Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18 <comment><USER2> Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil.

What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

<comment><USER3> Err no, money is not "the only thing" keeping us from having fusion power. I can think of one other thing which is that it's damn hard to create stellar- core conditions inside of a small containment vessel on Earth. It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. I'll bet if you added up all the research dollars that have been expended on fusion, it would come to quite a tidy sum indeed. Despite this, we still have little to show for it.

<comment><USER4> Just for the record, you don't re-create stellar-core conditions with earth- bound fusion devices: We don't have the means, and the yield would suck.

Now, it is true that there's still fundamental research to be done until energy production via nuclear fusion becomes a reality, but we're reasonably confident that we could make the conventional approaches work.

However, that research is Big Science, and there's no political will to fund it properly (the graph that people like to cite is [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png) ). ITER suffered from this as well, and W7-X basically only exists because German reunification happened, and the German government was looking for a big science project - _any_ project - they could leverage to funnel money into East Germany. The plans for W7-X just happened to be ready at the right time.

<comment><USER5> >>> However, that research is Big Science,

Not all of it. The big science approach is a function of "pure" fusion research done from the assumption that containment/ignition only comes from magnetic fields and particle collisions. Some are approaching it from different directions, even using physical forces to trigger ignition (ie slamming the hydrogen with a big hammer). This isn't crazy stuff, just a more practical approach from people who see the problems from a different perspective.

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

[https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy- geniu...](https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-genius/)

"At the centre will be a sphere, three metres in diameter, inside which molten lead swirls at high speed creating a vacuum, or vortex, in the middle. Arrayed around it will be 200 to 300 pistons, each the size of a cannon. Firing in perfect harmony, they will create an acoustic wave that collapses the vortex at the very moment a plasma injector shoots hydrogen isotopes, the nuclear fuel, into it. If General Fusion has its physics right, the heat and pressure will ignite a fusion reaction that spins off countless neutrons which will heat the lead even more. Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant."

<comment><USER4> Hence my qualifier 'conventional approaches'. I wish those working on alternative approaches the best of luck, and some of the experiments look like a lot of fun (they get to blow things up - I've seen videos where plastering was raining from the ceiling of the control room ;)).

<comment><USER5> I'd say that the "conventional" approach for triggering fusion is physical. We've been triggering fusion in nuclear weapons for many years and the physicalities of it are very well understood. What general fusion is doing is essentially a non-destructive nuclear secondary. Triggering fusion with magnets, without moving parts, is imho the unconventional way of getting to fusion. It is only conventional in comparison to fusion research. The practical users of fusion (the armed forces) don't use magnets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this ends up being the right design for fusion, it may be the most weirdly shaped human artifact, where the shape is fundamental to its operation and not decorative. It's far more complex than a mere turbine blade or venturi. Or can anyone suggest a weirder one? (Define weirdness as the Kolmogorov complexity of the shape, within the precision needed to work properly.)

<comment><USER7> The weird design makes me as a layman skeptical of the tech's potential, but I'd love to hear why I'm wrong:

\- The randomness and lack of symmetry suggest that we are lacking insight into the problem, like an inelegant physics explanation or an over-fitted model. It's not just that it's complex, but it doesn't even seem to have "parts" that work together. Conceptually fusion seems pretty simple: why in principle does harnessing it require super-human complexity?

\- If such extreme contortions and micro-optimizations are required to get this far, how much potential can there still be on this path? In software, if you are replacing divisions with bit shifts, maybe you really need a different algorithm. I understand this is just a research project, but if everything is so finely tuned already, how do you make improvements?

I don't know anything about fusion power, but those are the intuitions I feel when I see the plasma vessel photo and read how it was designed.

<comment><USER8> It's extremely symmetrical!

<comment><USER4> It's all about the magnetic surfaces. Some pictures:

[https://images.slideplayer.com/33/10482660/slides/slide_9.jp...](https://images.slideplayer.com/33/10482660/slides/slide_9.jpg)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493/figures/1](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493/figures/1)

[https://imgur.com/gallery/eikBLMX](https://imgur.com/gallery/eikBLMX)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With fusion devices having trouble to confine the plasma for long times, I wonder if a massively-parallel fusion plant woud be feasible.

Let's assume that plasma destabilisation does not damage the device, and is a mundane event.

Build 10 or even 20 fusion devices (economy of scale!) feeding the common heat buffer, e.g. a large reservoir of a molten salt or metal. Feed conventional turbines off the heat of the heat tank. The tank evens out the input power jumps.

Now we can restart the fusion in every fusion device every so often, provided that restarting it is made a mundane operation, too. It, of course, takes a lot of electricity to pump into the magnets. Conveniently, we have a mighty power plant right here. Dumping the magnetic/electric energy from the magnets requires a huge sink. Luckily, we already have such a sink co-located.

Building the plant takes a massive investment. Luckily, the architecture allows to build it piecemeal, feeding the next added unit with the power of the already built units.

BTW the waste heat could be directly reused in some kind of chemical processing, like smelting, or maybe even synthesis of carbohydrate fuels from ambient carbon dioxide and water.

<comment><USER10> What is it with physicists and molten salt?

Every battery-tech, pro-nuclear, fusion related news have to have somebody chiming in "molten salt".

Just an observation.

<comment> 08-15 Molten salts are hot!

SCNR. Seriously though, molten salts are great heat transfer media, a bit like water, just at higher temperature and still low pressure. They are also completely immune to radiation damage, which is a big deal if you have 14MeV neutrons flying around and something _has_ to stop them. Chemistry in molten salts is also interesting. Things can be extracted (say, into a molten metal phase) or precipitated, and some reactions just happen at 600 degrees while they need platinum and palladium catalysts at room temperature. What's not to love?

<comment><USER10> Can you teach me more about the radiation properties of molten salts? Didnt know molten salt is immune to radiation, why would that be? Thats cool, though.

<comment><USER11> Because they (or, at least, the ones being discussed) have no covalent chemical bonds or other static arrangements of atoms that can be disrupted. The ions are all just single atoms with more or fewer electrons than the neutral versions of those elements. The atoms can be ionized by radiation, but the resulting weird oxidation states just fall back to chemical equilibrium as the electrons redistribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love these guys, steadily working through the issues, making steady progress. I think with a slightly different diverter design they could claim to have the worlds first plasma cannon :-).

Pretty insanely complex machine, and really awesome results. Congrats!

<comment><USER13> This is what I find impressive as well.

They have this absurd shape, because the algorithm says it works, and they say it contains plasma. It does.

They say they will test this to hold 10 - 12 seconds of plasma. It does.

They say they will work on this and expand this to hold 30 seconds of plasma. It does.

This just feels like really solid engineering or practical science. Those 30 minutes will happen without much delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have any idea how do they take pictures of the plasma?

That seems quite hard considering the temperatures and the strong magnetic field.

<comment><USER15> I operate a fast camera at W7-X. It's a normal high-speed camera that records light in the humanly visible range, and the plasma emits in that range and reflects off the walls. IR cameras are most often used to gauge the temperatures of vessel wall components.

Our camera looks through a pinhole in the vessel wall, but it sits a few meters away from the machine and gets that view through a bundle of optical fibers. There wouldn't be enough space to place the camera right at the pinhole because of the magnets and their cooling systems, and the magnetic fields would be pretty high. The camera needs to be shielded from the fields for its electronics to work properly, and the shielding box perturbs the magnets' field, so moving the camera far away is a good idea. We don't worry about neutrons, because W7-X plasmas are fueled with stable helium and hydrogen (no deuterium or tritium so far, mainly due to onerous nuclear regulations in Germany), and these fuels don't produce many neutrons at all.

<comment><USER16> > Our camera looks through a pinhole in the vessel wall, but it sits a few > meters away from the machine and gets that view through a bundle of optical > fibers.

Wait, so does this mean that you have a _camera obsucra_ with an array of optical fibres at its back, and then you have an ordinary CCD camera imaging the other end of the fibre array?!?!

<comment><USER15> I guess the word pinhole is misleading here, I think it's a few cm in diameter. Behind it there's an array of lenses that projects the view onto a fiber bundle, then a lens at the other end of the bundle projects that view out. That light goes through a beam splitter which shares it between our camera and another one in the shielding box.

Most imaging in fusion is done like this because of space constraints, magnetic fields, and neutron fluxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought the main problem with nuclear fusion is neutron capture converting the structural materials which are no longer fit for purpose.

I'm quite keen on aneutronic fusion, Boron 11 + a neutron, which converts to three alpha particles which can lose their energy to magnetic fields generating electricity, no need for any Victorian steam engines.

The huge downside is that works at much much higher temperatures, but if you can't solve the neutron capture issue...

</comment><comment><USER18> > The result was high plasma densities of up to 2 x 1020 particles per cubic > meter – values that are sufficient for a future power station. At the same > time, the ions and electrons of the hydrogen plasma reached an impressive > temperature of 20 million degrees Celsius.

> Since the fusion fire only ignites at temperatures of over 100 million > degrees, the fuel [...]

Would it be accurate to say that this gets us 20% of the way there, or is that overly simplistic?

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately overly simplistic. The challenge with higher plasma temperatures is that the internal shielding needs to be better than the current graphite tiles. They will upgrade those next and go with more complicated water cooled carbon fiber strengthened carbon tiles.

Note that Wendelstein 7x will never operate to produce actual fission with DT fuel, because that is (a) outside its mission goal, which is to research plasma behaviour at conditions close to what is needed in a power plant and (b) dealing with the neutron bombarding creates all sorts of complexities in terms of the blanket. Not really solved here as well, as Wendelstein 7x is a nightmare to disassemble and upgrade. For a power plant maintenance and serviceability needs to be build into the design. And (c) they don't have the government permission to deal with nuclear material and nuclear waste.

So no, we are not 20% there. But we have proven that (a) the Stellarator actually has wings, and (b) plasma physics so far behaves mostly as predicted. Especially the latter is something to be celebrated, because plasma is nasty in terms of physical properties, really complex to model, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found this panorama shot on their home page: [https://www2.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/externe_daten_en/panorama...](https://www2.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/externe_daten_en/panoramaw7x/)

</comment><comment><USER21> In the words of peter griffin, why aren't we funding this more?

</comment><comment><USER22> The name is really scifi.

I love it!

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome progress, but I feel like the stellerator design won't be scalable/feasible :/

</comment><comment><USER24> "Although Wendelstein 7-X is not designed to generate energy, the device is intended to prove that stellarators are suitable for use in power stations. With Wendelstein 7-X the intention is to achieve for the first time in a stellarator the quality of confinement afforded by competing devices of the tokamak type."

This was at the very end.

While competition is certainly a positive, this doesn't sound like they're interested. Therefore, given the importance of fusion (read: there's a massive immediate need on the order of saving the planet), shouldn't the time and effort being put into stellarators be devoted to something that's important in the immediate?

<comment><USER25> I would say the opposite. Achieving fusion power is so critical to the long term sustainability of human technological civilization that we cannot afford to put all of our eggs in one basket, and hope that we picked the right one.

<comment><USER24> Fair enough. And I agree. However, to be clear, that's __not__what this article says. Per the quote I pulled.

<comment><USER26> I think you're misinterpreting the quote, and that's probably why you were downvoted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I know for my first major Rails/JS interview? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Rails.. and.. Javascript.

Good interviews will be focused on things you've actually done with the tech along with common knowledge items that show you've used them.

Past that lots of places like to talk general programming questions for the technical bits, so be prepared for stuff that might be a bit outside your normal day to day work like data structures/algorithms you don't have to think about in lots of langs.

Personally for an interview I just prepare myself to think clearly under pressure. The best interviews involve actually doing something, whether it be whiteboarding your thought process through an algorithm or actually writing some code. Just relax and focus.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would highly recommend going through Ruby Koans: [http://rubykoans.com/](http://rubykoans.com/) prior to the Ruby portion of the interview.</comment>


Cure for the common cold? Not yet, but possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/13/healthscience/13cold.php <comment><USER2> > Even so, it might be difficult to kindle the interest of pharmaceutical > companies.

I don't buy this. By the exact same argument, Aspirin can't possibly be profitable because a headache is only a minor annoyance. It can't be that hard to market a drug where your target audience is the entire planet.</comment>


Emacs as a powerful Python IDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.enigmacurry.com/2008/05/09/emacs-as-a-powerful-python-ide/

<comment><USER2> Emacs is my editor of choice, very powerful and portable. Its complexity can be frustrating sometimes, a bit of a time-sink.

Altough I'm currently using a Mac, I try to resist the temptation to use Textmate. It may be easier to use and extend, but it is not Free Software.

I wonder if in the next releases Emacs can be made more friendly to users who keep forgetting about how its internals work and the elisp syntax :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> For short Python scripts, I use Emacs; for bigger projects, I fire up Eclipse + PyDev.</comment>


The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal - <AUTHOR> https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> > I am afraid there is nothing that can stop [academic physicists]. They > review each other's papers. They review each other's grant proposals. And > they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. > Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, > they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it > looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

Sounds like academic physics is the old academic scholasticism. And this is true. When Newton made a successful coup in the European academic scholasticism and defined himself as the new grand master of the European scolasticism, all the Peripatetic Doctors of Philosophy became Newtonian Doctors of Philosophy and started to write commentery on Newton instead of Aristotle. They changed their professional name to Natural Philosopher to echo Newton's book to show thet they belonged to the cult of Newton. In the 19th century they changed their name again to "physicist" to remove any association with philosophy. But they forgot to change their real professional title which was and still is Doctor of Philosophy. An academic who calls himself a physicist today is a direct professional descendant of Peripatetic philosophers of old. It's the same profession. And finally someone inside the profession wised up and is showing how these useless Doctors of Philosophy corrupted the old science of physics to climb the scholastic hierarchy.</comment>


$153,161.25 for a Snake Bite - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mcpheeceo/status/622179748685283328 <comment><USER2> This same topic has 14k comments on reddit. Here is one of the attempts at explanation by a physician:

[https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3dngld/this_is_the_cos...](https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3dngld/this_is_the_cost_of_a_rattlesnake_bite_in_america/ct71jme)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the biggest problem I have with Obamacare. Getting everyone insurance isn't that impressive if the insured still have bills like this. Why not cut out the middleman, reduce the waste of giving insurance companies tons of money, and just make healthcare free?

<comment><USER4> In other nations, universal health care is actually cheaper for the state per capita than our system in the US.

Source: [http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod- media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...](http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod- media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/US_spends_much_more_on_health_than_what_might_be_expected_1_slideshow.jpg)

<comment><USER5> The US actually has higher per capita spending on healthcare and pharmaceuticals than any other OECD nation and public expenditure is only higher in the Netherlands and Norway.

Source: [http://www.compareyourcountry.org/health?cr=oecd&cr1=oecd&lg...](http://www.compareyourcountry.org/health?cr=oecd&cr1=oecd&lg=en&page=2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The possibility of becoming poor and/or bankrupt as a result of an injury is the scariest part of being part of the American society. Hope this changes one day.

<comment><USER7> Seems better than dying :/

<comment><USER8> Given what a bankruptcy can do to your credit and job prospects, I might seriously consider dying instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> US health bills seem extraordinarily high, maybe 5x in comparison to other first world countries. Why is this?

<comment><USER10> Unfettered, for-profit medical system.

In short, capitalism.

The same toxic structure is at work in the US penal system.

<comment><USER11> _Unfettered_

Are you for real? Nearly every aspect of medicine in America is regulated: from the number of people entering training to become new doctors, to whether a procedure will be reimbursed and at what rate, to what devices and drugs will be permitted for sale, to whether or not physicians are allowed to unionize, or discuss what their procedures cost (they are not in either case).

Whatever your ideology is, it doesn't change the fact that the health care is one of the most heavily regulated industries in our economy.

<comment><USER10> Unfettered in the capitalist sense and over-arching system, not necessarily administration thereof. Also remember that it is precisely unfettered capitalism that leads to layers of said administration, seeking profit at every turn.

Turning over a few rocks and we can quickly see that the cost of administration of medicine, including devices, pharmaceuticals, etc. is also wound up in this dance of maximal profit at all cost. This doesn't even begin to examine the cultural role capitalism has played in the legislation the enshrines the administrative layers to preserve profits for the corporate entities.

The last concern under such a system is the person and their health, or the ethical-societal implications, because such a model provides no such metric.

<comment><USER11> Capitalism unfettered by what?

Capitalism, in pure form, is a _political_ system (this is not a typo - I did _not_ mean to write "economic") in which a strong central government protects the individual rights of each of its citizens (mainly by going after people who murder, theft, fraud). A capitalist government does not regulate industry.

Despite what you say above, what we have today is not capitalism. In healthcare in the US today, it's 80% state control, 20% private (if not 90/10).

I'm not going to comment on the rest of what you've written because the above is a more fundamental point, and we clearly don't agree on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why it is not a 'failure' to leave academia - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05838-y <comment><USER2> Sometimes experience is the better teacher. I worked with a lot of programmers, some more talented than I am, and they dropped out of college or didn't go to college and learned by book or experience.

Anyone remember when the word Hacker used to stand for an amateur who didn't take classes but hacked away at the code and even learned how to do things college does not teach. Like double hires mode on the Apple // or speeding up the 1541 drive on the Commodore 64 by turning the display off or letting it randomize the color bars of the boarders.</comment>


Sheela-Na-Gigs: Women Adorning Britain's Churches - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45116614 <comment><USER2> It appears that the function or meaning of these is not well-understood. Of course, both might have changed with time and place.

Nonetheless, it is a nice reminder that Medieval Europe (and Britain) was a much stranger and more complicated place than the what is usually imagined in popular entertainment.

<comment><USER3> There are a couple of other common church carvings: the green man, and the imp (or devil _) - the meaning of the former is obscured in the mists of time, some claim it to be a pre-Christian fertility symbol but it doesn 't appear to be pre-Christian.

It's certainly true that masons had their fun: though, unlike some 'green men' the images of Sheela-na-gigs seem quite rough and amateurish suggesting to me they were not necessarily authorised adornments.

_ In addition to the normal grotesques and gargoyles. Any other common forms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is hilarious, and makes me think humans have been entertained by dumb depictions of genitalia for as long as we've been human. I can't help but think these works are the Norman equivalent of a bored teenager's notebook drawings.

<comment><USER5> "Public-works joker" is the third-oldest profession, after sexworkers and cab drivers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many times have I listened to that song and never once thought those words meant something... Nice to join the party, even if a bit late.

</comment><comment><USER7> Relevant song: [https://youtu.be/FgoC15Lom-M](https://youtu.be/FgoC15Lom-M)

<comment><USER8> That whole album is pretty excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Theres one at Eglwysilan Church in wales, locals say that it dates back to the 5th century I have no idea if thats true, its very old and I used to go look at it as a kid. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglwysilan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglwysilan)

</comment><comment><USER10> They remind me of the sand woman Joaquin Phoenix's character in _The Master_ sculpts for himself, then has sex with.</comment>


Study: Video Traffic to Kill Internet by 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Video_traffic_to_kill_internet_by_2010-nid-56367.html

<comment><USER2> Wrong.

As ISPs get overwhelmed with video traffic, they will upgrade their infrastructure and come up with new strategies to deliver video content to users.

<comment><USER3> More likely, at least here in North America, ISPs will just start throttling video streams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Imminent Death of the Net Predicted! Film at 11!

[http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The- Net...](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The-Net- Predicted-.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I just switched to viewing all video either as downloads or live streams. Many downloads are 780p HD. For me this requires about 1GB to 2GB daily. I also upgraded to a 20MBs downstream link from Comcast and typically see download speeds averaging 5Mb/s. Even with the the Comcast cap of 250GB per month current products sold by US ISPs can easily meet a reasonable demand for video.

For an interesting read on how ISPs are addressing the increasing need for high bandwidth demand read [http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our- vision-for-ge...](http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for- generation-4-modular-data-centers-one-way-of-getting-it-just-right/)

I think I have heard this claim every few years since the mid 90's. It is likely as valid now as in the past.

</comment><comment><USER6> Upgrading Hardware is of course one way to scale. I think the most benefit could occur from implementing a smart TCP congestion avoidance solution. Quite a while ago I stumbled over an interesting article or paper (can't quite remember, RFC??). Bascially it provides a easy solution for trottling and active feedback if a router is overwhelmed, which allows more intelligent routing. The theoretical speed improvement was significant.</comment>


Introduction to rate limiting with Redis [Part 1] - <AUTHOR> http://www.binpress.com/tutorial/introduction-to-rate-limiting-with-redis/155

<comment><USER2> Great stuff as usual :)</comment>


Show HN: My Simple Clock Radio iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nixie-clock-radio/id386477663?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> I originally built this app around one of the Apple streaming samples, just so I could listen to Dandelion Radio, a station in the UK.

I ended up adding in panel animation, and stream-scraping / detection from Google.

Eventually, I decided to strip out most of the more complex stuff, including the fairly ugly Javascript in a UIWebView scraping and sliding animations, and go ahead and productionize for the App Store.

After a few rejections for various problems, the app is now pretty robust, and useful as an unobtrusive and easy to use streaming clock radio.</comment>


Germany and US wrestle over coronavirus vaccine: report - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/germany-and-us-wrestle-over-coronavirus-vaccine-report/a-52777990 <comment><USER2> _" Trump was doing everything he could to secure a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the US," the newspaper quoted an anonymous German government source as saying."_

Related German News: [https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article206555143/Corona- USA-w...](https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article206555143/Corona-USA-will- Zugriff-auf-deutsche-Impfstoff-Firma.html)

One related Tweet which goes around: [https://twitter.com/thorstenbenner/status/123908864178962841...](https://twitter.com/thorstenbenner/status/1239088641789628417)

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally first saw it in this tweet translating the Welt article[0] and after looking into it other sources seem to agree.

For what is worth, in Germany's case, in particular, there is very little concern with them not sharing the vaccine, but I can see how the US might think it can profit by having exclusive rights to it initially..

0\. [https://twitter.com/nicktolhurst/status/1239117898901266432](https://twitter.com/nicktolhurst/status/1239117898901266432)

<comment><USER3> I can't. Any businessman/profiteer that thinks IP rights are going to be maintained in this case is a moron. Trying to secure exclusivity in this case is obviously futile.

This is almost certainly about securing a supply of doses, which well duh. Any government voluntarily putting itself at the back of that line will be overthrown immediately.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, the businessman involved is a moron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would upvote this if I felt the source were reliable enough. Is Welt.de a well-regarded source?

<comment><USER6> I don't think dw would publish articles without a reliable source. Also welt.de is the online-presence of "Die Welt" (the world in english), which is a major german newspaper. I would say that it's not known for world-class journalistic results and major breakthrough investigative journalistic pieces, but it's still a reliable, conservative newspaper that does solid journalistic work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this story is blowing up due to the distinction between "exclusive supply of XXX million doses" and "exclusive IP rights".

The former is something I expect every government to be trying to do.

The latter, which seems to be the common interpretation of this story, is so unbelievable that I can't believe it. It doesn't even make sense, there's zero chance of such a business strategy even working. I doubt there is a single government on the planet that would enforce or respect a patent in this case if the price or supply of this vaccine is constrained in any way.

<comment><USER7> Yup. Totally agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> CEO Dan Menichella was already kicked out 4 days ago:

[https://www.curevac.com/news/company-founder-ingmar-hoerr- su...](https://www.curevac.com/news/company-founder-ingmar-hoerr-succeeds- daniel-menichella-as-ceo-of-curevac-ag)

<comment><USER9> The timeline of their press releases is interesting, to say the least:

[https://www.curevac.com//news](https://www.curevac.com//news)

03-03-2020

CureVac CEO Daniel Menichella Discusses Coronavirus Vaccine Development with U.S. President Donald Trump and Members of Coronavirus Task Force

03-11-2020

Company Founder Ingmar Hoerr Succeeds Daniel Menichella as CEO of CureVac AG

03-15-2020

CureVac focuses on the development of mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine to protect people worldwide

<comment> rv-de That's sending a shiver down my spine. You rarely see something that so succinctly summarizes what's wrong with this world and how there's still hope. Trump is the closest this civilization got to an antisocial, bat shit crazy, Bond style super villain since that infamous Austrian fellow from the 30s. I'm asking where is Batman when you need him?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm wondering what the Americans think about that and if it will be covered in American media.

<comment><USER11> As someone who was born and raised in America, the idea of a making a vaccine exclusive to the U.S. is morally repugnant, disgusting and outrageous. I hope that this doesn't come to be in this way. Any vaccine developed for COVID-19 should be free and shared with everyone regardless of income or geographical location. That is the only sane and compassionate thing to do. I hope more details emerge about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> CureVac press release: [https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-focuses-on-the- developm...](https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-development- of-mrna-based-coronavirus-vaccine-to-protect-people-worldwide)

"...rejects allegations about offers for acquisition of the company or its technology."

<comment><USER10> However: `Germany's Health Ministry confirmed a report in newspaper Welt am Sonntag, which said President Donald Trump had offered funds to lure the company CureVac to the United States. Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: "We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag."`

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/coronavirus-germany-tries- to...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/coronavirus-germany-tries-to-stop-us- luring-away-firm-seeking-vaccine.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar)

<comment><USER12> That is a different thing then what was alleged in this article (that the Americans were trying to produce a vaccine only for the US).

By the way, the trick with anonymous sources is to always see who is actually quoted in the article, and assume that the anonymous source is what the real source wants to say, but doesn't obviously want to say it. In this case:

Karl Lauterbach, a professor of health economics and epidemiology who is also a senior lawmaker with the Social Democrats, junior partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, tweeted in reaction to the Welt am Sonntag report:

"The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means. Capitalism has limits."

<comment><USER10> The article says: `Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."` as well as `Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: "We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag."`

So the question is: What does `only for the United States` mean exactly?

<comment><USER12> If you go look at the report, the report only references that the US was in talks to fund vaccines, not the "only for the US" part.

<comment><USER10> You mean the report by "Welt am Sonntag"? They say `Der Grund: US-Präsident Donald Trump versucht offenbar [...] das Medikament exklusiv für sein Land zu sichern. Das erfuhr WELT AM SONNTAG aus deutschen Regierungskreisen.`

Translated: US president Donald Trump tried to safeguard the medication exclusively for his country. WELT AM SONNTAG got this information from government sources.

<comment><USER12> No I mean the confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FWIW, the substance of this article has been confirmed, on the record, by the German Health Ministry.[1]

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- german...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany- usa/germany-tries-to-stop-us-from-luring-away-firm-seeking-coronavirus- vaccine-idUSKBN2120IV)

</comment><comment> rv-de I'm not sure if I really have and know all the details. But if the goal really is to silo a vaccine then complying with this offer should be considered high treason against the German state, the EU and basically the rest of the world. It's the politicians duty to draw here a clear red line and to enforce it with any means necessary.

</comment><comment><USER14> $1B is too low. They have $360M of VC capital alone. Also: selling a vaccine against Corona (or some licensing deal) will make them A LOT more money than $1B.

</comment><comment><USER12> this kind of fear mongering and panic is absolutely par for the course with any panic. More often then not it leads to racism, hatred and death. Usually it's the Jews or the Russians, the masons or some powerful sneaky conspiracy that had the cure and won't allow anyone else to have it.

It sounds like the FDA is trying to fund a vaccine, maybe by a acquisition (but this article isn't clear) or by a ton of money with a distribution agreement. It sounds like someone is afraid that means the US is going to kill them by denying access and decided to make a scary anonymous claim. (Which is totally unsubstantiated in the document)

Let's wait for the Facts before going to pitchforks, fires and racial minorities being strung up, shall we?

This is the exact same kind of conspiracy theory people were saying about this being a weaponized virus the Chinese leaked or the Iranians claiming that the US army sprayed this virus Qom to kill the faithful.

A good trick to deal with anonymous sources is to see who else is also quoted in the same articles or related article about the topic, and then assume they are the author, who just doesn't want to be seen being partisan or bending the truth.

"Karl Lauterbach, a professor of health economics and epidemiology who is also a senior lawmaker with the Social Democrats, junior partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, tweeted in reaction to the Welt am Sonntag report:

"The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means. Capitalism has limits"

From what I understand Karl is one of the backers of a move to a single payer system, and the elimination of private insurance in Germany - Bürgerversicherung. So I suspect what happened here is that the US is investing a huge amount of money into vaccines (which they should be doing), as well as making sure there is capacity for producing that vaccine (which they should also do), and a socialist in Germany got worried that there will not be any for them, unless their government has ownership and gave the wire a good anonymous sound bite.

<comment><USER15> What about straight from the company itself?

03.03 CureVac CEO meets Trump [0]

03.11 CureVac removes the CEO [1]

03.15 CureVac denies the american buyout news [2]

[0] [https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-ceo-daniel- menichella-b...](https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-ceo-daniel-menichella- ber%C3%A4t-mit-us-pr%C3%A4sident-donald-trump-und-mitgliedern-der-corona-task- force-entwicklungsm%C3%B6glichkeiten-eines-coronavirus-impfstoffes)

[1] [https://www.curevac.com/news/company-founder-ingmar-hoerr- su...](https://www.curevac.com/news/company-founder-ingmar-hoerr-succeeds- daniel-menichella-as-ceo-of-curevac-ag)

[2] [https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-focuses-on-the- developm...](https://www.curevac.com/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-development- of-mrna-based-coronavirus-vaccine-to-protect-people-worldwide)

<comment><USER12> They denied it, did they not?

<comment><USER16> No, they did not deny it. What they said is that they won't be bought. They did not deny that the Trump administration tried to get exclusive access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This likely sounds like a conspiracy. I've been wondering if any country would be bold enough to make a powerplay to seize control over something amidst the rampage of this virus. For any psychopath, this seems like a great time to get ahead economically or detriment other countries in some form. I don't see Trump seizing control over a possible vaccine as something that'll benefit the rest of the world, either, without a hefty pricetag.

<comment><USER18> It's possible, the black death didn't stop politics in the 14th century.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody putting IP offshore to protect against patent issues? - <AUTHOR>

It's a rite of passage for a tech startup to get sued.  It means your doing something right.
However, I think you can hold your IP in an offshore company that would be significantly difficult for US jurisdiction to touch.
Is anybody using this strategy to avoid IP related litigation?
If so, what countries are you using to hold your IP?
Any specific precautions you are using to ensure the protections are enforceable? <comment><USER2> How would this work? You would be sued in the US, as that is where your product would be (supposedly) violating the other party's patent. Where your IP is doesn't matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where your IP 'lives' matters entirely!

If a Swedish company owns the IP and the IP is on servers there, US courts can't touch it.

How can a US court have any jurisdiction on a corporation or a data center in another country? I think it would pretty difficult for a US court to exercise authority over another country's legal system.

The only option the plaintiff would have is to take legal action in whatever country the IP was located in (i.e. they'd have to sue in Sweden).

If you pick a country that doesn't respect US trademarks or patents, then the plaintiff wouldn't have a case.

Even if they might have a case, picking a small, remote country would substantially increase their legal costs, which would deter them from pursuing legal action.

With all the patent BS going on now, this seems to me like it's a viable option to reduce risk.

I just want to hear from somebody who understands this ownership/operational structure and has (or has not) decided to implement it.

<comment><USER2> If you are a Swedish company, and your file patents in Sweden, and then you sell a product in the US, a company can file a patent infringement suit in the US saying that your product infringes on their US patent. Your Swedish patents aren't relevant. The fact that you are selling your product in the US matters.

How this might apply to a SaaS company is an interesting question. If all the business is legally conducted in Sweden, perhaps there would be no US IP issues. But if any portion of the business in conducted in the US, that portion can be shut down if their is a patent issue in the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. My brain is hardwired to think product == SaaS product. So I'm only referring to using this strategy for a SaaS product.

I think it works with a SaaS product, assuming you keep all business related stuff (Domain registration, servers, business incorporation, bank accounts, etc) in another country (i.e. Sweden).

I just don't know which countries would be best...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Creation of single-photon entangled states around rotating black holes - <AUTHOR> https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1VmG34wjQgt3M- <comment><AUTHOR> Warped spacetime near spinning black holes may create entangled states of photons. A surprising marriage of general relativity and quantum information theory.</comment>


Hack and Glitch Video Games on the Game Bender Console - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joylabz/gamebender-the-invention-gaming-system/description <comment><AUTHOR> This game console is backed by Scratch, so kids can hack the games and add "glitches" while they're playing it. It's made by the same team that made Makey Makey.</comment>


After years of preparation Oculus is launching the Rift for pre-order at $599 - <AUTHOR> https://unimersiv.com/post/after-years-of-preparation-oculus-is-launching-the-rift-for-pre-order-at-599-105/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a momentous day for VR lovers!</comment>


SharePics rejected for looking like a Polaroid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brianlane.com/2009/12/03/sharepics-rejected-by-apple/

<comment><USER2> This is especially interesting considering that _Polaroid doesn't make Polaroids any more_.

<comment><USER3> They announced recently that they're going to start making them again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're also using iconography that resembles an iPhone, another no-no in the App store.

Looks like getting rejected is a one way ticket to hypesville, though, so good luck with that part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean the icon on the searching dialog? That's part of Apple's Game kit PeerPicker class. If I get rejected for that they really are cracked!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you think your icon looks like a Polaroid?

If not, what do you think it looks like?

If so, have you considered not looking like a Polaroid as a potential solution?</comment>


Secure email: Tutanota free encrypted email - <AUTHOR> https://tutanota.com <comment><USER2> Tutanota is my first e-mail provider since deGoogling.

ProtonMail didn't have an integrated Calendar (at that time at least) and was more expensive. Fastmail is Australian which is a non-starter from a privacy perspective. Unironically written from the US. Also, more expensive to use your own domain.

Tutanota is €1/mo (billed yearly), lets me use my own domain, has a calendar, and is based in Germany.

Since using it, I realized without the Calendar scanning my Inbox and auto- adding flights and trips and birthdays, I don't use it as much. But I also haven't traveled much since March.

Definitely worth a look if privacy is a goal, and money is an object.

<comment><USER3> I have to say, i smiled a bit with protonmail (since I'm swiss), but Tutanota looks interesting and much cheaper/fairer 1GB for free is super nice..to put it mildly....maybe i shutdown my own email server someday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to Fast Mail or Proton Mail for general non encrypted use? For example how is the quality of their mobile apps, import/export features, etc?

<comment><USER2> The Android app's good, and available from F-Droid. And the features are solid. There's definitely room for improvement, but no glaring deficiencies in my experience.

To be specific though, their roadmap [1] includes "Import External Mailboxes into TutaNota", and I don't use their desktop client, so I'm not sure what export options are available there.

[1]: [https://www.tutanota.com/secure-email/](https://www.tutanota.com/secure- email/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love my tutanota email, well worth the money. I use it for business only but honestly Id love to ditch gmail for the rest too, tired of the spam</comment>


Been almost 15hours, Namecheap.com is down. All domain services badly affected. - <AUTHOR> http://status.namecheap.com/?p=15759

<comment><USER2> The namecheap website is dead - AFAIK no domain services have been affected. All of mine are fine anyway, and a random selection of some other folk I know on there are fine too.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ones which were in the process of migration ( old & new ) are affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> rumours on twitter of large-scale DDOS attack on namecheap and 300 other websites

<comment><AUTHOR> From their status page it appears that there was an unscheduled maintenance and within a hour it was back up but then something went wrong and since then its still down.</comment></comment>


Ruby 1.9.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2009/01/30/ruby-1-9-1-released/

<comment><USER2> WooHoo! Now when will it be packaged for Debian?! And what version of Rails do I need to work with Ruby1.9?

<comment><USER3> Rails 2.2 onwards [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/11/21/rails-2-2-i18n-http...](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/11/21/rails-2-2-i18n-http- validators-thread-safety-jruby-1-9-compatibility-docs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Change the "ftp" protocol to "http" for a more reasonable download speed.

<comment><USER5> More info at [http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-191-released-first- production...](http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-191-released-first-production- release-of-the-fastest-ruby-ever-1480.html)

But also mirrored for much faster speed (ruby-lang.org is notoriously slow, even with HTTP): <http://www.rubyinside.com/files/ruby-1.9.1-p0.tar.bz2></comment></comment>


Love of the Game: Be foolish enough to believe your startup will make it. - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/04/06/love-of-the-game-be-foolish-enough-to-believe-your-startup-will-make-it/

<comment><USER2> This is an excellent article until it applies one final twist that perverts the entire message into something loathesome.

He's working hard. Great! He's keeping his expenses low. Awesome! Who needs to be weighed down with that stuff? He gave up on useless egotism about his status. Perfect! Other people's opinions don't matter. He rejected job offers. Excellent! That's because they provide a way of life he doesn't want.

So far so good.

He can do all that without lying to himself. Lie to yourself and you'll lie to others, which makes you an untrustworthy con man. That's what gives entrepreneurs a reputation like televangelists.

Just give up the ego-trip of success, and accept the fact that what you are doing may not succeed. Why do you need it to succeed? Your ego. Just fail, start again, fail, start again, fail, start again. So long as you can keep yourself fed, you can keep it up forever. Your validation is not some future goal-- _this_ is the life you want. Right here. Right now. Otherwise, don't do it.</comment>


A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> According to the Atlantic, Kolodny's thesis is that toolbuilding laid the groundwork for the development of language. How about other human behaviors such as group activities requiring coordination and planning, or language as a means to invoke and control specific emotions in others? Certainly activities such as building encampments, changing encampments, delegation of tasks, coordination during hunting and gathering, all these also required sequenced actions. Fast forward to the present, and toolmakers are generally below the topmost pinnacle of society; MIT's endowment is only 13 billion compared to Harvard's 35 billion (humor intended). Dogs and chimps seem to enjoy hearing, learning, being influenced, and being told what to do via language, yet aren't capable of speaking it. Surely pre-modern humans were the same, leaving open a huge selective advantage for the development of vocal/language skills.</comment>


For Linux, Supercomputers R Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2960701/linux/for-linux-supercomputers-r-us.html

<comment><USER2> Hasn't Linux dominated supercomputers for at least a decade? The only place they don't have significant market share is on the desktop. Now we need Chromebooks to take off or for someone to add the extra polish and support needed to win over consumers.</comment>


Reception issues? Not in Steve Jobs' reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html

<comment><USER2> "We do something similar. We call it "clouding." Right now, for example, we've sent out the following messages about iPhone 4 and the antenna issues:

1\. All mobile phones have this problem.

2\. Our mobile phone does not have this problem.

You see how this works? These two statements cannot both be true.

Yet we've said both of them. And now you don't know what to believe."

</comment><comment><USER3> A rare return to form for Fake Steve Jobs.</comment>


Are you a solopreneur? How does it work for you? - <AUTHOR> The question is simple: are you a solopreneur, rather than an entrepreneur? How does your business work, how do you manage different clients, responsibilities, etc, being a single founder, possibly with no other persons to help you with the tasks? And also, why are you a solopreneur in the first place?
I had a small game dev studio, but I found that I wanted to work on more interesting technical issues by myself. Currently I'm working as a one person consulting company, for the development of new tech related projects. Projects I work in are very interesting, I learn a lot with my work, and I also keep a better part of the gains of the company. However, I have issues with the kind of services I can provide: I can't provide a soft development service as, once I'm developing programs for one or two clients (even if I make a part of it be developed by a third party), I have no more time to do a second or third project. So I'm starting to provide a consulting service, and only eventually offering development for very interesting projects.
It's working now but this is new for me, and I'm not sure how I'll manage this in the future... what do you think about it? do you know other cases similar to mine? how do they / you manage this kind of problem? <comment><USER2> In my view, if you're going to do a business on your own, you have to be focused. Between the other parts of life that need some attention, the care- and-feeding of the business, sales, marketing, and promotion, there isn't that much time left for actual development. So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the _absolute minimum_ that provides real value to people. This sounds like what you're doing with your "consulting only, no development" approach to most clients.

In my case, the project I just finished prototyping (yes, this is a plug/request for feedback, although the product is of extremely limited interest to this community) solves a narrow problem in the electricity industry: Energy meter data is passed around in an obscure binary file format (MDEF) that few people can understand, read, or troubleshoot when they receive a broken file from a 3rd party. There's a need for a tool to wrangle this format, and I believe I can do one that's better and cheaper than anything out there, with a modest effort.

As for _why_ I'm a solopreneur: I didn't know any good co-founder candidates, and didn't have a compelling sales pitch. ("Hey - let's quit our jobs, and poke around for a product that we can try to build into a successful business" is a little too honest!) I also didn't want any more of my life to drain away writing vbScript (long, long, long story) and, as the great Peter Gibbons put it: "I don't think I'd like another job".

I'm not philosophically opposed to growing the company, but it will have to be from a "given this problem, I need more people" angle, rather than a "let's enlarge the team, and hope something good happens" view.

P.S. <http://www.mlsite.net/meterdoc>

<comment><AUTHOR> "So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people."

This is very useful advice, it's a good rule to have in mind. I'm actually doing development, but I don't do active promotion of that as I can only do one project at a time, and projects tend to go for months. But as I keep developing on projects, I keep very focused on them and only a little consultancy work and some basic business meetings, sales, etc keep me out of full focus on dev. But I don't think I'm in the minimum yet, so I'll really think in what you said.

I also agree with you in prefering the "given this problem, I need more people" angle, for growing the company.

Thanks a lot for your useful and very interesting! advice, and good luck with your new project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's tough. I started my first company on my own, had a sales guy for several years and a few coders on contracts as well, but as a mainly solo gig it's been tough to balance all the tasks you need to do. The tasks that tend to suffer the most are the business and promotion sides of things. It's fortunately been able to stay at a steady pace for a long time on almost no promotion, just word of mouth, but I'm sure with another solid partner it could have gotten a fair bit bigger by now.

I also started a startup solo a couple years ago, and the combination of running my other company by day (splitting my time) and being the only person to do everything certainly factored strongly in its early demise. Got to about 10,000 users but couldn't take it to the next level because there was simply not enough time in one day.

My new startup that's launching any day now (waiting on a couple things like payment processing to be hooked up) is a partnership, and while I'm still splitting my time with my main company and I'm also the only programmer, it's been way better because it's two and not just one of us. After these experiences, I'm now definitely sold on PG's recommendation of having more than one founder. The key still is to find the _right_ co-founder, but I think unless you want to work 16-hour days (which isn't sustainable!) then you need 2+ people involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your good advice. I already have clients and also word of mouth is working ok for me; I would definitely scale if I found a way to do it without wasting the chance to do with my time what I love: creating, solving, thinking (for my previous business I worked more on the managing side and after a while I found that I was really hating it; at least I know that I hate it if that's the only thing I do: in that case, I feel like I'm wasting my time doing things I don't love all the day).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the same boat as you, and it's rough. At first I didn't believe in PG's advice for multiple cofounders, but as time goes by I definitely think it's important now.

As a one person shop I can't do much more than consulting, and as a technically minded person I find that I'm not particularly motivated to do the promotion / PR / SEO side of things. I'm on the lookout for a cofounder now but it's hard(er) to pick one up after college and all my friends want stable jobs instead of entrepreneurship.

If it's working for you now then I wouldn't worry about it. I find that getting myself motivated to do the non-technical things was the key to getting more success when going solo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your useful advice. And you are right, hiring promotion / PR / sales people is very, very hard for small companies like this (at least I could never hire anybody for that, and I've been doing business for some years now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been a "solopreneur" for almost ten years now. It is only in the last few years I have had significant (where I take "significant" to mean an income in the top 10% or so - which isn't a massive amount, but enough to live well).

The important thing I've found is to build assets that have the potential to creative passive (or near-passive) income and then run those in parallel to your more experimental ideas. Ideally, you can then sell off some of those assets when you need more time or more cash to put into other ideas.

On my part, I started a code snippets repository a few years ago. Only took 24 hours to do the first version, then it got another few days work a year on. It made about $800 a month for a couple of years, then I sold it for $30k. Not giant money but that's just one of many projects. I sold another one for a lot more just several months later. Having savings and a passive income that pays all your bills makes it a lot easier to work on the bigger and more experimental projects!

As to the "why".. I as in full-time work for almost a year after leaving school, and it didn't click with me at all. I wanted to run everything. So I became self-employed, and despite earning a pittance for the first few years, it was totally worth it. Besides, none of my friends are technically or academically minded, and I don't know anyone like that who lives nearby, so I'll be dreaming and working on my own for the foreseeable future :)

I should point out, however, that when I reach a point where I _need_ other people to launch larger scale projects, I will happily hire them.. online! Just because you're on your own doesn't mean you do everything alone. You always have to rely on other people and companies, whether it's for your hosting, graphic design, printing, or whatever. If you live in the general economy, you're never as "solo" as you think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting reply, indeed! And you are right, you're never alone in the general economy, and there are many professional services you can hire / buy to help you with the work. Thanks a lot for your interesting comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mostly I learn while I go along and probably I'm not doing this for much longer than yourself (1 year now). I have a similar background, as I tried to start a game company before that. That didn't work out because even though we created the game which we had planned, it had taken us too long to finish and it completely failed to sell afterwards. So I started to work as freelancer using at first mostly the technology which I had developed in that company.

I care now a lot that new projects will always improve my tool chain. I think in the long run that's my best chance as a solopreneur. So I try to get projects where I can learn new skills and I make contracts which allow me to use the sources I developed afterwards.

And now I mostly hope I manage to learn fast enough to survive. I learned already a lot about negotiating by now, for example that I will always underestimate project time (even if I know it...) and therefore I really _need_ to demand higher rates than I had originally expected.

Also I have some long-term targets for own products. So I'm not just doing blindly projects, but I care that projects always get me closer to that. Originally I had hoped to find time beside the official projects, but that was not the case so far.

Trying to get a new project while still working on the old is also tricky. I learned by now that I need full concentration for the current task. This means delaying everything that has no connection with my current project by all means until I can spend a full day on the other project. And then I will stay on the other until everything that was accumulated is done even if it needs more than the time I planned for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. What I found useful whenever I could was setting rates per hour or per time unit (say, month) of development time, in large projects no one can really estimate how much time they will take to finish (for example, these days I'm developing some kind of 2.0 video streaming app for a client, and we're always testing it with people and adding features, thinking of new security measures and so on... we couldn't have written a full requirements doc at the start of this specific project). This protects your budget, but also your client's budget in the end (you don't need to do over- estimations for the costs to be safe).

About parallel projects for products... I have none of them, but I use development work to learn more and more about difficult subjects that would take a long time of research or study to learn well (for example, on an older project I learned some basics of computer vision, etc). In the end that makes my development time more expensive and useful with every project. But maybe I should think in products too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a one-man shop, with both an online product and an unrelated consultancy.

If potential customers are banging down your door, and you're worried about not having the time to develop all of their software, then you need to raise your rates. At least some (more likely, most) of your customers will stay, and you'll be able to afford working on just one or two interesting software projects at a time.

There are other downsides to a lack of diversification though, like being less able to drop one of your customers if necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your advice; I've been raising rates for development but what I'm afraid, is that sometimes I'm very busy with projects for months, and then I just can't work in other projects... And if other clients ask for development at that time I just can't offer them it then. I'm afraid of slowly losing those clients, of course (that's why now I only "offer" consultancy, because then I don't break any clients' expectatives, and now and then I just start development for some months, in a project for some of those clients).

<comment><USER7> I'd say that if you're finding you always have work, or rather, if you have _enough_ work, then you don't need to worry about turning away clients due to being too busy. As a consultant, it's a good thing to have to turn away work.

You should also consider sending clients you turn away to another consultant. The idea is that when you're really busy, you send "overflow" customers to him (or her). And the other consultant would ideally return the favor as necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a co-founder, but I'm much more active, so it's more like 80/20. Most of the time I feel 'solo'. As I'm reaching my limit for workload, I'm trying to push more work to part-time contractors including: legal, accounting, and sys-admin type stuff.

Its a huge challenge to cleanly define areas to hand off, and to trust others with them. But I'm convinced its the key to growth.

</comment><comment><USER9> I work alone for the time being even though I'd rather not, but I'm not a fan of buzzwords, so I'm not sure I'd even answer the question if someone asked me that in person...

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish it was not a buzzword, but that more people used it. I don't know of any other way to explain what I do, why I do it, and how I do it in just a simpler way than by saying "solopreneur". I'm a little entrepreneur, but not interested in making the company grow if that makes me unhappy, and I'm working solo or with a few people most of the times here, but that's a choice, not just something that happened. That's all what "solopreneur" says in a single word, and that's why I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> WTF is "consulting" without development? What are you "consulting" them with? "Buy some computers and hire some programmers"? I can't comprehend your post, I'm sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> This responds to a clear need: some clients need to develop a given application, and they have the team to develop it, but they don't know how to solve a specific problem, or what is the best approach for the development (ie, which tools to use, or if their team is incomplete, who to hire, etc). Or they simply have already developed an application and need the solution of a specific point (they need a little research on how to do X, that for some reason their team is not going to do, even if they could). Many times those I consult for, I develop for later too, so it doesn't make a big difference in some cases.

<comment><USER11> In other words, "provide advice and experience", which is a nice gig if you can get it, because it leverages past experience into easier present work (writing code is harder than telling people what you think they ought to do).

<comment><AUTHOR> My interest is to keep doing development, not consultancy. But I have to offer a permanent service if I want new clients to contact me both at times I'm busy and when I'm not. I'm trying consultancy as that kind of service, and while I'm not completely sure yet, I think it works for now. 90% of the time I keep developing software for one or other project (but, as I don't offer that as a permanent service, I can choose which projects to work in, and also I can just tell clients "I can't do development now" when I'm just busy with some other project); but I'm always free for consultancy.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like a good setup to me, actually, because you can get paid for something with a lot of people, and cherry pick what to work on in terms of development, which is indeed much more time consuming.

Maybe not quite as good as having residual income from an actual product, but pretty good just the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, having residual income from an actual product would be better... I started my business career with a great product sales failure and since then I stayed at (quite successful) high cost services, even in a product-oriented industry like games :) Some months ago I was starting some product development again but a new big contract came and I just couldn't refuse. Maybe some day I'll go the product way.

Thank you for your interesting comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://searchyc.com/solo>

<http://searchyc.com/%2522single+founder%2522>

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't reply my question (and I already knew most related discussions, I've been here for a long time). I'm asking not how you get over being solo and construct a bigger company, or how you maintain motivation, etc. I'm asking: if there is any of you that is a solopreneur or almost solopreneur by choice (ie, because they are more interested in building than in managing or selling), what can you tell about your specific case? How is your business, how do you avoid business growth separating you from the building process itself?</comment></comment>


What happens if I delete my Facebook account? - <AUTHOR>

Has anybody deleted their Facebook user account via https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account ?
I wonder if ALL data ever added via the signed in account will be deleted. This includes status comments on friends walls, likes, events, my created groups etc. If not all things are deleted I'd rather keep my account to keep the control of my data.
Experiences of leaving Facebook are welcome. <comment><USER2> If you go through the process of trying to delete your account they do all this crazy stuff to try to dissuade you. One example - they show you pictures of your friends with comments like, "friend x will really miss you." The process tries to get you to just disable it. If you go through with totally deleting it you have 14 days to change your mind and then it is supposed to be permanent. Ars had an article a few months back showing how your data (specifically pictures) could still be found even after deleting your account, FB claimed they solved that issue, but I'm not sure.

Hopefully this is helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that heads up. More here: [http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/10/facebook-may-be- maki...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/10/facebook-may-be-making- strides.ars)

I could delete all the pictures I've uploaded before deleting the account. I think that will be enough for me. What is harder to trace and delete is all the comments and likes one spreads around the site. I'm more interested in what happens to them.

I guess I could create a fake account and spread some comments and likes around the site and then delete the account and see what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your machine zaps you and pulls you into the machine, where you are forced to play death match Yahtzee against other profiles.

Click here for the shocking truth: [http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s14e04-you-hav...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s14e04-you-have-0-friends)</comment>


Quantum Random Number Generator Created Using a Smartphone Camera - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-random-number-generator-created-using-a-smartphone-camera-602f88552b64 <comment><USER2> The article is from May 9th. HN Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728043)

</comment><comment><USER3> The numbers may indeed be random, and they may be from a physical process, but are they actually _quantum random_? As the article indicates, it is indeed true that there is no method of determining whether a string of numbers that looks random is actually random. You can tell if it's _not_ random through the use of various statistical tests, but there may always be a test that hasn't been invented yet that could reveal an underlying pattern.

However, distinguishing between quantum randomness and "other" randomness is quite easy actually. You just ask: did the randomness come from the collapse of a quantum state into an eigenstate of the observable being measured? (Now, if it's already in an eigenstate, it will collapse to the same state, so you have to prepare it in an eigenstate of an incompatible observable before measuring a new observable.) The particular new eigenstate that it collapses into will be -- according to the postulates of QM -- truly random.

So it seems to me that with this "QM random" source from the cell phone sensor, the scientists should be analyzing the "purity" of the signals they are using to generate their numbers. All kinds of factors could make the results non-QM random: electrical noise, different kinds of light sources, processing delays, etc. There's a lot of things to consider here.

(In fact, if you really wanted to be sure that it was QM random, you could create an entanglement [which is a QM-only phenomenon] and then see if the Bell correlations exist between the two entangled states.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't you just take a picture with the same camera and then hash it? The probability of getting the exact same set of pixels is small and it's certainly not predictable.

<comment><USER5> I wondered the same thing. Noise in the picture should also make it extremely hard to predict. For cryptographic use one would only need 256 bits of entropy to seed a CPRNG, and I can't see how this amount of entropy wouldn't be present in a normal photo.</comment></comment>


The Carbon3D printer pulls complex shapes out of a dish of plastic - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/10/carbon3d/ <comment><USER2> The article slants like stereolithography is a difficult to achieve ("magical") tech and these guys are pioneering some new kind of revolutionary product but I'm pretty sure outfits like Formlabs were doing this years ago (and now many others; see kickstarter). I didn't see it on my skim through but have they developed some revolutionary improvement to the old UV developer resin and projector technique?

<comment><USER3> See [http://carbon3d.com/](http://carbon3d.com/) for the slick presentation and [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract) for the juicy details.

The main innovation is allowing curing whilst submerged by using an oxygen permeable membrane. This allows continuous curing, which creates really high quality plastics - supposedly equivalent to injection moulds, really high resolution models - high enough to generate smooth slants, and really fast print times - over an order of magnitude improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:

\- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.

\- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get anything made

We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style. More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.

<comment><USER5> This isn't a thermoplastic printer?

<comment><USER4> Read the article: looks like a light-curing printer, which prints 2 dimensions at a time instead of 1.

<comment><USER5> I did read the article. I'm just confused about what the GGP comment about thermoplastic printers was about for an article that isn't about thermoplastic printers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Office politics for engineers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nightowlsbook.com/post/113421819414/office-politics-for-engineers

<comment><USER2> This makes me _very_ glad I work at a startup (there are three of us) and it truly is about the work. Chatting is great, but delivery is life.

I work from home most days (or a coffee shop). Sometimes we go weeks without seeing each other.

It's awesome.</comment>


Atlanta airport loses power, trapping travelers in planes and terminals - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/airplane-mode/atlanta-airport-loses-power-trapping-travelers-planes-terminals-n830546 <comment><AUTHOR> How would the insurance work on something like this? Would the construction company which cut the line have to cover loss revenue for the entire airport? Airlines? Passengers?

<comment><USER2> An acquaintance of mine works for a high precision concrete paving company. The specialize in airports and data centers.

Their contracts often specify a penalty rate for important data cables. Sometimes this would be $120,000 per minute that the cable is down. I think it was even an order of magnitude higher for some cables when they were working near Amazon's data centers in Northern Virginia.

Given that it would usually take two hours for a cable to be repaired, a single hit would be millions to tens of millions of dollars in fees.

This resulted in a NASA like level of paperwork, checklists, and team communication before anyone so much as put a shovel into the ground on the worksite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We have redundant power (coming in the building at 2 different spots) for data centers, why not for critical infra like airports?

(let alone having, you know, a generator)

<comment><USER4> I'll answer your question with another question: how much money did they lose because of this power outage?

Until the money lost is greater than the costs associated with adding redundant, backed up power supplies, they probably won't be added.

<comment> 549362-30499 It's a publicly owned and operated airport so at least in theory it isn't incentivized that way. It sure does make you scratch your head though... situations like this should be near impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ATL is having a bad run of it lately between snow storms and power outages...

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's hope Col. Stuart isn't behind it (ref: Die Hard 2)...</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Talks With Atlantic Editor James Bennet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/events/archive/2013/09/watch-mark-zuckerberg-talk-with-i-atlantic-i-editor-in-chief-james-bennet/279787/ <comment><USER2> I suppose he's gotten slightly better at talking. He seems nervous, but isn't a complete wreck (see interviews from 2 years ago, he has improved a lot since then). As I understand it the markets responded well to Zuck's talk with Arrington and now with Bennet -- fb stock shot up after each of the interviews. But that doesn't excuse the fact he is a cartoonishly twisted guy and entrepreneurs and consumers alike should be leery of his every move. Does he seriously expect people to buy his latest spiel about immigration? This is the guy who created a political movement that went so far as to fund ads for oil drilling in arctic national wildlife refuge and putting down Keystone XL pipelines, so, sorry, I'm not buying that he's in this cause because he met someone who couldn't attend college because they were illegal immigrants. Having talked at length with people who knew him in his Harvard days, he's ruthless, relentless, and rapacious -- he has determined he's going to approach the immigration issue in the public arena with stories about illegal immigrants not getting accepted into colleges, and this seems to be the way he's going at it. Pity. He's the face of a serious issue that warrants genuine people looking at it with sincerity and good faith, instead we're stuck with Zuck.

This is the guy who _literally_ called the users of his site "dumb fucks", and was _literally_ willing -- no, _eager_ to hand over private details of his site's users to his friends. I ran forums that garnered about 12k users per month when I was 16, I took the responsibility of safeguarding my users' private information _very_ seriously.

The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud, play a nice PR game, and meet people and convince them that he's a nice fella who wants best for everybody and "connect the world!" through Facebook (no matter if you want to be connected to it or not).

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment seemed to me a perfect specimen of the type that drags down forums: vitriolic and ill-informed. I've hypothesized before that the problem is not that people make such comments (which seems inevitable if you have open, anonymous signups) but that others upvote them. So I analyzed the votes to see if there was a pattern, and indeed there is. The median karma of upvoters was 644, and the median karma of downvoters was 1814, almost 3x as high. If this pattern holds up it could be very useful.

<comment><USER3> Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that pattern is sustainably observed, then it almost certainly means the upvote/downvote privileges should be changed, correct?

Elsewise, the pattern will continue like entropy, until the majority of comments are like that.

<comment><USER4> There already are certain privileges to karma: you need a certain threshold to downvote comments at all, and I suspect that thresholds to get onto the front page are based on the karma of who upvotes your story. (There've been times where my upvote alone, going from 2 to 3 votes, is enough to get something on the front page, while many times I've seen new stories with 4-5 points that don't make it.) I suspect PG is thinking of tweaking the weights, automatically, until there's enough of a weight to high-karma downvotes to kill bad comments. You could easily train an SVM or other classifier on some set good/bad comments and then pull out the coefficients to figure out what signals should go into weighting point totals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> pg, I'd love to hear what you found interesting about this interview, because I never seem to gain much insight by listening to Mark Zuckerberg. He's kind of like Bill Gates, that way. They're both brilliant guys, but they don't ever seem to publicly say anything that leaves me with any new knowledge, any spark of inspiration, or a new perspective on the world.

I have a lot of respect for both of them, and I'm usually very dismissive of the idea that they don't deserve their success, but this interview really gives me the impression of a man who got lucky to be where he is, and doesn't care for much beyond being keeping Facebook secure in its position (and dipping his toe into humanitarian issues).

Good counterexamples are Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, or yourself, who have often surprised and delighted me with whole new ways of looking at things, and who frequently leave me excited and motivated to go out and strive to make my work count for more.

Did I miss something important in this video?

<comment><USER6> Mark is younger than everyone on that list, so I'll suggest that it has more to do with age. Everyone has insight in their respective fields, but I think a certain level of adversity and time is necessary for one to turn a lot of that insight into wisdom. Tesla and Spacex almost didn't make it out alive during the 2008 financial crisis, and I recall Musk mentioning that when it looked like his two companies would be a failure, he'd wake up with tears on his pillow.

I think at the moment, Mark is definitely trying to not upset his share price by saying something that doesn't need to be said. We don't know how he is internalizing things right now. Hopefully we will get more wisdom from him in the future, that stuff doesn't just grow on trees.

Gates is pretty interesting from whatever talks/interviews I can remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's unfortunate that this guy has so much power over technology and, maybe to a greater extent, society as a whole. I don't know his true intentions and ethics, but he just seems so disingenuous.

<comment><USER8> That's a pretty hard judgment based on, well, nothing.

<comment><USER9> It's based on how many years the person heard or read about zuckerberg, and how many years he's spent on earth learning about life. The statement is an opinion (and is phrased accordingly), and it's based on his or hers unique perspective of life, in other words - the personality. Don't dismiss that, it's your biggest asset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always find it oddly comforting to see how nervous, and frankly awkward, Mark Zuckerberg can be on stage. I have a fine stage presence but it's somehow very encouraging that someone so successful can still sport such discomfort with important skills like public speaking.

<comment><USER11> Being able to be comfortable in front of people is a completely different skill set. There are 8 year olds that can be comfortable in front of crowds. There are people that are surgeons that can't get up the nerve to ask for an upgrade to first class at the airline counter. Or who wouldn't be able to negotiate down the price of a car. Has nothing to do with their ability to use a scalpel though.

<comment><USER10> Right, I've just always found it hard to believe the same of an executive. But your point -- and mine, really -- still stands. Not everything needs to be perfect. Just the important stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "There are a lot of problems to debug"

Is that normal English or just programmer English?

I am not native speaker so I really don't know. Is "debug" a known word for public?

<comment><USER13> No, it's not commonly used by non-hackers. I'd guess most people can figure out what it means given the context, but it's probably not entirely clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was pleasantly surprised by this, with the exception of the question about the Social Mobile Cloud's ability to Disrupt. Blech.

</comment><comment><USER15> _" 11 million people are a lot of people who are being treated unfairly"_ (Speaking of illegal aliens)

Unfairly? Most of these people or their parents snuck into this country, breaking the law. They knew full well the down side. How is this unfair? Isn't it more unfair that taxpayers have to pay their medical and education bills? and no they don't save the average person enough money on produce and services to make up the difference - this is a lie propagated by the handful of wealthy persons who actually benefit from their presence.

How can people be so blind?

 _" If you poll the majority of Americans, they want to get something done"_ (speaking on the illegal immigration situation)

Yeah Mark, you know darn well that most Americans want the borders secure, illegals deported. In other words - The public largely wants the laws of the country actually enforced (wow what a notion).

</comment><comment><USER16> Easy karma, pg.

I mean, you've posted a topic that is guaranteed to provoke the kind of flamewar you seem to think is counterproductive.

<comment><USER17> > Easy karma, pg.

Considering pg can likely award himself arbitrary karma points with a single SQL statement, I think your assumption of his motives is probably mistaken.

<comment><USER16> You mistake my attack. pg is hiding from the fact that the people that made him rich hate him.

<comment><USER18> I'm all for contrarian viewpoints, but what are you actually adding to this discussion?

If you want to discuss your fascinating ideas about pg and his motives, why not start your own discussion thread and see how popular it is, rather than trying to hijack this one?

<comment><USER16> Because I'm taking pot shots, not engaging in full discourse.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Academic Destruction of the University of Tulsa - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa <comment><USER2> Alumni here that graduated a few years ago. I'm a brown guy (that matters in this context.)

During my time there, the university was super obsessed with being in the top XX list. From what I could see, that obsession wasn't channeled through research but through superficial things like new buildings and multi-million dollar stadium. Why? Because that's what all big and famous universities have! Look at that big lawn. It does nothing of function but boy does it look majestic.

The push for fairness and equality etc was REALLY needed. Racism was just a way of life. I witnessed tenured professors in the CS department make very causal racist remarks. There was a black guy who was upset that the professor always chose his project/team to be the "Black team". After he left, the prof casually said "well at least he didn't shoot the place up". Perhaps the most ironic was an Indian prof who seemed to hate all other Indians. If you were black people assumed you were there for sports and not because you really were smart and interested in education.

Some of the comments in the linked article will give you an idea of the bubble that Tulsa/Oklahoma lives in. People claiming it's the liberal agenda and "social justice" that was unnecessary and ruined it. Sure, if you're white and born in Oklahoma it's unnecessary.

Funny enough after graduating and moving to the west coast I'm not reminded of my skin color every day.

<comment><USER3> It was weird how the corporatization and the "social-justice agenda" were lumped together like that in the article. Usually the people who criticize the former aren't the ones getting upset about the latter.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it does strike me as "remember in the past when things were better before the liberals ruined it?"

<comment><USER3> And yet conservatives are usually the ones writing off the liberal arts as useless pursuits of "liberal snowflakes", not advocating for them as essential facets of civilization.

Edit: To be clear, the behavior described by the above commenter is reprehensible. Independently of that, I think it's incredibly sad that universities are being turned into businesses that only care about profit. Obviously that makes the original article a mixed bag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A click bait title from the author. Reads like he is just upset that the direction chosen wasnt his. Personally I think being unique in your values, and giving the finger to US News, is a rational choice for a mid tier college.

And who can argue that colleges haven't failed to adapt to today's economy? Literally some small schools have larger Latin departments than CS.

Maybe this experiment will work. Maybe it won't. But, as long as students are informed in their choice, I think it's worth trying.

<comment><USER5> A large part of this experiment seems to consist of increasing the losses of the athletics program, such as the extra $9M subsidy in a year when the total deficit was $26M.

High expenditure on athletics is often justified by the revenue it generates, but that is clearly not the case here. Is there any plausible case to be made that this extra expenditure will lead to the athletics program becoming self- sustainingly profitable in time to save the university?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, there is a formal petition to the president of the university at the change.org link below. The petition contains a list of all the specific programs cut, more details about the process failures involved, and specific suggestions/demands of the administration to rectify these failures - something that was largely missing from the piece originally linked. You can find the petition here: [https://www.change.org/p/president- gerard-clancy-saving-the-...](https://www.change.org/p/president-gerard- clancy-saving-the-heart-and-soul-of-the-university-of- tulsa?recruiter=952433374)

</comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with author comment "Our infantilized and indoctrinated students will receive but a light wash of liberal arts before they are popped from the higher-education oven. They will perhaps be credentialed, but they will not be educated." I have a CS PHD. I have not read any books he mentioned in the article. Am I credentialed but not educated? I wish I know more about those things, but frankly I'm reading Game of Thrones, won't have time for that... well, I might actually be ignorant monkey now I think about it. Hodor!

<comment><USER5> I am generally in favor of the liberal arts, but this sort of smug self- satisfaction and assumption of superiority, as displayed here, does not sit well with me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

<comment><USER8> > MOOCs seem like the answer to so many questions about higher learning. I > hope they revolutionize American education, and soon.

Both higher and secondary should be revolutionized with MOOCs, not as replacements for traditional schooling by themselves, but as an enabling technology for flipped classrooms with no in-person lecture where all in- person contact time is high-value interaction.

<comment><USER9> Anecdotal but I did linear algebra at a local CC in a "flipped" classroom. We were expected to watch lectures (youtube videos from a MIT or whatever) outside of class and then class was supposed to be a discussion of the homework, which we also had to do out of class and was provided no class time prior to it being due to discuss, in class. There was no real teaching on behalf of the professor. I can't just interject a video when I have a question about the subject matter. I'd either have to wait it out and see if it was answered later, rewind and watch again, or find another video explaining the same concept. All of a sudden an hour long video became an hour and a half to two hour endeavor. Just absolutely time consuming. It came off as lazy by the teacher. To be fair was like his first or second semester doing it but I didn't care to take the class again. Some of the smartest guys I knew we absolutely frustrated with it also. We all gave him bad reviews. Learning should be interactive. This was not. My friend group would basically meet up and teach ourselves the concepts. It was way harder than it should have been.

I'd rather MOOC's be used to supplement a traditional lecture. I know I used the hell out of Khan Academy during Calc 1-3 which were all traditional lectures.

<comment><USER10> Hmm. With a video, you can pause it and go google for details.

Asking a professor is likely more efficient. It's still not as easy — you need to break his/her flow, and the professor must have enough spare time to answer.

Also, when you do more yourself you pay less; it can be important.

From my experience, going through harder parts of a textbook with a motivated friend or two works best.

<comment><USER5> The sort of questions I have when trying to do this sort of thing are often not well answered by search engines, as they often of the form "huh? I didn't follow how the last thing you said comes from (or is otherwise related to) the things that came before."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sadly so many universities are bloated with administrators. Part of the reason the costs are so high. Then they hire adjunct professors who make about as much as a waiter at a good restaurant does. I don't know if TU uses adjuncts but most college's do and this includes Ivy League schools. So the money in general is not going to faculty (that is the full time ones) but the administrators. At some point they are going to have to get rid of the administrative bloat and bring costs down. They are not going to do this willingly. But I think college has reached a price point that is too high that the public is questioning if it is worth the cost.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure the data backs that up:

Average expenditure per student:

Instruction: $17,996

Student Services and Academic Support (Not all of which are administrators): $9528

That results in $0.52 spent on Student Services and Academic Support for each $1.00 spent on Instruction. In 1999, that number was $0.47 spent on Student Services and Academic Support per $1.00 spent on Instruction. That's not a huge increase in administrators.

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.asp)

The cost of college is largely driven by reductions in state support for public institutions, and the resulting increases in tuition by both private and public schools:

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent- the-m...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main- reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/)

<comment><USER13> It might also be worth including some or possibly all of the $7,403 which is allocated to Institutional support (in the tables).

This page offers a summary of what that classification includes and it includes some clearly essential activities:

[https://www.wisconsin.edu/financial- administration/accountin...](https://www.wisconsin.edu/financial- administration/accounting-and-budget-control/chart-of- accounts/program-1-institutional-support/)

[edit typo]

<comment><USER12> That's fair, but it doesn't change the argument much. If you add the Institutional Support, you get these costs being 87% of Instructional Costs in 1999, and 94% in 2016. That is an increase of 8% as compared to 5% by my original calculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The faculty in question should unionize! Would be a great way to test the administrators' commitment to social justice.</comment>