Ask HN: How are you dealing with scraping hits from EC2 machines? - <AUTHOR> My website is being constantly hit by scrapers from EC2 machines http://d.pr/i/bLtE . I went aggressive and blocked all access from Ec2 IP's http://bit.ly/SUOaof until I realized that quite a few reader proxies like Flipboard are based out of Ec2 and blanket blocking of these amazon machines wont help. How is the community dealing with this problem? Can you advice?<p>Edit: I've seen somewhere that Stackoverflow blocks all the ec2 machines. I don't think this is the most optimal solution considering many legit services. Also the hits come from different ip's. <comment><USER2> I've done a lot of automation with Selenium, on EC2. (For the curious, it was on behalf of clients with legit access, not wholesale pillaging of a public resource)

1) You can block EC2 wholesale. You've mentioned issues with this, and can be bypassed via VPN or using another network. EC2 is attractive because it's so cheap (with spot instances, starts at 0.3 cents per hour), but it's not the only option.

2) Timing. Normal traffic isn't rapid fire. Many scrapers, however, fire off their scripts as quickly as possible. Block traffic that doesn't have enough meaningful pauses.

3) Report addresses to Amazon. I really don't know if they'd take action.

4) Reverse lookup, or whitelist addresses. I know if it's a legitimate source (like Flipboard) they'd probably work with you at least a little bit. Reverse lookup might not be successful, but maybe that can help you whitelist any legit sources that map their AWS IP to a legit DNS name. Most scrapers use the AWS external domain name. Also, I imagine legit sources give you a distinctive user agent, so that can help you let traffic through.

However, if you have a public resource, this is simply an issue you have to deal with. Anayltics: I'd just filter out traffic scraped traffic from your analytics. Content duping: blocking scrapers won't stop this. If someone stealing your content can't scrape at 0.5 cents per hour, they'll pay someone 5 cents an hour to copy/paste. You just have to use the same diligence others use, in terms of reporting to Google, etc. Perfomance: use Varnish/nginx/etc to combat performance hit from scrapers.

<comment><USER3> > 3) Report addresses to Amazon. I really don't know if they'd take action.

They take action. I've seen it done.

<comment><USER4> They take action on _abuse_. I am not sure scraping is abuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no silver bullet for stopping web scrapers. If you just try to block User Agents or IPs, all you are doing is putting a small hurdle in their way. You have to employ a lot of different tools to be able to make the wall high enough that they actually stop trying to scrape you. Some of the key things you need to do are:

behavioral modeling - rate limiting, bandwidth restrictions, etc

identity verifications - make sure they are running the browser they say they are, allow google and other search engins by whitelisting their IPs, block others that are pretending to be google, etc

code obfuscation - make it hard for them to scrape your code. Change up the CSS, etc.

OR you can use an automated service to do all this for you. Check out www.distil.it. Full disclosure, I'm the CEO of Distil.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use mod_qos but keep a close eye on it for first few weeks as you tune it:

<http://opensource.adnovum.ch/mod_qos/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I had problems with people scraping Twicsy so hard that it was taking the site down. For a while I would manually review the top IP addresses requesting pages a couple times per day and look for patterns and ban IP's based on that. Then I created a script based on the patterns I recognized to do it automatically.

But then I just made Twicsy fast enough to deal with the traffic so I don't need to worry about it anymore. I guess it depends on your business model whether or not that will work for you.

<comment><USER7> We've blocked a few of the worst, but mostly just added servers to deal with the load.

We actually found out who one of the worst ones was and contact them. It turns out it was a major legit proxy, but they had a bug in their proxy code that caused refetching of one of our urls over and over. They were very easy to work with and they fixed the bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there known user agents that you can identify as coming from the scrapers? If so, you either block that way and not worry about IP addresses or choose to disable Google Analytics on those requests so it doesn't skew GA data.

<comment><USER2> As was identified, most of the scraping occurs via Selenium. Selenium just automates a real browser, so it'd look like 100% legit traffic with a legit user agent (it defaults to using Firefox)

<comment><USER9> So the solution is simple isn't it? Google Analytics filter > filter referers like Selenium (or the entire EC2 block).

<comment><USER2> Not sure how you could filter Selenium. A well written script looks like normal traffic.

<comment><USER10> A well written scraper looks like normal traffic in the same way that a well written pseudo random number generator looks like a random number generator. It'll fool your eye but not statistical analysis.

Think about the goal of a scraper, it needs to actually walk through all the content. That doesn't look like a normal user at all. An individual request might look ok, but in aggregate the pattern of a robot pops out.

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/pubcrawl-...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/pubcrawl- protecting-users-and-businesses-crawlers)

<comment><USER11> So, would that detection mechanism be able to deal with a number of coordinated scrapers rotating through lists of proxies, using different User- Agent strings, making requests with (pseudo-)random delays between requests?

<comment><USER10> yup, read the paper

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You could add a CAPTCHA to suspect client IPs? You could implement some sort of real-time log analysis / monitoring based on client IP, x-forward-for (?) headers and User Agent, also possibly block certain geo-IP ranges from non- core customers. Inserting a javascript "puzzle" is also a way to test that a browser is generating the traffic and not a script.

</comment><comment><USER13> If these scrapers abide by robots.txt (you do have a robots.txt, right?) and scrape only whatever you left publicly accessible, then I think you should work on your server performance, because if a scraper causes problems, you'll have much worse problems once whatever you've built becomes popular.

Hunting down bots is a waste of time and effort better spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER14> Use this : <http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLimitReqModule>

</comment><comment><USER9> Let's examine your motivation: why do you want to block said scrapers in the first place? SEO concerns (dupe content)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly duplicate content & messing up my analytics (increased bounce rate, decreased time spend on page etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it seems to be from selenium (from referer), it is triggering the JS too, we are using Google Analytics.

<comment><USER15> Why not exclude the EC2 ip range from analytics ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many have suggested editing your robots.txt. This is absolutely the first step you should take. You could try blocking the crawlers by name or limit the request rate with a crawl delay in the robots.txt.

If the crawler ignores your robots.txt, check it's name in your access logs. Often, people build things and set them loose without thinking about the consequences. Many crawlers have a homepage / programmer contact information somewhere on the web. Let them know they are hammering your website.

What is the rate at which requests are being made? Are they making 1000 requests per second? Downloading tons of images? You should probably just ignore it if it is less than 1 request per second.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scraping, in itself, is often not prohibited, wrong, illegal, or against most sites' TOS. Your site would allow me, for example, to scrape all your content for my own personal use, but I couldn't re-publish or re-sell the info.

It seems hard to limit legitimate uses of a free resource without changing the requirements on how users access the site (require account signup, use CAPTCHAs, use CSS/JS to only display properly in a browser).

As one who does a lot of scraping, I have encountered few barriers that can't be (legally) overcome with a reasonable amount of effort.

<comment><USER17> > _Your site would allow me, for example, to scrape all your content for my > own personal use_ //

On what basis are you claiming this. Sounds like it would be true under fair- use clauses of US Copyright law but it's certainly not true in the UK (and by extension I presume for you to perform on content served from the UK though I've yet to read a thorough treatment of how the [ie any] law works with server locations).

Commercial considerations are usually much broader than selling too: not only could you not resell it but you couldn't distribute it (whether by publishing or otherwise).

<comment><USER11> From TOS on his site:

"Cucumbertown authorizes you to view, download and/or print the Materials only for personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices contained in the original Materials."

So, for example, I could grab everything from the site (minus copyrighted images, etc.) and make my own personal DB of the content. Obviously that's a lot of effort for a little reward for one person, but if I created a repo with a set of tools for people to do this for themselves it could become a big legitimate source of "scraping" traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> CloudFlare's scrapeshield might help:

<https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/scrapeshield>

</comment><comment><USER19> Do you have a robots.txt? That's the standard way.

<comment><USER6> Calling them "scrapers" implies they are doing something nefarious (stealing content). Robots.txt is for law abiding bots.

<comment><USER15> Not really. "Scraping" just refers to extracting data from a site using an automated method, it doesn't have any connotations about the motivation or acceptability of the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So the referer is a local Selenium server? How did you figure out it was an EC2 machine?

<comment><USER6> That second link digitalpbk gives shows all public EC2 IP address ranges: <http://bit.ly/SUOaof>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I assume HN itself is also being scraped to death, so ...

s/Ask HN/Ask PG/</comment>


Boeing May Halt 737 Max Production - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/business/boeing-earnings-737-max.html <comment><USER2> This is an incredibly weird article. It's basically a prolonged sob-story about how terrible a production halt would be.

No doubt there would be an economic impact but the writing is just full of hyperbole and doesn't name any sources for it's claims (like 0.6% of GDP growth rate - note the _growth rate_ , not 0.6% of GDP or 0.6% of GDP growth ...). It also fails to differentiate between the impact of existing planes not able to fly and continued production.

This smells like a PR campaign to put pressure on regulators.

Only, in this instance, the FAA probably won't risk further embarrassment by declaring the plane safe while EASA is holding out. Most of the world will wait for them rather than go with the FAA.

<comment><USER3> There seems to be a lack of objectivity in the article. Is a reduction of 0.6% of the growth rate (which, again, is 0.6% of probably a percentage like 2% of 3%-- a very small percentage indeed) a small price for the safety of air travel? There's zero discussion of the downsides of letting these planes fly. Or, stated in other words, are we willing to accept a third plane's worth of casualties over an already known systemic error, for a miniscule improvement to the growth rate? This strong-arming is not what Boeing needs right now.

<comment><USER4> > a small price for the safety of air travel?

You're taking it way too far in the other direction. It's not whether we have safety or not, it's a matter of some very close to 100% number vs. a different very close to 100% number. (And at this point it's more likely the same future safety level but different amounts of training.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My (conspiratorial) take is that they're making noises about this so that politicians can step in and pressure the FAA into approving their modifications. Talking about blue-collar job losses and economic impacts has the amazing effect of cutting through politicians' radar on both sides of the aisle.

<comment><USER6> If you think they could pressure the FAA, do you also think they could pressure the EASA and CAAC?

<comment><USER7> They could, but not as easily. On the other hand, the FAA will look very bad if the EASA and CAAC don't agree with them.

This is what I think is going on:

Part of the 737MAX fundamentally is that 737 NG pilots did not need retraining to fly it.

That's a nice goal, but it is not compatible with MCAS. With MCAS in the picture, pilots need to fly out two situations in a simulator: (1) MCAS goes bezerk and they have to manually disable it, and (2) they get into the kind of trouble that MCAS is supposed to stop and then MCAS doesn't stop it.

I think Boeing is hoping they can do a software fix but not add a training requirement and I think that's a major reason why the fix is taking so long. I can't believe that regulators will clear the MAX to fly again without the training requirement. If Boeing is trying to avoid simulator training, they are doing a lot of harm to themselves, their shareholders, their employees, airlines, their suppliers, the U.S. Economy, etc. If they bite the bullet and accept the simulator requirement they can probably get back in the air soon -- they might have to pay for the simulator training that they promised airlines wouldn't have to pay for, but that's probably less than what they are going to pay because of delays.

Another problem with their foot dragging is that delays beget more delays. The more time they waste, the more new problems will be discovered, the more it will cascade. The fast way out is the way through, but from the beginning to this moment, Boeing has not appeared to recognize the gravity of this situation.

<comment><USER8> Could it be the case that Boeing is behaving obstinately as a negotiation tactic, perhaps to negotiate more favorable terms concerning who pays for the re-training? Maybe they recognize that retraining will be necessary, but fear if they admit it they'll have no leg to stand on when airlines demand Boeing pays for it. Or maybe they realize retraining to some degree is an inevitability but they're trying to minimize the breadth of that retraining?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is also an issue with the 777X engines, as reported by the Seattle Times. This could cause a lot of pain for a lot of people in Renton and Everett. [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boein...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boeing-says-737-max-crisis-could-temporarily-shut-down-renton- production/)

<comment><USER10> From my understanding, the issue with the GE-9x is a durability problem with a component in the compressor that GE itself is manufacturing. It's not good news but it shouldn't be a showstopper.

<comment><USER11> Here's the best link I could find on the problem: [https://thepointsguy.com/news/boeings-777x-delays-engine- iss...](https://thepointsguy.com/news/boeings-777x-delays-engine-issues/).

High-bypass turbofans are finicky things. It seems likely there will be more teething problems in that area. The GE-9x increases the bypass ratio by 11% from 9 to 10 over the GE-90 based on comparison of specs published in wikipedia. [1,2]

So the interesting question for launch is what else pops up.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE9X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE9X)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE90#Specific...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE90#Specifications)

<comment><USER10> If you are interested in turbine engines, I highly recommend this guy's youtube channel as he will teach you everything you ever wanted to know and more about how turbines work. This video is about the compressor and it's actually a very simple component. Pretty much the only thing that can go wrong is that metal fatigue starts to form where the fan blades meet the hub. I suspect that the size of the compressor is resulting in larger centrifugal forces causing fatigue to occur quicker.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXSi4GXUojo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXSi4GXUojo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't be the only one who's more surprised that they've been making new ones this whole time.

<comment><USER6> They have a lot of orders to fulfill.

<comment><USER13> Over 4400 units, 80% of their total backlog, representing 7 years of production value at the present production capacity.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for adding this -- I can see the total economic impact of this could be huge.

Until April, they were producing 52 planes per month. Then they reduced to 42/mo. Now maybe zero for some while. At $100 million per plane, that's $5.2bil/mo!

And over $400 billion in 7 years. Can their defense business cover that? Can the employee 401k's survive?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Probably just trying some way to justify the plane, until they can't. The way they slapped the bigger engines onto the old design should not continue. Neither should their complete outsourcing of plane production. Quality counts and they're missing it.

</comment><comment><USER16> What if it costs too much to fix?

Anything can be made to fly if you spend enough money on it. But Boeing are in the business of making money. So they can't just get the 737 Max to fly at all costs. Even if they went all out the reputational harm is very much deHavilland Comet. They fixed the Comet and it was a lovely plane, but nobody wanted it. With the 737 it needs a full redesign, otherwise it is just an exercise in polishing a turd. Even if the MCAS works perfectly it is still an ugly hack.

To Boeing the decision to be selling single aisle short-hop planes might be something they get completely out of. They can finish orders for 737 oeo (old engine option) and just shut the whole thing down.

After 2008 the US auto sector was pared down a bit, GM getting rid of Pontiac to shutter it for good was needed to solve the bigger GM venture, similarly 737 MAX might be best closed in order to save the company. Much like how quick they were with the Dreamliner, in 5-10 years time Boeing could be back with another Ryanair grade offering.

Ford, GM and FCA decided to give up on making saloons for the domestic market, they let the Germans fill that niche. Similarly, with the 737 it might be better to be realistic about the competition, not just from Airbus but China, Russia and anywhere else. If China has a good plane to rival the 737 in 2-3 years time then it would be hard for Boeing's unionised workers to compete with their robots.

<comment><USER17> Which Germans? VW and Audi? Sedan numbers have gotten that low?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe if we want safety first we should be engineering lead, and only have sales/customer desires as inputs that are considered when creating a design that fulfills market needs.

That includes all stages of engineering knowing the big picture, even if they don't happen to be acting upon it, so that there are safety checks possible at every stage of design and implementation.

<comment><USER19> Safety is never actually first. First, you need an economically viable product. Otherwise, there is no reason for it or any if the processes behind it to exist.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but the airline industry has been doing a great job for the most part on both safety and economics.

The A320 costs about what the 737 costs and it has a flight envelope protection system with much better safety. It's had problems in the past that Airbus has learned from and that Boeing has applied to their newer airliners, but that Boeing got amnesia for when it came to the legacy 737.

(The A320 fly-by-wire also improves fuel efficiency, lowers maintenance costs, rides out turbulence to improve comfort, etc.)

Also the lack of safety has not saved anybody any money. I think now Boeing is saying they've lost $8 billion because of the MAX problems, and if they took that plus what they spent to make the MAX they could have been a clean sheet replacement for the 737.

People are so used to the 737 that they don't realize what a backwards airplane it is. Every other airliner from every manufacturer makes some claim that it is comfortable on their official web page. The 737 doesn't because it is the least comfortable airliner (and thus is the baseline everything is compared to.) The 737 is loud for passengers, pilots, and people on the ground. The A220 and E190 are smaller planes that are much more comfortable because they are designed around the human body as opposed to 1960's aeronautics. Compared to a clean sheet design, the 737 wastes fuel, causes excess global warming, has a higher seat-mile cost, and it makes everybody miserable while doing so.

The 737 is what secular stagnation looks like.

<comment><USER20> You're missing some important details.

The A320 and 737 have similar sticker prices, but it's not clear if one is cheaper to buy than the other because the prices paid for planes tend to be around half of the sticker price but the real prices aren't public.

The A320 is around 10k lbs heavier than the 737 and the A320 series burns more fuel per passenger mile ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft)). The A321 NEO is nearer the efficiency of the Boeing 737-900 than than the 737 MAX 10.

The passenger comfort of the 'human focused' designs often comes at the cost of fuel efficiency.

You're right that the 737 is loud and an old design. I don't dispute that Boeing messed up their one job (making safe planes) but to call the 737 secular stagnation when the newest version is nearly three times as efficient (in terms of fuel burned to move a passenger one miles) as the original 737 misunderstands "stagnation".

<comment><USER7> Up to a point the 737 got better, but the same things that made it get better (longer range) made it get worse (worse comfort)

An engineering prof I worked with years ago said that the 737 NG was already long in the tooth

[https://www.newsweek.com/boeings-737-airplane-prone- problems...](https://www.newsweek.com/boeings-737-airplane-prone- problems-63629)

and has a great quote from Tony: "Boeing are (sic.) stuck with a design that they want to fly forever."

<comment><USER20> The second gen 737 was long in the tooth. IIRC, the 737 NG has a much better wing than it needs because its landing gear is so short that the plane can't get the right angle of attack on the airfoil during rotation.

It's kind of deliciously ironic that Boeing's attempts to cut corners are going to cost them more than a clean sheet redesign, but I really wonder what's going to replace the 737.

We're at the point where we're doing inappropriate things with single aisle aircraft - it's just not great that we're about to have 9 hour flights on A321XLRs. It seems like there's a natural limit of 140-160 passengers on single aisle aircraft but and hubris has us cramming 220 people in them.

Hopefully someone figures out composites enough to create lifting wide bodies but we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I personally find odd the wording:

>... if the grounding of its most popular plane persists ...

as if the grounding was an uncontrollable event, like - say - weather.

I would have written it as:

"if we (Boeing) cannot soon find a solution that is considered safe enough by the relevant Authorities ..."

</comment><comment><USER22> At the very least they are going to have to rebrand it - 737 Ultimate Edition perhaps? :)

<comment><USER23> Apparently they are already selling them to RyanAir under the name 737-8200 to get rid of the MAX naming

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone old enough to second guess that McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merger? And 30 years before that, the McDonnell and Douglas merger? Are these really natural monopolies?

</comment><comment><USER24> Rebranding to a different name would be a simple solution.

</comment><comment><USER25> sometimes I wonder, will Boeing end up like de Havilland? too early to say now.

</comment><comment><USER26> Too big to fail. Not sure if America learned any lessons the last time.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good!

</comment><comment><USER28> I really, really hope this isn't necessary. We're currently in one of the longest (if not _the_ longest) periods of continued economic growth in US history, and the knock-on effects from a halt to 737 production could help put an end to that. (not just from the direct hit which was estimated at of 0.6% of GDP, but the confidence hit that would cause)

EDIT: To be clear, I think the best outcome is for the 737 Max to be made safe and to fly again. If it can't be made safe, obviously cancelling production of useless planes is a good idea.

<comment><USER29> If the plane isn't safe and can't be made safe then it's necessary. Also, the claim that Boeing halting 737 Max production will cause a recession seems like FUD to me.

<comment><USER30> > Boeing halting 737 Max production will cause a recession

Oh shit, let's bail them out!

<comment><USER31> This has been recently discussed: [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the- coming-boeing-bailout](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing- bailout)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353342)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I drop out for an online CS degree? - <AUTHOR> My current university is less than challenging and has a lot of Mickey Mouse courses that teach buzzwords like AI and integrated data platforms (in the first semester!) without actually talking about implementation or even the theory behind them. I don't think I'll get a lot of value in the next few years.
I have the option of starting the BSc Computer Science program by the University of London partnered with Coursera. The curriculum seems more standard and the online delivery will free up a lot of time for self study.
Will the choice of either matter in the long run? Is it worth taking the gamble of an online degree with the potential payoff of learning much more? <comment><USER2> That really depends. If you think you want to pursue a career track that is going to requires you to learn CS well (FAANG job or a specialization like DSP or data science), then it's a good investment. If you plan to be just an run- of-the-mill frontend or backend web dev, the consensus on HN seems to be that the quality of your education won't matter much one way or another.</comment>


The Kotlin Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://jetbrains.com/kotlin

<comment><AUTHOR> I found out about this language [here]([https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-kotlin- programming-l...](https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-kotlin-programming- language)). There you find some good summarization of what the language is supposed to be:

 _[...] a new statically typed JVM-targeted programming language developed by JetBrains and intended for industrial use.

The main design goals behind this project are to create a Java-compatible language, make it compile as fast as Java, make it safer than Java, i.e. statically check for common pitfalls such as null pointer dereference, make it more concise than Java by supporting local type-inference, first-class functions (closures), extension functions, mixins and first-class delegation, etc; and, keeping the useful level of expressiveness (see above), make it way simpler than the most mature competitor — Scala._</comment>


Bad Taste In Music? Crowdsource Your Next Party Playlist With Anthm - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/20/bad-taste-in-music-crowdsource-your-next-party-playlist-with-anthm/ <comment><USER2> Thats our app! You can see the video here if you want to see it in action: <http://anthmapp.com/> Our goal is to bring it to night clubs and overthrow musical dictatorships! What do you guys think? Feedback is always appreciated</comment>


Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment - <AUTHOR> https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html <comment><USER2> I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I'm reading "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow and it's scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power.

By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence.

I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow's book.

One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.

<comment><USER3> We already know how to safely operate nuclear power plants: the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents. We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators back in the 1970s, when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity. Or we could have done it after Three Mile Island (which harmed no members of the general public but clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn't is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem.

Furthermore, even the operational problem is now nonexistent with newer reactor designs. Older designs, like the reactors at Three Mile Island, required the operators to correctly execute a fairly complex procedure in the event of a problem to prevent the reactor from being severely damaged or destroyed; the TMI operators failed to do that. Also, as Fukushima showed, older reactor designs require reliable backup power for decay heat removal. Newer designs have neither of those requirements; you can literally pull the shutdown switch and walk away and there will be no problem.

So while I don't disagree with what you say about complex systems in general, I don't think nuclear reactors, with today's designs, are even that complex. We know how to design and build them so that it is impossible to operate them unsafely. We just don't have the political will to do it.

<comment><USER2> > no incidents

I would respectfully suggest that you read the book I quoted. I also thought there were "no incidents". The book is from 1983, so it specifically describes the 70s and early 80s. There were plenty of incidents and accidents, it's just that few of them resulted in major releases of radioactive material. My take on this after reading about some details is that we were just lucky.

Some might say it is outdated — but I followed up on some of the stories described there and checked more recent developments. Specifically, the San Onofre plant which gets a mention in the book. You can read about it on Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Shutdown,_2012_and_closure,_2013) — now tell me that we know what we're doing and that we "know how to safely operate nuclear power plants" after reading things like:

> On investigation, the replacement steam generators from 2011 in both units > were found to show premature wear on over 3,000 tubes, in 15,000 places.[47] > Plant officials pledged not to restart until the causes of the tube leak and > tube degradation were understood.

Other honorable mentions:

> "The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton > nuclear-reactor vessel backwards" at San Onofre

> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such > as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified > fire safety data.

Again, I am not against nuclear power. I'm just pointing out that we have way too much hubris and the rosy picture of "no incidents" is not entirely true.

Also, which newer designs do you mean?

<comment><USER4> We have accumulated a lot of stories that can be a bit hair-raising. But looking back, the actual rate of casualties is _much_ higher for coal, oil, & gas. Which makes this feel like obsessing about airline fatalities (0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles) and ignoring automobile fatalities (150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles)

I mean, look at it from the other angle. At San Onofre, a vessel was _installed backwards_. It then proceeded to deliver power for 25 years & was decommissioned. Additionally, we're reading about all this mismanagement as a result of _regulatory oversight_. Not as a result of a post-catastrophe investigative report.

<comment><USER5> I never liked comparing air travel to car travel. It's just not a fair comparison.

Per mile danger is the most favorable towards airlines, but you could use per- journey and then airline travel is 3-4x more dangerous than cars.

The best you can do is either say "airline travel is plenty safe enough" or make direct comparisons like "traveling from NYC to LA via airline is safer than driving the same distance".

<comment><USER6> > you could use per-journey and then airline travel is 3-4x more dangerous > than cars.

This wouldn't be a fair comparison either, unless you normalized for number of people on the journey. (As done in _passenger_ -miles.)

<comment><USER5> My point was that the 3-4x stat is also not fair. My point was that there are very few fair comparisons, and gave some examples that I think are fair statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Correct me if I'm wrong, but nuclear energy fundamentally requires a strong state, at least one capable enough of maintaining facilities and disposing of the waste.

Looking at human history, the assumption that some state power will always be able to manage it seems rather naive. There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn't strike me as very anti-fragile.

Furthermore, nuclear power requires and perpetuates government control over things in a way that say, solar energy, doesn't. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on your political persuasion, of course.

That said, one could probably also make the opposite argument that nuclear power would lead to more incentives for peace and stability, in the same way that arguments for Mutually-Assured-Destruction argue that nuclear weapons prevent warfare.

<comment><USER8> >There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn't strike me as very anti-fragile.

If that happens, the death caused by nuclear power will be the least of your concerns. A descent into anarchy would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths resulting from the collapse of civilization. A few hundred or thousand deaths from any nuclear power plants would be a rounding error in the calculation.

<comment><USER9> If the world descends into horrific disorder, I want our descendants to have lots of easily accessible plutonium so they can come out on top. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Conversations about public perception ignore the bigger problem of cost. Why build big expensive nuclear plants that frequently have to be subsidized and bailed out, when solar/wind/storage are already cheaper and continue to drop in cost? Even if we never have another meltdown again, and even if we never have a containment breach of the waste for the next 10k years, the economics just don't make sense.

<comment><USER11> Because there are only a few sites in the world that can supply reliable wind power in the megawatts, and the scales of storage required to provide even minimal backup power for solar to make it useful at the 3TW of power used by the United States are probably impossible (the figure I've heard for pumped water, e.g., is that every lake in the US would have to be raised 400m).

Solar/wind/storage means getting by with orders of magnitude less energy usage. Maybe we should? I just think that asking people to vote for that is even more impossible than getting them to vote for nuclear.

<comment><USER12> > I just think that asking people to vote for that is even more impossible > than getting them to vote for nuclear.

GP still has a point: asking people to vote for nuclear sounds hard because of the perceived risks, but even if there was no perception of risk, it'll still be very hard to justify the costs to voters.

<comment><USER11> The cost of nuclear or the cost of wind/solar/storage? Solar is dirt cheap for 2 hours out of the day - how much does it cost at 10pm? This isn't a dennard- scaling problem - it's Watts, and it won't necessarily get cheaper the more we need to store - if commodity scarcity kicks in, it could get more expensive! Storing enough energy to supply 3TW of power is daunting. I don't think we can do it and I think we'll need to just use less. Then what's the cost of using orders of magnitude less power?

"You can't commute to work anymore because your car will be too expensive to charge. Or, rather it will be a luxury to use a car."

"Ok, I guess?"

"You'll have to live within a few miles of work"

"Well..."

"If you have a two income family and your workplaces are across the city, one of you will need to leave your job."

"That sounds difficult."

"You can't have a detached house in the suburbs. You'll bankrupt yourself heating it".

"I have to move? Hmm... what was that you said about nuclear?"

<comment><USER13> > "You can't commute to work anymore because your car will be too expensive to > charge. Or, rather it will be a luxury to use a car."

Yes it will be. There are many many more externalities to using cars as primary transit than their CO2 output. Noise, land use, inefficient use of energy in terms of kWh/personmile, microplastic from tires, accidents,...

> You'll have to live within a few miles of work."

There's such things as mass transit that's actually quite ok at solving that problem. Now, if you mean "we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.", yes, that's already true. The sprawl would not be possible to manage. It's already not true for a large chunk of the population.

Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low.

<comment><USER11> _Yes it will be. There are many many more externalities to using cars as primary transit than their CO2 output. Noise, land use, inefficient use of energy in terms of kWh /personmile, microplastic from tires, accidents,..._

Hey, maybe you're right! Maybe we should stop using cars! Maybe you've convinced a couple of people to do that right now! Now convince 100 million US voters! Politics is the 'art of the possible'. That's what we're discussing!

 _There's such things as mass transit that's actually quite ok at solving that problem_

But none of our cities in North America have been built with that in mind. Convince 100 million US voters to move to transit-serviceable neighborhoods.

 _Now, if you mean "we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.", yes, that's already true_

With nuclear, you can continue doing this. Convince 100 million US voters to move out of the suburbs in the next 20 years. Maybe they will?

 _Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low._

This is difficult in northern climates, with short days and shallow noontime sun. Or are we asking people to stop living north of some particular latitude? That's a tough sell too!

And its not _just_ the US - politics is reflexive. As soon as your "impose a heavy carbon tax to make oil and gas prohibitively expensive and to encourage the deployment of solar storage" bill gets passed, you can forget about winning the next election - people will vote a guy in who repeals it as soon as it hits their pocketbook and their standard of living drops. Politics is the art of the possible. I don't see how you're going to convince people to vote for this.

<comment><USER13> I don't really see how nuclear power is helping you to replace all the fossil fuel cars on US roads with electric ones. Extending mass transit could be done in smaller timeframes given sufficient political will.

Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don't recognize the argument for nuclear power here.

<comment><USER11> _I don't really see how nuclear power is helping you to replace all the fossil fuel cars on US roads with electric ones. Extending mass transit could be done in smaller timeframes given sufficient political will._

 _political will_

Yes! And money! Convince people to vote for that now! Convince 100 million US voters! Anyone who has taken an interest in municipal politics knows how expensive and inefficient it is to service suburbs with transit service. The suburbs themselves are the problem. Just don't tell the people living in them that!

 _Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don't recognize the argument for nuclear power here._

On cloudy days, in the winter, do you just not go to work? Does everyone stay home from work? Or does everyone draw from the utility-scale storage to charge their cars? 3TW doesn't include cars - presumably we need to store power for them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but I recognize that there's some reasonable ground for opposing its development on grounds of potential catastrophe or radiation leakage risk. What gets me, rather, is that while we as a society have rejected nuclear power plants as too dangerous, we're still sitting on thousands and thousands of nuclear _weapons_ \- and still building more in the present day! [0] The failure of anti-nuclear activists to address the kind of nuclear technologies which can _actually_ be catastrophic, while instead focusing on those which are constructive and at least generally safe, is maddening.

[0] [https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons- moderniz...](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons- modernization)

<comment><USER15> The grounds really aren't that reasonable. Nuclear has _potential_ for catastrophe, but coal and other fossil fuels are a constant ongoing catastrophe by their very nature even if you disregard climate change. It would take many, many nuclear disasters for nuclear to come even remotely close to killing as many people as fossil fuel energy generation already has.

[https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far- more-...](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful- than-nuclear-power/)

<comment><USER9> Arguiung that we should stick with nuclear because it's cleaner than coal is like saying we should continue with gasoline fueled cars because they're cleaner than horses. It's looking at the wrong competition.

<comment><USER15> Huh? This analogy makes no sense to me at all. Which is cleaner is only incidentally related to my point. Nuclear is _safer_ than goal in terms of deaths caused by such a tremendous margin that no single nuclear catastrophe could possibly even make a dent.

<comment><USER9> Substitute "better" for "cleaner".

The point is nuclear is not competing (just) with coal, it's competing with every other alternative and combinations of alternatives. For nuclear to be preferable it has to beat all of them, not just one of them. Comparing it to just coal is a species of strawman argument.

<comment><USER15> Nuclear is the only alternative on a scale that can actually replace fossil fuel plants in a reasonable time scale. It does beat coal oil and gas. Solar, wind and hydro aren't going to come close to fulfilling our energy needs on their own (probably ever, certainly not in the next several decades).

<comment><USER9> > Nuclear is the only alternative on a scale that can actually replace fossil > fuel plants in a reasonable time scale.

Why do you people keep saying that? It's not true, and it's obvious that it's not true. It's not true in two ways: renewables can do so, and nuclear can't do so (too expensive, too risky, too dangeous for proliferation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> WTF? Where's the actual study?

If you go here: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519302125)

Once again there's no link to the study. And if you go here: [https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=...](https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=ELS&contentID=S0301421519302125&orderBeanReset=true)

"Read the article" isn't an option! Now the question is: Were public funds used in the study? If so, we own it and should have access.

<comment><USER17> Public funds _were_ used:

>This work was supported by the UC San Diego Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program; the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy; the Electric Power Research Institute; and the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon University, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-094970).

Unfortunately I had to use a site available at a Taiwan hostname to view the funding source info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _> Crucially, the researchers showed all respondents information about the number of deaths that had historically occurred in the worst accident associated with the technology. This is important for nuclear power, since accidents are rare but can have dire consequences if they do occur._

This seems like a flawed study. It implies that previous nuclear accidents are sufficient data to form a precise "statistical risk" level. And if people don't decide based on those statistics alone they must be irrational and just "anxious".

That is not a scientific conclusion. Nuclear accidents are rare, but potentially extreme. Just one more major accident, or the first case of terrorism, could significantly change the statistics. Thus It is possible that people are being rational when they recognize that we have too few data points to form a precise risk model for nuclear power.

</comment><comment><USER19> We have a "safety at any cost" mentality in society, which limits development in multiple areas. This was not the case 50 years ago, but it is today. There is a healthy respect for safety, but what we have now is constant fear mongering across society. Not just nuclear power, but immigration, stranger danger, helicopter parents, etc. All brought to you by the 24 hours news cycle that makes money by making sure everyone stays paranoid.

<comment><USER20> It's worse than that though, because, for example, nuclear power is _significantly_ safer than other technologies currently in use[1][2], and as another example, immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens in the United States[3][4], at least for several generations (they asymptotically approach native levels).

So I think we're fighting a couple of battles here: fear-mongering _and_ misinformation/ignorance, and I guess they go hand-in-hand.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical- numb...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of- deaths-from-energy-production.png) [2] Kharecha Pushker A, 2013 [3] [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107808741770497...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087417704974?journalCode=uarb) [4] [https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/jul...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/jul/06/donald-trump/trump-immigration-claim-has-no-data- back-it/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it coincidental, that something so complex, and multi-faceted, with both huge potential risks and benefits, attracts floods of simple-minded and "I told you so" comments, from even this very intelligent crowd

<comment><USER22> I don't think it's actually that multi-faceted. It's simple. 1. We have a coal problem. Fixing that would buy us critical space in the climate change equation. 2. Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative. 3. Nuclear has a bad reputation, but new information has come to light (modern reactor design, handling of waste, total impact proportional to coal). We need a lot of active debate on this.

<comment><USER23> > Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative.

One of the arguments against nuclear is that it's not a _short-term_ alternative; nuclear power plants take decades to build. For instance, the latest nuclear power plant in my country is under construction for over 30 years, and is still not complete; the other reactors in the same complex took 12 years and 24 years to build, according to Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _> ... there remains a gulf in understanding the difference between the technology's statistical risks and the dread it evokes ... that dread about nuclear power leads respondents to choose 40% less nuclear generation in 2050 than they would have chosen in the absence of this dread."_

Education on nuclear statistics and modern nuclear technology ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor)) would be useful.

Though I wonder if we're stuck for a similar reason many are afraid of flying, but not of driving - despite driving being significantly more dangerous statistically - the idea/story of a plane crash is vastly scarier than a car crash.

<comment><USER24> Have there been any commercial deployments of Gen IV reactors? You can't cite statistics of things that haven't been in operation for a reasonable fraction of their expected lifecycle.

<comment><USER22> Gen IV you're right. Gen III (and "III+") reactors already bring significant safety changes ("passive nuclear safety", though that is a spectrum) and we've had a few of those running for a while now, the longest for 20+ years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generation_III_reactors_currently_operational_or_under_construction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am in no way near an expert on this topic, but from what I know and given nuclear's track record, nuclear energy is probably mankind's only way out of total climate breakdown.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would have worded this headline differently, in a way that focuses on what I see to be the core issue:

Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Management Limits Its Deployment

It's not that we're afraid of nuclear power, it's that we're afraid that nuclear power will be managed as poorly as our other basic infrastructure is.

<comment><USER27> HN may care about the difference between nuclear power and management/operation thereof but the general public does not draw that distinction.

<comment><USER28> Pretty much every failure of nuclear power can be summed up as a management problem.

<comment><USER26> And so if we can present underground thorium capsule reactors as "if mismanaged, it cools into a lump of harmless rock", and design them to do so, we have a viable marketing solution to nuclear power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nuclear power is the only real option we have to limit climate change, that we can put into motion right now. The downsides are the politics associated, glacial construction times, and the fact we still lack proper disposal sites.

Critical thinking skills and more statistics education is something the world sorely needs.

<comment><USER30> You don't need waste disposal sites if you have full reprocessing chain. Which was made nearly-illegal and an invitation for us-sanctioned airstrike for several decades even if you abide by NPT, so...

<comment><USER29> My apologies, I was under the impression that waste was an order of magnitude lower on modern designs, but I was unaware it's effectively eliminated.

<comment><USER31> The waste problem has _in no way_ been solved. Reprocessing is, itself, horribly polluting and its waste byproducts are more dangerous than the original spent fuel rods.

I'll also add here that Fukushima is _still pouring radiation into the Pacific Ocean_ while we pontificate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of the most interesting things I've learned this past week is that Ukraine generates almost 50% of it's electricity from nuclear reactors.

I think it's impressive a country can suffer the worst nuclear accident but still overcome the fear of using it.

<comment><USER31> When states impose their will on the people, public sentiment doesn't matter. The idea that a former Soviet state would submit nuclear power to a democratic vote is simply farcical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The issue is that failures are catastrophic, and not under your control. And while systems and protocols can be perfectly designed, human administration is the weak link.

<comment><USER22> When plans fail and crash, it's a catastrophe. And yet we trust technology and process to fly everywhere all the time. We need to put nuclear in the same place in our hearts.

(I think the root cause of why it's not is irrational fear of radiation, which is why I love [https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/) so much)

<comment><USER34> A plane crash doesn't have the ability to destroy an entire region.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am becoming more convinced that we as a civilization will not cut CO2 emissions in time and we will need some type of carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is going to horrendously energy intensive and we will need something like nuclear power to provide that kind of energy.

<comment><USER35> I agree we'll probably need some sort of carbon sequestration. I disagree that nuclear is the only possible power source for that (or for that matter, that sequestration is going to be that energy-intensive).

<comment><USER36> How can sequestration not be energy intensive? Carbon is diffused throughout the atmosphere as relativly low energy statw molecules. Even assuming 100% efficiency, what end state of sequestration would not require significant energy just from conservation of energy.

<comment><USER9> I'll add that you could have figured out that there must be exothermic ways to sequester CO2, since CO2 naturally is scrubbed from the atmosphere by some process. If this process were not exothermic, CO2 would just accumulate in the atmosphere until the Earth resembled Venus.

[https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html](https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Just one pic:

[https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical- numb...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of- deaths-from-energy-production.png)

<comment><USER38> The calculation completely ignores any risk of nuclear disaster.

It's simply based on historical data, which is hugely misleading and dishonest.

Each existing barrel of nuclear waste has been causing risk for few decades at max but will cause risk for thousands of years.

(Not to mention all the waste that has been dispersed in the environment)

This is like driving a car for a 30 seconds and claiming that it's safe.

<comment><USER37> So does coal waste. Handling nuclear waste is not improving because humanity gave up on using tis energy. There are reactor types which "burn" nuclear waste from traditional plants and make them less dangerous. All of the problems you mention are solvable: safety, radioactive waste etc if we commit to it. Fire and burning is 400.000 years old, nuclear power is 70-80. We have technology ready to make it safe just as we did with fire.

<comment><USER38> > We have technology ready to make it safe just as we did with fire.

citation needed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Totally safe nuclear reactor operations are easily defined by placing a mandatory employee daycare center in the containment.

</comment><comment><USER40> From my 2016 letter on Energy to Candidate Trump,

[https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...](https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20160422%20trump%20energy%20letter%20SC.pdf)

QUOTE

We must finish taming fire.

It is no longer enough to raise sensible children without an irrational fear of nuclear energy. They must become aware at a young age that there is a silent war on and they must, in order to ensure the continued survival of modern civilization, begin to oppose and publicly ridicule anyone exhibiting this fear. This may range from a gentle instruction and chiding of those who express misgivings honestly and openly, to a direct and aggressive attack on the greatest dangers of our time — the ones who deliberately cloak their anti- nuclear sentiment in Byzantine ways intended to derail debate and parry the subject to other 'alternative' approaches.

It is unethical to see no clear path to unbounded Energy as anything but an existential threat.

Sound familiar? That is similar to the tactic fronted by frenetic climate alarmists who are trying to push a dozen pet agendas and several for-profit agendas crafted specially for them, all at once — rallying the people over a global average temperature signal that is presently buried in noise, and a CO2-to-temperature causation that may turn out to be nil or even backwards. Unfortunately there is an international scam in progress and the scammers are clever, they have seized the moral high-ground because it had been left unoccupied and undefended. Those who praise humanity and progress for its own sake, and would remind others we should never judge ourselves in haste, must have wandered off somewhere.

There is also a scuffle on the Global Warming moral high-ground as the folks who run nuclear power plants are kicked in the face and tossed off the mound. They expected to be welcomed with open arms because nuclear energy will help save the planet from CO2. They did not realize the movement is rife with people whose irrational fear of radiation exceeds any commitment to the environment. Anyone who even mentions nuclear power gets a feral and brutal response. I've taken pity on the nuclear industry and have tried to explain the phenomenon but they're not taking it very well. Like the Amish, our nuclear power industry needs staunch defenders surrounding it. They're just too polite for their own good.

Unfortunately, we have passed beyond peak politeness. To force Energy debates to address practical solutions, bullies are needed. We must rout the occupiers and re-take the moral high-ground because we place a high priority on survival, and for the children's sake. And because ... well ... "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals..." And other such stuff.

<comment><USER28> Honestly if your proposed technology requires the brainwashing of children then maybe it simply isn't good enough? Also at current construction time frames of 10-20 years per plant our children will be the ones who will finish the construction of those plants even if they were born this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The public also dreads vaccines, dihydrogen monoxide, and planetary alignments.

The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed citizens.

<comment><USER42> > The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed > citizens.

Easier said than done. Even if you drop a world class school with world class teachers into a poor neighborhood, you _still_ won't guarantee everyone gets a "solid education". Education is tightly coupled not just to public schools, but private family life as well, and the latter is much more difficult to solve.

<comment><USER29> I disagree - the education system itself is deeply unforgiving in how it functions. From even the most basic level of school scheduling being directly at odds with teenage biology, all the way to how students are ranked and filed purely based on test scores. These kids in poor neighborhoods usually (statistically) don't have the support that even the best students need to get through school. Of course there are always exceptions, but this is just what I've observed.

<comment><USER42> Well, my neighbors are on public assistance, and I swear the kids are truant half the time. Doesn't matter how great your school is if the kids don't go and the parents don't care if they go or not.

<comment><USER29> Let me rephrase my point: if school was more engaging and less of a punishment (which is what it can feel like for these already disadvantaged kids) then they might be more inclined to want to go. Obviously some home situations are too rough to sort out, but I think that's a situation where the government needs to step in.

<comment><USER42> What you are suggesting is not possible for the government to solve IMO. You are basically saying that the school system needs to take on the role of parenting ("helping kids engage") in addition to actual education.

When the kids' parents have not completed school themselves, can't help or motivate their kids with schoolwork, etc... you need an _army_ of mentors to help engage those kids. Unfortunately, disadvantaged kids outnumber such mentors by a large factor and such a system would quickly swallow any budget fed to it.

<comment><USER29> Not really.

I don't believe you actually need to force/motivate kids to do homework. Homework as a concept is fundamentally flawed as it is IMO and is another problem with the system. I love maths and science and all that stuff we all do on that forum, but I don't believe for one second that kids should be forced into it. Forcing students to do homework/exams/uninteresting subjects, and not fostering natural curiosity, is why school is not engaging.

I'm oversimplifying massively and understand there's a middle ground somewhere, but this is what I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Stop trying to make nuclear power a thing. It's not happening. We're all concerned about the state of the aging plants in the US and many are not hardened enough for the impact of climate change.

<comment><USER31> The whole industry is dying, all over the world, and must now reply on PR puff pieces such as this one that continue to haul out the "climate will kill us!" bogeyman.

Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered that, given enough time, the Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway. Personally, I'd rather wait for that than have nuke plants speed up the death toll and pollute the land with uranium tailings and contaminated water. But that's just me.

<comment><USER20> > Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway

Why? The reason climate change is dangerous is not because it'll get too hot or cold for us, but because the temperature is changing _too fast_. It's the gradient that's the problem.

<comment><USER31> Vast swaths of North America have been under water or covered in ice sheets at various points in the Earth's history, including the time when humans lived.

I think it's fair to say that we are not well adapted to live under water or ice, yet both of those are definitely coming. Someday.

<comment><USER20> Okay, so updated:

> Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered [that if we can slow down > climate change then we'll have to make some steady societal changes over the > next few thousand years (instead of over a much smaller time-frame) to adapt > to the Earth's natural climate changes]

Not to be rude, but you're wasting peoples' time when you don't even follow your own line of thinking in your comments. You've made quite a few comments on this post that don't really contribute to the discussion.

<comment><USER31> I'll accept that as your subjective opinion and respectfully disagree. I'm quite well informed on this topic and this thread needed several truths surfaced which were occluded by industry PR claims.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Resume Keywording Is a Must for Job Seekers - <AUTHOR> http://forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2015/04/27/why-resume-keywording-is-a-must-for-job-seekers/

<comment><USER2> If applicant tracking systems are so great, why do I get so many inquiries that ask if I'd like a job writing windows device drivers?

Never in my life have I ever written a windows device driver. My resume does not make that claim.</comment>


YC Reject Seeking Users for Beta  - <AUTHOR>

I wanted to begin registering Beta users for my startup www.Ommageo.com.
I don't know HN is the best place to solicit users for a Beta since so many in the HN community must dedicate time to their own projects, but the offer is open.  As always I am also welcoming all advice, so if you think there is a better place to find Beta users I am all ears.
Please email me if you are want to be a Beta. <comment><USER2> I've no idea what this does - can you elaborate?

<comment><AUTHOR> www.ommageo.com is a combination of YouTube and Google Earth. Every video uploaded to Ommageo is geotagged in Google Earth, so in addition to finding videos through feeds of your friends and searches, users can browse Google Earth and find video content based on location (and time).

Kerno if you or anyone else is still confused:

1\. visit the website, 2\. click the "Trending" button, and 3\. watch a video for yourself.

Note Ommageo uses the Google Earth plug-in which is supported by Mac and Windows operating systems.

<comment><USER3> You haven't explained why I should care about the location of video content? What value are you aiming to provide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not only is location important to video content, so is time (both date the video was uploaded and the date the video was created). Why? because that information is invaluable for video discovery.

How does the average person discover content on Youtube? Surprise they don't discover it on Youtube, because it was likely shared or embedded on another website. 500 years worth of Youtube video is watched on Facebook everyday, that could be users going straight to Youtube and discovering great content for themselves (there is no shortage of great content), but the problem is that video discovery on Youtube is so bad people do not go there to browse content, rather they go when they are looking for a specific video. If you still disagree look how many cable shows there are that simply have hosts showing YouTube clips, those shows would not exist if it did not take an entire team to browse Youtube just to find a half hour of quality content.

If posting videos to Google Earth and finding videos in Google Earth does not sound fun or interesting to you, and you need to be sold on the "value" I am creating, maybe this is not for you. The user experience is the inherent value, your question is like asking why you should care about Google Earth itself, it is simply a 3d representation of the Earth using satellite imagery for the purpose of location based content what value are they aiming to provide? Now if we can agree that location based content is valuable, then I appear to be the first to tackle location based video content, and I welcome anyone that wants to register for the Beta and I promise not to sell them on anything and let them make up their mind for themselves.

<comment><USER4> > and you need to be sold on the "value" I am creating, maybe this is not for > you

That's a rather closed-minded approach. Since you are trying to sell this to us, why not try and make this idea appeal to us? To say that someone needn't bother if the abstract idea you've presented doesn't seem to work for them... that's pretty weak and (forgive me if I'm misinterpreting) even comes off as arrogant. If you have a specific user base in mind, fine, but then say so. Those who have posted so far haven't a clue the benefit they are getting out of it. You might have a great product, but it never will be great if people don't know about it/use it because it affects your bottom line. Instead of brushing off this person's valid point, why not try and convince us about how "fun and interesting" your product is? What about more specific use cases? Not just "here's my product. Try it."

Overall, the reason the value is requested here is that we need to understand beyond what your new product actually does. Why is it making our lives better? Why should we want/need to go to it? Is the intent to solve some fundamental need or frustration? If so, how does it do that?

The difference between your product and pure Google Earth is that Google Earth was made by a large company that is exploring many different avenues, with an already established financial base. Were you looking to monetize this particular product in some way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to HN seadog33.

"Ommageo is a combination of Google Earth and YouTube" -I did not intend to be arrogant I just do not believe there is a better way to describe my start-up than this simple sentence. It is self-explanatory and should not leave readers wondering what Ommageo is or thinking this is some "abstract idea" (especially when I posted the link and anyone can go there now and find videos in Google Earth and watch them, use the search functions, and visit watch the "trending video page" - all without registering).

>Instead of brushing off this person's valid point, why not try and convince us about how "fun and interesting" your product is? What about more specific use cases? Not just "here's my product. Try it."

I am not here to promote my website, sell anything, explain my strategy to monetize the product, or convince anyone. I simply asked people who are interested in being part of my beta to email me or offer advice on finding additional beta testers. So its not like I am brushing anyone off, its just that some people are interested in testing Ommageo because I described it as combining Google Earth and Youtube, two products that people know and use, while others find Ommageo abstract and think it will be made more clear by answering business related questions. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with saying that the Ommageo Beta might not be right for that second group.

>Those who have posted so far haven't a clue the benefit they are getting out of it.

I cannot disagree with you on this point, but the qualifier is "Those who have posted", because I have received emails from the people interested in the Ommageo Beta, another HN member was even kind enough to share one of his projects which is similar to mine but instead of video it was photo oriented. So trust me people see the inherent benefit of combining Google Earth and YouTube and more generally the benefit of location based media sharing and discovery.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Photographer (me) plans to sue NCAA and Linfield College - <AUTHOR> https://calebyers.com/blog/photography-and-student-rights-at-linfield <comment><AUTHOR> For some context, I have been banned from taking photos at athletic events at my private college, but they have done so without following any legal or disciplinary procedures. And a separate issue is the NCAA's deliberate misinterpretation of its bylaws, which must be settled in a court.</comment>


Arizona Republicans Want to Prosecute Protesters the Same Way They Do Terrorists - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arizona-bill-protesters-racketeering_us_58af3692e4b060480e05e81d?b6zy7rzbvqqudte29& <comment><USER2> This seems like linkbait to me. My understanding after looking at the document is that the heart of the issue is whether organizers of protests that lead to destruction of property should be liable for that destruction of property.

Maybe I'm missing something, so if so, can somebody explain to me what purpose "the Same Way They Do Terrorists" serves in the title of this post other than draw a very emotional association?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why donations to ACLU are important. Also, Republicans are clearly misreading their "mandate". Trump won by a mere 70k votes in EC, but lost by 3 mn votes. They are in for a rude awakening. And not to mention that laws like this can be turned into its head when the opposition gains power.

</comment><comment><USER4> Protesting and rioting are not the same thing.</comment>