New memristor better mimics synapses - <AUTHOR> https://news.umich.edu/toward-brain-like-computing-new-memristor-better-mimics-synapses/ <comment><USER2> At the device level, variability remains a significant issue for all memristor types. Scaling feature sizes down is likely to make variability worse. [https://semiengineering.com/integrating-memristors-for- neuro...](https://semiengineering.com/integrating-memristors-for-neuromorphic- computing/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Was the transistor theoretically proposed similar to the memristor was? Wondering if people had as much hype for the transistor eventually appearing as we are about memristors.

<comment><USER4> According to [1], "[b]ecause the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built."

It seems like there are parallels. Chua theorized about the memristor in the 1970s, but the first one wasn't created until the 2000s. A question I don't have the answer to: a transistor is to a vacuum tube as a memristor is to what?

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

<comment><USER5> Electroplating baths have a "memory" of how much current has passed through them. Edison used them as a way of measuring DC power use.

[https://ethw.org/Electric_Meter](https://ethw.org/Electric_Meter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So the memristor has been physically proven? I thought there was skepticism over whether it was even possible to make them.

<comment><USER7> HP/HPE has patents on them and has supposedly made a ton in their labs, but hasn't seemed to get the costs down to make them commercially viable, and may have gotten trapped into some (interesting, but diverting) rabbit holes in the process not helping them commercialize the existing work, such as believing they need to reinvent the computer almost entirely from scratch just because of the memristor [0].

[0] "The Machine". There's a lot of weird stuff around on it. Official hype page of the (now cancelled, presumably) project: [https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine](https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine) (Makes some of IBM's Watson marketing almost look sane in comparison, doesn't it?)

<comment><USER8> I believe that there are lots of professionally-run science scams.

It starts with an idea that looks good on paper and a bunch of scientists investigating it. At one point it gets picked up by the management of a company and commercialization is being started while the technology is not ready yet. Now you have high-risk development of a new technology in the framework of commercial management. Failing is no option anymore. During the development it becomes clear to some insiders that the goals cannot be achieved. To those are three options. Either they quit, they shut up or they upsell what they have. Plans become bigger and bigger and the deadline shifts later and later. The later you are, the more sunk costs you have and the bigger your plans need to be to recoup the costs and keep your department alive. This is what I consider the when it becomes a scam. It started with science but instead of burying the dead horse it is paraded around town and management applauds while those who know do not talk.

<comment><USER9> Being one of the scientists who thought they were doing good by initially starting the research must be indescribably painful. I despise when good will is turned on its head. It turns good people into bitter and regretful pessimists. Rather than fight, they quit, like you mentioned - thinking its better not to play twisted games. Only later in life do they realize they should have fought like mad, because no evil should be given quarter, lest it eat you up for years to come. Let's just say I have experience in this type of regret :-/

A lesson for all: the bigger man does not quit, does not keep quiet, does not pacify in the face of evil. Contrary to the truthisms about being the bigger man - fighting for what is right is almost always the right move.

It is often said one should be mature and not "play the game." But the truth is, evil affects us all and isn't confined to isolated games. If you don't stop it locally, it will spread like a poison globally.

Learn from my mistake. Play the game, fight, dont quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the merits of memristors over solid state NAND and Intel optane technology?

<comment><USER4> Solid state non-volatile storage technologies such as NOR and NAND flash memory use something called floating-gate transistors [1]. Making these transistors is highly complex, and substantial amounts of research efforts have gone into R&D to improve NOR and NAND technologies.

A real issue with these memory technologies is wear. There is a finite amount of times a NOR/NAND gate can be written, and the implementation of wear leveling prolongs the lifespan of the memory device without solving the root issue.

Optane memory (originally called 3D XPoint) starts getting closer to the theoretical ideal of a memristor. According to [2], Optane allows a "memory cell to be written to or read without requiring a transistor." It's still not entirely sure what's the enabling technology, but the general consensus is that Optane is a form of resistive RAM, or ReRAM [3]. Not quite the memristor, but it's edging toward it.

Why memristors? Imagine you're given a piece of conductive material which changes its resistivity based on net current flow over time. It's just a chunk of material, so manufacturing memory cells goes from etching transistors to material deposition. Also, you can likely make the memristors smaller than today's transistors, meaning higher storage densities. Additionally, the memory should be bit-addressable unlike block-addressed NAND. Also, the memristor is fundamentally an analog device, meaning there's the potential for interesting innovations in storage technology (analog storage elements?). Finally, energy consumption should be even lower than transistors.

Takeaways: \- NOR/NAND storage is transistor-based and will eventually be replaced with neuromorphic technologies such as memristors. \- Optane storage exhibits expected properties of a memristor, but it's not quite a true memristor.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory) [2] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/9541/intel-announces- optane-s...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/9541/intel-announces-optane- storage-brand-for-3d-xpoint-products) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint)

<comment><USER11> Flash cells are analog as well - depending on the gate charge the resistance/current flow is different.

That's used for MLC/TLC.</comment></comment></comment>


Hands-on with the tvOS SDK - <AUTHOR> http://telliott.io/2015/09/15/hands-on-with-the-tvos-sdk.html <comment><USER2> The biggest disappointment for me, from poking around the tvOS SDK docs, is that the high-fidelity microphone (which clearly must exist on the remote in order for the Siri-enabled features to work) is not accessible from a public API.

Here's hoping someone will figure out a private API for it, even if I won't be able to ship apps like that on the App Store.

<comment><USER3> On the surface that would be a security risk that is hard to quantify (how would they figure out that an app is occasionally capturing audio from someone's living room and using and/or storing or sending it in a way that it's not supposed to?). For instance it could probably be used for some evil scheme to make targeted advertising.

They might be able to open it later if they can find a way to do so, e.g. perhaps only allowing post-processed text to be returned and not raw audio, and even then only whitelisted words.

<comment><USER4> They could do it via the granular permissions system on iOS, e.g., "This app wants to access the microphone. Allow/Deny"

Though it might be weird having to explicitly read and grant permissions to a TV app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is why the Apple TV comes with either 32GB or 64GB of storage, but apps are limited to 200MB and I don't exactly see Apple letting you download content to the device (a la AppleTV 1st Generation). So, why all the storage?

<comment><USER6> It is o my the initial download that is limited to 200MB, once launched the app can then download another 2GB right away. You can have another 2GB on the device, and up to 20GB in the cloud. So 4.2GB on the device at once per game and all the slices in the cloud. So common content in the initial 2.2GB and the rest in the swappable chunks.

I'm guessing this is for a few reasons, one would be to get debs into the habit of creating these downloadable slices for something down the track. But that's just a guess.

Another would be that the game is downloaded really quickly, from the end users point of view, and able to begin being played really quickly, without having to wait for 4-20gb to download first, then realize you've run into storage issues and have to deal with them. Common files and first level or two while the next 10 are on their way down. Seems like a decent plan for a fast user experience, if that's why they are doing it.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that most game developers are probably not writing SpriteKit/SceneKit games in Swift, but rather using Unity or some other kind of portable engine. Now they all have to wait for their toolchain to catch up with Apple's app thinning mechanisms.

After the complete failure of MFi controllers on iOS 7+, I hoped that Apple would make life easier for game developers, not harder. Now we have a 200 MB app limit plus the requirement that games have to work with the default remote.

<comment><USER8> My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to primarily be used with the new Apple TV. Supporting them early was just a Trojan Horse to get them in the stores in advance of the TV launch.

The alternative to requiring thinning is to allow fat app downloads and pretty much guarantee that app thinning stays a niche capability with low adoption, so Apple is making sure devs and their tools vendors just have to suck it up. It also means developers of apps that can conceivably fit inside the 200mb limit will work their buts off to make sure it does, which will tend to improve download speeds.

Both effects will lead to a better user experience at the cost of some developer inconvenience, but frankly they're not asking anything unreasonable. Apple provide support for app thinning in their own frameworks, and if devs still freely choose to use different tools then that's up to them but a professional tool or framework that doesn't support thin apps in this era isn't worthy of the name.

<comment><USER7> > My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to > primarily be used with the new Apple TV.

Then Apple shouldn't have allowed Lightning-connected game controllers. I bought one for development purposes when their price dropped from $99 to "let's clear this shelf" ($15 in my case), and not only can I not use it with an Apple TV, it's also a terrible controller, on par with a $10 USB gamepad.

I agree that tvOS was probably the driving force behind MFi controller support, but I also think it was a complete failure. (Sadly!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone tell if he was porting an iOS or OS X game to tvOS?

This suggests it was an OS X app: "While I didn't delve too deeply, I was able to copy over most of my code from the Invaders project verbatim, just making a few tweaks for places where the OSX APIs differed from iOS."

<comment><USER10> It was a SpriteKit game, which has very similar APIs on both platforms, the differences are mostly on the inputs side...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> On the other hand, I have never seen a HN link labelled in green.

Is this a new feature?

[http://i.imgur.com/6gAgfsg.png](http://i.imgur.com/6gAgfsg.png)

<comment><USER12> How come your HN looks like that - is there a new UI I'm not seeing? Mine is still orange(? - colourblind!) background

<comment><USER13> Same; still seeing all the old stuff. A/B testing perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is this domain (and a few others on the front page) colored?

<comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

<comment><USER14> Thanks.

And to the downvoters too.</comment></comment></comment>


Thomas Piketty's plan to fix the economy - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/157576/thomas-piketty-new-book-plan-fix-economy-review <comment><USER2> _Piketty's solution is that we move beyond private ownership to some blend of private, public, and temporary ownership. (Total abolition of private property, à la Soviet Union, for Piketty, was an ill-advised failure.) Since many societal goods are often already owned publicly, like electrical grids, highways, or parks, and some are owned communally, like worker cooperatives, it is easy to imagine this realm expanding._

1800 words into the article and finally we get the grand plan.

Like the rest of Piketty's work, yell real loud about a real pain, make interesting allusions to economic history, and offer no real solutions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better.

Now there are certain things that can that can contribute to people accumulating excessive amounts at another person's expense. Regulatory capture and economic cartels for instance. But those are never brought up by Picketty's breed. Their issues is that someone owns more than someone else. I suppose my advice to Picketty would be that if he is going to commit one of the seven deadly sins, he might choose a funner one than envy.

<comment><USER4> The worst thing is that it is not the inequality of wealth that matters. It's the inequality of power.

What Piketty and others of this philosophical movement believe is that taking money away from people is the same as removing power.

They are going to be disappointed. Power is a capital item, not a revenue item. Money gets you the contacts with the right people. Lack of money doesn't remove them.

Plus, of course, there isn't a fixed amount of wealth - particularly not financial wealth. So why confiscate when you can accommodate?

<comment><USER5> Lack of money absolutely does remove them. Billionaires like Murdoch and the Koch brothers have had a massive detrimental effect on US politics (and British, in the case of Murdoch). Without the capital they control, they wouldn't have anywhere near that kind of impact.

Not every billionaire uses their money for that kind of power, but some do, and it hurts democracy when they do. In fact, it's even been argued that legitimate philanthropy is undemocratic, because it's rich people deciding which problems society will fix, rather than a democratic process.

If money only provided luxury, people would have less problems with this inequality. And people would probably be less interested in amassing more wealth than they can consume.

<comment><USER6> Counterpoint: Michael Bloomberg recently spent almost half a billion dollars trying to convince people to make him a presidential candidate. How did that work for him?

What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that propaganda doesn't cause beliefs, it focuses and amplified beliefs that preexist at least in nascent form. The Koch brothers would have no power if there weren't people ready for their kind of message. In fact this is a good example. The Koch Brothers were against the Trumpian turn in Republican politics and spent heavily against it. How did that work out for them?

Sorry money == power is too facile.

<comment><USER5> There are effective and ineffective way to use your money for power, of course. But many US politicians work for their wealthy donors. Most Senators are millionaires, no presidential candidates are poor.

The fact that some rich people only get part of what they want because they're opposed by other rich people, does not mean that their money didn't get them power. The Koch brothers got a lot of what they wanted.

And even if poor people, if there are enough of them and they are sufficiently organised, are able to oppose rich people, that still doesn't mean that the rich people don't have more power individually. Their resources make it much easier to organise, to buy influence and support, to reward politicians who legislate the way they want.

In the US, even more than in other countries, money is absolutely power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Piketty is a fool. End central banking and lender of last resort. That is it. There will still be a natural order of poor and rich just like every other natural system but it will not be as extreme and it will not reward the wrong people

<comment><USER8> Please make your points without calling names. Maybe you don't owe Piketty better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER7> No thanks, I'm good

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In a voluntary society, why don't people who advocate for things like the abolition of private property (the thesis of the linked article) just create this themselves?

Absolutely nothing stops a group from creating a non-profit, electing a board of trustees that appoints managers, and signing lifetime contracts to pledge their income to it. Then the board and it's managers can divvy up the income among everyone fairly, build communal housing, negotiate to provide health benefits for all at group discounts, provide retirement income, etc. And if people sign on when they are young, then some will become more successful and provide more income for the whole.

This is the same as taxes, except even better because all group members are ideologically aligned and would be happy to give all their income away to an elected group of people who will spend it on everyone fairly. And this way, people who don't want to participate aren't forced to do so.

<comment><USER4> "Absolutely nothing stops a group from creating a non-profit, electing a board of trustees that appoints managers"

We have done. They're called nations.

Other nations are available. You're not forced to stay in the one you are born in. That's enshrined in the United nations charter on human rights.

<comment><USER10> > That's enshrined in the United nations charter on human rights.

Good luck turning up at $country's port of entry with that as your only immigration document.

<comment><USER4> That's a straw man isn't it.

The UN charter enshrines your right to leave a nation. And that's all it enshrines.

It's more the port of exit that is the issue.

<comment><USER10> Fair point. Being _stateless_ may very well be an improvement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which products are you least proud of? - <AUTHOR> I gather that many HN members are professional software designers or engineers who have worked on several products. Working on products is a real eye-opening experience because you get to see how the sausage is made. I've always looked to software engineers who've worked on a product to give their opinion on whether they would use it for personal or professional use.<p>Which product have you worked on that you'd rather not use? Or the least proud of? I'm sure there are are some great stories to be told. <comment><USER2> Took on a project for "online video" just to realise it was actually video _advertising_. Still feeling ashamed of that one.

Worked on another project that was actually great (and great people too) and I'd personally use if it wasn't full of analytics & marketing SDKs and leaking data like a sieve.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using ExtJS for a couple of finance web apps ~6years ago.</comment>


How to beat Google analystics? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for idea to work on it. And I come up with it. So is it possible or even worth to work on this area with hope to beat google analytics(maybe I am dreaming but it's nore for motivation). The idea behind this is to be able to master his data without sending them to google and more.
The first step will be to have a simple tool/framework to build newsletters/campaign and get metrics to analyze and see what we reached (by segmentation, by color .....). What do you thing about this idea? am I crazy to jump myself on it. <comment><USER2> Try to check other non-google analytics tool to know what is available if you plan to build something.

Simple start if this is an exercise.</comment>


Ask HN: How are you checking password strength on the client? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Simple length checkers and regular expressions. Only do it as a convenience, and perform all validation on the server as if no checks were performed on the client, as they might not have been.</comment>


Babbage's heart-warming message for the middle-aged - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/babbages-heart-warming-message-for.html <comment><USER3> I believed that age mattered until I met a super-coder for the first time. He is over 60 years old, and completes entire projects by himself. A team of five decent programmers would likely complete these projects late and over budget. He has high standards, a razor-like focus on implementing The Right Thing, has a great eye for reusing old code, and isn't afraid to split the world apart to make life easier for the client. I'm glad I met him as early in my career as I did; I unlearned a lot of falsehoods about software engineering.

<comment><USER4> I think this is where the current attitude towards programmers and how we hire them is wrong, or at least a little off-base. A lot of people here seem to look down on someone who just works his ass off and gets the job done unless that person has a web presence and a github repository. Why would a guy like this even have a blog? Why would he care about our opinions of him? The contrast is striking between the blogging, coding-a-personal-project nature of our generation of programmers and the get-things-done-efficiently-and-go-have- fun nature of an entirely different generation. Many miss that "completes entire projects by himself" and "razor-like focus" often preclude many of the activities we now expect to see in a good programmer. Many think that if a programmer is not giving something away for free -- likely something that few will use or read -- then he is just a hamster-wheel cubicle drone.

Your comment reminded me that the reality of the programming world is that there are countless unsung amazing programmers who have stuck to the same platform for years, if not decades. They know their IDEs, libraries, and code bases inside and out. They get an assignment, go into crazy-productive genius- coder mode, and get a high quality product out the door. And then they go home and enjoy themselves, and none of us are the wiser. But we sure do appreciate the reliability of our cell phone networks, our vehicle computer systems, and countless other amazing pieces of software that we take for granted. Thanks for reminding us that you can be a great programmer without having a huge following, programming open source, or even working for a startup. Building something people want and getting things done are all that matters.

<comment><USER5> When a field is new, its pioneers can be identified easily: they are the ones who are making the field up as they go along. Thus, there is no need for status signaling, because the merit of each individual is very clear: the "alphas" are the Newtons and Shakespeares, having to invent entirely new notations and words just to explain the things they're working on. This is how programming was for the previous generation.

When a field matures, and it becomes harder to make true advances on one's own, we lose our ability to easily evaluate objective merit--so we replace objective merit cues with subjective status cues. The "alphas" of a mature field are the ones who signal more, showing that they can afford to waste effort on useless plumage (little-used FOSS project contributions.)

Of course, once we have adapted to existence in a mature field, we begin to recognize an overabundance of status cues as "trying too hard," and recognize that those who have true merit might not be bothering with status cues at all: thus is born _countersignaling_ , of the kind these "unsung amazing pogrammers" perform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never bought into ageism. I've known too many brillant older guys. My grandfather was an aerospace engineer, and sharp enough to put me to shame until the day he died.

Overall I'd say its confirmation bias. Think about how many people we encounter every day that don't have a clue. That ratio doesn't change with age. Age just becomes a convienient scapegoat.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. Ageism is terrible.

If we can cure the diseases of aging that affect our mental and physical performance, we'll hopefully get rid of this sad state of affairs.

It's such a waste that so many incredibly brilliant people are seeing their mental functions decline because of the accumulation of beta amyloids in their brains or whatever other problem that happens to be in evolution's blind spot (humans didn't use to live that old, and rarely reproduced at that age if they did). A huge waste for humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ageism sucks. At 25, I'm an idiot – I mean, truly a _moron_ by comparison to some people ten, twenty, thirty years my senior. Not because of what I know, though that always needs work, but because of how I think. How passion can funnel into trivialities. How unfortunate events can discourage good ideas, while optimism can blind me to reality.

Youth can be applied to do great things but it has its disadvantages.

Ageism becomes, unfairly, a proxy for determining something important: The creative humility of being able to embrace and extend new ideas.

The thing is: Someone in their 20's can just as easily become set in their ways as someone in their 40's or 60's. Becoming jaded and self-important is easy. Losing your curiosity is easy – boy, some people lose it by age 10. I can't stand people who decide they've learned everything there is to know about the world around them – whether they're 22 or 82.

Especially when selecting people to help you build something, buy into people with creative insight, curiosity, humility and passion. Those can be found at any age.

(Fun example: Watch a David Attenborough nature documentary from the BBC. One where he actually shows up on camera, in the middle of a remote habitat. Watch how delighted he is, even after decades of study and exposure to what he's talking about. He doesn't take anything for granted. He and his work are wonderful.)

</comment><comment><USER9> My dad is still programming at 79. Go dad!

<comment><USER10> Please, let us know what he does. Had he worked as a programmer or is he an hobbyist? Thanks.

<comment><USER9> He used to be a math teacher. I believe he took some programming courses (as an adult student), and we had a computer in the basement back in 1978.

I think he's developed a couple of websites for pay. I just remembered that he worked for a while at the McLuhan centre at University of Toronto.

Now he's mostly working on personal research projects for education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've heard there are two kinds of genius, one that blossoms at an early age and those that develop their craft over time to achieve great things later in life.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html>

<comment><USER12> dabent, you should post the Wired piece separately -- it's worth reading just for the account of the metrics Galenson used to decide on the "value" of art produced by artists, poets, etc. at different points in their lives (it was not just the prices of the different pieces, but their citations in textbooks, a la Google's PageRank algorithm).

<comment><USER11> I would, but it was submitted less than a month ago here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1678415>

It really is a good article and worth the read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yet another example: Lars Bak wrote V8 in his 40s. There are some details in "The genius behind Google's browser" [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm actually working on getting my dad up and going on Android development. He has an app addressing a vertical he is involved with. He's in his early 60s. Hell, considering when I wanted games growing up, his solution was to give me the K&R book and told me to write my own. I guess this is the least I can do.

<comment><USER15> Your dad is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's common to find a 70+ year old electrician or plumber because those trades have had high demand for generations, ours is still young enough where stereotypes still have some hold over coming reality.

</comment><comment><USER17> > where there's currently a cult of youth

I hear that a lot. I've worried about it since mid-eighties when my father sued US Government for age discrimination. But, I've not see it.

I'm almost 40, not old enough? Maybe I got another decade or two before the kids kick me off their lawns?

Maybe cult of youth exists more in "corporate"/"enterprise" world? Where naive, cheap, workaholics are greatly desired and always in supply?

<comment><USER18> I think it's just a holdover in the comp sci biz from the days when COBOL programmers found their COBOL hacking to be obsolete and chose to retire rather than retrain

Truth is, old dogs CAN learn new tricks. But it takes more energy than just repeating their old tricks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Message" implies an actual quote from the man. "Example" would be more appropriate in this context.

<comment><USER20> Like many words in English it does not have such a discrete meaning.

A story or experience can have a "message" the same way it might have a "moral". In fact "moral" is often defined as: _the message conveyed by a story_.

"Example" would have been a poorer word in its place.

<comment><USER19> Yes, a story can have a message, but "Babbage" is a person, not a story. "This story's message" has a different agent from "Jim's message". Jim is always the _author_ in the second meaning.

"Babbage's message" made the title shorter, but also misleading. A complete title of "Babbage's heart-warming" would have made it even shorter, but I hope you're not advocating in favor of that!

<comment><USER20> Reflecting today I believe Jim's inspiring message to us is to live life to the fullest even if that requires participation in extreme sports.

Jim did not write a letter. He was the "author" of the sentiment (according to the speaker) by the way he lived his life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Babbage's work was a bleeding edge of the science. As far as i know there is still no "cult of youth" in the areas what are bleeding edge of science today. Most people are getting to the bleeding egde and starting to produce their first significant science results only at 30+ . Dismissing 40-50+ year olds at the top of their scientific work would be just like throwing gold in thrash.

Programming isn't a science (it is barely an engineering) and thus comparison with Babbage just isn't valid.

</comment><comment><USER22> The title is very misleading.

The article is more like, "What the middle-aged can learn from Babbage's life".

I give credits for the authors perspective, though.

I am calling this out because I was expecting a reference to an original article written by Charles Babbage and did not see one.

Imagine if someone wrote an article titled "Einstein's final message to the world" and you only see a list of life achievements of Albert Einstein from the authors perspective.

</comment><comment><USER23> One only has to ready Gladwell to realize that becoming a master of any craft takes time, patience, experience, and lots of practice (10,000+ hours) - <USER2> of which is likely at an early age.

My mentor was 20 years my senior. His ability to read into other people's code, see potential problems, bottlenecks, and keep our code optimized has been invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how much age is relevant in software development merely due to the commonality of awful working environments (which younger workers are more likely to put up with).

</comment><comment><USER25> It is there an actual market opportunity somewhere in this problem of ageism in tech? You've got all these undervalued veteran hackers, could there be a way to provide a way for them to pool their abilities, either on a company, or a freelancing collective or LLC or the like, in order to maximize their full value?

</comment><comment><USER26> If there is a preponderance of younger success stories w/r/t age of the founders of successful internet companies, or the average age of programmers working for those companies, my bet would be that is due to an increase to risk aversion as folks get older.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, but Babbage didn't ship.

</comment><comment><USER4> s/programmers by young/programmers be young/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I've fixed that.

<comment><USER28> wrt the pedantry elsethread, might I suggest "Babbage's life's message" as a better start to the title?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> And a heart rending message too from Tuesday's Babbage installment <http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/babbages-other-woman.html>:

His wife, Georgiana died age 31, Ada Lovelace died aged 36 and Countess Teleki died a year before Babbage aged 34.

Only three of his _8_ children survived into adulthood.

<comment><USER30> Life expectancy back then was quite different than it was today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Someone is feeling old.

It makes me confused when a old person simple doesn't learn anything new that could possible help with their life. Heck I've been trying to convince a family member with the iPad (possible the easiest "computer" to use).

<comment><USER32> I see most people my age (50) "closing off", they don't want to learn anything new. I think a lot of it is learned behavior, not wanting to be embarrassed or made fun of by their peers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So Babbage, the guy who is best known for _starting_ work on the first mechanical computer but dying before completing it, is a heartwarming example?

If he'd started at 20, he would have finished it.

<comment><USER34> From what I've read it seems extremely likely that he did build (in secrecy) a working computer. One that was used by the British secret service to decrypt enemy communications.

<comment><USER35> [citation needed]</comment></comment></comment>


Newsletter with Remote Jobs for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://remotedigest.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Weekly newsletter with remote jobs for developers. Most of the jobs are full- time, and may have country/time zone and language restrictions.</comment>


Why journalists deserve low pay - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0519/p09s02-coop.html <comment><USER2> Very good article.

It also neatly explains why certain magazines/papers, like, for example, the Economist, are doing fine even as the industry collapses: they provide hard, strong value in the form of unique insight and analysis communicated extremely clearly.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps "Why lazy journalists deserve low pay" would be closer to the mark. But that's less of a reader-baiting headline, common in much of today's journalism. Oh, the irony...

<comment><USER2> Not really. It's obvious that we don't need the "lazy" journalists, the kind who just repost press releases with little analysis. Those are bound to go.

But we actually need less "proper" journalists too. A dozen proper, independent news outlets are probably sufficient to cover most world news from every important angle. Why should we need that coverage to be repeated a thousand times, for every major city? Why does the San Francisco Chronicle need someone covering the war in Iraq? Why does the Tribune de Genève need to cover american politics?

There is no need for this duplication of (good) coverage by proper journalists, when global, instant distribution is essentially free.

That is particularly true when you consider that the leading paper's stories will anyway be duplicated a hundred times over by thousands of bloggers who will inevitably capture all the minority viewpoints.

<comment><USER3> I think you're underestimating how many of the writers out there may be freelancers/retained freelancers, rather than staff hacks. Eg the Islington Twaddler's Silicon Valley correspondent may just be a desperate stringer, flogging stories wherever she/he can...

<comment><USER2> Perhaps - are you saying that we need this person flogging stories?

<comment><USER3> No, more that that person needs to flog stories to whoever will take them, even if that means being an X correspondent in country Y, despite their being little link.

There's also a whole side-conversation about diversity of opinion and reporting being key, but that does rely on high quality reporting, which we need more of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is terribly confused. The declining state of media organizations has nothing to do with journalists and everything to do with the manner in which the businesses have been run over the past 20 years.

<comment><USER5> Really? What business practices would enable journalism to "survive" a transition to a world in which their product has no value? Perhaps their business decisions are all just whistling in the dark? If there are _no_ paths forward for them, blaming them is counterproductive. I don't think "blame" can accrue where there were no good decisions to be made, even in theory.

(By "survive", most people mean that while it may shrink a bit or grow a bit, it's the same fundamental business doing the same fundamental things.)

This sort of analysis is critical. Frankly, I could sum up the article even faster: Journalism supply has _shot through the roof_. What do expect to happen to the price, given that demand can't shoot through the roof at anywhere near the same speed? What does that say about the probability of journalism "surviving"?

<comment><USER4> First of all, the article speaks of journalists as a homogenous group which is ridiculous since they are neither created equal nor do they act as a single group. It then describes only one aspect of journalism and devalues all roles journalists play based on that incomplete description. For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

From the article: _Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay._

This is a generally correct assessment of the current situation. Where it goes wrong is with the conclusion it draws: _"Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."_

As long as there are businesses willing to pay for this type of content, there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.

<comment><USER6> > First of all, the article speaks of journalists as a homogenous group which > is ridiculous since they are neither created equal nor do they act as a > single group.

This is not ridiculous. I think it's perfectly valid to consider the question: "Why do journalists (in general) have low salaries?" -- More down below.

> "Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, > they deserve low pay."

> there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the > responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.

I think the article is actually quite sympathetic to journalists -- the low pay is seen as a bad thing, and it raises the question of what journalists can do to be better-compensated.

> For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or > the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

I'm not sure what you mean by historical value, but the article was quite clear that deeply-researched, well-written, 'hard' journalism is rewarded -- because it has special value above and beyond the noise floor of the 'average' journalist.

I think that your position and the article's are actually quite close. There is a lot of 'average' journalism out there, and it does not provide much value in today's world. The exceptional journalists with an understanding of value _are_ being rewarded -- the investigative journalists you mention come to mind.

Below I have pasted what I believe to be the thesis of the article -- I don't think you truly disagree:

 _If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences._

<comment><USER4> I agree to the extent that the article argues that a higher quality product deserves a higher value.

 _I think the article is actually quite sympathetic to journalists_

One of the reasons I said the article was confused is that it's not clear who the target audience is. If it was sympathetic to journalists, then why the accusatory title and overall tone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the things I appreciate about HN is that once or twice a week, I come across a submission which is a journalistic piece that has truth and beauty in it. Whoever claims that journalists "produce only instrumental" and not intrinsic value lives in a universe different from mine.

<comment><USER2> Once or twice a week is pretty bad, considering that this industry probably produces hundreds of thousands of articles a week. I come across intrinsically valuable blog posts much more often than I come across intrinsically valuable news pieces, myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with the general gist of the article, but I'm not sure I agree with this:

"Wages are compensation for value creation"

This implies that compensation in general (not wages in particular) is always relative to value creation, which I don't think is true for most definitions of value (other than monetary.) 'Wages are compensation for the creation of financial value' would be more correct.

<comment><USER9> Wages are expression of price for labour. What's your price?

<comment><USER10> Can't agree with you more. To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods.

Interesting, too, that the author pairs harmony and beauty as having "intrinsic" value. We might think of beauty as intrinsically valuable but, once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable. Which brings me to my next point.

To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?

I guess I'm not a big fan of moral philosophy.

<comment><USER11> "To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods."

Careful: this way lies Marxism. The value doesn't lie in the labor itself, because if the labor was just as valuable as the product of that labor then why not save the labor and sleep in? The value lies in what is produced. Which is why using less labor to produce something more useful is more valuable than using more labor to produce something useless.

"once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable"

You've gone through a loop and said nothing. I think a rainbow is beautiful because (by your account, which spuriously dispenses with the possibility of individual taste or universal beauty) my culture values pretty colors. But in what way does my culture value pretty colors? Answer: we find them beautiful. You basically said "we think things are beautiful because our culture defines what we think is beautiful", which is a simple, testable, false statement (some standards of beauty are shared across cultures, other standards can differ within a culture).

"To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?"

You can have harmony without everything in the world being harmonious. By analogy, can't we only call a system or an interaction "harmonious" if it is something distinct from disharmony? Isn't there a difference between two instruments playing the same pitch (or harmonious pitches, such as the same note an octave apart) and two instruments playing completely disharmonious pitches? (The answer is yes, and this can be scientifically demonstrated.) Likewise, when a group of people act in concert to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts, is that not more harmonious than a group of people warring with themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's the hierarchies between the journalist and the consumer that deserve lower (not low) pay. The journalists are doing all the work, they should be paid more.

The problem with journalism is that the customer of the journalists' publishers are not the readers of the articles, they are the advertisers that fill the publication. It is this mindset that has pushed news from one of providing information to the reader to one of providing entertainment.

Journalists then work for entertainment companies, not news companies -- there is a big difference. The Economist is a news company. The evening news is entertainment. This means news competes with every other form of entertainment and news just doesn't doesn't stand a chance.

Why? Because the news is supposed to have a standard. Look at what happens when standards are lost (cough, fox!). Look at how the Daily Show is more popular than the evening news -- because it is more entertaining, because it doesn't pretend to strive for ethics. These lies are transparent and the consumer knows the news is not the news, but one big advertisement for prescription drugs, politicians, and mega corps.

The journalists aren't making the decisions that are shaping this theatre, the bosses with the big wallets are and they are controlled by the advertisers.

How many journalists have been told to modify their stories to be more appealing to the ad market? How many embellish to win more viewers?

The downfall of journalism has less to do with changing technology and more to do with faltering ethics and diminishing focus on the end user -- that is, the reader or the viewer -- and more focus on the advertising they sell.

When the news industry begins to understand the product they are selling, things will change.

For the record, the ad based revenue model is failing on the internet too. Are we going to blame the internet for that?

</comment><comment><USER13> While this piece focuses on the journalists themselves, the other aspect of the supply-and-demand perspective here is that society's requirements are shifting as well.

It could be that there simply isn't a widespread demand for the type of journalism whose decline we're observing. As generations pass, the older always seems to lament the loss of "quality and integrity" in their entertainment and news media.

<comment><USER14> I suspect those lamentations are largely due to a combination of selective memory and the spirit of the times. Getting back to journalism as an example, there wasn't much investigative reporting in American journalism before the Watergate scandal toppled Nixon's administration. It existed, but that's about all: most American journalists weren't Tarbells, Sinlairs, or Naders.

Before Watergate made it fashionable, most investigative journalists had strong personal motivation for their work. They would have fit right into the last election cycle as bloggers. I suspect that's also true of Bernstein, but under today's conditions Woodward might have chosen law or business.

After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet. Afterward it became apparent that this wasn't sustainable, and investigative journalism declined again. However, there will always be a certain number of motivated investigative journalists (or, if you like, muckrakers). With modern technology, they can publish their own work at a very low cost.

<comment><USER15> > Tarbells, Sinclairs, or Naders

Then there's the fact that many of these muckrakers didn't actually do good.

Take Nader. While the Corvair was made by "evil" GM, it was significantly safer than comparable cars of the same era, especially the VW bug/beetle. The bad publicity that Nader created out of whole cloth chased GM out of small economical cars.

> After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative > journalism with both feet.

It's not so much investigative as "change the world". It turns out that journalists don't actually know better and are very easy to capture by folks who have their own agenda. As a result, journalists have driven their credibility towards that of used car salesmen.

Oh, and Watergate doesn't actually make journalists look bad. When "Deep Throat" was revealed, we found out that it was just revenge by someone a vindictive crank who thought that he should have been appointed head of the FBI.

<comment><USER15> Argh - too late to edit. I meant to write that Watergate doesn't look journalists look GOOD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value.

I disagree. I've seen some journalistic writing and photography that I'd say qualifies as art.

Also: journalists have been poorly paid (excluding the national talking heads) for a lot longer than the Internet has been stepping on their turf. Terrible pay was one reason I left journalism.

Nowadays it's supply and demand, but it seems a bit like salt in the wound to say "they deserve it."

</comment><comment><USER17> :D The reason journalists have low pay is the same reason you find ridiculously beautiful and over-qualified people running coffee at TV stations -- so many people want to work in the industry that employers have their pick.

My friend "W" is a PhD and former model. She tried for two years to get any job at all at Univision in Miami. She gave up and got a crap job at a newspaper in Colorado. Another friend "J" is a fiber optic technician who's constantly bothering his cousin to get him an assistant gaffer job on local a game show.

</comment><comment><USER18> This falls in line with common wisdom doesn't it? Specialists do better in the work force than generalists do...

</comment><comment><USER19> The purpose of journalism is to monitor the sources of power. The people doing that job should NOT be low-paid.

<comment><USER20> They SHOULD be low-paid if all they do is act as a stenographer and just repeat verbatim what is said by the anonymous sources of power.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but that just means they aren't fulfilling their purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think we'd be in a lot of trouble if most traditional journalism disappeared, so much blog information is just opinion on news generated by traditional journalism or opinion pieces.

While in the web company area that hacker news covers this may not be the case a lot of blogging is.</comment>


The best way to preserve Macintosh software from floppy disks - <AUTHOR> http://vintageapplemac.com/155-the-best-way-to-preserve-macintosh-software-from-floppy-disks <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, I was recently able to recover some Apple IIe/Mac 800K floppies for a relative using a KryoFlux board [1] and a regular PC floppy drive. I was glad to have that option, since I sure don't have any vintage Apple 800K drives lying around!

[1] [https://www.kryoflux.com/](https://www.kryoflux.com/)

<comment><USER3> Kryoflux is amazing. I have found the best way to get good images is to get a few different old floppy drives (you can find them pretty cheap on amazon or ebay) and take images with a few of them. You will find that each drive has different bad sectors in the images. You can then patch together good sectors from the different drives to create a full, complete image.

I was able to get a lot of disk images from disks that were failing to read fully on ANY of the drives, but were failing in different sectors.

<comment><USER4> Same here. After my Amiga died I wanted to move to emulation, but I found a lot of my disks had died (I had moved to WHDload years before this so they haven't been used in a long time) and I was heart broken. A friend told me about Kryoflux and it worked flawlessly for them. It's only very rarely that I haven't been able to read a disk with it and most of them were super cheap 2000's era shitty disks. It's a utterly lifesaving and magical device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm wondering what the best way to preserve old Mac _installations_ is. I have some old Macintosh computers (one 68K & one PowerPC), and I'd like to get rid of them, but only after I've backed them up and ensured that I can run them on a modern Linux system.

SheepShaver is … a bit of a chore to get working (compared to VirtualBox).

A quick Googling doesn't reveal any obvious walkthroughs …

<comment><USER6> Why get rid of them ?

<comment><USER5> Because they're taking up space in my small home, and someday I may want to move. And eventually I'm sure the electronics will fail. Don't capacitors dry out eventually?

<comment><USER7> If the capacitors come from the right time then they may bulge and have failed already. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague) . Replacing capacitors is generally quite easy and they are cheap.

There are lots more things that can go wrong with old electronics and if the chips have lost their logic or whatever, you may find replacing those a bit more of a challenge or even to diagnose.

That said, I simply put a new battery into a radio made around 1974 (Roberts) and it worked. I'd already read up on things like tin whiskers growing inside the transistors and all sorts of horrors but I didn't need to dust down my soldering iron.

There are a lot of electronics hobby sites around with some very knowledgeable people lurking in them.

<comment><USER8> Tin whiskers were really only a thing with lead-free solder that was mandated in a stupid fashion by the EU (I won't go into specifics, but it really didn't make any sense once you started to look into why it was done, and the exemptions, etc).

That solder used more tin in the alloy than lead-based solders did, and grew "whiskers" like crazy. Various methods and means were attempted to slow it down (the best way was complete conformal coating - but that made rework very difficult), but it took a while for manufacturers to understand what and how it was happening. I think since then, lead-free solder has a different formulation to make it not as bad, but it still happens. Technically, it can happen in virtually any tin-based alloy, but for some reason lead-based alloys with tin didn't grow them anywhere near as much or as fast.

So - a 1974 radio is probably not going to be an issue. The computers, though, are a different thing. It will depend on when they were manufactured vs when the EU directive came around, and when the manufacturer switched over, etc. A lot of small variables come into play.

Likely, though, there won't be any problems. I still have computers and electronics from the early 1990s and before that all work fine. The issues with capacitors should be looked at, but it was only a problem for a certain time period (late 1990s IIRC); prior to that you'd only have to worry about "reforming" capacitors if they were very, very old (like power supply caps from a computer of the early 1970s or such). If you had - say - an Altair from the 1970s - yeah, you wouldn't want to try just plugging it in, that could lead to a fire even if the caps looked ok.

<comment><USER9> Is there any strategy I should use for turning on old electronics that haven't been turned on in a while (or links I should be looking at?) I still have a Commodore 64, Apple IIGS & a Mac LC630, but I haven't turned them on in a few years. For instance, maybe I should plug the devices into an APC UPS, so at least I know it's getting clean power?

I'd be sad enough if starting them up caused them to stop working, but I hadn't considered the possibility of them catching fire....

<comment><USER10> I would blow any dust out, and do a basic visual inspection of the logic board before you power it on. Macs of a certain age (like that LC630) have PRAM batteries which may have leaked/exploded, and capacitors which also may have leaked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a small stockpile of 5.25-inch floppies from the early '80s. They're mostly TurboDOS diskettes, which was a multi-user CP/M clone. I have no clue how they might be formatted or even whether they're readable, but I'd love to recover them for admittedly sentimental reasons. Can anyone suggest a starting point?

<comment><USER12> How important is this? I'm guess these are just "it would be neat to see what is there", so that is what I will comment. If you have something that is important look for a professional service - disks this old often have problems and can be only read once. There is a lot of old live music on CD because someone put the cassette tape in an oven and then read it at ultra slow speeds: they got one try as the act of reading the tape destroyed it. Thus for anything important you want someone who knows all the tricks.

My first thought is start with an old pc (probably i486) with a floppy drive and a working harddrive, and a network card. Install linux (old kernel - don't give this access to the real internet). From there use networking (nfs or ftp) to copy the parts to a more modern system.

Goodwill and surplus stores might still have all the parts if you look around. Also hacker spaces, ask around what someone still has in the dark corners of their basement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure how close to unobtainium they currently are, but I second the SuperDrive as a viable alternative to something like a Kryoflux. Given you have a 68k or other compatible Mac lying around as well, of course.

Ciderpress (windows utility) + SuperDrive-equipped Classic Mac was all I needed for all my early-1980s and Macintosh and Apple ][ related hobby adventures.

EDIT: Well I guess if you're stepping all the way down to 140KB ProDOS disks you'll need access to an Apple ][ system that can bridge the gap. Apple ][GS's are great for this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Site appears to be down at the moment; it's in the Internet Archive though: [http://web.archive.org/web/20171204210040/vintageapplemac.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20171204210040/vintageapplemac.com/155-the- best-way-to-preserve-macintosh-software-from-floppy-disks)</comment>


Ask HN: What do webdevs do for additional money? - <AUTHOR>

Some of my mobile developer friends make handsome additional money with their smart phone apps which they develop in their part time. Although I can develop smart phone apps, but I am far more comfortable in web development. So I was wondering if similar possibilities exist for web developers to make extra bucks.
For example, recently I heard of a freelancer who made a million with a WordPress theme: http://propakistani.pk/2013/08/13/pakistani-freelancer-sells-1-million-worth-of-items-online/
Similarly, Facebook games could be another dimension but I am not sure of that.
I am not looking for a million dollar idea, but something that could make a modest amount (around a thousand bucks a month) will be nice.
Any ideas/experiences will be much appreciated. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I am an iOS Freelance Developer, and I would highly recommend getting into mobile development. Right now, I am able to pull in $X,XXX/month through freelance projects on the side. On the side, I develop my own apps which will start earning me even more very quickly.

If your general goal is to make around $1,000/month with side projects, that is definitely possible!

As with most reoccurring revenue models, find a niche. Before you even think about development, do your research. Understand the market you are in. Is your competitor a Google app, or is it an app that hasn't been update in a year that has been getting bad reviews. At least for your first project, find the latter. Read the reviews, find out with keywords are being used, and think about why yours will be better.

The App Store is an complex jungle, with Candy Crush being a Lion, and hundreds of thousands being ants. Find a nice spot next to the watering hole and you will be able to bring in a substantial sum each month. If you're happy with the results, iterate and make even more!

</comment><comment><USER3> It can be easy to pick up side gigs building brochure ware websites for companies. Just approach a business that doesn't have a website that should (coffee shop, CPA, doctor, etc, etc) and tell them you can build them one. You'll need to be persistent, though.

If you are ambitious, you can turn those into recurring revenue by reselling hosting--I haven't done that because I don't want to be on the hook for down websites.

Make sure you check with your employer and get written confirmation that this is OK.

</comment><comment><USER4> My advice would be to use your free time to improve your existing skills. Use these skills to find a better paying job. Maintain a technical blog. Give a presentation about something not directly related to your current job. Chasing side-income is tough and difficult to maintain.

Or use your extra time for non-monetary pursuits. You only have one life.</comment>


Ask HN: Nazi "atomic pile" criticality in WWII? - <AUTHOR> I had seen on a television documentary where men with radiation detectors entered an overgrown  tunnel entrance in a German forest, and in the tunnel the radiation levels became extremely high. I had seen photos of Allied dismantling of a prototype Nazi power reactor on Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program#/media/File:German_Experimental_Pile_-_Haigerloch_-_April_1945.jpg
however this photo appears to show an industrial prototype and not a physics experiment, and criticality had not been achieved at this facility. So, I wondered if the underground radiation was from the original research prototype.
WWII nuclear scientists from Germany were secretly recorded conversing after after the defeat of the Nazis, and of course they were unaware of the U.S. "atomic pile" criticality at the University of Chicago. In the transcripts of their discussions, they refer to an "engine" which seems to be their term for a power reactor. I see the following statement on page 12 of the transcripts at http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf
"History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine."
which tells me they were all aware of a research reactor having achieved criticality. Does this seem correct? <comment><USER2> There's a museum in the Haigerloch beer cellar where the prototype reactor was built. [https://www.haigerloch.de/de/Tourismus/Atomkellermuseum/Der-...](https://www.haigerloch.de/de/Tourismus/Atomkellermuseum/Der- Versuch-B8) says that the B8 attempt did not reach criticality.

Last paragraph:

> Der Vermehrungsfaktor (das Verhätnis Voll- zu Leermessung) ergab sich etwa > zu 7. Damit war der Haigerlocher Reaktor nicht kritisch geworden. > Berechnungen ergaben, dass etwa die eineinhalbfache Reaktorgröße notwendig > gewesen wäre. Eine Vergrößerung war im April 1945 nicht mehr möglich, weil > weder weiteres Uran noch Schweres Wasser vorhanden war.

Google Translate:

> The multiplication factor (the ratio of full to empty measurement) was about > 7. Thus, the Haigerlocher reactor was not critical. Calculations showed that > about one and a half times the reactor size would have been necessary. An > enlargement was no longer possible in April 1945, because neither more > uranium nor heavy water was available.

<comment><AUTHOR> It makes sense that the nuclear physicists involved actually meant that history would record they "desired to produce" or "hoped to produce" \- their spoken German was probably not very good.

<comment><USER2> The "WEIZSÄCKER" here is Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4cker)

> Born in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, he was the grandson of Karl Hugo von > Weizsäcker, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg. His > grandfather was ennobled in 1897 and raised to the hereditary nobility with > the title of Baron (Freiherr) in 1916. As such, the four-year-old Carl > Friedrich Weizsäcker became Baron Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Since 1919, > noble titles have legally been considered parts of the family name.

> Weizsäcker was raised in Stuttgart, Basel and Copenhagen. Between 1929 and > 1933 Weizsäcker studied physics, mathematics and astronomy in Berlin, > Göttingen and Leipzig, supervised by and working with Heisenberg and Niels > Bohr, among others. The supervisor of his doctoral thesis was Friedrich > Hund.

I therefore _cannot_ believe that his "spoken German was probably not very good."

That Wikipedia link gives a further description

> the "Farm Hall Transcripts" also revealed that Weizsäcker had taken the lead > in arguing for an agreement among the scientists that they would claim that > they had never wanted to develop a German nuclear weapon. This story was at > least untrue to the extent that the detainees also included scientists > actively engaged in eager attempts to build a nuclear bomb, namely Kurt > Diebner and Walter Gerlach.[14] Max von Laue later called this agreement > "die Lesart" (the Version).

Thus, I think you should see this as an attempt to create a narrative that likely didn't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thus, I was being mildly sarcastic about the German scientists ability to speak German.

<comment><USER2> It came across as a comment by someone very ignorant of the history around the German nuclear program.

Not only was it nonsensical for Weizsäcker specifically, Heisenberg was attacked by proponents of the "Deutsche Physik" movement, who had a particular hatred of the "Jewish physics" which turned out to be so useful for nuclear weapons development. They believed Heisenberg wasn't German enough - a 'White Jew'. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik)

Your sarcastic comment also suggests that the physicists on the German nuclear project weren't German enough to even speak German well.

For anyone who knows the history, your attempt at humor instead comes across as a continuation of the anti-Semitic smear attack on Heisenberg.

Since that isn't what you meant, it means that you don't know anywhere near enough of the history to be at the point where you should be comfortable in making sarcastic comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Consider me to have been properly and most righteously chastised.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>