'Diamond-age' of power generation as nuclear batteries developed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/november/diamond-power.html <comment><USER2> It would be more credible if the Cabot Institute linked the paper on their "All Research Papers" page ([http://research- information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/c...](http://research- information.bristol.ac.uk/en/organisations/cabot- institute\(c0347f3a-1376-405f-aca9-7d3d008a9701\)/publications.html?page=0)) or if they described how they are getting electricity out of beta decay (is it simple a thermo-electric generator? How much heat differential can they push? Or is it just bodging together chunks of radioactive material in a casement that has reasonable head conductivity and absorbs 99% of radiation.

My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball. Basically you take a kilogram of spent fuel rod, encase it in a austenitic stainless steel ball, and suspend that bad boy in the center of your water heater holding tank. Hot water for the next 500 years without using gas or electricity :-).

<comment><USER3> > My favorite "invention" of that form is the water heater "booster" ball

This sounds super cool! what happens if people e.g. go on vacation for 3 months? would it explode the heater or melt through the ball..?

do you have any other links/info about it you can give me? I'm super curious about it. I googled moderately but I only found some seemingly unrelated things[1]

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a- nu...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/02/22/nasa-a-nuclear- reactor-to-replace-your-water-heater/#7b4faf433ba3)

<comment><USER4> if there's any water left in that water heater after a couple hours and it didnt explode from vapor overpressure, you'll painfully die of acute radiation sickness.

that's the best case scenario.

<comment><USER2> You over estimate the decay heat in a kg of spent fuel. According to here [1], a 1GW (1000MW) plant uses 100 Metric tons of fuel, so 1 kg is responsible for 1G/100K or 10Kwatts and the decay heat of spent fuel is .1% of its nominal power level so 10K * .001 or 10 watts. If you dump 10 watts into your water heater it will get hotter and depending on the heat insulation of the tank it might even get to boiling. Although typically I would expect a tank to lose close to 10W into the ambient air once the water was at temperature.

[1] [http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/hlwaste.htm](http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/hlwaste.htm)

<comment><USER4> No argument, though it's hard to envision a scenario where [1] is not a predetermined eventuality for any setup that would be laughably inadequate or economically impractical.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_units_4,_5...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_units_4,_5_and_6#Spent_fuel_pool)

<comment><USER2> It doesn't follow, fuel (whether spent or not), is density and dissipation question. Each kg of fuel is generating heat, so more fuel in a smaller space means more heat in a smaller space. Fukishima's spent fuel ponds had both spent and fresh fuel in them (reactor 4 was undergoing maintenance) and there was a lot of it. Spread that fuel out across say a hectare pool of water that is 5 meters deep and it stays out of trouble.

One disposal plan called for mixing the fuel with silica to create glass bricks. By spreading the fuel mixture to a density that was low enough to allow the ambient air to cool it, the bricks are shelf stable for thousands of years and not a radiation hazard (less of a risk than even natural uranium deposits you might come across).

Many disposal plans were like this, encapsulate the spent fuel into a container that withstands (and blocks) the radiation while conducting enough heat to avoid changing the properties of the material over the lifetime of its storage. Glass and austenitic stainless are both good candidates for that material.

<comment><USER4> This does not really change the conversation.

The fact that spent nuclear fuel must be kept in water _at all_ until it is sufficiently decayed to be put into dry storage _still safely away from humans_ means it is by definition not fail safe. Water evaporates and if you lose the ability to dissipate heat or absorb ionizing radiation, "you're in deep shit" would be a colossal understatement. How comfortable would you be that something on your property or in your home is one water outage or tank failure away from irradiating your family and probably a bunch of your neighbors. I imagine the hazmat team won't be happy to be invited to your housewarming either.

If it requires cooling or radiation-blocking-immersion to be safe, it absolutely _has_ to be monitored by trained personnel 24x7 who can also immediately and reliably take necessary measures when something goes wrong. Anything less than this is a non-starter. Nuclear reactors work because they centralize risk to where it can be managed by a team of knowledgeable people; A 1GW reactor does not have the same risk profile as 1000 dispersed 1MW reactors.

<comment><USER2> But that was my point, spent fuel doesn't have to be kept in water _at all_ , if it is sufficiently dispersed. Take a spent fuel assembly remove each of the fuel rods and lay them down on the ground and you're done caveat two things, one they emit alpha, beta, and some gamma radiation and two they warm their surroundings. So there always exists a solution to the equation of heat generated over time = heat absorbed by ambient air keep the total temperature rise below that of the safe temperature of the cladding.

If you lay a spent rod out on the ground in the air, it may glow (would depend on the amount of material in a single rod) and you wouldn't want to approach it without protection (again more material more radiation) but it would be fine.

The reason people put these things in water is two fold, one is that water is a great transporter of heat and you can generate almost an arbitrary amount of heat in a small space if you have enough water flow to carry it away (ask any highend gamer PC aficionado :-)) and water absorbs neutrons, which if they were not caught and hit another fissile atom nearby slowly enough might spit it, or a non-fissile atom might become an unstable nucleotide (which is going to eventually emit an alpha or beta particle)

If the material is clad in a neutron opaque material and can transfer the latent heat to the surrounding atmosphere or fluid at a rate that keeps the system temperature under the breakdown temperature of the containment, then it will be stable "forever".

Yes, it takes a year or two for the short lived nucleotides in a fuel rod pulled from a reactor to decay, but once it has, you can safely store this stuff.

In terms of why we haven't, most of the issues around storing high level nuclear waste arise because third parties do _not_ want to encapsulate permanently this material, because doing so would make it uneconomical to recover. And in that calculus they know its "easier" to reprocess spent fuel for bomb grade uranium and plutonium than it is to build a breeder reactor to make it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can see that they are emphasizing on the #DiamondBattery hashtag so that general public will be hooked and share it more, but why haven't they given any hints (mildly technical) to the capabilities of the battery?

// A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.//

When I read the "small electrical current", the physicist in me was naturally assuming a very small current of the order of pico to nano amperes (without being conservative) - essentially useless. Metrics like the half life of the battery doesn't make any sense at all if the power or current rating is not specified. Current rating is something you could trust, that it will end up as a viable product.

This would appeal more if they can give a direct link to their research paper.

<comment><USER6> Current off the shelf betavoltaic batteries produce 50-350 nA @ 2.4v. I don't expect them to be producing much more than that.

<comment><USER7> Is that an idiom, or are they really "off the shelf" and not specially built for every space probe?

<comment><USER6> They are "off the shelf" in that you can give them a call and in 6 weeks have one. I suspect they obtain and load the nuclear material for your order, but the rest of the device is stocked as it involves custom semiconductors which have fairly large minimum orders.

These are the class of battery that would replace the CMOS battery in something that can never lose power to its RAM, rather than the much more powerful RTGs that space probes use.

<comment><USER8> Part of a spectrum from MEMs through pacemaker batteries, Cassini-style RTG, pebble-bed reactors, up to massive GE/Siemens style LWRs. It's a remarkably scalable tech, both up- and down- scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This will sound like neckbeard cynicism, but I actually mean this and in a positive way:

"There are so many possible uses that we're asking the public to come up with suggestions of how they would utilise this technology by using #diamondbattery."

It's cool how they're engaging the public in their research in this way. Of course it's a transparent ploy to get social media mentions, but scientists of all sorts (and I kind of am one myself) would do themselves a favor by doing more to get the general public to know about their/our work. This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy (to me at least, but I suspect to others on this site as well), but I think that's a bad reflex on my part, and that easy, low- friction things like giving people an opening to send a quick tweet or FB post reaches a different audience than having a stand at the 'open science fair' or having a lecture open to the general public; those tend to self-select in the audience they attract, to put it mildly.

<comment><USER10> > This particular thing 'feels' sort of slimy

I was just coming here to talk about how inaccurate the title was. It implies (or leads people to believe) that "nuclear batteries" are something new. Or at least, that's what they want readers thinking. They're not even close to new. They're decades old. They're aboard the Voyager probes (which is why they're still working, 30 years later) and they're powering the Curiosity rover on Mars. Hell, there was even a nuclear battery powered automobile made by Ford I believe (the "Nucleon") as proof of concept. This was in the 1950s.

The new thing here, is the fact that they can run the batteries with nuclear waste.

<comment><USER11> Voyager I and II and Curiosity are powered with radioisotope thermoelectric generators [1], which are nothing like this proposal.

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

<comment><USER10> > Voyager I and II and Curiosity are powered with radioisotope thermoelectric > generators

AKA a nuclear battery... That's how they're referred to by just about everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally > nothing we could use that could offer more protection.

With such nonsense it is hard to believe the rest of the article. Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air, smash it with a hammer and it will burst in million parts. Small particles and gasses are very easy to ingest.

<comment><USER13> > Heat a diamond and it will burn releasing CO2 into the air

I bet you have never tried that.

Heat a diamond enough (what it a lot), and it will turn into graphite (layer by layer), a substance usually used for heat protection since is one of the solid materials we have around that survive the hightest temperatures.

Also, hit it with a big enough hammer, and yes, it will smash. It will also press a dent on your hammer.

<comment><USER14> A material can be "hard" but also be brittle. Diamond is one of these substances. You don't need a large hammer to crack or destroy one. Ask any jeweler.

<comment><USER15> Diamond has perfect cleavage in four directions.

If you want a mineral that you can really pound on without it breaking, you want nephrite. The Maori made war clubs out of it. Bring a diamond to a nephrite fight, and you're going to end up in the stewpot.

If you need hardness and toughness, corundum is what you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds cool. One annoying bit of breathless (and brainless) enthusiasm stuck out though: "In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection."

While diamonds are extremely hard, they are brittle, and shatter relatively easily.

<comment><USER17> Maybe it's my lack of imagination or not having English as a native language, but how can something be "hard" and at the same time shatter easily?

EDIT: nvm found the answer via Google

[https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet- brittle](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-diamond-hard-yet-brittle)

<comment><USER18> Even better:

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

I read an enlightening discussion on HN a few months back about "hardness". I was under the impression professional scientists/researchers do not use the generic terms "hard" or "hardness". Outside of marketing, I presume they would employ concise measurements like ductility, elastic stiffness, plasticity, strain, strength, toughness, viscoelasticity, and viscosity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From #diamondbattery tweets: [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23diamondbattery)

Could be used in underground seismic monitors [https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541](https://twitter.com/Keminoes/status/803297734694465541)

Car keys that require batteries. If we don't have a spare battery with us and our keys die, we're stranded. MP3 players, too [https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796](https://twitter.com/tysongeisler/status/803438384052129796)

To power a low-power-mode Arduino for gas detection (CO, CO2, Low O2, etc), fire detection, radiation detection, etc. [https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112](https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112)

Could diamond batteries be used to power medical nanobots? [https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184](https://twitter.com/weirbe/status/803418222972125184)

Power clothes that contain sensors, as well as clothes that electrically regulate the temperature. [https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528](https://twitter.com/CIMCloudOne/status/803440800759574528)

how about in cell phones to give a little charge to the battery while the phone is not in use. [https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961](https://twitter.com/W_Haas/status/803352403512872961)

Is there the potential to power watches as a fair amount of waste is generated from depleted watch batteries each year. [https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088](https://twitter.com/Merrett72/status/803297788163289088)

<comment><USER20> > To power a low-power-mode Arduino for gas detection (CO, CO2, Low O2, etc), > fire detection, radiation detection, etc. > [https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112](https://twitter.com/noalear/status/803389146433626112)

Except you wouldn't use an Arduino; AVR processors are notorious power hogs when you start counting the milli (and micro) watts. Run-of-the-mill TI MSP430 microcontrollers, aside from being arguably more powerful and better designed at similar price points, consume less than 1 _micro_ amp in idle mode.

<comment><USER21> > AVR processors are notorious power hogs

> MSP430 microcontrollers ... consume less than 1 microamp in idle mode.

As someone who's done extremely low-power development on both platforms, this is an _extremely_ disingenuous comparison. Of course MSP430s consume very little current in idle mode. So do AVRs. People just don't usually run them at low frequencies or in idle mode, because Arduino is targeted at novice users, not people who know how to do low-level power management.

I've been running an ATTiny off the same pair of AA batteries, blinking an LED for 50ms every 5 seconds for _4 years_. Just turn all peripherals off, maximum clock prescaler division, sleep mode with wake on watchdog interrupt. There's functionally no way to get better performance out of an MSP430 in real-world applications.

While I prefer the MSP430 instruction set, beyond that there's no obvious all- around advantage over the AVR family.

<comment><USER22> >I've been running an ATTiny off the same pair of AA batteries, blinking an LED for 50ms every 5 seconds for 4 years.

Is this just for fun or is it part of a larger project?

<comment><USER21> For fun. My parents wanted a fake security system with a blinking light at their house to ward off burglars, so I soldered an LED and a resistor to an ATTiny and then soldered on a double AA pack. It's still going off the first set of batteries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is no diamond-age. These devices are all well and good, but think of the scales involved. To generate enough power to do something like power a home, let alone a vehicle, we are going to need kilos of this stuff. Kilos of diamond. It's also going to get rather hot. That is the point.

Using numbers from patch_collector: 1 x 50watt lightbulb / 0.0013 Watts/gram = 38Kg = 83lbs of diamond per bulb.

Diamonds are far from indestructible. They shatter. More importantly, they burn. We don't see it very often but put enough of them together, add heat and electricity, and you better hope there isn't any oxygen nearby. Imagine a couple pounds of these things, on fire, pumping out radioactive carbon dioxide. At least when uranium burns it produces something heavy that can be filtered. Filtering radioactive CO2 would be a nightmare. These things will never find there way into any consumer product.

<comment><USER24> At what temperature does Diamond burn?

<comment><USER25> Diamons will burn at 690°C in pure oxygen. Houses burn at around 590°C. Maybe if you rupture an O₂ tank in a house fire right next to the diamond battery you could pull it off.

I wouldn't worry about small diamond batteries. There is already 1 part per trillion carbon 14 in you. The odd telemetry battery that gets caught in an oxygen fire isn't going to shift the scales much.

<comment><USER12> Trash incineration is around 1000 degree Celsius. People already now throw batteries in household trash when they shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If civilization ever falls, future generations would think using crystals for energy must have been a fairy tale.

<comment><USER27> Enter Laputa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Haha this sounds straight out of Asimov's Foundation novels where a civilization was driven to innovate miniaturized nuclear power.

<comment><USER29> Wasn't the Earth in Asimov's Foundation radioactive and unhabitable? Having that blue glow at the horizon (ionizing radiation-induced luminescence?).

<comment><USER30> The Earth was made radioactive due to a plot by the Spacers.

On the other hand, the Foundation - the civilization using miniature nuclear reactors - is happening many millennial later and far away from Earth.

So the "miniature nuclear tech" and "radioactive Earth" aren't related in the plot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone have details? Like what is the nominal voltage, power density, etc?

<comment><USER32> Here's the best I can find, from Eikka's comment on Phys.org:

"Carbon-14 has a mean decay energy of 49 keV or 7.85e-15 Joules and activity of 165e+9 bq/g which gives you a power output of 0.0013 Watts per gram.

So a gram-sized lump of carbon-14 - about half a teaspoon - assuming perfect conversion, will produce 1.3 Milliwatts, or about 1/20th of what it takes to light up a common red indicator LED."

[http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear- batte...](http://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear- batteries.html#jCp)

<comment><USER33> That would actually be perfect for long range interstellar probes. A constant source of energy for thousands of years, even that small, would propel a craft to reasonably high speeds. Give a spacecraft a few pounds and you'd have something really great.

<comment><USER34> So given that, assume you put an array of batteries together, what is the formula for Batteries of qty=N allowing a range of Z AU comm ability to earth / current-AU-distance == distance-from-earth before we will not be even able to receive said comms...??

So how far can they get on N batteries before we cant hear them?

Is there such a thing as "solar-syncronous" and "galactic-syncronous" orbit such that we can deploy a TON of little relays that would speed up comms to each probe to the Earth?

I.E. we have however many in a sphere around the solar system, then at some AU distance out, that the extending probes can contact more efficiently?

Assume that the little diamond batts can only reliably transfer a signal by AU/.00X - then we need to create grids of these little guys at AU/.00X intervals to relay the signals within the power capabilities of the probes...

or is this a stupid thing to say?

\---

This begs the questions; what is the best method/technology for sending messages between sensors through space?

We can still hear the Voyagers, how long do their signals take to get here? How much data do they send? How long will their batteries last? How far until they go dark? (they are already like 34 times as far from us as we are from Jupiter.)

How well could these little batteries power the new EM/ION drive: [https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas- fut...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic- em-drive/)

How much power does that need?

<comment><USER35> If you put a radio at ~10X the distance of Pluto, you can use the sun as a gravitational lens, and communicate with another star using milliwatts of power:

[http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123](http://www.centauri- dreams.org/?p=10123)

You're still bound by the speed of light, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Even if this is true I think this is such a public safety hazard, that the authorities will never allow its public adoption.

Just think in terms of domestic terrorism and dirty bombs. Exploding a few such batteries would release radioactive powder, which is a quite dangerous if inhaled, and cleaning it up is very difficult.

<comment><USER37> C14 isn't much good for a dirty bomb. It's too light. You'd probably need to be actually caught in the explosion to stand a risk of inhaling enough to be problematic, and at that point you've got other things to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> WOW. I always expected that we would see mobile phones that lasted for days or weeks before needing to be recharged. I never once considered the idea that we may have mobile phones and laptops that NEVER need to be recharged during our lifetime. That is an incredible thought.

I wonder how hard it will be to convince people to put nuclear batteries in their pocket. Many people are still afraid of microwave ovens.

<comment><USER39> It does sound incredible, but I don't think most people would be down with carrying nuclear waste in their pockets.

<comment><USER38> Many of us already carry around lithium ion batteries in our pockets, and I think these nuclear batteries could be far less dangerous. Phones can explode without warning, and bending or piercing a battery can cause huge explosions and fires. You'd have to try really hard to shatter these diamonds, and they would probably have some lead lining.

<comment><USER40> Sure, it's easy to say that as an engineer since we deal with facts and data, but the general public is anywhere from wary to extremely scared of anything "nuclear."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm not sure if this will lead to a new revolutionary battery.

But I'll say this, the man/woman who creates a company that builds a new revolutionary battery that will keep your laptop humming for a week; will be very rich. Probably the next richest person on earth.

<comment><USER42> Putting that much power density on your lap is kinda scary. It's like carrying a slab of C4. Imagine if the galaxy note incident happen again but with a much much higher power density battery which can go kaboom.

<comment><USER43> How would a C14 slab would go kaboom? Its only role is to give radiation which is transformed into heat or electricity.

I don't expect any explosive parts here.

<comment><USER42> I was talking about a high capacity battery that can power a laptop for a week, not the nuclear battery from the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown > a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to > generate a small electrical current.

So, they are replacing the thermocouples as used in RTGs with this diamond- like stuff? And low radioactivity sources (as opposed to plutonium)? That would indeed be revolutionary if it worked.

<comment><USER45> It'll work fine, but the problem with low radioactivity sources is that they are also low energy sources. So you need a lot of material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Suspicious: sounds like a con, in every breathless undocumented wild claim.

<comment><USER47> Watch the language.

It's a university press release. It may not meet expectations. The science may be faulty. They could be utterly incompetent.

But a con implies wilful behaviour on the part of the University of Bristol to deceive people.

<comment><USER48> > It's a university press release.

Which are often trying to actively deceive people, implying that tiny iterations are new fields, and that devices are orders of magnitude more effective than they are. I'm comfortable calling this press release deceptive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Every few years there's a proposal for a new nuclear battery. This was the last one:

[https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear- batt...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/190555-this-nuclear-battery- could-power-your-smartphone-forever-as-long-as-you-dont-value-your-life-or- sperm-count-too-highly)

The problem is none of these approaches solve the disposal problem or the dirty bomb problem. You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people.

So, this will never be in a smartphone or laptop, but perhaps power industrial items that can't be practically charged often like remote robots or sensors. Or applications in space to replace aging, expensive, and heavy RTG's.

<comment><USER38> > You can buy 1,000 of these and build a dangerous device that would require > serious clean-up and, obviously, can hurt a lot of people.

Or you can buy $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and try to build a breeder reactor in your back yard: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn)

Oh no, I didn't know he passed away only a few months ago. And that's very sad to read about the rest of his life.

<comment><USER49> The lithuim is just used to purify the thorium he illegally acquired. I don't think your comparison really works here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > _diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing > we could use that could offer more protection_

Weird, I was under the assumption that density (and other more exoteric chemical properties) shielded from radioactivity, not hardness. /s

<comment><USER24> Maybe they meant protection of the containment itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Obvious applications would be [...] high-altitude drones

This made me wonder about the funding for this research, but then I found that Dr. T Scott is involved with[0]:

> Radiation Mapping Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

> Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the > Interface Analysis Centre has been developing an unmanned aerial system > capable of mapping radiation in regions inaccessible to humans.

[0]: [http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/](http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/research/iac/casestudies/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Normally with nuclear power you use the heat generated to drive a heat engine of some sort with strict limits on the theoretical efficiency. But many pulse fusion designs look at using the momentum of emitted charged particles directly through their interaction with magnetic fields at far higher efficiency than could be achieved with the energy going through a heat stage. Carbon-14 emits only beta particles which are, of course, all negatively charged. I wonder if they've managed to turn those into a very high voltage, very low current continuous source directly?

</comment><comment><USER53> IMO the headline here isn't the minimally powered batteries, it's that this is a potential solution to the (very) secure storage of nuclear waste. In the US, for example, the proposal to store essentially all of our nuclear waste at one site (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is a truly terrible idea that would create the world's most coveted terrorist target. Encapsulating the waste in small diamond shells that could be distributed among several sites seems like an ideal solution if they can get it to work at scale.

<comment><USER54> Why would anyone attack that facility? Its extremely easy to secure - If you somehow neutralize everyone protecting it you still wont get in and out with any meaningful amount of material before a military response comes in and removes your ability to actually do anything.

Note that Yucca Mountain doesn't just have piles of fissile material - all the waste is in the same concrete capsules they arrived in. The ones that need a crane to be moved[1][2].

You could argue that these will fail before we know what to do with them and that they will leak radioactive material over time, but that still wouldn't make it a good terrorist target.

[1] [https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear- Fue...](https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/How-Is- It-Stored-Today)

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

NOTE: Sources don't say that you cant move these without cranes, they just say that these are larger than a person and made of steel and reinforced concrete so I thought it would be a safe assumption these are a pain to move.

<comment><USER53> So if someone bombed that facility with large conventional weapons, or detonated a low-yield nuclear device there, the casks wouldn't leak?

<comment><USER55> At this point you are talking about blowing up part of a mountain and if someone can do that you are already in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> (Note this math is a thought experiment ... completely off the cuff and utter non-sense.)

Based on their numbers:

AA is about 700J/g @ 20g gives about 14000J and a 24 hour drain gives us 580J/hour.

DiamondBattery is about 15J/day or ~0.5J/hour

Ignoring voltage issues (among other things), we come to 1.1kg of DiamondBattery being able to supply something that would drain their 20g AA in 24 hours.

The math here is complete off the cuff non-sense, but an extra kg or so here is not unreasonable for some fixed applications ...

<comment><USER49> This is a little disheartening in terms of robotics. For a non-trivial robot with a handful of 12V motors and a decent workload, I imagine this would add tens of lbs compared to only a handful of ounces using lithium. Of course, those tens of lbs means more power needed to push the robot and you quickly hit the laws of diminishing returns.

<comment><USER56> Of course, we're talking about less than first-gen tech here as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The part where they list "airplanes" as something it could potentially power was where it became silly... that's gonna be a lot of spent fuel rod mass.

</comment><comment><USER58> Given that Bristol researchers did not explain the physics behind their diamond battery we can only speculate but considering some recent developments we can make some good guesses.

It probably functions similar to a betavolatic cell. (See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device))

In a typical configuration you have a P-N semiconductor junction placed next to beta emitter. The beta particles impact the PN junction and create electron-hole pairs that are pulled apart by the junction to produce a current.

The use of diamond seems like a could be a significant innovation: 1) Carbon-14 is an efficient beta emitter and could make op part of all of the diamond material. 2) Diamond has a wide band-gap which is necessary for high efficiency conversion to electricity. 3) Has strong resistance to radiation damage.

In one configuration the diamond would be layered on top of a silicon P-N junction so it works like a conventional betavoltaic device. (see: [http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/harrison2/))

A recent patent shows that diamond is a very efficient moderator for injecting electrons into the junction. (see [https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610](https://www.google.com/patents/US9064610))

Considering that diamond is itself a semiconductor we could also do away with the silicon. For example diamond is being considered for highly efficient photovoltaic cells. (see: [http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm](http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_diamond.htm))

It is also being considered for production of next-gen schottky diodes. (see: [http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?artic...](http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?articleid=207252&section=ICNews))

The diamond could be stacked next to a conducting metal to create a Skottky barrier which is a type of P-N junction. The beta particles would excite the electrons with enough energy to push them over the barrier and create a current. (see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_barrier))

</comment><comment><USER59> Would anyone care to explain how this works? The crystalline structure of the diamond and the directionality of the radiation source doesn't give me a clear idea about where to add terminals to this battery.

</comment><comment><USER60> in a diamond battery what serves as anode and cathode, how do you connect wires to a diamond?

this diamond making process would be quite hazardous.

I wonder if they should just create a layer of diamonds and and sandwich that between C14 rather than try and rely just or those diamonds to power spacecraft (would save having to develop the non-radioactive diamond layer).

would a standard diamond also do that trick, I don't see why a radioactive diamond would be different if it is in the presence of C14?

<comment><USER61> There are diamond LEDs so this is solved problem, I think by adding very specific impurities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Reminds me [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S)

</comment><comment><USER63> Damn. I was hopeful if used gamma radiation. That would have been truly revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER64> 10:1 odds that this is just a use of the photoelectric effect with a clever dielectric. Based on the press-release description, it is probably not a radiothermal generator (like that used in deep space probes).

1) Have an ionizing radiation source.

2) Get a robust dielectric, with metal plates on both sides of it. Call the plate near the radiation source the cathode and the far one the anode.

3) As the ionizing radiation impacts one side of the cell, the released electron travels only a short distance through the cell. Ideally, the first interaction is with a cathode and the far side an anode, imparting a negative potential to it.

4) A potential difference now exists between the far-side anode and the near- side cathode, from which you can draw current.

Strictly speaking, this is a more like a capacitor which is trickle-charged by the radiation field rather than a battery. There is a design tradeoff between thickness of the metal and dielectric layers in that the initial and final ionizing interaction must be of a (cathode/dielectric -> anode) or (cathode -> dielectric/anode) to get any energy out of it. Ideally, the dielectric has an extremely small cross-section for interaction with whatever the ionizing radiation source is, while the metal plates interact very strongly. However, there will always be some losses due to internal ionization of the dielectric itself. I'm not sure how you would build an effective multi-layer structure, either.

Is this preferable to an RTG? Almost certainly not. The vast majority of the radiation energy in an ionizing photoelectric-effect cell is still released as heat. Very little energy can be captured this way, so it is quite inefficient in terms of energy produced relative to the radiation emitted. You can extract some more electric work by pre-charging the cell such that the freed electron is slowed in part by the electric field gradient, but in practice the bulk of the energy is still lost as heat.

Sea story time! The internal electric field within the dielectric will produce some weird mechanical stresses, too. When my ship's reactor plant went through a refueling overhaul one of the things they replaced was the reactor compartment windows. There are a couple of leaded glass windows that allow Mk. 1 eyeball inspection of the reactor compartment during operation. They are quite thick, electrically insulating, and they build up a large internal electric field along with internal stresses. Standard maintenance was to replace them well before the stress could fracture the glass.

So... could the press release be ...excessively breathless? My guess is a qualified "probably". The physics behind the photoelectric effect are well known and understood. Diamond is special in part because it has a fantastically high dielectric breakdown strength. So, you can extract more work out of the ionized electrons by supporting a very high potential gradient between the anode and cathode, which could be seen as a breakthrough for this type of energy conversion device. BUT it also would enable a new generation of high-density ultra-capacitors. The energy density in a capacitor is limited (in part) by the breakdown strength of the dielectric, since the stored energy is a volume integral of the squared electric field strength. Since ultracaps are technologically much easier to commercialize, and much more investor- friendly than anything involving an ionizing radiation source, but that isn't what the press release points to, I think it is likely to be ... exaggerated.

I could also be wrong, and we'll soon have a new generation of ultracaps!

</comment><comment><USER65> How much is it? same as diamond?

<comment><USER66> Low-quality diamonds can be manufactured more cheaply than the synthetic diamonds intended to compete with the jewel industry. I imagine this prove would come down with the scale batteries are manufactured at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> mm, I remember from a lecture that 'nuclear waste' is actually a label used by the nuclear industry but non all of them can be disposed, some by products can be used as a base atomic weapons.

So all countries with nuclear power plants have to return/control the 'nuclear waste'.

</comment><comment><USER68> Dilithium crystals, anyone?</comment>


How We Managed to Beat the Crypto Market Using Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/how-we-have-beaten-the-crypto-market-using-machine-learning-a45e8a7dbdcd <comment><AUTHOR> I was originally writing this article for a general audience of Medium but if you have more technical questions within the range of what I can share, I'll do my best to answer them in the comments</comment>


Bradley Manning found not guilty of aiding the enemy, convicted on other charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23506213

<comment><USER2> "He faces a maximum sentence up to 136 years."

I wonder how Adrian Lamo is keeping up these days.</comment>


Understanding the Emotional Response (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/article/understanding-emotional-response <comment><USER2> document.evaluate("/html/body/header/h1/a", document, null, XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null).singleNodeValue.style.marginTop = "50px"

there fixed that for you.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are there no discussions related to the Trump Administration? - <AUTHOR> As I write this, none of the top 30 links pertain to the massive emergency engulfing Y Combinator's home country, which will have rippling negative effects around the world. Why isn't this news more important here?
HN is full of extremely intelligent, passionate and capable people. Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime. I came today expecting a community making plans to protect the vulnerable, to save the planet from climate catastrophe, to ensure the economic environment that has allowed Silicon Valley to flourish. Instead: "I'm a huge fan of Zelda, The Wind Waker's graphics."
What does it mean that we as a community are silent about perhaps the most important turning point in society so far in most of our lifetimes? <comment><USER2> I can only speak for myself but I've been clicking flag on anything election related including this. I think both the candidates were bad in their own ways. Hillary an ethically challenged war hawk who as secretary of state brought US Russian relations to the lowest point since the cold war. Trump is crude, unapologetic and his greatest skill is self promotion.

It was pretty clear to any one that bothered to pay attention that the election was very close, either way neither outcome was going to be positive. People predicting the end of civilization because Trump was elected are totally divorced from reality and not thinking rationally. That kind of fear mongering is dangerous and unwarranted. If you want to participate in that there are many many websites you can go to to get your fill personally I'm tired of seeing it and don't think it has any place on this site not to mention political stuff is off topic per HN guidelines.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate you doing this. I haven't been as zealous lately because I'm shellshocked by the week, and as a result I've been at least once sucked into a political thread that wasted a bunch of my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With all due respect, I think you are simply overwhelmed. Specifically, this:

> _which will have rippling negative effects around the world._

We don't know that.

> _to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime._

Nothing clear about that.

> _I came today expecting a community making plans to protect the vulnerable, > to save the planet from climate catastrophe, to ensure the economic > environment that has allowed Silicon Valley to flourish. Instead: "I'm a > huge fan of Zelda, The Wind Waker's graphics."._

Silicon Valley was not born to protect the vulnerable or save the planet, but to create technology. Often in the form of games and graphics.

To calm your spirits, let me try to put it succinctly:

People are trying to infer what kind of president he will be based on what kind of candidate he was. This doesn't work. When someone is a candidate, their job is to win at the game of being a candidate. This involves a certain tool-set: Scandals, digging up skeletons, making dead people vote, disinformation campaigns, promising a utopia, coming out as crazy, whatever gets the votes. Some are morally higher than this. It might work, but I don't think they ever become presidents, especially when others are playing by certain rules.

When a candidate is elected, though, they are the president and their job isn't to be a candidate anymore, it's to be a president. It's different.

Candidate Trump was something, but President-elect Trump is another thing, POTUS Trump _will_ be something else because he _needs_ to be.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. People forgot that election smear is just that: smear. Both opponents will try their hardest to make the their opponent look bad.

People need to realize that their image of Trump is not the real Trump, it is only the smeared version of Trump.

<comment><USER6> Laudable sentiments. Are you willing to extend the same to Hillary?

<comment><USER5> Of course.

Unfortunately, her e-mails are revealing a lot of stuff that are not just smears. Smears are smears when you have no way to prove it. But with Hillary, her emails are right there for everyone to see, to read, and judge for themselves.

So I try to extend it to her too, but she made it impossible, especially since you don't need to rely on someone else telling you that she is corrupt. Instead, you can read the e-mail evidence for yourself and decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I'm mostly tired of it already. Is this the "most important turning point in society...of our lifetimes?"

I think that may be overly dramatic. There have been many things which have had a dramatic effect on society in our lifetime, both positive and negative. I don't want to give Donald Trump the satisfaction of being a member of that club.

Living well is the best thing you can do, no matter who is president. That doesn't mean living high on the hog, that means doing well, being good, helping others. Nobody can stop us from doing that.

</comment><comment><USER8> HN is for news and discussion about "hacker news": programming, the startup scene, etc. It's not for organizing political movements, even if you assume everyone is of the same political slant.

Even so, nothing has happened. He was elected, and will be inaugurated in a couple of months. Perhaps we wait until some bills actually get proposed or an actual executive order before we get all crisis mode?

<comment><USER9> ^ this

Furthermore, there have been articles referencing the analytical failings behind the miscalculation by those who claimed Trump had no chance along with numerous links to self-reflection pieces characterizing the attitudes of the media, especially a perceived "smugness" as it pertains to the liberal media.

Confession, I'm socially liberal yet conservative on a few other major issues; I have a history of exhibiting said "smugness" and rather than seeing this election as an "emergency", I find it to be a thought-provoking indictment of our (liberals) ineptitude at true empathy, collaboration, and compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are plenty of places to hear alarmist talk. HN is not the place for that.

Bookmark your sense of alarm. Your sense of impending doom. Remember your feelings today, then get on with life. Come back in a year or two. How will your perception today compare with reality two years from now? (I have a prediction . . . .)

This is said by someone who has watched the sky fall and people throw hissy fits since the 1968 Nixon victory.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime.

No. Your hypnosis will soon wear off, give it a couple of months. This is exactly why nobody talks about this on HN.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm uvpoting this post _pour encourager les autres_ , so we can talk about it and mock you^W^Wdiscuss it and posts like it in one place.

 _> As I write this, none of the top 30 links pertain to the massive emergency engulfing Y Combinator's home country, which will have rippling negative effects around the world._

What "massive emergency"? What "negative effects"? Every four years the losing voters will say that it's the end of the world, and yet here we are, going through the same tired shit _yet again_.

 _> Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime._

First, the people here are entrepreneurs and many of them would be the first to sell software to run trains to the camps if it meant turning a buck. The people here are the sort whose businesses collect the data that would used by a fascist state. The people here are the type to laugh at the enslavement of the poor by the service industry. I would count on them _not one goddamned bit_.

Second, looking past the silly rhetoric and bluster, how can we claim the "very cleary...an abominable and destructive regime" bit? What, like the excessive assassinations via drones Obama carried out? Or the bombings of countries the US conducted under Clinton? Or the comically large fuckup of military adventurism under Bush II? You gotta do better if you want to sound credible.

 _> What does it mean that we as a community are silent about perhaps the most important turning point in society so far in most of our lifetimes?_

More important than 9/11 and the Patriot Act? More important than the fall of the Berlin Wall? More important than the release of Netscape and IE? More important than Facebook and Twitter and Paypal?

Do you even _read_ what you're saying? Your alarm is only matched by your ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Politics is off topic per the Guidelines. Even then, there have been several discussions about Trump in the past few days.

</comment><comment><USER14> There was a very good link submitted to an NPR article that simply took Trump's published list of things he says he is going to do in the first 100 days, and annotated the items with a short look at what it would take to accomplish them.

It did not advocate for or against the various items. It just looked objectively at whether they could be accomplished. There was nothing partisan or inflammatory in the article.

It was [flagged] and [dead] within minutes.

If a simple, nonpartisan, neutral analysis like that cannot make it here, no way is anything even remotely near political activism going to fly.

<comment><USER6> A lot of people on the site are tired of the political discussion on the site, especially given what such discussions have looked like recently, and that political discussions are not generally in line with the site guidelines. I suspect a lot of submissions are getting flagged as a result, sometimes regardless of the tone of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this your first election? What you are experiencing is called OMG!-The- candidate-I-voted-for-did-not-win-so-the-world must-be-ending Syndrome. Happens every election. Remember Bush? "OMG! That idiot will be the end of America as we know it!" Well, we're still here, America is still here.

So calm down. The President is not a dictator. The President does not have that kind of power.

</comment><comment><USER15> Discussions about Trump have been all over the front page ever since the election.

> massive emergency

Maybe that's just not the consensus view you thought it was.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something that really helped me stop getting panicky / excited / enraged by politics is ready and listening to P.J. O'Rourke. He's entertaining and funny and level headed.

Definitely helped me gain a calmer understand of politics.

Try his books or start here[1] with his 'Dangerous state of the nation' address at the Sydney Opera House.

1\. [http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/pj-o'-...](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/pj-o'-rouke/7733076)

</comment><comment><USER17> There are multiple threads, some of them with >1000 comments. why they are not in the top 30 (anymore) has been answered in the other comments.

From what I've read of them (as an outsider), there is still a lot of "Why did that just happen", pro-contra-Trump debates and of course a lot of hypotheticals -> we don't know all that much yet. It seems people will need time to cool down and figure out where to go next, and watch what actually is likely to happen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think I got part of my answer: it seems that many people on HN do not interact much with those of us who are now in immanent danger. Reading the delusional apathy, ignorance and disdain in the replies here I'm even more concerned.

<comment><USER15> If you're going to blame people for not interacting with you, pay close attention to how you treat them when they do.

> delusional apathy, ignorance and disdain

I engaged with some folks I know on Twitter with calls for moderation and suggestions that things might not be as dire as they seem. I was asked to "stop", "go away", "shut up", and "respect the pain".

Twitter now seems to be functioning as the national amygdala.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MY 24 HACK, just in time for valentines? - <AUTHOR>

ilov3u.net ok so I made this quick hack..would love to get some feedback... It basically provides hosting for the name of your loved one <comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://ilov3u.net></comment>


Cloudflare is experiencing failures in its connections to hosts - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/hptvkprkvp23 <comment><USER2> Most comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24322861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24322861).

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't a Cloudflare-specific issue. Level 3/CenturyLink are in trouble. Affecting other providers (see, for example, Fastly's Status page: [https://status.fastly.com/](https://status.fastly.com/)).

@dang or another mod, would be better to link to [https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2020-August/013187...](https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2020-August/013187.html) as this isn't a Cloudflare issue.

<comment><USER4> The Level3 outage thread is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24322861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24322861)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title needs to be updated. Issues are not limited to CloudFlare but to CenturyLink and Level3

</comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant idea to recentralize the decentralized internet.

Edit: With more information coming in, I don't think the current issue is specific to Cloudflare. FWIW I'm having zero issues in mid-US.

<comment><USER7> Well, for most smaller websites using something like Cloudflare means they are more decentralized, more easily, than less (e.g. instead of using their single source of failure own server).

<comment><USER8> I don't really know why we need to discuss this now but the point has nothing to do with this.

Small sites don't really need that decentralization, sure it's nice that it's easy but this isn't the problem.

The problem is that in aggregate you end up with an internet with a single point of failure.

And even if as it is now isn't a big problem, who's to say that one day it is a huge problem?

<comment><USER7> > _The problem is that in aggregate you end up with an internet with a single > point of failure._

And the other problem, which I'm pointing at, is that without using something like Cloudflare, you end giving yourself more points of failure (more pressure, DDoS, lack of easy load balancing, most costs and devops to implement those yourself, etc).

And each site doesn't care if 10000 others go down together -- if anything that's good, if their competitors go down for a while. They care for their own status...

> _And even if as it is now isn 't a big problem, who's to say that one day it > is a huge problem?_

I'd say periodic mass failures should inform our usage and dependance patterns of the internet so that we're not 100% dependent on it 24/7, in which case sites going down together never becomes "a huge problem".

In other words, one way to never have it be a huge problem is to make the internet perfectly decentralized (which is impossible anyway -- first because sites people care about is a power law distribution, e.g. Google, MS, Amazon, stores, app stores, etc, so if Google goes down there's a disruption to billions of people, even if millions of lesser sites are up that much fewer care about, -- and second because critical instrastructure is shared, e.g. undersea cables etc.

The other way to never have it be a huge problem is to learn and adapt to situations when sites might be done, and build resilient alternative ways of operation (analogue, if need be).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a Tor user and privacy maximalist, I see no difference from usual.

What you are experiencing today is the normal state of the nowadays web when you refuse to be tracked.

<comment><USER10> You are cringe</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a Patreon? - <AUTHOR> If you do, tell us about it. (or an equivalent non-patreon service)<p>Disclosure, I don't have one, but I have space to support a few. <comment><USER2> I just deleted my account because of their participation in the de-platforming movement.</comment>


AgTech Hackathon in Central Coast CA - <AUTHOR> http://www.herscripthacks17.eventbrite.com <comment><AUTHOR> Come Hack the night away on April 29-30th. First time Hackers are welcomed. Facebook will be providing workshops for first time hackers to help you get started with your project. Checkout the eventbrite page to register. Everyone is welcome to come and no, you do not have to be in college to participate. www.herscripthacks17.eventbrite.com</comment>


Peter Thiel: How to Invest in the Singularity [Video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007/peterthiel

<comment><USER2> god this site needs more articles on ai. I know I shouldnt be complaining since I could be submitting articles myself, but I am pretty lazy.

I guess what I am saying is that reading this is a nice change of pace from the boring articles about over-valued web 2.0 startups.

<comment><USER3> I agree 100%. I'm hoping the reason they aren't up here isn't because we haven't made anything but incremental progress on AI in a long while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well worth a listen!</comment>


Time Capsule for $25 (Using Raspbery Pi) - <AUTHOR> http://garmoncheg.blogspot.com/2012/11/time-capsule-for-25.html <comment><USER2> _"Time Capsule for $25"_

A naked Raspberry Pi costs $35. Add an enclosure and shipping, it will be closer to $60. That doesn't include storage.

Time Capsule contains a 2TB hard disk. The same WD drive retails for $170 at Amazon.

That brings our total to $230, for a product that doesn't work nearly as well as a real Time Capsule and for which you won't receive service and support from Apple.

Or you can just buy a Time Capsule for $299: <http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD032/time-capsule-2tb>

<comment><USER3> Where are you getting $170 for a 2TB disk? Amazon has 3TB disks for $130.

<comment><USER4> This whole conversation is kind of strange, but let's play along anyway.

If you deal shop, you can get the price down:.

        [1] $40 Raspberry Pi - Model B, because that's all that's available (includes $5 shipping)
        [2] $10 Enclosure (some DIY required)
        [3] $116 WD 2TB Hard Drive (selected WD because that is [apparently] what Apple uses)
        Total: $166

That's an aggressive HD price, and remember, you need an _external_ HDD. A lot of the pricing being thrown around here is for internal drives. Regular price on the drive I spec'd was $180. There are always deals to be had though. The price may be more depending on your timing.

The case I spec'd is extremely DIY as well. If you went with something nicer, you'd spend more as well. It's kind of hard to justify a crappy case when you're comparing to a Time Capsule.

So if you add in $20 for a HDD price not-so-on-sale and $10 for a nicer case (Adafruit is decent), you're looking at $196, which is edging up toward the cost of a Time Capsule, and that's not factoring in time for configuration.

The whole point here is that you don't do projects like this to save money. You do projects like this for the fun and learning experience, or to have greater control/flexibility. If you go in to this project to save money, then I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

1 - Pick a vendor any vendor (pricing is standard)

2 - [http://blujay.com/item/Black-Electronic-Project- Box-100-x-60...](http://blujay.com/item/Black-Electronic-Project- Box-100-x-60-x-25mm-suit-Raspberry-Pi-ABS-Multi-Purpose-4020000-4189163)

3 - [http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal- Desk...](http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal- Desktop/dp/B00471EYUU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1354305295&sr=8-3&keywords=western+digital+green+2tb)

<comment><USER3> > The whole point here is that you don't do projects like this to save money. > You do projects like this for the fun and learning experience, or to have > greater control/flexibility. If you go in to this project to save money, > then I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

That was where I was leading it, yeah. Attacking it on a price basis just seems weird to me.

<comment><USER2> _"Attacking it on a price basis just seems weird to me."_

The title of the article is _"Time Capsule for $25"_ , so apparently the author thought the price is the main selling point. The actual price is way higher, he set himself up for someone to point that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Be warned. I used my Raspi with netatalk3 for a while, and it kept corrupting. I reverted to using an external drive on my Mac.

<comment><USER6> I second this warning. I've never used a Raspberry Pi, but I've used netatalk for years on a Linux server, and after I upgraded OS X 10.7, my backups to it would get corrupted once every month or two. I think it's not so bad if you have a wired connection, but wireless backups from a laptop (which can get put to sleep at any moment) just aren't reliable, for me at least. Also, it would constantly index my Time Machine backups over wireless, which takes forever and made my Macbook Air's fan turn on.

I suspect some of this is due to limitations in netatalk's AFP implementation, but I've never compared to a proper Time Capsule

<comment><USER7> Same here. Apple changed the AFP protocol in Lion and netatalk had trouble keeping up. But since my last update to netatalk 3.0.1 a month ago I have had no corruption. (I hope they finally got it right!) The initial backup and indexing is very painful indeed, but after that it works smoothly. (and without fan for my MacBook Air)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat writeup, now please please please search and replace "MAC" with "Mac" so it doesn't look like it's all about Ethernet hardware addressing or cosmetics? ;)

<comment><USER9> I was actually thrown off for a second by the capitalization and possessive apostrophes.

<comment><USER10> It's almost like he didn't have a tech literate editor to fix his fuckups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is no need to use the buggy HFS instead of the stable Ext3 on Linux. The backup will be in a disk image anyway...

<comment><USER10> Buggy or no, Ext3 is still the better option for linux when doing network shares for other operating systems since it's pretty transparent anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It should be noted that journaling on the HFS volume should be off or the Raspberry pi will not be able to write to it. When I set this up @ home, I formatted the disk in OS X first with journaling off, and then connected it to the RSBPi. Very effective, cheap backup solution. You can also then use crashplan to upload your backups to the cloud as the RSBPi receives them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Two weeks too late, I set my Raspberry Pi to serve as a Time Machine all by myself using Raspbian, and boy, it was a massive pain.

As for people saying that the complete setup is almost as expensive as an actual TimeCapsule - yes,but then I had a spare 500GB drive laying around,and had no special use for my Raspberry Pi. Thanks to this both of them are used on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER13> Time capsules of any sort just aren't so useful anymore. They work fine most of the time, but they get inconvenient when you have to reinstall or migrate to a new machine. If you end up doing so and have to re-establish your backup, it might take 12 or 18 hours or more to do that! Add in the Time Machine memory leak, and Time Machine/Capsule no longer makes much sense.

</comment><comment><USER14> You could rig up something similar for Windows 8 using this hardware, Samba, and Windows 8's File History _[1]_ feature, which is similar to Time Machine.

1\. [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8Step0TurnOnContinuousB...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8Step0TurnOnContinuousBackupsViaFileHistory.aspx)

<comment><USER15> While a useful feature, it's only remotely similar in that it keeps an incremental history of selected user folders, whereas Time Machine backups _all_ files and gives you a 1:1 (file-level, as opposed to block-level, like dd/carbon-copy-cloner/ghost) image of your computer, _including the OS_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great timing on this post! It reminded me to check on the status of OpenWRT 12.09, and I see that the first release candidate came out a week ago ago. 12.09 includes a netatalk 3 package. If like me you have a wireless router with USB ports, OpenWRT should provide a great platform for building your own "time capsule".

</comment><comment><USER17> The actual read/write speed should be awfully slow. His screenshot estimates that 322mb will be transferring 18hours!

<comment><USER12> I use this and transfer speeds are around 5-6MB/s. That's because both the hard drive and Ethernet share the USB bus. And it's completely fine, took around 6 hours to backup 90GB from my MacBook Air.</comment></comment>


Is Quantum Cryptography Broken? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetechscoop.net/2011/06/20/is-quantum-cryptography-broken/#axzz1PpjOzVuT <comment><USER2> See also the article on this subject submitted almost a week ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2656314></comment>


Twitter's latest experiment hints at typographical changes - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/03/20/twitter-latest-experiment-hints-that-it-will-remove-replies-from-its-service/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=profeed&utm_reader=feedly#!AHUkm

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't the original headline, but HN won't allow @, '@', [at], (at), 'at', at-sign, etc. in headlines. The story is about Twitter possibly getting rid of the @ sign in user handles.</comment>


The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN - <AUTHOR> https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/RelativisticGAN/ <comment><USER2> This is just confusing misuse of the word "relativistic", being based as it is on _relative_ probability and having little to do with philosophical relativism and nothing to do with physics relativity.

<comment><USER3> "Relative probability" is only correct for standard GAN, not for other GANs which don't estimate a probability.

My first name was "Critic's difference" since it's literally C(x_r)-C(x_f) so its the difference in critics, but it felt really unclear, it doesn't give the reader any sense of what it is about. Relativism/Relativistic is better since it's to say that it really doesn't matter if the data looks real, what matters if how realistic is real data relative to fake data (and vice versa). The frame of reference is important here.

<comment><USER4> It's not even probability in standard GAN is it? Since you are taking the difference before the sigmoid. It can't really be interpreted as probability until it the range is clamped. Critic's difference or Critical Difference would be a better term perhaps.

<comment><USER5> It's logits or log odds or the logarithm of the odds, i.e. log(odds(p)) = log(p / (1 - p)): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logit)

Since sigmoid(C(x_r)) = p(x_r is real) and C(x_f) = p(x_f is real), the sigmoid of the difference expresses some probability that that x_r looks _more real_ than x_f or vice versa (depending on whether it is C(x_r) - C(x_f) or C(x_f) - C(x_r)). Not sure whether there is a probabilistic interpretation of the difference, but it looks so simple that there maybe is one. I couldn't find one in the paper.

<comment><USER5> Correction: sigmoid(C(x_f)) = p(x_f is real)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> GAN, Generative Adversarial Network: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network)

</comment><comment><USER7> Same guy who wrote this has another post called Deep learning with cats[1] which has a great open source repo[2] with multiple GANs.

1\. [https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/cats/](https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/cats/)

2\. [https://github.com/AlexiaJM/Deep-learning-with- cats](https://github.com/AlexiaJM/Deep-learning-with-cats)

<comment><USER8> Same guy? Try... Not a guy!

<comment><USER7> Thanks for correcting me! I commonly call a group of people "guys" even if they are women, this is something I need to break the habit of. Will strive to be gender neutral in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, especially the performance on bigger images, and it looks like a low-effort modification of many standard GAN losses. Seriously, I want to give this a try right now. What do GAN researchers think about this paper?

It should also be appreciated that it comes with code _and_ a short blog post.

<comment><USER4> And a 24-page paper ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since the url is the same we changed the title to the one the author had for [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17449143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17449143).

</comment><comment><USER11> what 'computer scientist' uses wordpress for their blog. Though, I don't have a blog, so...

<comment><USER12> Dick Lipton and Ken Regan, for example: [https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/)

Scott Aaronson: [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/)

Jeremy Kun: [https://jeremykun.com/](https://jeremykun.com/)

Also, although he's a mathematician rather than a computer scientist, there is Terry Tao: [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER7> Wonder what he thinks (not really) of Rob Pike using blogspot: [https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/](https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Co-founder Conflict - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/18/co-founder-conflict/ <comment><USER3> We hear about co-founder dynamics a lot in the startup community, and I wonder if the traditional business/technical dyad exacerbates conflict?

I am a technical co-founder, and that means I build things. In a conventional co-founding relationship, I am be expected to give my business-oriented partner the final word with respect to strategy or direction, and he defer to me on how to build the product.

At the outset, this puts all the power in technology. Nothing is more important than getting the right product built and shipping on schedule, execution is everything.

Unfortunately, at any significant scale it's all strategy. Technology increasingly becomes a cost centre; either it works or it doesn't, either it ships or it sinks. Strategic decisions begin to lead technology choices, and the CTO drifts away from the locus of power. Even if she's explicitly invited to participate in strategy, the buck stops somewhere she is not.

Influence, and with it ownership and personal investment, whipsaws from one founder to the other with neither realizing it explicitly. Ultimately, technical founders almost always drift away (as we've seen most recently at Buffer) when the company hits scale and they're fully vested. And that sucks - any new blood won't be as naturally invested in the product without further dilution, will lack history with the team, won't know where the skeletons are buried, etc.

I hypothesize that balanced founding teams - two business, two technical, sales & business, etc. would have more staying power in the long run. Cases where there is no default division of labour and influence. I _believe_ I've seen this pattern, but without a neutral data set I can't trust my biases. YCombinator has enough data now to figure it out... (\ _nudge nudge\_ )

<comment><USER4> Unless I'm reading the blog post wrong[1], you've got it totally wrong about Buffer, Joel made Buffer 1.0 and was the technically minded co-founder at Buffer, not Leo. Sunil might have been an early hire, but we're talking a year after company founding. Joel + Leo took a while to grow it.

I remember watching a talk by Joel before he'd even brought Leo on board in Nottingham, UK (Joel was starting up in Birmingham, UK if I remember correctly), about his previous products/failures and how he'd just built Buffer and the problems it solved. I think I saw a post about Leo joining 3 to 6 months later, at the time a recent uni grad compared to Joel's more experienced dev + freelance dev background.

I've always been pleased to see Joel succeed, as he's a great guy, but I have to admit some of the posts they came out with have ultimately proved to be utter b%!!$hit. I remember calling them out on a post about how the UK was a bad place to startup, I've seen a couple of $100+ million buyouts of startups here since then just in Nottingham. Then they claimed bootstrapping was best, then raised. Claimed a flat structure was best, then go a traditional management structure, etc., etc.

I sometimes felt they were just echoing back to the startup community what the community wanted to hear, and to be fair, it really worked, they got lots of upvotes on HN, etc., so great marketing out of it, and good traction. There was a time when like clockwork they'd have a high-rated post here every Sunday (or Monday, can't remember).

[1][https://open.buffer.com/change-at-buffer/](https://open.buffer.com/change- at-buffer/)

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's just me but posts like that you linked fill me with a toxic feeling. I don't know how to describe it. It just smells so fake and diplomatic. Plastered with photos of smiling people in different countries and happy-go-lucky company culture bullshit. I don't know how I could move my body out of the bed if I were to work in environments like that. A "company retreat" is a nightmare in my eyes.

Sigh. I'm a pessimistic loner of an introvert and I don't need your bullshit in my life. I wish there was some more room for us on this planet. Every corner you look it's either filled with extroverts or fake extrovert wanna-be rockstar-templayers.

</vent>

<comment><USER6> I consider myself an introvert as well, and quite frankly don't even think about things like company retreats etc. in my business. When we had lots of employees, even things like company Christmas parties or after work drinks would fill me with dread and I would just turn up out of duty. I would never organise them or enforce them, but simply go along when someone else did.

However, I've learned in all these years that for some people, this is actually what makes them tick. They thrive on such 'company culture' and the chance to let loose a little outside of the workplace. Each to their own. The sight of other people doing things they love _shouldn 't_ fill you with toxic feelings. Make you slightly uncomfortable or disinterested perhaps, but anything more than that, and there are probably deeper issues at play that probably need to be resolved in yourself, rather than externally.

<comment><USER5> I should clarify the part that I meant feels me with a toxic feeling was not seeing other people doing something they enjoy.

It's just that it seems like a carefully crafted image is being presented to manipulate the reader and to push forward a corporate agenda hidden behind a veil of optimistic language.

It's the corporate equivalent of a Facebook profile with holiday photos and what not.

I've seen people get sick of their "company retreat" on day one but they don't dare ever talk about it for fear of being labelled not a team player. They just pretend they are having the time of their life. And they'll come back write a blog post about their "WONDERFUL AMAZING JOURNEY" because that's politically correct.

No one writes some Medium post about "How I fucking hated being stuck with these people for 3 days and couldn't wait to come back home to take a break from this nonsense.".

<comment><USER7> It's one thing to say "parties aren't my thing," "I don't like talking to lots of people," and so on.

It's another thing to talk about a "carefully crafted image is being presented to manipulate the reader and to push forward a corporate agenda hidden behind a veil of optimistic language," a "toxic feeling," a "nightmare in my eyes."

The first case is just what it's like to be introverted, and I empathize with that. The latter is something else. That negativity and cynicism speaks to issues deeper than just being introverted. For example, I had this problem a few times before, and it usually had to do with feelings of jealousy over being left out.

I am somewhat introverted. Here's what I do if I'm at a company party/retreat/etc and I'm not having fun (usually because I don't see anyone I know): I leave.

<comment><USER5> I think it has to do with me being an introvert and not being able to deeply understand or view the world through an extrovert lens.

Having said that when I look around what I see is what appears to be mostly actors. And I think I'm just tired and jaded toward it.

People hide their ulterior motives behind a happy phrases in a way that I almost find offensive. I don't blame them, but I reserve the right to roll my eyes.

It's like how people hide behind "Changing the world for the better!" because "I want to get rich" doesn't sound as nice. Or how "Open friendly environment! Collaboration!" is used to push open offices when more often than not deep down the reasons are not quite the same as they say.

Sometimes I just want the wolrd and the people in it to be a little more real.

<comment><USER8> _Having said that when I look around what I see is what appears to be mostly actors. And I think I 'm just tired and jaded toward it.

People hide their ulterior motives behind a happy phrases in a way that I almost find offensive. I don't blame them, but I reserve the right to roll my eyes._

It's a bit unclear if you realize this or not, but to make it clear: there is a (very) large group of people who _aren 't_ acting or "hiding ulterior motives" when they act like this. They genuinely feel this way - indeed this type of behavior is what energizes them.

It's completely ok to not be one of these people of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I can throw in a bit of advice in this thread - here is something that worked well in the two businesses I've founded with someone else in the past. It doesn't matter the type of business, or the relative skill sets of each founder, but it is something that I learned from "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber. (Highly recommended reading from anyone thinking of starting a business.)

The tip is to draw up a company organisational chart, as if you were a 20 or 30 person company. Starting from the top, a box for CEO, then break down the other managerial roles, such as Operations Manager, Finance Manager, Technical Manager etc., then under those, further boxes for the sub-roles.

E.g. for 'Finance Manager', you might have Debtors Controller, Creditors Controller, Payroll Manager etc. Under 'Technical Manager' you might have 'Lead Programmer', 'Graphic Designer', 'Database Administrator' etc. as you see fit.

Then, it is a case of filling in the boxes with the name of the co-founder who will be responsible for each of those areas. Sure you may get one name placed more than others, but the idea is to work out the exact separation of duties and who will be responsible for what.

It is also a great technique for working out each others weaknesses - <USER2> instance I personally hate accounting related tasks, so I could never be the finance manager, but I am content doing some rote work like invoicing or bank reconciliations from time to time, so I would put my name lower in the order, but be supervised by someone with more knowledge.

In the business startups where I have done that, things have worked out well while we continually referred to it and used it as we grew. As we hired, we removed our own names in the boxes and replaced them with the employee names.

The point is, that this whole concept helps with the communications angle that we are talking about in this thread. Knowing what each person is responsible for, and knowing who is accountable for what really helps with the reduction in animosity between the founders.

But as with most things - constant vigilance is due. Things started to fall apart when we deviated from these simple principles. Human nature I know, but I hope the lessons learned here will help others.

<comment><USER9> is there any chance you could share that original org chart (with just the 2 or 3 of you, but all the different roles and their relationships)? It's hard for me to picture. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This should be required reading for anyone thinking of starting a business, of any sort. Personally, I have been through a couple of co-founder business startups over the past 30 years, and can agree with everything that Garry has pointed out in the article. Communication is key.

No doubting that a co-founder can make a big difference to the gargantuan task of getting a business to build momentum. It is one of those times when 1 + 1 = 4. But it is vitally important that both (or more) co-founders keep the same vision and goals at the forefront of their minds.

In both my previous cases of co-founded businesses I ended up with the case where each of my co-founders had massive life changing things happen to them personally (My first co-founder had his wife end up in a wheelchair for life). I look back now and think that things could have been handled very differently and perhaps the business could have made it through. I am not naive enough to think I was completely blameless in those situations, but every time I look back on the events, I can see that clear communication could have solved things, as well as taking emotion out of the equation so things could have been examined in a more rational manner. Really wish we had someone step in as a moderator back then.

As an aside, I was an early adopter of Posterous, and loved the platform. I was sad to see it go, and I wonder 'what if' Garry and his co-founder had resolved their differences - would the company ever have continued for far longer that it had?

</comment><comment><USER10> Great to see this, thank you Garry for laying bare one of the most common causes of start-up failure.

And make no mistake: almost every start-up will sooner or later face this in one form or another. Simply because goals may be in alignment at the start of a start-up but they _rarely_ if ever remain in alignment over the longer term.

I've counseled/mediated in quite a few companies facing these kind of issues and it is always surprising in some way or another to everybody involved when the root cause of the conflict is finally laid bare.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing this, Garry. In hindsight, would you have preferred to run your startup as a solo founder, or do you believe that a solo founder startup presents a greater operational/execution risk than co-founder conflict?

<comment><AUTHOR> The product we made caught lightning in a bottle because of the joint choices Sachin and I made together. It is impossible to know if the product would have come together without the talents of both of us. I would frankly guess not.

I think the outcome would have been better if I knew the things I wrote in this blog post now, 10 years later!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're interested in famous co-founder issues, I maintain a list here: [http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co- founder...](http://thestartupconference.com/2016/05/13/famous-co-founder- issues). Snap, uBeam, Cruise. Let me know if you know of more to add to the list.

I could probably write a book about co-founder issues (I gave presentations on that topic in the past, that's something :-).

The best co-founder is someone you worked with before. You know them. Starting something with a co-founder you don't know? It goes downhill very fast.

There is a very fine balance that is hard to achieve. You want to have complementary skills, but still be on the same page. You need to trust the other co-founder and not micro-manage, and get the same trust in return. If you have no shared history, it's extremely hard.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great post and thanks for sharing. However I don't see the most important point covered:

Before anything, set up a _written_ agreement with your co-founder(s) containing

* Founder roles and responsibilities * Expected time commitments * Testable performance metrics or at least testable cases of non-performance

This may be part of the company operating agreement (containing the company ownership structure) or a separate document that any co-founder has to sign.

Unfortunately I learned this the hard way and once ended up with a co-founder that wasn't really committed to the company up to the point where we got acquired (up to which point I've invested about 3x the time as compared to my co-founder). Trust me, getting acquired in that situation did not feel good, not at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> One thing I'll share is that finding a co founder in a similar financial state as yourself can be an important factor.

Money > Contracts

</comment><comment><USER15> From the article "One concrete thing before you start to work through conflict is to always remind yourselves: You're on the same team."

...yet, this is actually not obvious to many co-founders. I angel invest and see this problem over and over -- situations where co-founders are not on the same team but rather on either multiple teams or have misaligned incentives.

before any of what is discussed in the article, co-founders need to ensure -- in writing -- not only their roles/responsibilities but outside commitments, especially paid outside commitments. Companies where one partner takes undue risk (e.g., giving up a job while the other has not) are incredibly fragile, yet this is often not discussed by many. In such situations, the co-founders are not actually on the same team entirely.

EDIT: Another bad situation -- one where one founder has a much longer tolerable horizon (perhaps they are rich, perhaps they have side incomes) and another founder seeks a quick exit at a lower figure (perhaps because they cant stay on a founder's salary for too long.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Haha joke's on you, I don't have a Co-Founder!

...I'll go back to being miserable and lonely now.

</comment><comment><USER17> In college I was an RA. Somewhat surprisingly, this is really similar to the communication advice we give to new roommates, most of which are first-time roommates, and a good portion are even total strangers on move-in day. The most common conflicts we had were around cleaning and who would take out the trash with disparity between the norms of the roommates pre living together.

An interesting data point is that disputes over responsibility were roughly an order of magnitude more common in triples or quads than doubles.

</comment><comment><USER18> My friend and CEO of fido.ai Michal Wroczynski reposted this article with an IMHO important clarification "Conflict is something to embrace. Narcistic Assholes don't have conflict with you - they are just lying all the time. No asshole rule is the most important advice for startups." Based on my personal experience I couldn't agree more!

</comment><comment><USER19> _I had reached a point where I couldn't agree with my co-founder over the future of the company._

That's the real problem. When looking for a co-founder, I think it's very important to choose one who shares the same vision about whatever you intend to build. If a potential co-founder doesn't agree with the direction you wish to go, keep looking.

<comment><AUTHOR> We started with very similar plans for the business, but as you get farther along in the war, the fog of war engulfs you and in the middle of running the startup can result in two very smart people with different views of the battlefield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's just like marriage: choose your partner carefully. In bad times, and in good times, you should remember to be true to each other and honor each other. And in the end, it still may not work out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Cofounder issues is one of the main reasons why startups fail. Structuring things the right way at the beginning is critical.

Below is a threat with great recommendations when there are cofounder issues.

[https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/how-do-you-deal-with-a- cof...](https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/how-do-you-deal-with-a-cofounder- that-leaves-the-company-with-a-good-amount-of-equity)

</comment><comment><USER22> Where can I learn more about the services of executive coach, Cameron Yarbrough?

</comment><comment><USER23> My last startup failed simply because my co-founder and I couldn't stop arguing. There's a fine line between compromising on an idea in order not to clash with the other partner to over arguing and defending your idea. We couldn't find this line and decided to stop. From talking with other friends in startups seams like that's a main reason why most of them failed, yet no one like to admit it or openly talk about it.

I wish there was a way to due-diligent co-founders like you can do with business plan.

<comment><USER24> When we were considering starting a startup, I explained my potential co- founder my vision, what we should prioritise, and what we shouldn't do. He took a few weeks and came back with his vision, and we realised that we have diverging visions, so we didn't do the startup (among other reasons).

We remain friends, and he advises me on my business, and vice-versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some category theorists are now probably wondering what an n-flict is.</comment>