered per $1B in (inflation-adjusted) research spending has dropped by a factor of 80 since the 1950's. Do a search on 'Erooms Law' for the relevant papers.

<comment><USER11> Is that even an argument though? A better way to say the same thing is "Easy problems get solved first". Or another way to say it "You aren't going to spend a billion on a problem if you solve it in 10 million".

What we have here is a measurement problem. For example looking at curing polio and curing AIDS as one issue is disingenuous, it tells us nothing about the complexity of the actual problem we are solving. To cure AIDS we may have to solve many hundreds of different problems, many of them usable in other applications.

<comment><USER10> Read the paper ([https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.p...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.pdf)), it addresses these objections. The "easy problems" objection is just a form of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, where you redefine difficult problems to be the ones you haven't stumbled across a solution for.

<comment><USER12> Uh, isn't that what makes a difficult problem... difficult? I don't think there's any redefinition going on. I'm not sure I've ever heard somebody say, "this is really easy, I can't figure it out."

<comment><USER10> The thing is we don't figure out drugs, we find them by inspired accident. The attempt to move to a "let's figure it out" approach with computational methods seems to be what's making us worse at drug discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article seems to ignore the speed at which things can be done nowadays, which makes all those 'familiar' things that bit more amazing to a 1950's traveller. It also seems to set the metric for progress as the visible physical changes in the world around us. This ignores the amazing things we can do today.

Need to get to the other side of the world? 24 hours max. Need to write to someone other side of the world - instant email. Need to face to face with someone on the other side of the world - instant video.

Live TV from everywhere, instant access to the worlds information fight in your pocket, instant social networking when needed too.

Need something built for you? Commission anyone from anywhere in the world in moments. Maybe even 3D print your complex project overnight.

Got a problem? Ask for help and get responses from people around the world in seconds. Got a complaint? Publish your grievance and have it shared around millions of times, maybe even get together with your countrymen and bring down a tyrannical government using just the power of social communication.

What about simulation and the power computing gives us to 'get it right first time'? We can do incredible things with minimal physical testing thanks to computer simulation.

And medically - the author skips over almost the entire field of transplant surgery as just one single example. We've progressed amazingly far in medicine. Even in the last 15 years huge advances have been made in trauma care (thanks in part to Iraq/Afghan wars) that would be astounding to doctors of the 1990's let alone the 1950's.

We live in a wondrous world full of things that we take for granted. Maybe the author doesn't realise just how much more connected we are nowadays and just how much more empowered an individual is in terms of knowledge and creative potential. And that's not to speak of the incredible advances in energy, materials science, social progress, reduction of poverty, transport, communication, education and scores of other fields.

Just because there aren't such highly visible physical changes immediately apparent (though they're there), that doesn't mean 2015 would be any less of a stunning place.

<comment><USER14> You're right, but you're not rebutting his point, you're actually reinforcing it: all of those things were possible in 1950, we just made them faster. The whole point of the post is that very little is completely new, meaning (close to) not understandable to a 1950 man:

> They will no doubt be impressed with miniaturization as an evolutionary > spectacle, but will tend to have a context for the functional capabilities > of our gizmos

You say that we can now face to face with people from the other side of the world in real time -- he says if there was as much _innovation_ (and not just refinement) as there was between 1885 and 1950, we should be able to interact with a hologram of someone from the other side of the _Solar System_.

The real change a 1950's man would see is probably how more linked humans are (mostly first world humans though) and how much more interaction there can be.

<comment><USER11> Welcome to science.

First rule, exponential growth is not capable forever.

Second rule, duplicating what is already there is far easier than creating something new.

The second rule is what is important. All of our 'innovation' from 1750 to 1950 was because we decided to interact with the world using the scientific method. Once we started correctly classifying observations and experiments we quickly learned the limits of physics. Light speed is light speed and there is no getting around it. Instantaneous communications over long distance is not possible. The problem we have is non scientists attempted to make predictions of the future with no understanding of how reality works. This gave us the incorrect expectation that we could use unlimited energy forever. Just using more and more energy to get the job done is not innovative.

With all the easily observable gains taken early, the things we do now are highly innovative, but require massive amounts of data to do. The reduction in the amount of energy required to accomplish a task will be the legacy of our century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In 1885 people were flying in balloons. In 1950 radios were ordinarily furniture, portable radios were luggage, and radio operation was a military rating. A mere twenty years ago, I accessed the internet with bauds, phone numbers, parity and gopher. A SVGA resolution picture [800x600 for anyone on my lawn] took about a cup of coffee to download and the idea of an online encyclopedia was the stuff of science fiction.

And science fiction is largely a cultural invention of the article's second epoch. Around 1950 is when it went from a few authors to a literary genre and ideas about the technological details of the future went from projecting steam into the future as rockets and submarines to projecting computers and radios. We don't have personal helicopters for two reasons: the laws of physics and the laws of information theory. I can order my potatoes and herring online. Strapping on a jetpack and flying to the Isle of Man for my fix, isn't just impossible, it's absurd.

I've got Hari Seldon's prognostic pocket calculator prognosticating Wednesday's weather and wending through the ether to an encyclopedia galactic. I can text you a photograph of it from a chair in the sky.

The article does not list irony among the cultural we got from ancient Egypt, and it is civilization which is not attributed a great sense of humor in the popular cannon. Yet certainly it had been invented by Socrates' day. Fortunately it thrives today. [https://youtu.be/ZFsOUbZ0Lr0](https://youtu.be/ZFsOUbZ0Lr0)

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems to me that the progress we are making is in technologies of great generality, computers, AI, and genetics. Once these reach an inflection point, the world will get impossibly weirder than it ever has.

Genetically informed iterated embryo selection looks like it could lead to children with higher IQs than any human that has ever lived. Regardless of the ethics, someone somewhere is going to do this. A world where the average kindergartener is learning chromodynamics? Talk about a historical discontinuity.

If we get human level artificial intelligence, this again is a historical discontinuity.

If we get whole brain emulation, things will get very weird very quickly.

We're just now getting good VR. False realities that seem real and immersive. This seems like a much bigger jump than that from radio to television.

Maybe we are in a period of stagnation - I'm unsure if this time travel thought experiment is a good means of measuring progress. However, it seems to me the world is about to get much weirder this century.

<comment><USER17> Well hitting a biological limitation wall is most likely a thing that will happen and at that point AI and genetic engineering might will be required for progress to happen but It's not sure if were there yet, and it's not clear if it will be a "hard" stop or a sluggish ride through much while getting there.

We have fairly limited understanding on how intelligence works at this point, for example while the general consensus is that average human intelligence has evolved even in the past 1000 years it's still not clear how "smart" would say an AMH from circa 100,000 BCE would compare to us today, and many people believe that with correct nurturing they will be indistinguishable form a modern human born into a "high IQ" family.

It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance.

On the VR part this isn't a really good example, were getting good VR now because the components are dirt cheap and available so it requires much less R&D effort to develop, all of the current VR trends are software based and they can afford to be because they can get cheap and readily available high performance high resolution screens, accelerators and other components required for VR to work. This is exactly the opposite of say the 90's where the likes of SEGA had to develop side projected micro CRT's and specialized LCD's to make even the basic premise of VR feasible. However if there was sufficient reason to pursue VR then well we would've had gotten it much much sooner.

Allot of the technical innovation especially the one that comes to the consumer market is more often than not a perfect combination of available technologies rather than a focused effort. I don't personally see VR as an example of innovation or any meaningful development effort it's probably the best case of using current technology rather than innovating I've seen in the past decade. Heck the VR experience I had as a child in SegaWorld in London 12 years ago impressed me much more than the Oculus Rift 2 SDK i got a year ago.

And this might be an issue there might be less of a pressure today to "innovate" than it was before, conflict was always an integral part of our drive for innovation, and it seems that once the 2 leading nations at the time stopped trying to one up eachother things slowed down.

We could've had a better particle accelerator than the LHC over 30 years ago if the cold war was still going on, heck the only thing the defense department seems to care these days about cutting edge particle physics is still neutrino detection since it can give them a way to detect nuclear submarines.

I for one would not mind if everyone in the world would get a life time dose of the old Soviet Space religion that would inspire everyone to drive for something better, but sadly i think we'll need to have a real impending catastrophe for the bigger nations and the entire planet to start caring about that again.

If you build a doomsday clock that would say earth will self destruct in 50 years we will have a mars colony withing 30 because this is how our species works, but as soon as the only thing we care about is the size of the screen it shouldn't surprise you that some innovation stops because those resources are now being direct at quite pointless things.

<comment><USER16> >It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance.

This is, to put it charitably, not the consensus of the relevant science. Once you get adequate nutrition, which western countries have, IQ if influenced far more by genetics than environment. Adoption studies show consistently that adopted children's IQs resemble their genetic parents not their adopted parents. Twins separated at birth tend to have very similar IQs and personalities. Programs like Head Start and brain training regimens have proven to have little impact on IQ and future outcomes - which you wouldn't expect if environment was the prime factor. We are biological robots, we should expect our source code to have a significant influence on our cognition.

The "environment is all that matters" idea is basically Lysenkoism and its popularity is more do to ideology than science. Your statements are from a mirror world. I assure you, you're misinformed.

<comment><USER18> I'd be happy for a couple of references from you (Moshe_Silnorin) and dogma1138.

<comment><USER16> I don't want to play study tennis with dogma. However, here are some representative examples:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/)

[http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148](http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148)

IQ and its heritability are about as uncontroversial among psychiatrists as global warming is among climate scientists.

Here's a good blog post about the personal implications of this, and how this knowledge can be used productively and charitably: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the- tale...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)

<comment><USER17> That's not completely honest and not the main issue here, it's not about heritability and the IQ potential but the actual fixed IQ of adults. People with higher genetic potential for intelligence are considerably more influenced by their environment and for longer periods than people with lower potential.

So unless we are talking about <100 and in many cases <90 IQ individuals the environment plays a bigger role than pure genetics in the final outcome, I've linked a very recent and very extensive study on that same subject.

<comment><USER16> Dogma, the claim I disagree with is this: overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics.

You know what has a huge influence on your early development, your genetics. Do you really think I could be as good at math as Terry Tao if I had spent my childhood practicing? If we raise a chimp right, could it beat Terry Tao?

Yes, high IQ people vary more between tests, but much of this is regression to the mean. And still scores are relatively stable. The common superstition that environment and effort matter more than innate capacity is false - <USER2> perseverance is hereditary to some extent, too. I have not read the paper, but I very much doubt this effect would mean environment matters more than genetics. If you clone Terry Tao, and let this clone be raised by two average- IQ parents, he will not grow up to be average.

The summery you provided doesn't seem to discount the value of biological interventions to any great extent, as the "extended period of synaptogenesis" would likely have a genetic cause, given our knowledge about the heritability of IQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it is hard to get progress when number of Americans unsure about evolution _increased_ from 7% to 21% from 1985 to 2005 [1].

I think Idiocracy prediction [2] is what we are getting.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16902112](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16902112) [2] [http://uproxx.com/movies/2014/10/the-many-signs-that-mike- ju...](http://uproxx.com/movies/2014/10/the-many-signs-that-mike-judges- idiocracy-is-almost-upon-us/1/)

<comment><USER17> As long as we don't start watering our fields with Gatorade and elect wrestlemania stars as presidents will be alright...

<comment><USER20> Reality show star for president isn't looking all that impossible, so we're probably halfway there.

<comment><USER21> Not just any reality show, Trump has starred in Wrestlemania specifically: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I)

<comment><USER17> [http://i3.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/990/005/721...](http://i3.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/990/005/721.jpg)

Were doomed then...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think that the author understands just how computers have changed everything.

>The big differences are cell phones (which they will understand to be a sort of telephone, albeit with no cord and capable of sending telegram-like communications, but still figuring that it works via radio waves rather than magic), computers (which they will see as interactive televisions),

sure, someone from the '50s would see games systems as interactive televisions and probably not be too shocked; games systems aren't a world-changing thing (vs. tv) - the same is true if you use cellphones as, you know, mobile telephones.

Think about the information we all have in our pockets now.

Like how to fix things... if you don't repair your own stuff... you should try it one weekend, just for fun. I've used youtube to figure out everything from how to assemble a crazy-complex sony vaio to replacing a bad fan in a fridge, to replacing shocks on my motorcycle.

and the textual information that is available to you is also absolutely huge. We're all carting around a really bad interface to a library that is more vast than the library of congress... in our pockets.

What I think is interesting here is the huge availability of what would have been out of print books in the '50s... books who's copyright has expired; those are available at the snap of the fingers. Even more modern stuff is also available, of course, it's just not as available as the out of copyright stuff.

Actually, I think this is the interesting thing going forward... who can access information, and at what cost. But I think there is sufficient focus on that.

</comment><comment><USER23> The major changes to "consumer" behaviour were the Aricultural and Industrial revolutions. I'm unsure when the so-called "Information revolution" began - with the first writing, which was Sumerian accounting records (certainly data storage and processing)? Perhaps markets and the "consumer" were the most fundamental change.

We try to accomodate technological change - shape it to existing consumer behaviour - rather than change everything.

A great example is Moore's Law. The mind-boggling doubling of transistor density fortyearly is now routine. We're actually _unsettled_ by the hiccups at 10nm.

Thought experiment: can you imagine a new technology which changed costs so drastically that current societal structures (municipal; national; consumer/market; informational) could not accomodate them, and instead would require another revolution? [limited by imagination, of course]

At some point, we'll have succeeded at modelling human nature, and we're self- limited from further change. Aliens might do things differently (or might not - it coud be that the greater part of humanity is just cooperative intelligence, common to all sapients).

</comment><comment><USER24> The article reinforces a point I was making recently; biotechnology and medicine is essentially invisible to most people, and they ignore the massive gains made in past decades, and ignore the potential for the near future.

[https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/10/the- arcane.php](https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/10/the-arcane.php)

We are in the midst of a transformative revolution in the capabilities of medical technology and other biotechnologies. But most people don't care, take their vague ideas of the present state of medicine as a stable situation, set in stone, and don't devote any attention to medicine until they have to.

Medical research and development is an arcane world: invisible, you don't know anything about it, and yet it is the greatest of influences upon your own personal future, determining whether you will live or die, suffer or be healthy.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would think anybody from the fifties would be absolutely shocked if you gave them a tablet with an internet connection and showed them how to use it. They could access any newspapers, books, songs, movies from any time, all the information they ever needed, all their friends whereabouts and actions, and could contact them instantly with text, voice or audio. Learn new things or just play fun games. Look at the map of the earth with street views from all around the globe. Even pictures from the surface of mars. And on the more disturbing side they could look up any sick violence or sex stuff to their hearts desire...

Yes it's "kind of incremental" but my god, all this in a device the size of a clipboard pulling stuff out of thin air. Now that's magic, no other word for it.

And this is just a tablet. Plenty more amazing "incremental" improvements. Put this time traveller in a tesla and push the pedal down. No sound and instant acceleration...

</comment><comment><USER26> The author fails to note the difference in the ease of access to information. Some time ago, if I wanted to e.g. find out what is the half life of some medication in blood, I'd be lucky to find that in encyclopaedia and would probably need to visit a library or consult a pharmacist. Now I can find that out in one minute, without leaving my home.

<comment><USER27> Specifically you'd probably want the current PDR (physicians desk reference). There were a number of these fat and expensive references for various fields that were still woefully incomplete and non-current by modern standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't really agree with the author's method of measuring progress. "Progress" is not measured by how surprising today's world is compared with a world, say 100 years ago.

Despite the frenzy around technology and startups today, I do sincerely believe that we are making a lot of "scientific progress". We have more people than ever before doing scientific research and publishing papers. We have more physicists, doctors, more engineers etc. and I would argue that having so many skilled people in itself is "progress". Also, we have come a long way with society: normalizing gay marriage, stripping down racist laws etc.

Anyways, point being: scientific and social progress does not always manifest itself as glitzy gizmos.

</comment><comment><USER29> Technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in physics. Things that will amaze a 1885 person in 1950 were mostly made possible with electricity and derivative technologies, plus nuclear physics, and a few other things. Even engines for our flying machines wouldn't have been possible without electricity.

So the reason the leap between 1950 and today is not as noticeable in terms of the author's time machine experiment, may be because there have been no more major, truly groundbreaking discoveries made in physics, as in, e.g. discovering a new force in nature not known before etc.

But the author is of course right in saying that the past 65 years were marked with a lot of hard work rather than earth shattering discoveries.

<comment><USER30> > Technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in physics.

I couldn't disagree more. Take the Haber process as a counterexample from chemistry, or vaccinations as a counterexample from medicine.

<comment><USER29> Medicine is not technology. Materials are, but in the end chemistry is just a subsidiary of physics.

<comment><USER30> By that logic, physics is merely an ersatz subsidiary of mathematics, therefore technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in mathematics.

Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think one of the biggest differences a visitor from 1950 would notice is food.

The Germans were called "Krauts" in the second world war because they ate Sauerkraut, a then prevalent way to preserve some food with vitamins for the winter.

And today you can go into the store in winter, and buy twenty kinds of fresh fruit from all over the world, and twenty more types of vegetables.

You don't have to stockpile for winter, and don't have to change your diet signficantly because fresh stuff is unavailable.

We don't think of that as a huge technological advancment, but it has a huge impact on the daily life. Likewise the prevalence of washing machines. The availability of public and private transport in a way unimaginable to somebody from 1950.

</comment><comment><USER32> Related: "Eroom's Law"[1], coined in this Nature paper: [http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html](http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html) which states that the cost of discovering a new drug has been increasing exponentially for 60 years.

Obligatory log graph: [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp- content/uploads/site...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/RD-trend.png)

Some discussion at the "In The Pipeline" blog: [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/ero...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law) [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/14/the...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/14/the_blackian_demon_of_drug_discovery) [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/12/the...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/12/the_brute_force_bias)

[1] You may now groan.

</comment><comment><USER33> Medically, we now have drugs that break up blood clots and give heart attack patients a fighting chance if they get to the hospital fast enough. Same thing with some stroke victims. Today people who would have died from anaphylactic shock from peanut allergies or bee stings can carry around an Epi pen and a couple of Benadryl tablets and have a great chance of surviving an attack[1]. When I was a boy scout, I was taught the sequence of CPR was ABC- Airway, Breathing, Circulation. They very recently changed it to CAB, and there were quite a few other things that we've learned along the way that changed how it works. I understand that the CPR program is changing again at the end of this year.

Of course, these change are small and not on the scale of nuclear fission. But there have been tons of significant medical changes in the last 40 years that increase quality of life and let people live who otherwise would die. And I'm not even getting into the changes I consider even more significant medically, or in AI. Things computers are doing today weren't even imagined a generation ago.

[1] Epi pens started going out to the public in the 80's. If you have a serious allergy that could lead to your airway closing up, and don't yet have an Epi pen, go see your doctor and get some. People still needlessly die from that stuff all the time, and it can be prevented.

</comment><comment><USER34> This has been said about a billion times before, in many different periods, in many different ways. Breakthroughs often come only after long incubation periods, which to me should be counted as part of the breakthrough, just an unseen part. We are about to see incubation give way to a Cambrian explosion of innovations. I just hope we survive this evolutionary trial.

<comment><USER4> I agree. To give an example of what I think you're referring to, the field of synthetic biology is evolving rapidly (perhaps too rapidly in my opinion, the implications are fairly far reaching and I'm not sure we have the cultural maturity to handle them). Even if the most visible fruits of this field appear later they'd still be linked to the research happening now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A big source of the perceived slowdown partially comes from the grant- oriented, near-sighted, and incredibly toxic environment that today's researchers have to deal with.

Making something faster, cheaper, or smaller is incremental progress with immediate payouts. It's easy to sell that as a research project. But some newfangled warp drive? Flying cars? Self sustaining space stations? None of those things have any sort of short term payout, and so they don't get dollars. Or at least, a lot fewer than they probably deserve.

And so we get incremental progress on existing technology instead. If we want more _new_ , then we need to finance it. And that means making investments with 0 return for 20 years. That means financing people who are coming around at things they don't understand with no certainty of financial return.

</comment><comment><USER36> What's happening today is technological (and socio-technological) _change_ at a great pace. However in order to call it _progress_ most people would require it to be _good_ for us, the people.

That's where the article's concluding question becomes relevant: "How reliant are you on the narrative of progress for your sanity and understanding of our world and its future?"

The answer is that to a thoughtful observer much of the aforementioned _change_ is not of the _good_ kind anymore. People are increasingly disenfranchised in the new techno-social environent; the recent upswell of talk about the robopocalypse etc. is just a projection of trends long underway.

So we end up with feel-good "progressivism" as a prosthetic replacement of actual progress.

</comment><comment><USER18> Horace Dediu has looked at how quickly technologies are adopted. He doesn't see any increase in speed of technology adoption (he said this in a recent "Critical Path" podcast), which he was expecting and looking for. [https://twitter.com/asymco/status/631108777333403648](https://twitter.com/asymco/status/631108777333403648)

Technology becomes more complex with time, so _new_ technologies are necessarily more complex, and require an increasing amount of effort to develop. The Wright Bros could research and develop an airplane on their own. I see no chance that two brothers can invent and implement a fusion reactor or spaceflight to Mars on their own.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think this is a symptom of all the 'technical debt' we have as a society/species in law, morals and other 'difficult' things.

That quote about the future (It's already here - just not evenly distributed) is a good description of the situation.

There's going to be a war (its sort of already started), hopefully we can come out the other end ready to innovate again. Right now it is too dangerous to share some technologies (for example how to harness nuclear energy) so it puts a hamper on innovation.

Basically we're starting to reach our moral limits in more fields meaning we need better morals before we can continue.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

You're assuming morals can be overcome. Information complexity may simply be an obstacle that cannot be overcome. At higher energy levels technical and societal change may simply be too dangerous, and to survive long term societies must lock themselves into a steady state where innovation is actively quashed.

<comment><USER37> Well that sucks.

But when faced with problems the only option is to find a solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We have indeed had fewer innovations in consumer goods that take up visual space in a living room.

However we have had massive innovation in medicine--many diseases that were once a death sentence are now treatable.

Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

Infant mortality has dropped. Certain diseases have been eradicated.

Due in part to the ability to communicate and coordinate economic activity on a global scale, the number of people in extreme poverty has declined since 1950--Not the percentage of people, the absolute number of people.

<comment><USER39> You're missing the authors point, heck you're even reinstating it yourself:

> Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they > were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

> Certain diseases have been eradicated.

That's what he's saying. We've mostly (massively) refined existing technology instead of revolutionized it: vaccines, airplanes and cars are all pre-1950 technology.

Not sure if I agree, but it feels like you haven't even read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think the reason he or others may perceive a slow down in innovation happens because innovation is more incremental, but is released far more quickly, thus making up for small increments.

A good example is the Windows or Mac OS, which took 2-7 years to be released; now it's happening on a yearly basis, and we're finding that too slow. So maybe in some unintuitive sense, we perceive a slow down due to it speeding up in innovation.*

*this of course doesn't apply to everything, and some ideas do takes years to develop a working prototype.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra You won't see many planes in 1950, and TV was unheard of on most of the planet. Change comes with different pace to various places of the world.

But yes, we're mostly catching up, not leaping forward.

<comment><USER41> > But yes, we're mostly catching up, not leaping forward.

What concerns me is that we (or at least some folks) used to leap forward. I'm struck by a comparison to the citizens of the Soviet sphere of influence: they were almost all materially much better off than they had been years before, but they weren't as much better off as citizens of market states. The Soviet system did, indeed, enable them to catch up and even surpass the Britain of 1914 or the America of 1917—but that didn't seem as good a deal in 1987.

I wonder how much potential innovation and improvement has died in the cradle due to regulation, financial disincentives, cultural aversion &c. Sure: we're better off now than we were a decade ago, but how much better off could we be?

<comment> guard-of-terra We could be a lot better. Assuming "we" is "people from reasonably developed country".

We could work 6 hours per day, 4 days a week.

We could avoid having problems with drugs, ghettos, extreme poverty - <USER3> sort of self-breeding thing.

We could live in fairer world, with less government supervision. Right now there are whole classes of businesses for which ripping customers off is okay (cell companies for example). This did not have to be the norm.

The price? Some undeveloped countries will probably be left to their own devices. Which is an unstable situation: once you solve infant mortality for them, you get population boom and then political instability. Hunger, I'm afraid - maybe on grand scale. Some things will be more expensive. Right now services are expensive and goods are cheap. It could be reversed a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I would argue that the advances in industrialization, miniaturization, energy, and computing are no less important that some of the more visibly valuable inventions in prior decades/generations, but that they are largely supporting technology that provides a scaffolding for us to invent upon rather than inventions that [externally] impress by their own merits. And it's not like our race to the moon was technologically more impressive, either; we just had a direct application of technology we decided to pursue. My $.02 is that for the past 20 years or so, when high-tech manufacturing exploded the domestic economies of the developing world, we've been in a dichotomous environment where the advanced nations continue to pursue original research [but in a largely aimless manner due to all sorts of political incompetence] while the rest of the world accelerates their internal development and jockey for position to gain seats at the table as humanity collectively decide what's next.

"Next" may be manned flight to mars, or it may be elimination of fossil fuels, or eradication of disease, or something completely off the wall, but the point is that -- excepting poverty, war and education -- the world is in a pretty good place right now and the only thing separating most countries from another development-wise is money, not invention.

</comment><comment><USER43> > They will no doubt be impressed with miniaturization as an evolutionary > spectacle

They might also take note of how difficult these devices are to repair

</comment><comment><USER44> In terms of material progress, you need to understand fundamentals before you can apply them.

There are only so many fundamental things about the universe. We are still learning, it's true. But we've pushed the darkness back on a lot of fronts since the late 1800s. You kind of expect that once science takes a hold there will be fewer mysteries.

As it happens, the late 1800s and early 1900s were boom times for fundamental science. Radioactivity, Relativity, Quantum, and so on.

Once you have the fundamentals, you need some economic organisation to occur before thing like mobile phones appear. People need to be figuring out exactly how the theories will be useful, what kinds of work there will be in the area, and so forth. Much of what we've seen lately is this, finding niches for things we know about the natural world.

I can understand the author's disappointment. Not many things that are new are undreamed of. But remember your imagination depends on how you think the world works, and we now know more about that.

</comment><comment><USER45> In a related vein, one transformative idea ([http://www.theguardian.com/science/small- world/2013/oct/21/b...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/small- world/2013/oct/21/big-nanotech-atomically-precise-manufacturing-apm)) has been mostly ignored over the last 15 years or so -- as if "Space travel is utter bilge" had won out instead of Sputnik. At some point the continued progress in fields like biomolecular engineering is going to make the potential too obvious to miss, and we'll be reminded that technology is not a synonym for computers.

(This is another 'jam tomorrow' response, like a lot of others here. I pretty much agree with the OP about the progress seen before and after 1950.)

</comment><comment><USER46> Whether you view a new fangled technology as "magic" depends on if you understand how it works. Scientists in the 1800s knew much about electricity, combustion, etc well before a "19th century rube":

 _Our 19th Century rube would fail to recognize cars /trucks, airplanes, helicopters, and rockets; radio, and television (the telephone was 1875, so just missed this one); toasters, blenders, and electric ranges. Also unknown to the world of 1885 are inventions like radar, nuclear fission, and atomic bombs. The list could go on. Daily life would have undergone so many changes that the old timer would be pretty bewildered, I imagine. It would appear as if the world had blossomed with magic: voices from afar; miniature people dancing in a little picture box; zooming along wide, hard, flat roads at unimaginable speeds—much faster than when uncle Billy's horse got into the cayenne pepper. The list of "magic" devices would seem to be innumerable._

Similarly the perspective of the average 21st century "rube" (though likely to be better educated than his 19th century counterpart) has little understanding of computing or networking, or genome sequencing etc.

Growing up in the 90s reading Bruce Coville's "my teacher is an alien" series, I remember being awed by the description of a "universal translator" device gifted by aliens to the main character. Yet within 20 years, everyone I know has a much more capable version of that device in their pocket.

The author obviously has a right to his opinions, but it's clear that this article is just that: an opinion piece. Since he's a physicist, his perspective might be somewhat muddled by the place of science in technological progress:

Science > Engineering > Market Adoption

Today's scientists are discovering things that tomorrow's engineers will turn into technologies that day after tomorrow's entrepreneurs will consumerize. It's worked this way throughout history, and yes, it's faster now than ever before.

</comment><comment><USER47> This guy is a perpetual Chicken Little. He's been featured on /r/economics multiple times. His argument is two-pronged: he plays up the inventions of yesteryear, and plays down the inventions of today.

Even the invention of the television was gradual. It was developed via "refinements" of the facsimilie. Ignorance of history is a bad argument. Ditto antibiotics: first arsenic, then atoxyl, then arsphenamine, then sulfanilamide, finally penicillin. The car was nothing but a road-adapted train. The airplane was preceded by ground-towed heavier-than-air craft. And NASA's budget was massive relative to the Wrights'. The telephone came from the telegraph, and the steam engine might have been invented in Alexandria when Jesus was around (assuming He existed).

</comment><comment><USER48> At least in one domain, life expectancy, progress hasn't stopped. It just might not anymore have the extreme momentum of earlier times: [https://thaddeusktsim.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/were-there- no...](https://thaddeusktsim.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/were-there-no-old- people-in-1900/)

Same for GDP. Would be interested in median income over the last 100 years though. [http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of- pr...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of- prosperity/gdp-growth-over-the-last-centuries/)

</comment><comment><USER49> This article is a hypothesis looking for evidence. And ignoring evidence blatantly when it doesn't fit his hypothesis. And I'm not even sure what his hypothesis is apart from the statement that we're not inventing electricity a second time.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's worth noting that Peter Thiel has also advanced a version of this argument (progress stagnant since 1970): [http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology- stalled...](http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled- in-1970/)

along with Tyler Cowen (low hanging fruit has been picked, specifically in the US): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation)

</comment><comment><USER51> Yes, the pace of fundamental inventions has slowed down, but that has nothing to do with progress.

I think the author confuses two ideas: progress and technological inventions. Progress is not defined by the appearance of new "fundamental" inventions. A lot of it comes from how we use technology. Sure the Internet was just a bigger network, but by being a world-wide network instead of a LAN, it has enabled many things previously not possible. The author's take on technological inventions is very narrow. He's only looking for new "fundamental" inventions.

And new inventions have nothing to do with progress. You know what I call progress?

"Economic growth over the last 200 years completely transformed our world, and poverty fell continuously over the last two centuries." \-- [http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of- pr...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of- prosperity/world-poverty/)

That's the only real, measurable progress. Everything else he lists as "fundamental" inventions are simply a means to an end. They are not progress itself. Finding the cure for smallpox isn't progress. Progress is curing smallpox. Nuclear fusion isn't progress. Progress is getting it developed enough for it to become a real energy source and getting people to use it. Even the author acknowledges this, but he's way too confused on inventions vs. progress.

Finally, he adds a section on social progress. It's hard to argue that at all. Yes, we're more open to differences ... in the West. But obviously, the author has completely forgotten about such nation-states as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Afghanistan, China ... yeah, I really don't need to keep going. Global social progress is indeed a myth, but I do think certain parts of the world are making some progress. Finally, he also ends up equating decline of 'social progress' with lack of progress which is ridiculous because social progress is only local and just because something reverts back to the way it used to be doesn't mean progress wasn't made for a time (although this is a rather popular, yet extremely wrong idea in the US).

</comment><comment><USER52> Open Question: do we think that we basically understand all the laws of nature at this point?

If that were true, we should expect few new fundamental breakthroughs... ever. We will simply explore the vast combinatorial space of what is possible within these laws, essentially remixing the 20th century forever.

I am personally skeptical of this. I think it might be an illusion created by dogmatizing what we have now and being a bit too satisfied with that. Same thing happened with the wisdom of the greeks, taking us over a thousand years to finally realize heavier objects don't fall faster.

</comment><comment><USER53> If one looks at GDP per capita or life expectancy, progress did not stop or slow in the 50's.

I think the main difference is that progress is now made in much smaller increments. E.g. smartphones have transformed our lives, and yet the smartphone era really begin with the iPhone, which was itself not revolutionary from a purely technological viewpoint. It was however, sufficiently better in its hardware and software to appeal to a much larger market.

</comment><comment><USER54> _Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, and a raft of other pernicious diseases resist cures despite large continuing investments._

I'd much rather get cancer today than in 1970: [https://c0nc0rdance.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/crukmig_1000...](https://c0nc0rdance.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/crukmig_1000img-12647.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER55> I only agree about the 'energy predicament' not being taken seriously. I don't think progress can be measured like he described. The steam-engine and frequency signaling where huge, transformed our society greatly and still are the base of many things we do now. But he sounds like "there are no hoverboards so progress must be declining".

</comment><comment><USER56> Part of the issue here is classifying non-linear ideas in linear terms (i.e. Bubble or no Bubble). What we regard as the tech industry is an integration of countless individual markets, each moving at their own relative pace. A collapse in something like the app-game market wouldn't necessarily dictate a collapse in AI.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've always wondered if there was a limit to human knowledge.

Just like a Chimpanze can't even 'comprehend' how to use a cell phone.....

If we are indeed animals and monkey descendants would that mean that there's a limit of understanding the universe that human will never be able to surpass?

And are we getting closer to that limit?

<comment><USER11> The human body is chock full of limits. So much so that you are using electrons modulated at different voltages to communicate to another person instead of using analog mouth vibrations right now. The story of humanity is one of using tools to surpass those limits. Now as our technology advances we can understand the nature of human limitations, and possible novel ways of overcoming them, such as gene therapy or direct brain to computer interfaces. There is also the possibility that we will create our replacement capable of surviving the harsh realities outside of our comfortable planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This would definitely look like sci-fi to someone jumping from 1950: [https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance)

</comment><comment><USER59> Since around the same time, income inequality has grown massively and rises in wages have become mostly confined to the top earners.

I wonder if these are related.

The era of unrelenting progress and ever-rising living standards is gone. It was a real thing for a few decades, but I think it's coming to an end.

<comment><USER38> Income inequality in the United States has grown massively.

<comment><USER59> I'm talking about the Western world, yes. But is this not also true in others parts of the world? Has anywhere seen income inequality _decline_?

<comment><USER60> Yes, inter-country inequality has been coming down despite in-country inequality going up. The rich have been getting richer and the poorest have been getting richer while the middle class have stood still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Just taken at face value there is nothing surprising about the article's premise. As we continue to increase our knowledge more problems move into the "solved" category, and what remains is the harder stuff.

<comment><USER62> Could it be the case that everything that has been 'discovered' in history has at some point been 'the harder stuff'?

<comment><USER61> Well yes, but I am thinking on a more meta scale... or do we believe there is an endless supply of hard problems? At some point, assuming we continue, will we not have figured it all out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> At the end of 2015, major breakthroughs are combined science & tech efforts involving so many players and so many small, incremental steps that we may even not be aware that they are just happening under our eyes.

</comment><comment><USER64> We live in a dream world where we believe technology can eventually save us from our sins. We dream that technology will allow us to live unsustainably, forever in a world with limited resources.

Unfortunately, we are bounded by limitations in physics, energy and nature. Technology is derived from the same universe, and therefore, like all other things in nature, there is a limit. We can't keep sucking oil out of a well forever.

Whether we have reached peak technology is debateable. It would be wise to approach such an idea with caution. But to utterly deny that a technological peak even exists is a fools errand.

</comment><comment><USER65> i don't have much of a reason to believe that breakthroughs need to be regular, since by nature they are unpredictable.

in a monstrously reductive sense, I feel like this article is analyzing a series of coin flips and commenting on a streak of tails.

it doesn't help that the scope of the topic is far broader than could be covered in the given text, and entire fields were ignored out of existence.

in all, I was entertained, so I'm happy.

</comment><comment><USER66> Looks like calculated trolling. Either it's a social experiment or the author is trying to look for something in responses.

Or he has no idea what he's talking about.</comment>


Nuclear blast sends star hurtling across galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53415294 <comment><USER2> 900000 km/h = 250 km/s. This is fast but comparable to 224 km/s that the sun moves. Our galaxy itself moves at ~600 km/s relative to local cluster center of mass.

<comment><USER3> The Sun is way slower in regards to neighboring stars. 250 km/s is an order of magnitude faster than Sun/Alpha Centauri relative speed.

<comment><USER4> Yep, there's no true reference frame in the universe - Einstein realized that more than 100 years ago and put it down as the theory of relativity.

<comment><USER2> Microwave background provides a kind of reference frame for the universe. We are moving ~370km/s relative to it [0]. We are fairly certain CMB is homogenous so this reference frame is same everywhere.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine being on some planet far away, just living your life, and a literal star comes through and ends all life in the system.

<comment><USER6> If the star is a direct hit on your planet, it would look as if a second sun was getting brighter and larger, and the heat so unbearable you'll be dead before there's any impact.

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't just show up some day, ambush style.

It would be slowly getting closer and closer over centuries.

The warning doesn't really change how the story ends though...

<comment><USER8> It could, if you're where we are now developmentally you could conceivably determine a safe place in the solar system to colonize in the thousands or more likely millions of years it would take to arrive, right? Or maybe more realistically leave or build large scale space habitats (since there might be no safe planet due to rotation of them).

<comment><USER9> Generally a star plowing through your solar system is going to throw most orbits into wack, so you may not want to be in the solar system at all.

<comment><USER8> Hah, amusingly I failed to consider that. I wonder how fast a sun would have to move through to have a negligible (or at least not catastrophic) effect on orbits?

<comment><USER10> The Oort cloud around the Solar system ranges halfway to the next star. That far out the Sun is probably not the only relevant influence anymore. Even though stars would have to get really close to be able to mess up orbits of the inner Solar system, a large comet can absolutely wreck the biosphere if it hits us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everyone's views in this discussion are really enlightening for someone like myself who has been consumed with nothing but programming the last few months! Miss being a kid and dreaming about space travel.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is that picture real? Drives me crazy seeing articles with stock art that might as well be completely fabricated

<comment><USER13> That looks like an illustration, not a photo

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Question is, in what direction.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe an alien civilization just fired off this star for some gigantic war...

</comment><comment><USER16> Something hot and bright far away emits photons. What are those? Heat transfer through the medium of time, right? A fast clock is bright and speeds up a slow clock that's dark.

What's the difference between a tiny spot on the Hubble, or any material for that matter, turning colder and darker always when pointed into that direction? Voltage spikes up at that sensor and it sees a hot spot because it caves in on itself instead of being hit with a beam of energy in motion for billions of years.

Weak force parity violation?

Is that just some higher abstraction on top of pair production and spontaneous particle creation?

Electromagnetism is the emission of photons and the absorption through the photovoltaic effect. Matter decay is mass decreasing and releasing energy without EM. Or EM plus negating the effect by messing with that EM counterbalance. Or gravity, the heat transfer through the medium of time, interaction so fine it looks like you are broadcasting to everything at once if something else tries to trace it.

That's what I'm thinking. Eventually spontaneous particle creation is the basis of all interaction. Not EM or photons. I think humans get to it, that we do it already. Massive celestial objects pop into existence because highly accurate sensors here on Earth say they must. Particles here pop into existence and they give the data of everything out there for no other reason than they must. Instead of being loss in a vast sea of stuff, the universe is a very complex filter to a massive energy source.

When they talk of causality violation, backwards time travel, I think of hitting the big bang itself, or original energy source. Throwing dynamite into the wave you're surfing on.

Forget worrying about a star crashing through Earth. Earth is the source of all destructive acts in the universe for the most trivial of reasons, and we have soverign access to all that out there to make our lives the slightest bit better for any reason.

Just some thoughts I get when I read these things. Thanks for that article.</comment>


Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? - <AUTHOR> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030/405874#405874 <comment><USER2> This was the best comment to that answer:

"You always break someone's workflow: xkcd.com/1172 – YSC 2 hours ago"</comment>


Ask HN: Effective ways to attract visitors to your site - <AUTHOR>

I know it's kinda a broad question, so let me explain it a little.
I have a site http://www.railstutors.com where I teach online Ruby on Rails courses. I think we have a great value proposition - beginners who want to learn Ruby on Rails now either reply on free tutorials (no interaction with teachers) or have to sign up on expensive classroom based training. We provide 4-week online tutored classes with a ton of interaction with students with affordable cost. Our conversion rate also proved this - a quite high percentage of visitors to our site ended up signing up for the course.
What we need to do now is to get the words out, and I'd like to hear from everyone what are the effectively ways to do that. We have done the typical - Quora, Reddit, RubyFlow.. we even tried AdWords.. but the daily traffic just doesn't seem to increase much.
What worked for you to attract traffic to your site? <comment><USER2> I've looking at railstutors.com and see a lot of room for improvement.

Currently it's NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAR what you're offering (maybe because the name itself focuses on tutors and since a clear service description is lacking, it's easy to get confused?) or what the value proposition is. WHAT DO YOU OFFER and WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT YOU - clearly answering these two questions should be a high priority for you.

A clear CALL TO ACTION is missing: 'Learn more about this course' doesn't cut it. Let your call to action be a megaphone: unambiguous and impossible to miss.

Ok, I've spent some time on your site and being the indecisive type, I'm just not sure if signing up is worth the hassle and cost. Can you GIVE ME A PREVIEW, SAMPLE OR ANYTHING that narrows that mental gap between what I want and what you offer? Testimonials on the front page is a good idea but I want to see for myself. Also, I can barely smell the social proof coming off those testimonials. Humanize those people or get references from more trusted people and sources.

The TYPOGRAPHY LOOKS BAD on Win7/Chrome 21.0.1180.89 m [1] to the point that it makes it difficult to read your copy.

[1] <http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/i/31758-916201221158am.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback! appreciate it very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527602> \- 30 minutes after you posted.

I would suggest you use the hn search for all people who post about learning or wanting to program and offer them a free course in exchange for them writing blog articles about what they liked and didn't like.

Also - on your website you need to be more specific what you actually do. It says "rails tutors" which is specific but it doesn't tell me a) when it happens, b) where it happens, c) what i'm actually going to learn, or d) why it matter.

Here's a good example of someone (Amy Hoy) selling a course -> <http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/>

The other good example of someone teaching courses <http://railscasts.com/>

In the real world you can always use skillshare or meetup to target groups of people who are programmers (ruby and or rails) or want to learn to program and meet them in real life.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We do have a separate page talking about details of the course, but looks like that's not obvious for people coming to the front page.

I like your suggestion of HN search and will do that - thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > What worked for you to attract traffic to your site?

Having content that people actually want. If this is so, your audience will increase by word of mouth, no explicit promotion required.

> but the daily traffic just doesn't seem to increase much.

Everyone has a site. Everyone wants visitors. Everyone would like more visitors. The sites that get visitors without coercing them, do it by having useful content -- not content that _you_ think is useful, but content that _visitors_ think is useful. And content that isn't duplicated everywhere, like ... well, one example ... Ruby on Rails tutorials.

Google "Ruby on Rails tutorials" : 3,150,000 hits.</comment>


Cooney Prizes for Innovation in Children's Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/initiatives/prizes-excellence-children-media.html An opportunity to win cash prize, pitch to a distinguished jury at E3 2010, and ongoing business planning support <comment><AUTHOR> Apply to the Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children's Learning The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is accepting applications for the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children's Learning, a national competition intended identify, inspire, nurture, and scale breakthrough ideas in children's digital media and learning. The program will annually award cash prizes and provide ongoing business planning support to innovators in children's educational media.

The Cooney Center is challenging innovators in two categories: Breakthroughs in Mobile Learning and Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning. Up to five finalists in each category will be invited to pitch their ideas to media industry and education leaders at an event held at this year's E3 Expo. This year's prizes include $50,000 towards prototype development in the Mobile Learning category and $10,000 and the opportunity to work with Sesame Workshop to turn a literacy idea into a product for national dissemination via Sesame Workshop's revival of the iconic literacy show, The Electric Company.</comment>


'Tap Tap Revenge 3' going free today as Tapulous bets on virtual goods - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tap-tap-revenge-3-going-free-today-as-tapulous-bets-on-virtual-goods-2009-12

<comment><USER2> I want a version of Tap Tap Revenge that is $5.99 _without_ advertisements. Video interstitial ads? Guess which iPhone game I'm going to be avoiding now.</comment>


NASA to test prototype Kilopower nuclear reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ON-NASA-to-test-prototype-Kilopower-reactor-1711174.html <comment><USER2> This is similar to the "Stirling radioisotope generator" [1] but it is an actual nuclear reactor (albeit a small one). Both systems are a response to the same fundamental problem, the dwindling supply of Plutonium-238 [2]. The Stirling radioisotope generator uses Pu-238 more efficiently than thermoelectric RTGs, and the nuclear reactor from the article dispenses with Pu-238 altogether.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238)

<comment><USER3> The problem with Stirling engines is they have moving parts. It's highly unlikely a Stirling cycle generator on the Voyagers would have operated for 40+ years as their RTGs have.

<comment><USER4> Yup, I wonder how they can guarantee the engine will keep turning for 10 years even. Maybe if everything is sealed in a (very long) lived lubricant that stands the harshness of space?

Still hard to imagine

<comment><USER5> Stirling engines have a pair of seals that are extremely hard to make durable, and to my knowledge only Whisper Systems has cracked this problem to the point where you won't lose working gas (or seals) in a timespan much shorter than those 10 years. It's a stupidly hard engineering issue, without it there likely would have been far more adoption of the Stirling cycle for production machinery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a very cool technology, but frankly I have a hard time imagining that it will see much use. NASA sees public protests and scare mongering whenever it tries to fly an RTG, which is based in the radioactive decay of (usually) plutonium, and does not use a nuclear chain reaction. They did fly one on Mars Science Lab, because it was the only way to get enough power for the rover. But it takes a PR hit every time it does so. RTGs are therefore only used when no other technology will work.

It think it's likely that the public relations nightmare NASA would have to go through to fly an actual reactor will be through the roof.

<comment><USER7> they should be indoctrinating kids at school that nuclear is safe, rather than other "stuff" they tell them nowadays

<comment><USER8> Totally. You're probably catching downvotes from people offended by "indoctrination", but a) indoctrination is what schools do, that's their purpose, and b) nuclear _is_ actually pretty safe.

I agree with the sentiment. Anti-science sentiments proliferate partly because science doesn't spend much on public outreach, especially compared to people who want to make a buck off scaring others about new technologies. NASA has been doing more and more PR work over the past few years, and that's great - but IMO in this case, they really need to get someone who looks and sounds confident, and who would go on national TV and say "Yes, we are totally sending a nuclear reactor to space, why wouldn't we?".

<comment><USER9> In your zeal to defend nuclear energy, you're come around full circle, defending something indefensible, with arguments far removed from actual science.

Nuclear energy may be safe, if done under near-perfect condition, with extremely large budgets to understand risks, and plans to mitigate incidents. There is truth to the argument that nuclear power saves lives compared to coal power.

But nuclear power isn't inherently safe. It is, by its very nature, extremely dangerous. Actual nuclear scientists understand that. See, for example, Feynman's work on nuclear safety during the Manhattan project.

Strapping a nuclear reactor to a rocket is almost by definition a dirty bomb. Depending on the height and mode of an eventual launch failure, the result could be anything from Tchernobyl to a less-dramatic yet more deadly dispersal of nuclear material in the upper atmosphere.

The dose-response relationship of radiation exposure is largely linear, meaning the latter event might just increase your risk of brain cancer by 0.005%. Yes, you may consider it negligible. But statistically, it would kill half a million people.

To blithely state that "nuclear is safe, hoho, why shouldn't we strap Plutonium to a rocket, you environmental nincompoops" has nothing to do with science, and gives science a bad name. Maybe NASA could come up with a way to protect a reactor during a missile launch. But it wouldn't be easy, and saying "why wouldn't we?" on TV would not inspire confidence in their abilities, but doubts in their sanity. The right thing to say on TV is "We're sending a reactor into space, and here are the mechanisms we've come up with to make it safe..."

<comment><USER8> I wasn't aiming for the full pro-nuclear argument in a single comment, because it's a well-trodden road. Nuclear safety issues have been discussed _ad nauseam_ here and elsewhere.

But maybe I should have stated my main assumption explicitly: people at NASA know what they're doing. They're not incompetent morons, they can do the math. They already have absurd amounts of procedures in place to ensure a launch failure doesn't hurt anyone. They're not just trying to strap a bunch of random nuclear isotopes on a rocket and hope for the best.

> _Strapping a nuclear reactor to a rocket is almost by definition a dirty > bomb._

No, it isn't. A dirty bomb is meant to create a large-scale radioactive contamination that's dangerous to humans, and U-235 is probably the last thing you'd like to put in it. It's an alpha emitter with a half-life so long it doesn't matter, so the only effect you'd get is heavy metal poisoning.

(That's beyond the fact that dirty bombs are speculative devices, and from what I read, they actually turned out not to be a real issue in practice.)

> _Depending on the height and mode of an eventual launch failure, the result > could be anything from Tchernobyl to a less-dramatic yet more deadly > dispersal of nuclear material in the upper atmosphere._

That's the kind of thinking that I suggest we need to fight with a serious public outreach effort. Chernobyl was a total clusterfuck, but the only connection between it and the NASA project is the word "nuclear" in newspaper headlines. Chernobyl was an _active_ reactor, and its explosion contaminated the area with _reaction products_ that had very low half-life and underwent beta and gamma decay, making them really dangerous, _unlike plain U-235_.

> _To blithely state that "nuclear is safe, hoho, why shouldn't we strap > Plutonium to a rocket, you environmental nincompoops" has nothing to do with > science, and gives science a bad name._

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that there's so much baseless fear around nuclear energy as a whole, that it's high time we stopped treating it as reasonable. And right now, the biggest danger around nuclear energy is the cost in lives of it not being used instead of fossil fuels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Okay, this is awesome. 10kW is a serious enough amount of energy to do some fun stuff. Things like rovers that move at km/h rather than m/h and all day operation. It also solves the 'base load' problem on deep space missions which would like to use more power for radio communications.

<comment><USER11> "It also solves the 'base load' problem on deep space missions which would like to use more power for radio communications."

Not really, since "moving parts" ...

<comment><USER12> One of the primary uses are deep space probes. The stirling engine has exactly two moving parts and uses non contact seals. In theory the lifetime should be limited by the deformation of the piston at elevated temperatures. Still, you're right. They certainly have to do a lot of reliability testing to be able to show that these stirling engines will last 10+ years before they use them in a mission. They have several stirling engines that have been running for multiple years in simulated conditions for just this purpose at NASA GRC.

<comment><USER11> But on deep space missions, aren't you aiming for 50+ years, or ideally potentially unlimited if you want to hit alpha centauri?

Voyager 1 is going for 50 years ...

<comment><USER10> Your point about moving parts is good, it is absolutely the place to look for possible failure. That said, it is also possible to build such things in a durable way. For example, at the science museum in London there was a display with a Stirling engine that over 75 years old and still works fine. I expect the challenge will be to keep the materials within the range of temperatures and pressures that do not cause structural change in the material.

<comment><USER13> Has that stirling engine had zero maintnence in the last 75 years? If so that is quite impressive and gives much more confidence that NASA can pull this off with the benefit of three quarters of a centruty of technological advancement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thermo-acoustic stirling engines have long been a niche product. Seems like a great environment for them to shine, and far better efficiency than RTG's.

<comment><USER15> What's the advantage over direct thermoelectric conversion?

<comment><USER2> > _What 's the advantage over direct thermoelectric conversion?_

Stirling engines can approach 50% efficiency [1], whereas thermocouples are usually less than 10% [2].

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator#Effic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator#Efficiency)

<comment><USER15> Cool, thanks! It's really surprising to me that inserting a mechanical intermediary has such a large efficiency advantage.

<comment><USER16> Why does mechanical stuff suck? Because of friction of moving parts. Too much energy is lost to heat. For a thermal engine, if you can arrange to put the moving parts mostly on the hot side, that's no longer loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought one of the advantages of the normal RTG is that it is non- mechanical. I would think a mechanical engine has a lot higher fail rates?

<comment><USER18> The problem with normal RTGs is they're dependent on Pu 238 which is in short supply.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More details in this german article: [https://www.golem.de/news/kilopower-ein- kernreaktor-fuer-rau...](https://www.golem.de/news/kilopower-ein-kernreaktor- fuer-raumsonden-1712-131418.html)

I'll summarize some of the interesting points:

\- The nuclear core (75kg of enriched uranium/molybdenum [1]) is designed to not go critical, even if it accidentally falls into the sea and is surrounded by water (which is a good neutron reflector). It only starts when you surround it with a neutron reflector made of beryllium (an even better neutron reflector, mainly due to less absorbtion). Combined with the fact that the reactor only gets nasty when it's been running for a while (and thus is already far away from earth) it is a lot safer than plutonium fueled RTGs.

\- It would be very useful to reach far away destinations (like the orbit of Uranus, Neptun or Pluto) using ion drives, as they need to run for years and solar panels aren't effective far away from the sun.

\- While there have been other attempts at developing nuclear reactors for space, most of them didn't go far. They could use an existing research reactor (Flattop [2]) for this project which already has all the required permissions to run, so a lot of paperwork could be saved for the Kilopower experiments.

\- The Kilopower reactor is the first to use heatpipes instead of pumps for the heat transport and stirling engines for the energy generation. The first experiment was thus to show that the cyclic heat draw of the stirling engine would be safe, because usually nuclear reactors reach an equilibrium between heating up (and thus expanding slighty which slows down the reaction) and cooling down (which accelerates the reaction).

\- Instead of the planned eight 125W Stirling engines, they're currently using two 70W ones from the Advanced Stirling Converter Project [3]. The other ones will be simulated using simple heatsinks.

\- Theoretically it could run for hundreds of years (after 500 years less than 1% of the uranium will be used), but the Stirling engines will break much sooner than that.

[1] [http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...](http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/33/034/33034319.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattop_(critical_assembly)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattop_\(critical_assembly\))

[3] [https://tec.grc.nasa.gov/rps/stirling-research- lab/advanced-...](https://tec.grc.nasa.gov/rps/stirling-research-lab/advanced- stirling-convertor/)

</comment><comment><USER11> My first thought was "deep space mission". But because of moving parts involved, this is probably not the use-case.

So a bit OT, I was wondering if anyone has yet thought about the solution of still using solar panels for them, but to also use a mirror to focus more light in the direction of the probe or a laserbeam?

I mean, theoretical I don't see why not, appart from being more expensive? Andd you could also offset the laser/mirror cost, because you only need them later on ....

(but to be on the safer side, I still would add a RTG)

<comment><USER19> Inverse square law. Every n AU you go out from the earth you will need n __2 are of mirror to focus on a solar panel to get the same power. That assumes you can even build a structure that can keep that shape.

Say you have a mission to Uranus, you will need a mirror with 400 times the area of the solar cells to get as much power as they would in earth orbit.

<comment><USER20> Does this mean that if you go towards the sun, you would be able to generate more solar electricity with less surface area? I'm not thinking dyson sphere style, but perhaps some sort of electricity space-tanker, that sails toward (or around?) the sun, collecting solar energy, and then returns to earth with batteries packed to the brim with energy?

Dibs on Solar Harvester

<comment><USER8> Yes, it means exactly that - though soon you'll start hitting into issues with solar panel efficiency and thermal management. It's _very hard_ to keep things cool in space.

The space electricity tanker idea is theoretically possible, but might not make any economical sense. For it to be worth it, it would have to store _a lot_ of energy, so that it could ship back more than the cost of moving it around, while also being competitive with simply building more bigger collectors further away (and closer to the industry). But maybe a highly eccentric orbit, with a very low perihelion, would work.

Not totally sure if the math works out on this, but I could see moving the energy-intensive industry closer to the Sun, and having it use beamed energy to move resources and products to itself and back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201600...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20160012354.pdf)

2-5 W / kg.

Solar cells seem to be about 150 W/kg.

This is relevant for outer system exploration (beyond Jupiter) or maybe for night power on planetary / moon surfaces.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone know the approximate size of that thing? Hard to tell from the picture.

<comment><USER6> Hard to tell what the weight is, of course. Judging from the size of other objects in the picture (the lift point and the connectors) it's very roughly around four cubic feet. Which is actually pretty awesome; the equivalent solar panels would be significantly larger.

<comment><USER5> According to a NASA pdf the thing weighs 1150 Kg or thereabouts.

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20170002010.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I first read 'NASA to test KILLpower nuclear reactor' and thought are they starting to use Space X naming conventions...

</comment><comment><USER7> the cold of space and the heat of a nuclear reactor would be the perfect combination for a peltier reaction. not very good for a rover though.

<comment><USER24> cold of space? Unfortunately, no - space is an extremely effective insulator, so it's extremely difficult to get rid of heat. You need large heat sinks (which adds weight) and they have piss-poor efficiency in space. So your cold side would get hot very quickly

<comment><USER7> are you saying it would be better on a planet with an atmosphere to use as heat conduction medium?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> put it in a car

<comment><USER26> 1kW isn't driving you anywhere though(even if we ignore all the dangers of having a nuclear reactor in a car). A typical automotive engine produces 100-300kW.

<comment><USER27> But it would be perfect for a well isolated home wouldn't it?

<comment><USER26> Hmmmm a normal boiler for a 4-person family home is about 8-10kW so again, probably not. At least not for heating. But for normal power consumption should be ok, especially if paired with some storage device to account of periods of higher consumption(running a 3kW kettle for couple minutes for example).

<comment><USER27> Well yeah not the average household obviously but if you really wanted to get rid of your dependency on the grid it would be somewhat possible. As opposed to say drive a at least 70 HP ~ 50 KW car. Not a proposal for everybody of course but for lets say political idealists.

As far as the 3kW kettle is concerned having a battery to provide for these surges is entirely viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Strap it to an EmDrive and head for the stars!</comment>


The Cost of Making a Hollywood Movie - <AUTHOR> http://www.anomalousmaterial.com/movies/2010/03/the-cost-of-making-a-hollywood-movie/ <comment><USER2> This is so flawed. The costs it lists are levied by the studio itself against itself. Its called "hollywood accounting" and its been in buckets of court cases. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting></comment>