Whistle-blower reveals N Dakota leak of 11M gallons of gas condensate in 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/08/19/north-dakota-regulators-oil-gas-spill-exxon-valdez <comment><USER2> > "In North Dakota we do not regulate based on volume," Suess added. "Whether > we put a 10 there, a 100 there, a 1,000 there is not going to change our > response to the spill, it is not going to change what the responsible party > has to do, not going to change their remediation, it is not going to change > anything other than your curiosity."

That's a very self serving opinion Mr. Suess, since if word gets out that _millions_ of gallons were spilled under your agency's watch, yet reported as 10 gallons, that will create a lot of political pressure to change more than curiosity. That difference is a little more than "nothing to see here, move along".

<comment> munk-a Officially underlisting the volume, even if the state privately responds in an appropriate manner[1], ends up being misleading to the public and downplaying the environmental damage that's on-going. During the Keystone protests it was often repeated how small most spills are - now I'm curious if these small spills are just being under-reported.

1\. Which I have _extreme_ doubts about, but I'll just ignore that for a moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is why we participated in the protest against the pipeline that went over the Missouri and through tribal lands a few years ago. A crack over the river would be devastating to the surrounding communities. The claims that it is unlikely we're bogus as it's been shown time after time. Worse yet, we can't trust the officials to do the right thing. It's more likely they'd hide or downplay it than make sure it's properly taken care of.

<comment><USER4> >The claims that it is unlikely we're bogus as it's been shown time after time.

What are the stats on gallons spilled from pipelines vs trucks vs trains?

<comment><USER5> They're all greater than the amount of gallons spilled by not extracting and transporting it in the first place and instead finding alternative sources of energy supply.

FOH with that strawman.

<comment><USER6> Those alternative sources currently cannot replace fossil fuels entirely.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's just not true. With appropriate investment alternative energy technology today can replace all fossil energy sources. You just have to build the wind turbines and the solar panels, and the batteries, and the power-to- gas facilities. It's expensive to change the entire energy supply, but its doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The draft document here:

[https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/G...](https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Garden%20Creek%20Spill%20Remediation%20Document%2C%20Verifies%20Spill%20at%2011%20Million%20Gallons.pdf)

appears to be incomplete. Specifically, pages 3-7 appear to be missing.

From the article:

> Suess [the state's Spill Investigation Program Manager] defended his > agency's methods. "What I believe the North Dakota public wants to know is > not how big is it, but is this spill a risk to me," he said. "Personally, I > have actually been told by others that we are one of the most transparent > agencies out there. My boss is the North Dakota taxpayer, and my door is > always open, any citizen can walk in at any time and talk to me."

That statement sets off all kinds of alarm bells. Forget the facts. You can count on us to tell you what you need to know.

<comment><USER9> > "Personally, I have actually been told by others that we are one of the most > transparent agencies out there"

Are there really voting-age citizens that are persuaded by a comment like this?

<comment><USER10> The comment isn't supposed to persuade anyone, it's supposed to be a fig leaf for people who already support the political party in question, to cite in defense of their party.

This shifts debate into an unanswerable questions - whether or not the official in question is lying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Native American anti-pipeline protesters were endlessly demonized and criminalized, violently opposed by both police and privately-funded thugs, yet their concerns were clearly absolutely valid.

<comment><USER12> It disgusted me how places like reddit were absolutely, positively swarming with pro-pipeline accounts during that time, defending it as the more cost- effective and environmentally-friendly option.

<comment><USER13> > defending it as the more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly option

Is that not true? What's the best option for transporting oil and gas?

<comment><USER14> Not transporting it. A better solution can still be a bad solution.

If you absolutely are going to burn it (sigh), burn it on site for electrical generation. Transmission lines don't leak methane, and HVDC cables can be buried in a similar fashion to a pipeline. Methane extraction aligns well with geographies that have strong renewable growth and need combined cycle gas turbine backing until battery replacement can occur.

Now, if you're trying to export it and need it in original form, this doesn't work and you're going to try to avoid externalities of transport, which is what regulation is for.

<comment><USER15> You can suffer 60% loss on HVDC long range transmission alone, and that's assuming you have the tech for it.

There's a reason why coal is hauled to power station, instead of being burned near mines.

<comment><USER7> According to the Wikipedia HVDC losses are below 3% per 1000km. To have 60% loss you'd need to transmit the power halfway across the globe.

<comment><USER15> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My two cents: how are the regulators funded? Is it self funded like the CFPB through fines on the entities it regulates or through the state / federal government? Self funding, while difficult and not applicable to all agencies, seems to inoculate regulatory capture somewhat.

Second, what's Mr. Suess resume look like? His LinkedIn profile only shows his work as a regulator, was he in the industry in a previous life? The revolving door between industry and regulation at the highest levels seems to be a precursor to "oversights" like this.

<comment><USER17> > Self funding, while difficult and not applicable to all agencies, seems to > inoculate regulatory capture somewhat.

I would absolutely want to see statistical evidence of that before I supported it. Regulatory agencies are destroyed from within. If you tie funding to prosecution, a few corrupt appointees can cripple an agency for years. Simply by passing on a few big cases they would destroy the funding flow and lose critical employees _even if they didn 't intend to_.

If there is an external funding supply, it can be cut off but at least the agency will survive bad appointees. The US government in particular is built on checks and balances; betting everything on the agency keeping itself afloat is not balanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Where is the proof or evidence? Are we so captive by our own belief systems that we no longer require a single shred of evidence that anything even close to this ever occurred?

Since this is a blog, it doesn't even have the benefit of built-in (although perhaps suspect these days) credibility of investigative journalists and editorial vetting at the NYT, Guardian, WSJ, etc. One would imagine that such outlets would have reporters on flights immediately. A spill larger than the Valdez would certainly be news-worthy!

There are no photos of this spill in the article, except for a photo of some tainted water that could be anywhere and an irrelevant photo of salt-water contamination. I'd think that a spill of this magnitude would have highly visible proof from drone or even satellite photos, on the ground, etc. Did all of the gas condensate, and evidence, seep into a massive hole in the ground?

The sole piece of "evidence" is what appears to be an email with all identifying information, logos, etc removed. Even the alleged company or investigating agencies are redacted. It doesn't appear to be an official form, purchase order, etc. It could have been completely fabricated in ten minutes in Google Docs. No deep fakes necessary.

In fact, @mods, the HN headline should probably be changed from the submitter's _Whistle-blower reveals N Dakota leak of 11M gallons of gas condensate in 2015_ to the actual _Did North Dakota Regulators Hide an Oil and Gas Industry Spill Larger Than Exxon Valdez?_ Even the blog's headline is a question and not an answer.

As hackers/scientists/intellectuals, we should be asking for facts, hard data, and photographic evidence.

<comment><USER19> Since you mention drones, this Browns University exhibition (#NoDAPL Movement) in Providence, RI is fascinating, [https://www.brown.edu/research/facilities/haffenreffer- museu...](https://www.brown.edu/research/facilities/haffenreffer-museum/drone- warriors-art-surveillance-and-resistance-standing-rock) and a talk makes some content available to those not in RI: [https://www.brown.edu/academics/race- ethnicity/events/sioux-...](https://www.brown.edu/academics/race- ethnicity/events/sioux-surveillance-drone-warriors-and-nodapl-movement) seeing the footage is interesting for hackers/scientists/intellectuals, but I link these because the establishment made it hard to get that evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > over 11 million gallons of condensate that leaked through a crack in a > pipeline for over 3 years

These companies are making way too much money if they can survive for 3 years leaking that much oil.

<comment><USER21> At the current price of oil, a gallon of oil comes out to $1.34.

That's about $15 million, which though not 0, is not going to have an effect on the vast majority of oil companies.

<comment><USER22> It would be nice if this price for accounting, not just for consumption, always included the negative externalities. At least this number would then be 2-5x+ as high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> who this hurts most is north dakotan residents and their kids who will be drinking this and bathing in it as it seeps into the aquifer

<comment><USER24> It's on a native American reservation. Has there ever been a time in the history of North Dakota that the state has held any sort of priority for its natives? Even without the oil industry being involved?

The state of North Dakota has direct financial incentive from the oil industry. The profit margin is great enough that they can afford to lose millions of gallons of oil over a few year period and still have resources to cover it all up.

I don't foresee the state changing its priorities anytime soon. I believe fixing this will take federal oversight or intervention of some kind.

Edit: This particular spill was not on a reservation, but the article talks to people on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation who have been affected by spills on many occasions. Many of my sentiments remain.

<comment><USER25> The spill was in Watford City, which is not on a reservation.

<comment><USER24> You're correct. I was confusing another part of the article that talked to folks on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't think of a more compelling illustration of the need for leadership at every level of government, business, and society promoting environmental stewardship, including each of us who can reduce consumption, vote, and lead others to follow suit.

We can't rely on a Swedish 16-year-old with autism any more.

<comment><USER27> We have to rely on a 16 year old because governments are not providing any sort of environmental stewardship. Or any sort of leadership at all for a few decades.

It's no wonder people arrive at adulthood with the impression the lunatics are running the asylum and there's no alternative to their own direct action.

Why is her autism relevant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> the reason why you have to stop this kind of thing is because the people who are responsible are the same people behind the destruction of unions, public transportation, universal healthcare, etc. they think they are outsmarting us by getting away with crimes and stealing from us.

if you don't punish the criminals they will keep committing crimes. and no getting rid of laws (deregulation) will not stop criminals from committing crimes.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is appalling, but the comparison is a bit disingenuous.

It's not crude oil, and it's not in the ocean where it spreads to coat an entire coastline.

<comment><USER30> right, it's in the ground water that people are drinking.

<comment><USER29> That does seem likely, and is another reason the comparison isn't great. The nature and impact of the two situations are wildly different in various ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> alt link to referenced paper: [http://www.saltedlands.org/images/uploads/news/Vengosh_Brine...](http://www.saltedlands.org/images/uploads/news/Vengosh_BrineSpills_UnconventionalOilDevelopment_NorthDakota.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> Native North Dakotan here... and this really pisses me off.

</comment><comment><USER33> On a sidenote, I find it odd this story has a lot upvotes in such a short amount time, yet it's dropped from the top story to now the 15th result on the frontpage below stories that are older with fewer votes?

<comment><USER32> Woah, WTF.

It had more votes than any story above it, except one, and the votes to comments to time ratio was all better on this article.

Someone at HN really hates North Dakota, doesn't feel like a coverup is something techies should be talking about. Frustrating.

23th place and falling.

[https://imgur.com/a/yRz9FrW](https://imgur.com/a/yRz9FrW)

<comment><USER4> Or maybe it's people flagging it because it's unsubstantiated so far.

<comment><USER32> Seems like a metric that should be made visible, no? I mean... if we see votes, we should see flags... otherwise, flags are just a way to secretly control what people can see on the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> lota-putty Now, how is US different from China again?

Edit:

What will you do different tomorrow?

Why did it take a whistle-blower to break this news?

Why did he/she refused to give out their identity?

Again, how is US different from China in "covering up" you know what _.

        * national embarrassments

<comment><USER4> China is a country in Asia, the US is a country in North America. There are many other differences that you will be able to find if you put a small amount of effort into researching such a question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> simply awful

</comment><comment><USER35> There is a difference between a coverup and not informative reporting.

From the article:

"That is despite the fact that a North Dakota regulator has acknowledged the spill was much larger, and even the official record, right after stating the spill was 10 gallons, notes that the area was "saturated with natural gas condensate of an unknown volume," and thus may have been larger."

Hardly a coverup if they immediately stated the area is "saturated".

<comment><USER29> Reporting it as a ten gallon spill isn't mere incompetence.

> Suess readily acknowledged that the officially listed spill size was too > low. "We know it is significantly bigger than 10 gallons. We have known that > since Day One," Suess continued. Yet he defended the state's decision to > continue to list the spill as just 10 gallons.

<comment><USER36> As someone that is familiar with the software which powers a lot of the Oil and gas regulatory bodies in the US, this is not uncommon. It is basically all up to inspectors and regulators to determine and enter this data, with no tie back to actual measurements or integration to sensors that track well output or detect leaks/spills. Inspectors are typically former industry workers and may have perverse reporting incentives. Places like ND and WV are rife with corruption between wealthy drilling corps and regulatory bodies.

<comment><USER24> > Inspectors are typically former industry workers and may have perverse > reporting incentives. Places like ND and WV are rife with corruption between > wealthy drilling corps and regulatory bodies.

This is a major part of the wider issue. Regulatory bodies are financially incentivized to not work as intended. There needs to be a restructuring of the current incentives, so as to balance the priorities of the people and the planet.

Unfortunately, the rule makers are the profit takers, so don't expect them to self regulate..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What sort of a job could I find with my background? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN'ers,
Besides what the title says, feel free to share your own experience or if you want to
hijack the thread, feel free to do so with your own questions. Maybe we could even make this a monthly thing, supporting each other.
I speak two languages fluently and have a basic to intermediate in a third one. Last year I graduated from Psychology and I have some experience from doing internships. They amount to roughly 700+ hours in two different fields.
On the other hand, I have been teaching myself to code on and off for the past two years and full time for this one.
Language of choice: Python. I have dabbled with html, css, ansible, vagrant, git; among others.
Currently I am doing the second part of the course Systematic Program Design and MiTx: 6.00.1x, Intro to CS and Programming using Python. I'm also working through the exercises in freecodecamp.
Other courses and tuts won't be mentioned.
Hopefully this will give you a fair idea of my background. Now, the reason I am asking is because last week I applied to a job in Germany (I live in Central America [work visa is not an issue]), which was an internship (paid) as a research analyst. Obviously I didn't get it because of where I live.
Search for a job where I live currently? I did that for four months, every week after graduating. I got a single response. Additionally, most jobs I could get would barely cover rent. Let alone food and transportation for the rest of the month. In a way, it doesn't make much sense - at least to me it doesn't. Thus, Germany being my country choice. Moving to Germany and searching for a job isn't an option. I don't have the funds for that.
Any advice, suggestions, or if need be, even wake up calls would be appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
P.S. Half way through, this felt a bit like rubber duck "programming" :)
My github account if anyone is interested. Not much in it. https://github.com/teichopsia- <comment><USER2> I think you would need to decide what kind of programming job you want and make a "bet" on it. OK you chose python. Are you going to be using Django for building websites? Are you going to apply to research institutes to use Python in a scientific way? Do you know how to do this? Maybe taking a course for statistics with Python or R?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for answering. I had lost hope :)

I have focused my energies on learning how to make web apps (haven't made any - still learning), using flask. It is terrible daunting most of the time, due to the urges of wanting to bash my head in.

On the other hand, I also have an interest on 'data science(?)' \- which is on pause to learn the previous first.

Basically, go for what I'm interested in and wing it. Fair enough. Thanks!</comment></comment>


How to fly a paper airplane from Germany to Australia - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2011/02/how-to-fly-a-pa.php

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty fun example of how to run a PR story when the product is hard to sell =]

Samsung memory cards are just one of many products that can't necessarily push PR pieces by the product itself. Trying to get coverage for a new manufacturing technique or a higher average performance just isn't going to cut it.

This story is pretty ridiculous and also the kind of fanfare you can push to a large number of media outlets, even outside of IT in general.

That or I may just be influenced as I'm Australian ;)</comment>


New technology for aluminum production promises zero CO2 emission - <AUTHOR> https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2020/06/24/iceland_s_co2_emissions_could_be_reduced_by_a_third/ <comment><USER2> I'm not certain the differences, but there's been a similar effort as a joint venture between Alcoa, Rio Tinto, and Apple to clean up the aluminum smelting process. [1]

The aluminum industry is notorious for having incredibly high energy requirements, and being price sensitive to changes in energy contracts. The economics behind smelters are challenging and at an unimaginable scale. Having an electricity interruption of more than a handful of hours can cause the aluminum in-process to solidify, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage to the smelter and requiring months to fix. This paper [2] describes a framework for making decisions to enter/exit a market based on variability of inputs, investment required to exit/enter, etc. While the example in the paper is focused around renewable energy, it can be applied to other types of facilities. We covered this paper for about 2 weeks during undergrad, which at the time was painful, but it _was_ one of the most interesting papers and concepts I've read.

A great video outlining the refining process is available in [3]. Having worked there, I promise the safety at Alcoa is now far superior to what's shown in the video. Paul O'Neill hadn't become CEO yet [4].

[1] [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/05/apple-paves-the- way-f...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/05/apple-paves-the-way-for- breakthrough-carbon-free-aluminum-smelting-method/)

[2] [https://www.imse.iastate.edu/wp- content/blogs.dir/16/files/2...](https://www.imse.iastate.edu/wp- content/blogs.dir/16/files/2012/11/tee-mlw-061212.pdf)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5wPJp- hasU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5wPJp-hasU)

[4] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2019/01/22/have- we-l...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2019/01/22/have-we-learned- the-alcoa-keystone-habit-lesson/#1405482858ba)

<comment><USER3> I think its interesting in the Northwest, Huge Dams were built on the Columbia River to power Hanford (and the Manhattan Project) and the large glut of power after it was scaled back made it cheap to move Aluminum Smelters there. (and to Send 3GW of Super High Voltage DC power to LA from near Portland) Then, in the 90's, when power got more expensive (and more environmental rules) they moved them all overseas. That left a huge glut of Power in the area. So now, Facebook, Microsoft, AWS, Google All built their datacenters there.

<comment><USER4> Was Hanford there for power or for cooling water (and general remoteness so people didn't die in an accident)? Can't remember but I worked at PNNL for a few years.

Still lots of aluminum smelting with hydropower in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just caught a video the other day about manufacturing on the moon. He referred to this kind of research being a potential game changer for lunar colonization.

There are many metal oxides on the moon, and if you were trying to construct a habitat then a reduction reaction gives you industrial feedstocks and Oxygen to breathe. But electrolytic refinement of aluminum produces CO2 via the sacrificial anode, so you need a different chemistry to avoid that, or a steady graphite supply and a lot of photosynthesis.

He also mentioned that you can use electrolysis to refine iron, but that we have cheaper (but much heavier) terrestrial options.

<comment><USER6> Would love to watch it! Is there a good youtube channel or book for this sort of ISRU stuff? The ones I have found are too hand-wavy

<comment><USER7> I helped write a report [1] about the state of the Space Resources industry for 2019. This report should get you up to speed on the science, engineering, and law/policy going on in the field.

Our website specifically covers ISRU, including a monthly newsletter and sporadic articles (including one published this morning about minimizing lunar dust kick-up when landing vehicles on the Moon).

[1] [https://www.thespaceresource.com/news/2020/the-space- resourc...](https://www.thespaceresource.com/news/2020/the-space-resource- report)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel this is one of those articles where lots of important information is missing.

Do they have any expectations on how expensive this process will be? Is there a chance that it's cheaper than existing processes or will it cost more? Is this plant they plan to build subsidized? Do they have plans to enforce this technology?

Ultimately for every green technology there's a simple truth: It's only going to be successful if a) it's cheaper than existing technology or b) it's going to be required or incentivized by law.

I've been seeing too many articles about fancy new green technologies that promise so much. The problem is: Most of them never happen at scale. Because they're usually more expensive and there's no political will to enforce them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately this is the only article I can find in English. I recommend looking at the youtube video I already posted. They claim it will run at a lower temperature and use less space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I read the headline I thought to myself: Great, the tackled the overvoltage problem successfully. In electrolysis there are two parameters relevant: the current and the voltage applied. (An electrochemist once told me: voltage means costs, current means money). The current is directly proportional to the amount aluminum (in this case) produced, whereas the applied voltage is directly proportional to the energy involved in the process. So a minimization of the applied voltage means a huge increase in efficiency. But I was mistaken. I hope that these new electrodes are not consumed in the process, otherwise this would mean the overall efficiency would be greatly reduced and if that really means a reduction of carbon emission remains to be seen

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is their pitch from 2015 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyJCS1sldhg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyJCS1sldhg)

</comment><comment><USER10> "using multiple, vertical inert metal-alloy anodes and ceramic cathodes"

What is the process? Why was it hard before, and why does it work now?

I'm not expecting a thorough analysis, but the article was _very_ light on what they are actually doing, even for a casual reader.

<comment><USER11> Well, you are convertible AlOx to Al. The current process is AlOx+C+energy ->Al + CO2. This is practical for various reasons.

You can directly do AlOx+energy ->Al+O2. This is the proposal, and it works, somewhat.

I am not sure this needed to be in the article, as the balance between 'too basic' and 'sufficient' is tricky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As my mining engineer lecturer always said. Aluminum is congealed electricity.

This is a great breakthrough, but unless we reduce the energy requirements, for most countries it wont be a big change.

<comment><USER13> It changes the production process from producing Al+CO2 to Al+O2. That's a good thing for emissions reduction.

The power source for aluminium smelting is a separate question and can be replaced with renewables.

<comment><USER14> sadly not just any renewables - if the power goes off the Al in the pot lines hardens and ruins the hardware ... so solar and wind alone are out - geothermal and hydro (or those mixed with solar/wind) are OK

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would drop 5% of New Zealand's carbon emissions too

</comment><comment><USER15> How much energy is one soda can's worth of aluminum?

<comment><USER16> It's about 14.9 grams of aluminum:

[https://recycleusainc.com/how-many-aluminum-cans- equal-1-pou...](https://recycleusainc.com/how-many-aluminum-cans- equal-1-pound/)

Modern aluminum smelters consume 12,500 to 15,000 kilowatt hours per metric ton of metal produced:

[https://agmetalminer.com/2015/11/24/power-costs-the- producti...](https://agmetalminer.com/2015/11/24/power-costs-the-production- primary-aluminum/)

If we take the higher value of 15,000 kWh, that's

(14.9 / 1000000) * 15000 = 0.22 kWh for one can's worth of aluminum.

<comment><USER15> Thanks! Wow that's a lot of energy.

<comment><USER17> Fortunately it's 100% recyclable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like bullshit. Doesn't most of CO2 (in aluminum production) come from all the production of electricity that you need to smelt?

<comment><USER19> You will notice that this article is from an icelandic newspaper.

The electricity in Iceland is almost exclusively 'sustainable' energy (hydro and geothermal) and the Icelandic power system is one of the least carbon intensive in the world. At present it is #2 ([https://www.electricitymap.org](https://www.electricitymap.org)) in the world behind Norway at 28 gCO2e/kWh. Smelting aluminium in Iceland instead of say, the USA (~ 400 gCO2e/kWh), is already a great way to reduce the carbon intensity of aluminium products.

This article is discussing the CO2 emissions related to some integral processes within the smelter, and it is a big deal. No, it wont save the world, but also no, it is not bullshit. These are the sort of small incermental improvements that we require in ALL industries in order to dent global carbon emissions.

<comment><USER20> This is all true, Iceland is the worlds aluminum smelting hub. And the CO2 here is for the process.

However... what people fail to realize over and over is that the route for most of the worlds aluminum is from China to Iceland to China again. In tankers burning fuel like there is no tomorrow.

The biggest gain would be in how to refine the aluminum without shipping across the world twice.

<comment><USER2> >The biggest gain would be in how to refine the aluminum without shipping across the world twice.

Yes, that'd be nice. People are working on solutions, but the only economically viable way to refine the material is to use a highly intensive electrolysis process. My quick google search is showing 17,000 kWh/ton of aluminum [1].

It's currently economically viable to refine in Iceland, but China is the #1 producer of raw aluminum [1] [2]. Iceland only has 3 smelters, and the combined capacity is less than the 9 largest smelters in the world, 2 of which are in China.

Citation [1] also has mentions of how much better the process of smelting has become.

>So, within 60 years, by improving the technology, fluoride emissions have been reduced more than 15 times (Table 2) and annual amounts of fluorinated residues have decreased from 1500 ton after WWII to 60 ton today.

From a purely energy standpoint, raw aluminum production has become vastly more efficient [4], with kWh/kg dropping from ~27 in 1940 to ~17 in 2000. The theoretical minimum is 5.99 kWh/kg [5]

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/aluminum- pr...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/aluminum-production)

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

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

[4] [https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/aluminu...](https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/aluminum/pdfs/al_theoretical.pdf) (page 40 of the PDF, numbered 25 on the page)

[5] [https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS0...](https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS03_Panel1_Paper02.pdf)

<comment><USER20> > It's currently economically viable to refine in Iceland, but China is the #1 > producer of raw aluminum [1] [2]. Iceland only has 3 smelters, and the > combined capacity is less than the 9 largest smelters in the world, 2 of > which are in China.

Great post, saved it for future reference!

Do you know how China powers their much larger smelters?

And do you know if these possible difference in aluminum smelting is considered when the carbon footprint for something like a mostly-aluminum Tesla is made?

<comment><USER2> >Do you know how China powers their much larger smelters?

Looks like largely coal. [1] This surprises me, as China has some truly massive hydroelectric generation stations which would be ideal for smelting.

>And do you know if these possible difference in aluminum smelting is considered when the carbon footprint for something like a mostly-aluminum Tesla is made?

I'm sure it's considered, but really don't know more than that. There is a big push in the manufacturing field to get ISO 14001 (environmental) certification. Many large manufacturers are requiring that of their suppliers. I'm unfamiliar how well the certification would allow tracing back emissions. Even if there were a higher carbon footprint on production, some of that can be cancelled out by better energy efficiency of the vehicles. The cost per pound and cost of repairs can be higher on aluminum.

Tesla, in its push to be economical, appears to be going with steel on the Model 3 (compared to aluminum on Model S).

>Chowdhry highlighted the key advantages of steel over aluminum as being the lower production equipment costs, the lower worker training/skill needed to work/operate steel, the lower compensation and cost savings of steel workers versus aluminum workers, and the lower repair costs. [2]

We've seen significant increases in aluminum per vehicle [3], though much slower than estimates from 40 years ago would have said. The CAFE standards implemented in the Obama era seemed to kick things into gear, notably with the Ford F-150 switching much if not all of its body to aluminum.

[1] [http://www.world-aluminium.org/statistics/primary- aluminium-...](http://www.world-aluminium.org/statistics/primary-aluminium- smelting-power-consumption/#data)

[2] [https://evannex.com/blogs/news/112953413-tesla-model-s-vs- te...](https://evannex.com/blogs/news/112953413-tesla-model-s-vs-tesla- model-3-aluminum-vs-steel-infographic)

[3] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/496185/pounds-of- aluminu...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/496185/pounds-of-aluminum-per- car-in-north-america/)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py > Iceland's three aluminum smelters ... emit more than 1.6 million tons of CO2 > a year ... 30 percent of Iceland's total CO2 emissions

this presumably doesn't include the volcanoes, which globally emit hundreds of millions of tons per year per this

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how- much-co2-does-a-single-volcano-emit/)

<comment><USER21> Unfortunately, the volcanoes have thus far resisted public pressure to reform.</comment></comment>


Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors' Melted Uranium Fuel - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html?referer=https://www.google.com/ <comment><USER2> > [https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE](https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE)

This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text.

Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.

<comment><USER3> YouTube really should be detecting and pushing them to the bottom of search results. Downvoting doesn't appear to have much of an effect.

<comment><USER4> I believe likes and dislikes on Youtube both count as "interaction" as far as rankings are concerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident."

How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is much smaller, with 873 people per square mile. If you compare GDP/area the difference is even greater.

<comment><USER6> Chernobyl is still in Ukrane (near the boarder with Belarus) and not Russia (yet). At the time it was part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine has always been a bread basket of Central Europe.

Fundamentally, Chernobyl is a much larger (order of magnitude) event with 6 tons of radioactive material burned and released. Frankly, for all the coverage Fukushima gets, it's amazing that you rarely hear about the associated tsunami and the damage it caused... 22k direct casualties with 2.5k still missing, 230k people still displaced in 2015 with ~400k structures destroyed.

<comment><USER7> > 230k people still displaced in 2015

The displacement is mostly due to radioactive contamination still being high in several zones around Fukushima.

The tsunami was a huge catastrophe but it's over. There is no breaking news to get coverage.

Fukushima on the other hand is an ongoing disaster producing news from time to time which, naturally, get coverage.

<comment><USER6> No, they are separate. Only 100k people are still displaced by Fukushima covering an area of over 400km2.

[http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the- nuclea...](http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclear- accident/evacuation-orders-and-restricted-areas)

Sendai is some 50km away from Fukushima and the population center is well outside the evacuation area. Tamura and Minamisoma are the only cities within it.

The tsunami destroyed 400k structures and decimated Sendai, which (note that the figures in the linked article are in 10s of people and structures as indicated at the top of the figures). Some 300k people and 100k homes were within the inundation, ~25% of the local population.

[http://tohokugeo.jp/articles/e-contents16.html](http://tohokugeo.jp/articles/e-contents16.html)

In the Fukushima evacuation area the majority of the surface is less than 4x background radition ~1uSv/hr. In discussing an ongoing disaster please look at this video:

[https://youtu.be/G_0rQ9hnP84?t=477](https://youtu.be/G_0rQ9hnP84?t=477)

[http://www.world-nuclear- news.org/RS_Contamination_dropping_...](http://www.world-nuclear- news.org/RS_Contamination_dropping_in_evacuation_zone_0706131.html)

[https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know how they extract the molten fuel? Sounds like they will use more robots, but if it's taken this long just to get a robot to see the target, how on earth does a robot retrieve this stuff? Must be a career defining experience for these robotists, doing something that can really help an awful situation

<comment><USER9> That's basically what they say at the end of the article:

"I've been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we've never faced anything as hard as this," said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. "This is a divine mission for Japan's robot engineers."

<comment><USER10> > This is a divine mission for Japan's robot engineers

That is so cool. I'd love to see some kind of "lessons learned" summary from the robotics people.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.

<comment><USER12> I could imagine that shielding electronics from radiation could fall under military secret.

<comment><USER11> These days, once you get to the level where you can afford to develop them in the first place, there really isn't that much of a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power.

Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nuclear power statistics haven't factored in a major waste storage incident because one hasn't happened yet. Until we've witnessed multiple lifecycles of nuclear fuel consumption to full waste breakdown, the safety stats could still swing against nuclear power. Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste. From what I understand, breeder reactors can vastly reduce the quantity of a power plant's waste and produce waste with a much shorter half life. This isn't widely implemented or shared because that technology can also be used to produce weapons grade material. I think humanity will be ready if/when we can sort out our differences without violence and greed/corruption are no longer problems for most large orgs.

Additionally, renewables seem to have better scalability today than they did in the 90's when I formed my initial opinions. Right now, the worst case situation with a renewable power source is probably a large dam bursting. That's certainly possible due to corruption or terrorism too. If the three gorges dam suddenly burst, that could take out most of Shanghai. For most other renewables, the potential worst case is much milder though.

<comment><USER13> I agree that renewables are a very good alternative to nuclear power, but in practice moving away from nuclear means doubling down on coal. The problems with nuclear are political, but the alternatives to nuclear power are mired in political conflict as well.

As for your dam bursting scenario, something like that actually happened in the 70s when the Banqiao Dam burst. Nearly 200.000 people died. Fukushima had 0 radiation deaths.

<comment><USER14> You can't really say 0 deaths, because no one knows. We don't have good epidemiological models for wide-spread low-level dispersal such as was seen at Fukushima, we already know incidences of cancer and gene mutation don't scale linearly with exposure at low levels. There are also associated deaths from psychological factors of those who were evacuated, lost land / business etc. which will only become apparent in years to come.

Dams do have the potential for massive loss of life as you say, and they also suffer from the problem of massive centralisation of capacity (unlike e.g. solar or wind). On the smaller upside, the models related to fatalities are pretty well understood.

Perhaps an instant move away from nuclear may need coal, although here in the UK it's gas that has been taking up the slack while the government dilly-dally on whether to build out new nuclear or invest in renewables research (successfully doing neither).

I see over the longer term renewables coming up as nuclear is naturally retired at the end of the current plant's lifespan. Solar is now cheaper than coal to built-out in many places, there are other impediments but (generally) lack of public support isn't one of them (compared to coal/nuclear).

<comment><USER13> Deaths resulting from psychological factors involving those who were evacuated count when it comes to nuclear energy but not when it comes to dam failures? I don't think this kind of double standard is reasonable.

Besides, I'm pretty sure you just copied the argument about low level exposure from the Fukushima disaster wikipedia page, but you conveniently left out the next sentence: "given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out.[11] However, no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected."

Scare-mongering about nuclear radiation doesn't help anybody but the coal and gas industry.

<comment><USER14> I never said that such deaths form dam failures didn't count. The only reference I made to dams is that the model (physically traumatic & psych- related death) is well understood. Deaths due to low-level, widely dispersed radiation is not.

I'm afraid you were wrong to be "pretty sure" that I copied the argument from Wikipedia, I haven't read that page (until you pointed it out now). My comment comes from what I've picked up working for 10 years in epidemiology at Oxford. I didn't "conveniently" leave out the next sentence, and I wouldn't have quoted it anyway as its effectively tosh. There is no discernible increase expected on current models, but the current models are accepted (by most experts) not be useful predictors, as described in my initial post.

It's not "scare-mongering", it's being open to scientific discussion and exploration. Blind-adherence to your view-point doesn't help anyone but the nuclear industry.

Let's have open and honest debate. Even when that means we say "we don't know".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of surprising at this point that there's not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

<comment><USER16> > Kind of surprising at this point

Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old.

You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

<comment><USER18> You know if you stopped smoking in your early twenties they're not likely to affect you when 63. So this is more like smoking crack in your twenties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone's interested in related reading, there's a manga called Ichi-F[0] that walks through the daily life at Fukushima Daiichi.

[0] [https://kodanshacomics.com/series/ichi-f/](https://kodanshacomics.com/series/ichi-f/)

<comment><USER20> Wow, thank you! The art is pretty good overall and the story seems well done enough. There are 39 chapters according to where I found it to read online but MyAnimeList (MAL) says 24 chapters from 3 volumes.

More info on MAL here: [https://myanimelist.net/manga/61341/1F__Fukushima_Daiichi_Ge...](https://myanimelist.net/manga/61341/1F__Fukushima_Daiichi_Genshiryoku_Hatsudensho_Annaiki?q=ichi-f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated. Do they just leave the robot down there? Or do they somehow decontaminate it so they can use it again?

<comment><USER22> Robots just kept dying in there all those years [1]. I reckon they are disposable, in effect.

[1]: [http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots- fail/](http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots-fail/)

<comment><USER23> That's the primary reason it's taken so long, as far as I understand. It's not that it was hard to find the location, per se, but that the robots didn't last long enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > At the plant's entrance, a sign warned: "Games like Pokemon GO are forbidden > within the facility."

Was this a thing people were doing? Going to a nuclear disaster site as part of a game?

<comment><USER25> Probably nowhere near as dangerous but I think its interesting. [https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of- cherno...](https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of-chernobyl- stalker)

<comment><USER26> A number of Russian middle class volunteers who fought in Donbass war treated it as kind of similar experience - an adventurous game/vacation, a "noble quest to defend 'Russian world' from dark forces of fascism and imperialism".

<comment><USER27> Is there an evidence of that? We could open a case for these war crimes.

<comment><USER26> It wasn't war crimes, it was participation in a civil war fighting armed volunteer and regular forces of the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties)

reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...

<comment><USER29> I'm not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I'm worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven't seen one on that scale yet, doesn't mean we never will.

<comment><USER30> Ok, let's do a Fermi-like estimation.

Estimates on the number of deaths related to coal generation vary from around 13,00 to 30,000 per year in the US [1] and 500,000 per year in China [2]. The current world population is 7.6 billion, of which the US and China account for approximately 1.8 billion people. Let's round the coal-related death rate way down for easy math: 10,000 per year in the US and 100,000 per year in China. Then, multiply that rate by the world's population, and you have, let's say 450,000 coal-related deaths per year worldwide. This is a really squishy number, but we only need approximations here.

You were concerned about how many people would die every hundred years from nuclear disasters, so let's see if we can work today's 450,000 per year estimated deaths backwards for the last hundred years.

The world population was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.8 billion people in 1917. Assuming linear growth (I know, I know) and a strong r-value correlation for population vs. coal-related deaths (arguable, but again, Fermi estimate), we have to sum .00006 * population from 1.8 billion -> 7.6 billion, and we end up with approximately 28 million people.

Which is to say, if we could gather up all the deaths, worldwide, from coal, over the last hundred years, and convert it into a single disaster, it would kill the entire city of Shanghai, and New York for the apple on top.

That would have to be one hell of a nuclear disaster.

Now, there are arguments to be made that the energy we've received from coal has also powered hospitals and technology which have saved or improved people's lives. There are also arguments to be made that the side-effects of coal (hospitalization, environmental disasters) cause the death toll to absolutely pale by comparison.

And again, I've rounded these numbers down at every stage of the calculation.

[1]: [http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_fro...](http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_from_Coal.pdf) [pdf]; it includes its own numbers, at the 13,000 estimate, and the EPA's, at 14,000 to 36,000 range.

[2]: [https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by- ener...](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy- source.html) (blog, but includes lots of supporting links; I'm open to alternative sources that give vastly different estimates).

<comment><USER31> There are very few people who are anti-nuclear power who are pro-coal.

Even ignoring renewables, gas solves many of the worst problems with coal.

<comment><USER30> Sure, but even natural gas and rooftop solar have higher rates of death per year than nuclear. (In my second link above.)

In a world in which we must choose the lesser of evils for energy, nuclear is among the least evils, yet faces the greatest overall public resistance to new installations.

<comment><USER31> I dunno - even that source itself says that the death rates from solar would fall using better construction methods. It also notes (in the case of wind) that increased take up is associated with lower death rates ("Wind power proponent and author Paul Gipe estimated in Wind Energy Comes of Age that the mortality rate for wind power from 1980–1994 was 0.4 deaths per terawatt-hour. Paul Gipe's estimate as of end 2000 was 0.15 deaths per TWh, a decline attributed to greater total cumulative generation.")

I'd also note that the very low rates of death from nuclear power do not appear to include construction deaths, which are the only source of death measured from wind and solar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Non-mobile link: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan- fukushima-n...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima- nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> If I'm reading the article right, the robots actually made this discovery back in July.

</comment><comment><USER34> As seen as another HN thread, seemingly relevant here as well:

[http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material- reduces-h...](http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces- helium-damage-fusion-reactors)

</comment><comment><USER35> The YouTube video with images of the core that nytimes linked, is one of those spam news videos using text-to-speech.

<comment><USER10> I was wondering about that. Was about to adjust my false-positive filter for YouTube click spam. I mean, if the NYT links to it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Early on there was considerable talk about the contaminating impact this might have on the Pacific. Has anything come of that?

<comment><USER37> Water sampling happens frequently at various points near the reactor, all of which showed levels at expected bounds to date.

Most of the scary charts were fake: [https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp](https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What is the article talking about when they say "radiation-hardened materials"? What kind of materials might that be?

<comment><USER39> I don't know what they did in this particular instance, but basically there are two things you can do: shield, or in the case of electronics, use larger parts.

The smaller some piece of electronics is, the smaller the charges in there are, and the easier it is to introduce errors with ionizing radiation.

<comment><USER40> And the design of the electronics might help with radiation tolerance. Computation paths could be redundant to detect/eliminate bit flips due to radiaton.

(Some server Power cpus seem to run parallel in pairs, comparing the output at critical parts to detect cpu errors)

<comment><USER41> Basically the same as in space exploration. Also running at very low MHz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What causes a robots electronics to go bad in radioactive environments?

</comment><comment><USER43> Web link not bypassing paywall for me, anyone else? Or am I in some experimental cohort? :)

<comment><USER44> It worked for me. Anyway, here's an archived copy:

[https://archive.is/jQlRG](https://archive.is/jQlRG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > "... exotic space particles called muons "

welph, that's my eyes rolling right out of my head. I mean really, "space particles"! The might as well call all metals "supernova remnants" -_-

<comment><USER46> Would you prefer for them to be referred to them as "Cosmic Rays" :) ? To be honest, "Space Particles" sounds less silly and more descriptive. It also emphasizes that they're not generating the muons themselves, but collecting them from space.

EDIT: Though I guess, now that I think of it, it's a bit unfair to refer to muons as 'exotic'. People will typically encounter thousands of them in a day [1].

[1] [http://cosmic.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm](http://cosmic.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm)

[1] "Muons arrive at sea level with an average flux of about 1 muon per square centimeter per minute."

<comment><USER47> Aren't muons terrestrial particles created by cosmic ray impacts on the atmosphere, though?

<comment><USER46> Well, yes; but calling them "exotic-in-the-sense-we-don't-talk-about-them- very-much-even-though-they-pass-by-all-the-time-that-got-created-when-an- actual-space-particle-that-wasn't-that-exotic-like-a-proton-or-helium-atom- hit-the-atmosphere particles called muons" doesn't quite roll off the tongue. :)

They ultimately (and not in the we're all space dust sense, more like 2.2 microseconds ago sense) are caused by interactions with particles from outer space, so calling them space particles, isn't _that_ bad. :) But yeah; it's does elide that aspect of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> SO! it never made it to China LOL

</comment><comment><USER49> Why in fuck is this a link to mobile?</comment>


Facebook Video Ad Pitch Deck Reveals Plans To Steal TV And YouTube Dollars - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/13/facebook-vs-tv-and-youtube/ <comment><USER2> "Steal TV and Youtube Dollars"? This headline is nonsensically sensational.

This is a pitch deck describing an upgraded Facebook video product. In it, they make a case for the effectiveness of their ad targeting, and its competitive advantages. The news is that they're entering the broader video market.

Also, while the contents of the deck may be protected by an NDA, my sense is that there's absolutely nothing in this deck Facebook doesn't want you to read. I'd strongly suspect that it was an intentional leak to build awareness.

</comment><comment><USER3> I swear to god, the day people finally realize they can actually block ads, we're going to have a massive collapse of the industry. Fear that day.

<comment><USER4> There may be truth to this. I only recently finally decided to get AdBlock... and man... I can't imagine a world without it. Then again, whats to stop Chrome Store from removing the extension?

<comment><USER5> > Then again, whats to stop Chrome Store from removing the extension?

The fact that I'll switch to Firefox the day they do that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It amazes me that facebook has achieved this sweet spot of harvesting personalized ad dollars while providing so little utility.

<comment><USER7> So little utility defined how? I'm hard pressed to believe that a site almost a billion monthly uniques isn't providing utility to any of them. Or are you just on your latest "holier than thou" act and need to tell the world that you don't like facebook? Then congratulations for not liking facebook.

<comment><USER6> The amount and conviction of users doesn't imply usefulness. There are pretty obvious examples of this.

I don't dislike Facebook. I'm just amazed that their bargain is so lucrative. I don't think it will be best for consumers or the industry, but that's not really Facebook's responsibility. Is it?

<comment><USER8> Would you share some of the "pretty obvious" examples?

Not everyone is a genius and the fact that I can't figure it out, actually makes me feel insulted by your comment. The tone is just obnoxious!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." \-- Jeff Hammerbacher

<comment><USER5> > Jeff Hammerbacher is founder and Chief Scientist of Cloudera, Assistant > Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director at > Sage Bionetworks. Formerly an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners. > _Before Accel, [Jeff] conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook_.

Well, he could start by not working for institutions whose entire business is predicated on making people click ads.

<comment><USER9> This is why his words carry weight. He's probably watched capable engineers and managers go from successfully building an impressive software system to pulling out their hair because they're constantly trying to figure out human systems, which are highly variable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This "accidental" leak turned out to be a pretty good advert itself for Facebook video ads.

</comment><comment><USER11> FaceBook is such a waste of time & treasure. They should all be ashamed of working for such a useless company.</comment>


Ask HN: Porn sites use Facebook API - <AUTHOR>

I was surprised to visit an adult site today (with Firefox and NoScript, of course) and find scripts being pulled from facebook.com and fbcdn.com. In an apparently legitimate use of the API for "liking", the site can theoretically access basic information from my Facebook account. Worse, it's almost impossible to spot this in a browser without NoScript.
The ultimate Internet nightmare is here: your porn-viewing habits can be linked to personal details about yourself.
BTW The site in question is [NSFW]: http://www.shooshtime.com/ <comment><USER2> That isn't how the "Like" social plugin works. The site doesn't know anything about you. FB, on the other hand, does know you visited that porn site though I expect that amount of data is too much for them to store for long. They will of course definitely store something if you like it.</comment>


Sure, Earth Could Get Hit by a Deadly Asteroid–But There's an Upside - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-threat-getting-hit-asteroid-could-spur-international-collaboration-180961543/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I wrote a science fiction novel about an asteroid crashing into Earth, and did some extensive research on the topic (including how large an asteroid has to be to cause worldwide damage).

Regarding global unity, my book takes the opposite stance. In it, futuristic superpowers U.S and China squabble about who should do what, and global politics destroys any chance of stopping the asteroid in time. Of course, there's much more to the story, and there wouldn't be much of a plot if there was 'global unity' :)

<comment><USER3> What did you think of Seveneves, if you've read it?

<comment><USER2> I haven't read it yet. I want to read it though as I am working on my follow up book right now and one of the concepts is a 'human genetic database' managed by an authoritarian one-world government entity.

Speaking of global unity, the central premise of my book (and the series) is that without the asteroid, the world descents into an authoritarian quagmire with endless laws, taxes and regulations, and they use technology to control every aspect of our lives.

<comment><USER3> Ahh cool. I ask because _Seveneves_ has a much rosier (overly so in my opinion) end game, in terms of world powers cooperating and most of humanity also doing so, despite knowing for certain that almost everyone will die.

<comment><USER4> Not sure if that's the case,

[Spoliers!] ###########

It's been a while since I've read the book, but if I recall correctly nukes are used against Venezuela when they disagree with launching supplies to the Ark project. There are further hints of looming conflict (e.g. Ivy's fiance mentioning the nuclear sub he was in was on high alert).

I also believe there were numerous delays of supplies and disagreements even within NASA / the U.S. space program. Not too certain of all the world powers cooperating, although admittedly their cooperation on the Ark project at all may seem odd, but doesn't seem out of place with the status quo and how world powers "get along" in regards to the ISS?

<comment><USER3> [Spoliers!] ###########

It definitely is better than GP's book, where the powers that be completely fail to work together - in Seveneves, the Ark project actually succeeds!

There is definitely some conflict, I just don't think there was enough of it. Part of it may just be the fact that there's not much focus on what's happening on the ground, so we just don't hear about how it's being dealt with.

I was most conflicted about how normal people would deal with it. Eg I would expect mass riots and looting, very little of which happens according to the book - only in Venezuela apparently. And the nukes are used on their military, about a few days before everyone is going to die anyways, so I don't really see it as that big of a deal - nukes just don't mean as much in such a scenario.

I'm also surprised at there being only a single Ark project - I'd have thought at least one nation, say China, would want to strike out on their own.

<comment><USER5> Somewhat related, I remember reading some research that talked about how during natural disasters you get very little in the way of riots and looting. Rather people have a strong urge to cooperate [1].

It doesn't mention it in the linked article, but I also remember hearing that the idea that people get very violent can cause serious issues as resources go into military-police rather than relief efforts.

It makes sense when you think about it evolutionary. The groups that fell apart when the going got tough were not the ones that survived!

[1] [http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/31/how-disasters-bring- ou...](http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/31/how-disasters-bring-out-our- kindness/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the article, it makes a lot of sense. Note that in this book, the doomsday scenario is predicted to happen 2 years in the future, so it's not quite the same as a natural disaster that has already happened. So I don't think it would look quite the same in terms of violence and how we've evolved. It's more like, imagine 30% of the population suddenly lose their jobs or something like that, you could probably see riots happening today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Yet these threats also present an unusual opportunity for nations to band > together

My cynical prediction: "Phew! Okay, that was intense. Good job everyone. However, now we aren't 'due' for another impact that size for, like, _thousands_ of years, right? Plenty of time to go fight my neighbor!"

<comment><USER7> Would we want to band together to fix it anyway? I would have thought smaller teams from US, Russia, China and EU could all come up with independant solutions and see which works.

If an asteroid is hurtling and don't want people fucking around in committees.

<comment><USER8> Why do you think that individual smaller efforts are more likely to succeed than a single unified global effort. I see no evidence to support that. We're obviously going to spend a few years researching this before we start figuring out how to stop the asteroid to determine if we should be fighting this asteroid menace as a whole, or individually.

<comment><USER9> There's no guarantee a "single, unified global effort" will be better than multiple different efforts though, plus it sounds like putting all your eggs in one basket.

If events in 2016 has shown anything, it is that people are naturally divisive. We all live in our own bubbles and want to do things our way all the time, win all the time and be right all the time. Unless you're willing to compromise, it'll be hard to just tell people to team up with you and do things "the global way".

<comment><USER10> There's no guarantee they won't interfere with and nullify each other. For instance, one team lands a big ion thruster on the rocket to push it out of the way. The next detonates a nuke next to it. They screwed up the positioning so it didn't deflect the asteroid enough, but did wreck the ion engine. Oops.

At the very least you need some communication between the "competing teams".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > There's another factor that makes the threat of asteroid impacts a unique > opportunity for global unity. Unlike some more localized natural hazards, > like volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, these kinds of impacts are > theoretically preventable. "It's the only natural disaster that we really > have the ability to—at least in principle—prevent," says Barbee. "That > creates a certain type of international collaboration that is very unique."

The desire the unify the world is powerful. It might even be deeper than any surface issues. Sometimes I wonder whether, if we invented some machine that quickly and easily pulled carbon out of the atmosphere, people would adopt it or still continue to push for a global agreement. I think they'd adopt it but then they would look for other ways to unite the world.

<comment><USER10>
      some machine that quickly and easily pulled
      carbon out of the atmosphere

I want this so we can colonize Venus.

<comment><USER12> It's pretty simple really - just put back all the binding energy we gained from burning up that fossil fuel, minus what earth was able to absorb in the meantime. Hint: Start as early as possible, because the risk for positive feedbacks to nullify your efforts grows every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Yet these threats also present an unusual opportunity for nations to band > together

Yes, that has worked so well for climate change.

<comment><USER10> An asteroid is a lot more of a concrete threat than climate change, and there's no economic upside to getting hit like there is for CO2 emission.

<comment><USER14> But there is a "everything's fine, no need to worry, I can't admit the horrible truth to myself" aspect that is similar in both circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or complete chaos. Pillaging, plundering, and warring.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, 2016 couldn't get much worse, so bring it, Universe!</comment>


Ask HN: Who is streaming plays, operas, dance and music performances online? - vanilla-almond The closure of theatres and concert halls around the world has led some venues and organisations to stream selected works online.
Please post links to the companies or organisations making performances available online during the lockdown.
Here are two from the UK:
National Theatre (London):
The are streaming productions every Thursday. Unfortunately, they are only making them available for a week before taking them down. Last week they showed the play 'One Man, Two Guvnors'. Next Thursday (9 April) they are showing a stage production of Jane Eyre:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ntdiscovertheatre/videos
Royal Opera House (London)
They're broadcasting a mixture of complete ballet and opera performances every Friday:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RoyalOperaHouse/videos
If you know of more, please post them here in this thread so we can collect them all in one place :-) <comment><AUTHOR> The Vienna State Opera is releasing one opera a day, up for 72 hours (subtitles in multiple languages) [https://www.staatsoperlive.com/live](https://www.staatsoperlive.com/live)

The Metropolitan Opera (NYC) is releasing one opera a day, up for 23 hours, has English subtitles. [https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met- opera-...](https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met-opera- streams/)

[https://operawire.com/](https://operawire.com/) has a complete list of opera companies doing free streaming.

Wikipedia has details and synopsis for many operas.</comment>


Nuclear Power Professionals Are Serious About Joking - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/why-nuclear-power-professionals-are-serious-about-joking-around <comment><USER3> This reminds me of an excellent talk on paramedic work at motorcycle road races in Northern Ireland given by the late Dr. John Hinds [1]. These guys crash into things at up to 200mph with unsurprisingly grisly results, which makes Dr. Hinds's calm technical descriptions and gallows humor all the more fascinating. What's especially crazy is that the paramedics have to ride motorcycles at 180mph+ to get to the crashed riders! (Northern Ireland didn't have helicopter ambulances at the time of the presentation).

I highly recommend the video. Hinds was an excellent speaker with an excellent sense of humor. The technical details of motorcycle injuries and their treatments are very interesting, but I think the coolest part is the proximity of the riders and doctors to catastrophe and how it leads to an integration of the morbid and the banal.

[1] [https://youtu.be/MsZBXlTHPCg](https://youtu.be/MsZBXlTHPCg)

(edited out repetitive phrasing)

<comment><USER4> > 180mph+

That's rather excessively fast. It might end up with some tricky recursion issues where other paramedics will have to fix the first ones on even faster motorcycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The stark dark humor is just a way to cope with the crushing seriousness of reality. For instance, our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor. But one of the very few ways he would be humorous would be to call a meltdown an "uncontrollable rearrangement of geometry" with a wink and a nod precisely to both convey the seriousness of the issue and to use the needlessly absurd technical language to make us more empathetic to the common person, and therefore make us more readily internalize the seriousness.

<comment><USER6> a datacenter exploded due to fume build up in the backup power fuel tanks and we called it a rapid expansion of air

<comment><USER7> Doesn't Elon Musk refer to it as a RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - <USER2> whenever a launch vehicle opts out of existence?

I love these euphemisms.

<comment><USER8> Not just Elon Musk, that's a fairly common "euphemism" in the world of rocketry.

<comment><USER7> In my line of work - subsea handling equipment - the going phrase when things go really, really bad appears to be "EEE - Entropy-Enhancing Event"

Looks much better in the post mortem reports than the equivalent "Sh-t just blew up on us!!!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always enjoyed dark humor. Though not because I have higher intelligence. It's fun to get away from cliche and melodrama with any type of humor. And dark humor seems to be fitting for possibly bad situations. I wouldn't joke about death at a funeral but I might when someone talks about possible doom and gloom and death is abstract ways.

</comment><comment><USER10> I kept waiting for the author to use the term gallows humor. I was a little surprised when I got to the end and the phrase was never used.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Same thing for doctors. I was at a party with a ton of doctors and it was the funniest and also most gruesome party I have ever been to.

</comment><comment><USER12> I worked at a nuclear consulting co. where network hostnames were Simpsons' characters and people backed into parking spaces out of habit.

</comment><comment><USER13> My grandfather, a Norwegian, was a nuclear engineer for GE his whole career and helped build Hanford.

He was also the funniest person in my family.</comment>


Gmail.. Of all Mailservers - <AUTHOR>

<<I can't access my gmail acct.>> Could this disruption always be happening to the world honeypot?
:::Message on Firefox::: You have asked Firefox to connect securely to mail.google.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure. Normally, when you try to connect securely, sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified.
What Should I Do? If you usually connect to this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue.

     mail.google.com uses an invalid security certificate.
 The certificate will not be valid until 2/07/2015 5:18 AM. The current time is 23/06/2015 11:38 AM.
(Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate) <comment><USER2> > _" The current time is 23/06/2015 11:38 AM."_

If that is your _system_ time, then you need to set your system time properly.

<comment><USER3> Yep, certs have valid from and to dates, not just expiry :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is fine with my infrastructure - network (active dir.) & PC time, e.t.c.. It might have in a different geographic area to the Google servers/CDNs though. One would never have expected this kind of weird error/notification with Google services. I am thinking many other users will be encountering such frustration.</comment></comment></comment>


Tech developer quits UK saying Brexit has 'killed' his business - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/10/tech-developer-quits-uk-saying-brexit-has-killed-his-business <comment><USER2> It's quite difficult to take the article seriously when the first description of the guy's business is that he outsources software dev jobs to Eastern Europe and India. That sort of stuff is quite literally why lot's of people want out of the EU. It's a shame, but it's also understandable that people see this guy and say "Hang on, that's not bringing the prosperity and jobs we were told immigration would, that's doing the exact opposite"

</comment><comment><USER3> Alternative title: A guy with a business model relying on cheap foreign labour is surprised that his business model is failing when foreign labour isn't as cheap anymore.</comment>


InfoEther Acquired by LivingSocial - <AUTHOR> http://infoether.com/livingsocial <comment><USER2> Congratulations to Rich and company! That's a significant talent acquisition for LivingSocial, especially if most of the InfoEther team stays on board.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think we're all pretty excited, good times!</comment></comment>


Comcast's New Smart Sensor Will Count How Many Times You Pee - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/the-byte/comcast-smart-sensor-pee <comment><USER2> Go home Comcast, you're drunk,

</comment><comment><USER3> Soon to be found at your nearest call center!</comment>


Does the free market corrode moral character? - <AUTHOR> http://www.templeton.org/market/ <comment><USER2> Not in the ideal case. The best long term strategy in a free, highly competitive market with knowledgable consumers and no externalities is to build long term trust. The way to build long term trust is to be moral and ethical.

Now, this breaks down if:

        - There are externalities
        - The consumers are uneducated and uncritical
        - There is a monopoly

<comment><USER3> #1 and #2 are basically the default. Not good news for moral character.

<comment><USER4> No. Just his argument breaks down. Not all kinds of #1 and #2 dispose creating trust (and educating your customers) as a viable strategy.

<comment><USER5> "educating your customers" may be possible within certain domains. But is it possible in a free market structure which must include all people?

Does the definition of "transparency" also imply that all mechanisms which emerge in a free market must be "understandable" by all participants? That is, even if you fully disclose financials, but the transactions and risks are so complex the average "customer" can't or does not have time to make sense of it, is it "transparent".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Compared to what? As far as I can see, the only alternative to a free market is some kind of controlled market, and a controlled market requires some subset of the population to control it.

If you're a controller, then holding that much power is almost certainly going to lead to a corrosion of moral character -- the reason power corrupts is because it makes it too easy for an individual to get huge benefits (whether personal benefits or just service of their own personal view of the greater good) by doing (what look like) minor wrongs.

If you're not a controller, then it leads to a corrosion of moral character because your own interests will be best served by sucking up to the controllers, rather than by doing the right thing.

Of course, I haven't bothered to define what the hell "moral character" actually is, but I think the above will hold for most sensible definitions.

<comment><USER7> _As far as I can see, the only alternative to a free market is some kind of controlled market, and a controlled market requires some subset of the population to control it._

Free markets do not create powerful people? I think if anything the supposed US/Soivet case studies (both of which are imperfect examples of the ideologies they were supposed to represent), is that both claimed to be removing excess power from single hands. Both did the opposite. Both ended up creating a power class.

In the case where powerful individuals are public as opposed to private people you can at least complain. With free markets, as long as their actions are legal, it's 'fair.' To create a framework for accountability, you need to create a legal framework, which of course makes the 'market' a little less 'free.'

A patent troll doesn't need to justify his actions in terms of public good. Nor does any other commercial entity. The free market theory as a _moral theory_ might be summed up as: everyone do what's best for them. Between, supply & demand and game theory, we'll hit the best result for everyone.

<comment><USER8> > Free markets do not create powerful people?

They do only if someone is selling power, something that happens in non-free markets as well.

In a free market, willing participants make the deals that they want, pretty much without regard for what other people want. In other words, they're not affected by the powerful.

To me, the key point is not whether someone else has the money to pursue their dreams, it's whether I have the freedom to pursue mine. Non-free markets almost always place more restrictions on the little guy because rich guys buy exemptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your question parses, but makes no sense, semantically. Somewhat like " _do colorless green ideas sleep furiously or seductively?_ ".

Firstly, free markets are not entities which can act, they are a social systems which organize people, and secondly, "moral character" is a complicated abstract concept linked to personal choice and ethics.

Rephrase your question more succinctly and the answer will be obvious.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think "Freakonomics" answers this. If your goal is to get money, and there is no monetary penalty for being "immoral", then of course people are going to be immoral. It's the same reason corporations dump toxic waste -- paying the fines is cheaper than not producing the toxic waste.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anyone defines a "free market" as meaning that there is no penalty for getting money by immoral means (e.g. stealing your neighbour's wallet). Polluting a river should, of course, also be penalized and/or priced appropriately.

<comment><USER7> You don't need to _define_ free market as that. You just need not to define free market as not that.

Penalties can either be legislated (eg fines) or consumer generated (eg Nike). But internal morality is not part of how the market works. Sure you can have Google not being evil. But if you have a sound an economic opportunity presented by creating (fro example) waste. It will be taken up by someone. Without legislation forbidding it, you can bet that there would be a business in taking garbage from London & dumping it at sea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with questions like this is that "moral" character is kind of a relative and arbitrary concept in the first place. What's immoral today might be moral tomorrow, and vice versa. In fact, if a free market becomes ingrained into the culture deeply enough, it will eventually decide what's moral. Not the other way around.

<comment><USER7> _What's immoral today might be moral tomorrow, and vice versa_

Well then you've already made a big statement about morality. (its relative & arbitrary). Welcome to the relativist school. You leave behind virtually all humanist ethicists, much of the The Enlightenment and of course most western religious traditions.

You are in an extreme minority. You will be accused of nihilism.

But even as a relativist, you could ask yourself questions like:

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their own view of what is moral?

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their friends & neighbours of what is moral?

Does the free market cause individuals to be immoral according to their seniors view of what is moral?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excellent submission. It seems that the method they use for conducting discussions: asking a whole bunch of people in parallel for an essay, and then revealing them, allows to conversation to be a whole lot less contentious, and a much broader set of viewpoints and arguments to be heard (rather than the argument being dominated by fights over a few sticking points). I see that there are many other questions asked by Templeton.org as well. Thanks for pointing it out.

As for my opinion, I don't think the free market corrodes moral character, because it can spring back. On the other hand, it can, and it does, confuse, hide, and suppress it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Non-transparent markets do.

<comment><USER4> Fortunately there is money to be made (arbitrage) in creating tranparency.

<comment><USER13> Unless you ban one end of that arb (shortselling).

<comment><USER4> I agree.

But not all is lost. There are ways around that. Ever heard of Put-Call-Parity and similiar relations that allow for the creation of synthetic products? (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put-call_parity> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_options_position>)

<comment><USER13> I trade options, and I know that people cuold put on synthetics in lieu of shorting outright. But the market makers on the other side of the trade have to short the stock in order for them to properly hedge. Since it's much harder to do, the spreads on options became pretty retarded after the short-selling ban. This reduced liquidity, put the VIX, VXO, VXN, to all time highs, and exacerbated the moves downward.

The past 30 days have essentially become one very long one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No, I would say free markets expose existing moral/character flaws (namely greed).

<comment><USER4> Free markets turn greed into an urge to help other people (to get their money).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back." — Abigail van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman), American newspaper advice columnist (1918-2002)

One of my favorite quotes on character. Think of it this way - if you meet the typical VC and they don't think you can make them money, what will they do? Offer you intros? advice? help? feedback? no.. they will stop communicating with you as quickly as possible because they are really busy and have to look at more deals that help make them a higher return on their fund.

In this example, the forces of the free market are directly in contrast to this definition of character.

<comment><USER16> So if I understand you, everybody in the world should spend special time with you or they're morally bankrupt?

I think you've twisted your definition of reality a bit. Obviously, even in a world full of wonderful saints everybody can't spend hours with everybody else. The math just doesn't work out. So the act of limiting one's time with someone else cannot be immoral or bad -- in fact, it would seem to be a defining good quality. The reference you quote could only be applied in those cases where you're already spending time with each other: a restaurant, a bellhop, in an elevator, etc.

You took a wonderful quote and made it into something it was never meant to be.

<comment><USER15> I don't think my point came across as intended, and was probably not the best example either. Just to be clear.. I ignore homeless people all the time and do not see it as a reflection on my character.

Most people that you meet with the ability to help you with your venture will do so - they will give you feedback, make intros, etc - often without the need for anything explicit in return. Its human nature, and what I would consider a norm for moral character. I think most people would say that given the resources, they would help anyone they could - everyone has a need for basic altruism.

However, when you introduce the need to capitalize on this same activity, it requires a change in behavior. My point was that, the same guy who would help you out for no reason as a norm, the minute he starts doing the same thing for money he does not have the luxury to help you in the same way any more. Now he has to make a business out of it and be efficient.

That is what I was trying to illustrate. This ability to be altruistic inherently declines when you have to take on the same role to make profit. The ability to treat someone well 1) 'who can do you no good' or 2) 'who can not fight back' changes when the bottom line is profit. It does change the nature of our character, and I think that is inherent to the nature of succeeding in a free market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, I always read that foundations ads in the Economist. It's the first time I actually see those essays they mention.

</comment><comment><USER17> Free markets will succeed only when race to the bottom is prevented in this flat world.

<comment><USER8> Are you really willing to pay as much for rotten bananas as you are for good ones?

The free market will satisfy both, at different price points. Since there are uses for rotten bananas, this is a good thing. (The "race to the bottom" people think that other people should do without things that the "race to the bottom" people don't like.)

Don't buy what you don't want, but don't insist that other people share your preferences.

<comment><USER17> Preventing race to the bottom = Social Safety Net

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Finally, something I know the answer to.

 _No._

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes. I want money.

</comment><comment><USER20> Obviously not. People treat each other horribly in the least economically free countries. I think the pattern generally holds as you move along the spectrum, too.

<comment><USER3> Correlation does not imply causation. The social and government restrictions that allow capitalism to function (enforcement of contracts, property rights, police/military protection, etc) also prevent lots of bad moral behavior.</comment></comment>


My Startup has 30 Days to Live — In 30 days, my startup will be be dead - <AUTHOR> http://mystartuphas30daystolive.tumblr.com/post/53839497912/in-30-days-my-startup-will-be-be-dead <comment><USER2> plenty of discussion going on here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939498)

</comment><comment><USER3> the tech industry would do much better if it would circumvent VC by going B2C...</comment>


Show HN: http://datafa.me/ first step in 'small data' analytics - <AUTHOR>

There is plenty of work being done on 'big data' problems but there aren't many tools for visualizing and comprehending small bits of data. A teacher should be able to copy/paste her class grades to quickly draw a chart. A kid should be able to connect to simple data files on the net, visualize the data and investigate trends among various dimensions. A blogger who does an experiment and generates a few hundred lines of data should be able to share it the way she can share videos.
http://datafa.me is currently at the 'minimum viable product' stage. I'll be expanding to more charts, adding more intelligence to detect the most appropriate visualization, saving data, making it private and many other things. However, after reading articles from other product developers, I decided to start getting feedback, rather than develop in isolation.
I'd love some feedback! <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why the link isn't clickable, here is another try: <http://datafa.me>

<comment><USER2> Links aren't clickable in the initial submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I applaud your initiative. I am doing something similar, but textual. I also believe that <http://www.wolframalpha.com/> does graphing of data.</comment>


Inside the AMD Microcode ROM [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9614-inside_the_amd_microcode_rom <comment><USER2> According to a question at the end, this is about _very_ old CPUs, K8/K10, because the newer ones authenticate microcode updates with public key cryptography which hasn't been broken. Still pretty amazing stuff.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the description says "up to 2013." I think that's likely a bit more recent than K10 but I don't know.

<comment><USER4> That's just the tail end of K10 production (201 _2_ according to Wikipedia). Its successor, Bulldozer, came out in 2011, but a new architecture being out doesn't mean its predecessor immediately stops production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder whether it would be possible to add aftermarket AVX-512 instruction handling? Not for performance necessarily, but for compatibility.

<comment><USER6> We have robust support for alternate code paths based on CPU flags after many years of this kind of thing. Is that really necessary or useful?

Custom microcode handling is a lot more brittle and chip- specific yet nearly equivalent to overloading in software your call to some avx512 op.

<comment><USER7> You're right, it isn't needed

The "last time" this was done was in the x87 days, where if the math coprocessor wasn't installed you could trap the corresponding interrupt and handle it to emulate the instructions.

<comment><USER8> This is done for MIPS FP emulation too - [https://www.linux- mips.org/wiki/Floating_point#The_Linux_ker...](https://www.linux- mips.org/wiki/Floating_point#The_Linux_kernel_and_floating_point)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if it would be possible to dump, from microcode, the contents of the microcode ROM. This would neatly sidestep the problems inherent in decoding the ROM contents from pictures of decapped chips.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible to hack the microcode so that it can run ARM assembly natively?

<comment><USER11> It would be hard, because the ISA is tightly bound to the underlying silicon's structure.

Some of the commands cannot be translated to the silicon effectively or not at all.

e.g.: MIPS have 64 x 64bit registers. You can use any of them as a source or a destination, however x86 always designates EAX as the ALU accumulator. This has some profound effects on silicon design.

<comment><USER12> > x86 always designates EAX as the ALU accumulat

Actually no. After decoding there is nothing special in the aex register.

AMD at some point was going to release K10 which was basically Zen but with an ARM decoder. It got cancelled when Zen proved viable and AMD decided it was better to compete with Intel than all the ARM vendors.

<comment><USER11> > Actually no. After decoding there is nothing special in the aex register.

The microcode, or specifically the modern x86 processors, are using register renaming to move things around, but the actual ASM commands imply that the results should end in EAX register. You cannot arbitrarily do a MUL and get the result from EBX for example [3]. i.e. x86 assembly dictates where the results should end in.

AMD played with two ideas: A pure ARM core, and a hybrid x86 core with ARM co- processor. The ARM core missed the performance targets [0], and they also abandoned the ARM accelerated x86 core [1], but I don't know why.

They never intended to go full TransMeta and transcode the x86 ASM into something proprietary or ARM.

Bonus: It seems they are _still_ muling the idea of X86/ARM hybrid [2].

[0]: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_graviton_specs/)

[1]: [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205078-amds-project- sk...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205078-amds-project-skybridge- the-armx86-hybrid-core-is-officially-dead)

[2]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/comments/8x4sba/the_retur...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/comments/8x4sba/the_return_of_the_x86arm_hybrid/)

[3]: [https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_210.html](https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_210.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is AMD microcode not open source to begin with?

<comment><USER14> because there's a lot of proprietary stuff in microcode that's used for accelerations. gfx drivers too. it's the reason the closed amd drivers are so much faster than the open mesa ones.

<comment><USER13> _> it's the reason the closed amd drivers are so much faster than the open mesa ones._

On the contrary, Mesa is faster than their blob. AMD themselves are working on replacing blob with Mesa in the long term.

Firmware doesn't offer any acceleration advantages, it's used for different purposes.

<comment><USER14> yeah... I don't know what numbers you're looking at but that's not true in the general case. and this isn't firmware, it's microcode. firmware is already on the chip. microcode is used so the os can take advantage of chip specific features, like security patches or even acceleration.

<comment><USER2> Do you have actual benchmarks which show the closed source OpenGL driver significantly faster than the open source one? In Phoronix benchmarks I've seen, the open source driver beats the closed source one by a large margin.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-P...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU- PRO-16.40-Deus-MD)

<comment><USER13> That's years ago and is outdated. Today Mesa beats the blob point blank, thanks to AMD themselves working on optimizing radeonsi.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTTP request logging in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://brightinventions.pl/blog/http-request-logging-in-node/ <comment><AUTHOR> One of the most basic kind of logging every backend application should have is a trace logging of all incoming HTTP requests. Yet it's not easy to make it right and useful. Most of the backends we create at Bright nowadays are Node.JS applications based on Express. Although there is a plethora of libraries that are to handle logging for you, we would not be ourselves if we haven't tried to build something on our own (even if only for the sake of knowing the internals better). Let me show you what we have learned and what we do to ensure our logs are meaningful and useful.</comment>