The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A coming in hardcover later this year - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#Previews

<comment><USER2> I would have to say I am less excited about the topics promised in Volume 4 (supposedly Combinatorial Algorithms, but way too much time in the Facicles is spent on explicit enumeration) than those found in Volumes 1 (Fundamental Algorithms), Volume 2 (Seminumerical Algorithms) and Volume 3 (Search and and Sorting). I grew up with "The Art of Computer Programming," but I think not all of the volumes are equal or have aged similarly. For example Volume 2 now can be seen to fail to anticipate a lot of exciting results in pseudo- randomness, quasi-randomness and de-randomization. On the other hand Volume 3 is, due to our current obsession with search, possibly even more exciting than the day it was new.

</comment><comment><USER3> anyone care to elaborate on this (from the bottom of the page under Public Lectures):

Wednesday, 30 June, at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco (some time in the afternoon) speaking _(and making an Earthshaking Announcement)_ at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference

<comment><USER4> Retirement ?

<comment><USER3> that's not very fun. I was thinking something more along the lines of "the rumors are true I am an alien and here is my spaceship". that would be earthshaking

<comment><USER4> Hm. But less likely! Recording contract? Knuth plays Bach on the organ!:

<http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/duets.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Outstanding! I think I'll pick one up, when available. No hint of a schedule for vols 4b, 4c (and possibly d), or 5.

<comment><USER6> the volumne 4 fascicle 1 (Bitwise Tricks & Techniques) can be found and downloaded from safari o'reily. have no idea about the others, though.</comment></comment>


Urban Climates - <AUTHOR> http://thebritishgeographer.weebly.com/urban-climates.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone know how much the automobile directly and indirectly contributes to the heat island effect?

Not only do you have thousands of vehicles burning thousands of gallons of petroleum, you also have low-albedo asphalt parking lots everywhere.

Do car-friendly cities have a bigger heat-island effect than transit-friendly cities?

<comment><USER3> Did you at least attempt to read the article? It's in the first paragraph.

<comment><USER2> The article mentions that the energy input from combustion is significantly higher than that from insolation in Manhattan in January, but also that the primary driver of the heat island effect is from building materials.

Obviously asphalt roads and (especially) parking lots are an indirect contributor to low-albedo and low-permeability landscape.

Taken together, how much of the heat island effect is due to the automobile? Would a pedestrian + transit city, with aggressive tree canopy, still be a heat island?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What would be an effective way to reduce cities heat? Just plant more trees? Special roof top materials?

<comment><USER5> Even repainting roofs from black to white can make a major difference for minimal cost.

Planting trees is great in many ways (quality of life and air quality in addition to heat mitigation) but is pricier. It can also take several years to "bear fruit" (even for non fruit-bearing trees ;-) because generally you plant saplings, which can take decades to grow to a size where they provide significant shade. NYC hust completed an initiative to plant a million new trees, and it's barely made a dent in the amount of treeless sidewalks, let alone unshaded space in the city.

It would have been nice if the article had made more concrete recommendations, tho, I agree.</comment></comment>


Rust Priorities after 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://internals.rust-lang.org/t/priorities-after-1-0/1901 <comment><USER2> I think one thing that we need to emphasize is that Rust 1.0 does _not_ indicate that we think the language is "complete". It is merely the result of recognition that _getting_ to that "complete" state can, as of very soon, be done in a stable and backwards-compatible fashion. I expect the post-1.0 releases to see a flurry of activity as we flesh out deficiencies in existing features and add new features to address pain points, but over time the rate of feature growth will slow. Rust has no intention of becoming a ball-of-mud programming language.

<comment><USER3> Hi! I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but it wasn't found in a quick skim of the FAQs, so:

How long do you (the Rust community) expect Rust to remain backwards- compatible? That is, once 1.0 ships, on what sort of approximate timescale would significant effort be made to ensure code that worked with the initial release (assuming no experimental features / libraries in use) would keep working? On the order of months, years, decades?

I'm interested in writing some random things in Rust, but very much not interested in _re_writing Rust code in newer Rust. This probably means it's still too early for me, if the standard library is expected to expand soon after 1.0. But given e.g. the prevalence of Python 2 versus Python 3, it seems like there's quite a lot of people who think similarly.

Background: I used to write Firefox extensions and things like that. Stopped being active around Firefox 4, when they declared that they are fine with breaking backwards API compatibility (and, IIRC around that time or soon after, put in arbitrary checks to force recompilation). This was just before the short releases started.

<comment><USER4> > How long do you (the Rust community) expect Rust to remain backwards- > compatible?

The hope is for all of 1.*. I forget what the plan is for 2.0, but I think we want to keep things the same (mostly).

In practice there will be minor breakages due to unavoidable bugfixes.

Expanding the stdlib will never break your code. All changes now are being made with backcompat in mind; older code should never have to update.

<comment><USER3> > The hope is for all of 1. _. I forget what the plan is for 2.0, but I think > we want to keep things the same (mostly).

Right, but how long is that 1._? 2.0 is a good time to have (hopefully small) backwards compatibility breaks, so having a rough idea of an order of magnitude of the timespan would be helpful.

> Expanding the stdlib will never break your code. But having it obsolete the > non-standard libraries (from e.g. crates.io) will. Code is, unfortunately, > not static; things suffer from bitrot, as the toolchain etc. changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the proposals: _" Perhaps the biggest is the lack of "privacy" or "unsafety" hygiene (meaning that it's not possible to define macros that have privileged access over normal code). This prevents macros from being used to define abstraction barriers."_

That may be a misfeature. One would like to reduce the need for unsafe code, not make it easier to write unsafe code. Unless you're talking to hardware or another language, you should not need unsafe code. If you do, the language has a problem. I'd suggest identifying each use of unsafe code in a large system and then looking at why it was necessary.

It's important to keep Rust from going off into template la-la land, as C++ did. C++ generics are starting out with roughly the complexity level it took C++ two decades to achieve. Try to keep the metaprogramming fanatics from driving the language design, please. That doesn't end well.

<comment><USER6> > Unless you're talking to hardware or another language, you should not need > unsafe code.

... or if you're implementing safe abstractions on top of data structures or synchronization protocols that the type system cannot automatically infer to be safe.

Of course that is going to be a smallish subset of Rust programmers that gets smaller with time as the standard library fills out, but an important one!

For those who aren't as familiar with Rust, the std::sync [0] module can be a fun way to cut your teeth.

For example, here's the implementation of Mutex.lock [1]:

       pub fn lock(&self) -> LockResult<MutexGuard<T>> {
            unsafe { self.inner.lock.lock() }
            MutexGuard::new(&*self.inner, &self.data)
        }

Note that the self argument is immutable: "&self" instead of "&mut self". This may seem odd: doesn't locking a mutex _require_ a change to its innards? Which is why you should not be surprised to see the unsafe, which allows us to bend the immutability of &self in order to acquire the lock.

In fact, how could it be otherwise? Rust prevents there ever being more than one &mut to something, so if the signature of Mutex::lock was "&mut self", there could only ever be one usable ref to the Mutex! That would be pointless, of course -- multiple threads need to have references to the mutex.

We're still safe, though, because the "mut-aliasing" that Rust normally prevents via the borrow checker at compile time is being replaced with a run- time mechanism that achieves the same thing via the Mutex and the MutexGuard [2].

[0] [http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/index.html](http://doc.rust- lang.org/std/sync/index.html)

[1] [http://doc.rust- lang.org/src/std/sync/mutex.rs.html#196-211](http://doc.rust- lang.org/src/std/sync/mutex.rs.html#196-211)

[2] Well, strictly speaking a RwLock is a closer runtime approximation to the borrow checker's rules, because it allows multiple simultaneous readers: [http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.RwLock.html](http://doc.rust- lang.org/std/sync/struct.RwLock.html)

<comment><USER2> Rust's own Aaron Turon put this nicely in a recent talk at Stanford. A data race requires all of the following: aliasing, mutation, and a lack of synchronization. Rust's usual ownership rules already make aliasing exclusive with mutation, so out of the box you're safe. But when simultaneous aliasing and mutation is exactly what you want, as in a mutex, it's safe to subvert the type system as long as you make sure to uphold the synchronization aspect on your own (which Rust nicely helps with by leveraging ownership on the synchronization mechanism itself).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5vzLKg7y-k&t=31m00s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5vzLKg7y-k&t=31m00s)

<comment><USER5> I was at that talk.

In a sense, what you need there is not "unsafe", but "atomic", declaring that the contained operation is atomic. That's less general than "unsafe", and atomicity of code is checkable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really wish better Windows support was available now. Solid cross-platform support has allowed me to move some Python code to go. My attempts to do the same with Rust have been failures, on multiple occasions, but as recently as their 1.0 beta and nightlies (both 32/64 bit were tried).

After giving it a few hours with the IRC channel riding shotgun and hello_world.rs still crashing on Windows, I've again hit snooze of Rust. A pity too... I am quite re-interested after seeing some Rust demos/discussion at PyCon.

<comment><USER8> "cargo new helloworld ; cargo run" doesn't work for you in Windows?

I did some REALLY REALLY MINOR code in Windows before doing it on Ubuntu, and I had no issues dependent on OS.

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing that the parent poster was trying to do a "hello world" equivalent of calling Rust from Python (as per the Pycon presentation), which would definitely cause grief on Windows if Python isn't compiled with the same toolchain that Rust is.

<comment><USER9> I just gave a presentation on Rust + Python at a local meetup, and I have been constrained to windows only for the past few months.

Have had 0 issues, and I have no idea what the fuss with windows is about. 0 ICEs nowadays, and it works like a champ speedwise (obviously)

Compared to Ruby, Rust is basically C#, windows wise. In the past I have gotten ICEs and shit, but nowadays its perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does "ARM support" include bare-metal arm at all? I know there are several projects that move in that direction, but it's not obvious to me how mature they are relative to the rest of Rust (granting that everything in the ecosystem is in an early state)...

<comment><USER2> Rust exists to support Servo, and Servo's most important platform may very well be Android. I expect that Rust will see a lot of interest by hobbyists who hack the compiler to work with various fringe platforms, but in terms of official support I wouldn't expect Mozilla and Samsung to contribute anything beyond what's required for Android.

<comment><USER11> I hope Servo will be important for non Android mobile Linux as well.

<comment><USER9> Rust builds for straight up ARM, see [https://zinc.rs/](https://zinc.rs/)

Now we only need to dependencies for Servo to move along and it could work. I would imagine this would be a lot of work for the OpenGL implementation they use.

<comment><USER11> I should try building Rust with Mer SDK. Would be useful for Nemo, Sailfish and Plasma Active. Weren't Samsung also working on Servo? Did they consider it for Tizen as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if Rust would support something like the following. Say, I have a mmapped file, and in this file I'd like to store data-structures such as maps, sets, lists, etc. Basically, they are the same data-structures as one would use on the heap. Because the mmapped file is offsetted at a different point in memory every time it is opened, the actual pointers used to access these data- structures will be different every time. But the pointers _inside_ the data- structures will be the same every time the file is mmapped. So, this requires some special pointer arithmetic (and perhaps a special type system). It would definitely be a very interesting and useful feature!

</comment><comment><USER13> After using Go for a couple of pet projects in the last couple of months, I came out bored. Many people seem to be quite excited about Rust. I'm setting up my (new) Emacs end for Rust.

Any cool projects I can take a look at?

<comment><USER14> The problem with rust is that it has been around for nearly as long as Go, yet is nowhere near stable or production ready in nearly every aspect.

Go has been ready for years.

<comment><USER15> of course, if you're interested in rust's memory safety, performance, low- level control, and expressive type system, then in a very real way, go isn't ready at all.

it does have some marquee names behind it, though. I suppose if you squint, that can make up the difference.

<comment><USER14> Go performance is going to converge on C performance with new optimization's being written after go 1.5.

Any gains from rusts expressive type system are lost by all the memory lifetime annotations imo.

I still think rust is probably going to be the best language for embedded software like router firmware, as they need to be fast, low overhead and secure.

<comment><USER16> As an upper performance bound for a GC language, I don't think Go will be able to surpass C# (which has stack allocation in the form of structs, ahead of time compilation, and many other goodies). Rust, on the other hand, has more potential as a non GC language, though at the end of the day it might be hard to tell given equivalent applications.

<comment><USER14> The upper performance for garbage collected languages (and rust) is potentially higher than C. The reasons are non aliased pointers allow more aggressive optimization, and batched garbage collection plus memory compaction can perform better than regular mallocs.

Rust still has these advantages though, time will tell. Does rust have a way to avoid bounds checks on arrays? I suppose that requires unsafe annotations.

<comment><USER2> Rust essentially never wastes cycles on bounds checking thanks to the design of its iterators. The Servo team tells me that bounds checking has never shown up in any performance profiles.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if after Mozilla writes Servo in Rust 1.x and Google sees how fast Servo is, even compared to its own JS engine, it will also consider writing a new JS engine in Rust 2.x (I assume, by then), as I doubt they'd use Go for that. Same for the whole browsers. Due to the safety features of Rust over C++ we might see both Firefox and Chrome be rewritten in Rust over the next 5 years.

<comment><USER18> Servo isn't a JS engine, it does make use of Firefox' SpiderMonkey, written in C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish I could use 'type' as a variable name or as a field on a struct. It's one of the most used identifier names and the inability to use it is frustrating.

<comment><USER20> You could sidestep it like Python does, adding an underscore after variables that are named the same as keywords (e.g. `type_`).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm glad specialization is listed as a Top Priority; it's something that I've wanted in Rust for about 2 years nos.

</comment><comment><USER22> LOL, the new Godwin's Law: Edward Snowden.

(See my valid but then NSA downvoted answer to the question below regarding GO vs. Rust that no one else could answer and were forced to make jokes about -- if you are wondering what I mean.)

Sorry rust thread. :(

(now kicked off the front page)

</comment><comment><USER23> For a language that was written by Mozilla, I find it very annoying that they steal my browser's built-in ctrl+f functionality that I'm perfectly fine with using. Also, my vimium plugin doesn't work. This is the first time I've encountered something like this. This better not become a thing.

<comment><USER2> The forum software has nothing to do with either Rust or Mozilla. It's Discourse ( [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/) ), and personally I agree that it's kind of a pain. :)

<comment><USER24> Please use something different. Something utterly broken like this (keyboard navigation?) casts a bad light on a project that's - at least mentally - connected to Mozilla.</comment></comment></comment>


Ultra Safe Nuclear - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnc.com/ <comment><USER2> Two interesting things to see here, of many. They are really planning the sites to be temporary compared to the solar/wind/ and other industrial power plants that have little or no plan for returning their sites to the original virgin soil. And two, they seem to use a molten salt loop like in concentrated solar to meet variable demand without changing the power level of the reactor, which you can't really do because of Xenon poisoning. So it's like a natural gas plant in its ability to deliver power, but clean and holds 20 years of fuel inside the reactor.

<comment><USER3> And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost.

I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out.

Nuclear is _outrageously expensive_ , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that.

Look, I think nuclear is fine. But as a numerate and earnest environmentalist, I don't see where the case for it lies. Right now, we should be building out solar and wind as fast as we can, because they're good and safe and CHEAP. And when we get to that last 5-10% where we need buffering capacity that we're currently getting via gas? Yeah, maybe then we can talk about nuclear.

But even then... meh. What's the case on trying to finish the job on electrical generation vs. putting those same dollars into low hanging fruit in other areas of the energy puzzle?

Nuclear needs to make its case on a balance sheet before it makes sense to talk about.

<comment><USER4> So, why did so many countries/companies originally build nuclear reactors, if the economics inherently don't make sense? Has something changed?

<comment><USER3> To make bombs. And what's changed now is we have enough bombs.

Seriously, even the reactors that aren't expressly breeding fuel were designed with an eye to the technology and as part of programs in the 50's-70's to build out expertise in this critical technology area of national security.

Countries wanted bombs. To make bombs you need a nuclear industry. Ergo, everyone who wanted bombs built civilian reactors, without exception.

<comment><USER5> This argument doesn't hold. There are several countries such as Finland that have operated nuclear power plants for decades and do not have ambitions for nuclear bombs.

<comment><USER3> If you want to go with that argument: cite Japan, not Finland. But it doesn't have to be 100% true to be largely true. The overwhelming majority of nuclear capacity has been built out by nuclear powers or aspiring nuclear powers. And with few exceptions the end of their warhead buildout happens to correlate with the end of their megawatt buildout.

<comment><USER6> Japan has a stockpile of separated reactor grade plutonium sufficient to make thousands of bombs. This is a deniable kind of proliferation. If push came to shove they could weaponize that material without having to make new plutonium.

(And, yes, reactor grade Pu CAN be used in weapons, with proper design.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with.

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

>Exposure to radioactive waste may cause health impacts due to ionizing radiation exposure. In humans, a dose of 1 sievert carries a 5.5% risk of developing cancer,[12] and regulatory agencies assume the risk is linearly proportional to dose even for low doses. Ionizing radiation can cause deletions in chromosomes.[13]

<comment><USER8> Because it's not a problem. There's actually very little of it. It occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Storing it is pretty foolproof: bury it in an area with no aquifer. The main risk of contamination is getting into the groundwater. If there's no groundwater the risk of contamination is eliminated even if the containers decay over time. And lastly, it doesn't make sense to bury our waste right now because some of the latest reactors being built can use this waste as fuel.

We hold nuclear to an incredible double standard with respect to the waste it produces. Fossil fuels release substantially more radioactive waste [2], and that waste is poorly contained. Usually put in an exposed pile next to the plant, which occasionally spills into rivers nearby [3]. Not to mention a whole other host of pollutants like heavy metals, and the carbon dioxide that is th main driver of climate change.

1\. [https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about- spent-...](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent- nuclear-fuel)

2\. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is- more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more- radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

3\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_f...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill)

<comment><USER9> 1\. How long does it need to be kept safe?

2\. How to find a storage facility that can keep it safe that long?

3\. How to ensure that a facility does not contamine other stuff in X years?

4\. if it is recycable why does nobody do it?

5\. if it is so easy to store it safe, why does not country have a TRUE final depot?

yeah coal is bad, but why compare it to coal in the first place when we want to reduce such things anyway?!

<comment><USER8> 1\. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity.

2\. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2]

3\. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater.

4\. France does recycle it's nuclear waste.

5\. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this waste is fuel for some of the reactors currently being built.

The reality is that nuclear waste will have minimal if any impact on the rate of uranium contamination. Naturally occurring uranium is responsible for vastly more contamination than nuclear waste. Streams and rivers flowing down from mountains pick up uranium in the sediment and bring it downstream: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates- drinking-w...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uranium-contaminates-drinking- water-in-us-west/)

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)

2\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)

<comment><USER10> > Forever

How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?

<comment><USER11> Most toxic elements last forever. That includes the toxic elements in coal ash. Both coal ash and spent nuclear fuel need indefinite safe storage. It can be cheaper to store spent nuclear fuel because it's so much more compact than fossil fuel waste.

Remember that the status quo already has a large forever-waste cost of its own. Nuclear waste is a trade off vs. other kinds of waste, and it is cheaper than the status quo.

<comment><USER12> Wanted to leap in here to mention tailings from minings projects. The gold that goes into a circuitboard comes from a mine which likely has a tailiings facility and associated dam, which is essentially an open pit filled with water into which tailings are dumped.

They're incredibly toxic materials. We had an engineer go out to the field and take a sample of some tailings, and after 6 months of being left in a lab, the materials had eaten through the stainless steel tube containing the sample.

It's not just power generation that has a negative externality in the form of waste. ALL resource extraction has associated waste.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention, industrial chemical processes in general.

Toxic waste requiring indefinite safe storage is _the default state_. Spent nuclear fuel is actually nice here in a way, because in some cases, it's a self-solving problem (dangerous stuff decaying into less dangerous stuff over time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The walk away passive safety is a tradeoff with non-proliferation concerns. This design requires 20% enrichment, much higher than traditional reactors. This might be a smart tradeoff, but let's not pretend it's doesn't exist.

[https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201810/reactors.cf...](https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201810/reactors.cfm)

<comment><USER15> The countries in the nuclear club represent a significant fraction of the world's energy consumption. Even if they were the only ones to eliminate the use of carbon-based energy via nuclear, it would be a good start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a more dense read, see the whitepaper[1] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory about FCM fuels, which seems to be one of the key innovations of this reactor type. Instead of using pellets of Uranium oxide directly inside the reactor, this method encapsulates the fuel in a high temperature ceramic material which makes it very unlikely for the reactor to 'melt down' the way that mainstream reactors can.

[1] [https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/Files/Pub42476.pdf](https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/Files/Pub42476.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems like their claim to "Ultra Safe" is actually merited based on a first principles look at the power density. They claim 1.24 W/cm^3 versus 20-40 W/cm^3 in normal reactors. The high power densities mean you have to be able to cool the reactor, even when you shut down the reactor because reactors take a long time to actually turn off. With such low power density, it should be no problem to cool down the reactor. It'll just cool down naturally, like a hot pot. In fact the metric to look at would be power per core surface area.

<comment><USER17> There are reactor types like the Integral Fast Reactor that will safely shut itself down even if the cooling systems fail.

In fact, the engineers at Argonne deliberately tried to overheat the reactor by shutting off its pumps and they failed.

<comment><AUTHOR> But they don't lose the liquid coolant - which seems like a pretty reasonable scenario.

<comment><USER18> Especially considering the IFR (and it's predecessor EBR II where the experiment the parent refers to was done) are pool type reactors, meaning the reactor sits in a big pool filled with the primary coolant, there are no pipes where the primary coolant leaves the tank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Assuming nuclear truly can be ultra safe, how do you convince a public that has seen Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to get on board? Particularly when the "competition" (solar, wind, etc) has such a strong tailwind.

<comment><USER20> Deaths per joule are the lowest out of any major fuel source except for maybe wind, which is debatable depending on your assumptions about the future.

<comment><USER21> That's deaths per joule _so far._ How would nuclear compete if far more renewables were installed, producing far more joules?

How about clean-up costs? Estimates for Fukushima vary from $76bn to $660bn depending who you ask.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the- radi...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radioactive- rubble-heap-that-was-fukushima-daiichi-7-years-on/)

How about general carelessness?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear- weapons-s...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-weapons-site- alarms-shut-off-scientists-inhale-uranium/)

This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.

Which is the problem. This is primarily a managerial issue, not a technological one. And the quality of executive and managerial decision-making of all kinds across the entire industry is nowhere near the standard required for future confidence. Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.

<comment><USER22> Since deaths from renewables scale linearly with installations I think that nuclear will continue to win that particular argument. Building more wind turbines and solar installations is not going to reduce the deaths from installation and maintenance.

I wonder what the clean-up costs are long-term for the groundwater contamination from solar panel production and for the dismantling and junking of wind turbines when they reach their EOL? Maybe not as much as nuclear but definitely not free -- right now they are a hidden negative externality just like coal plant fly ash, but eventually someone is going to have to pay the bill.

<comment><USER23> The type of renewable matters though, it seems like retrofitting existing houses with solar panels is relatively more dangerous than building utility scale solar farms (no roof to fall off from, higher yield).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Random renewable energy-related question that I've been thinking about:

Specifically wrt solar, a big argument against is that it can't provide power during the night and we don't have a good way to store energy. What I'm wondering is why it's so imperative that residential/commercial properties are able to get full power from the grid 24/7? What if prices for power go way up during the night (because it can't come from solar), and people could just learn to get most of their power from the grid during the day? And have a relatively small per-house battery that charges during the day and can be used at night.

<comment><USER25> > What if prices for power go way up during the night

Individual energy providers do not control prices. The market does.

If there is market demand for energy at night, then people will fill in the gap to provide it. Anyone pushing up prices at night will have competition from someone else who will undercut them. They'll be forced to drop prices or lose customers.

Batteries are inefficient, expensive, and do not provide an adequate amount of electricity for most purposes. Consider a UPS, they're about 90% efficient at most, and for all that 10% of wasted energy, you get to power your computer for about 15-60 minutes if the power is lost. The batteries only last a few years.

Also, a bigger argument against solar (at least, photovoltaics) is that they use up rare earth metals, have limited lifetimes (<25 years), and then become non-recyclable toxic waste.

Concentrating solar energy is more promising as a sustainable solution, but requires large infrastructure and the right climate to be cost effective.

<comment><USER6> "Inefficient" = 90%? I think you need to think more about what you've written there.

<comment><USER25> As stated, that is "at most". A usual UPS is 80-89% efficient.

Even still, assuming they were 90% efficient, is it worth the extra 10% energy consumption just so you can run your computer for 1 hour at night when the solar energy provider ups their rate? You still need to consume the additional energy in the day to charge the battery.

For me to label it efficient, I'd be looking for 95%+, but 99% would be preferable.

Remember, this efficiency declines as the battery ages. You only get a few years of efficient use before it declines significantly. Then you have a disposal problem. A typical UPS uses lead-acid batteries, the same type used in cars. They're not environmentally friendly.

<comment><USER6> Of course it's worth it. Losing 10% of the energy in storage is close to trivial, particularly if that energy is otherwise curtailed excess production. It would be worthwhile to use far less efficient storage for long term load leveling, if the capital cost were low enough. Hydrogen with cheap electrolysers and combined cycle turbines might have a round trip efficiency of 33% -- and that would be GREAT as a last component for getting to a fossil- fuel free grid, particularly at high latitude.

<comment><USER25> But this is missing the elephant in the living room (this thread), which is nuclear.

One of the main issues with nuclear is that it isn't cost effective to turn on/off to meet demand changes in day and night. Nuclear power stations usually only generate energy for the baseload. If we were to cut energy consumption down at night (by increasing costs), the baseload would also drop, and leave an even larger gap to meet for peak, which must be met by other means like solar or fossil fuels.

If anything, we want to shift some energy consumption to off-peak times like early hours, so that the baseload is higher and can be met by cheaper nuclear, along with other solutions like tidal. If this happens, the gap between peak and baseload during the day/evening will be smaller, and can be met with solutions like (concentrating) solar which are more environmentally friendly than photovoltaics + batteries.

<comment><USER6> No, it's not missing nuclear. Hydrogen is the stake through the heart that kills the last argument for nuclear (that batteries can't handle long term load leveling). With reasonable projections of where the costs of renewables and storage are going, nuclear gets optimized right out of the picture.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I can't take you seriously. GL with your blackouts and energy quotas, oh, and reliance of fossil fuels. Where do you think the energy is going to come from to perform electrolysis for hydrogen? solar? You are _nowhere near_ meeting basic needs yet with solar, wind, tidal, geothermal combined. (3 out of the 4 can be intermittent/dependant on environmental conditions and are not reliable). Remember, energy demand is going to continue increasing. By the time your renewable utopia exists, you're going to need to double or triple its capacity.

Perhaps I'm unaware of some technological breakthrough which can produce hydrogen using little energy?

Nuclear is great once up-front costs are paid. Most future energy demand will be met by nuclear. Cleaner renewables will be there to provide additional capacity above baseload, but I wouldn't depend on them to meet basic needs.

I have pondered whether it would be possible to generate hydrogen more cheaply via concentrating solar or geothermal. The hotter you can get water before performing electrolysis, the less electricity will be required. Above 3k Celsius, the atoms in water will dissociate without electricity. You might have a reasonable argument against nuclear if you don't need to spend 3x the electricity creating the hydrogen than you'll get back from it.

<comment><USER6> > You are nowhere near meeting basic needs yet with solar, wind, tidal, > geothermal combined.

Ah, the old "it hasn't happened yet, therefore it can't happen" argument. I'm sure if you honestly think about it you can realize why that argument is nonsense.

> (3 out of the 4 can be intermittent/dependant on environmental conditions > and are not reliable).

We're talking here about power for hydrogen production. Intermittency doesn't matter much for that (it requires the electrolysers be cheap, but their costs have plummeted recently, so that's no longer an obstacle.)

> Perhaps I'm unaware of some technological breakthrough which can produce > hydrogen using little energy?

Perhaps you could stop using strawman arguments? Hydrogen doesn't have to be produced with little energy in order for hydrogen storage to be viable. The energy that is used just needs to be sufficiently cheap. You know, like that $0.013/kWh power from large scale PV in the UAE? And that's only the latest in a constant string of record low bids.

> Nuclear is great once up-front costs are paid.

Yes, if you can get the Nuclear Fairy to wave a magic wand and make the power plant appear for free, it's much less expensive (but even then, the operating costs will be much higher than renewables). In the real world where real money has to be paid to build nuclear power plants, not so much.

> I have pondered whether it would be possible to generate hydrogen more > cheaply via concentrating solar or geothermal.

Neither of these are competitive with PV now. Hell, it's now cheaper to make domestic solar hot water with PV and a resistive heater than it would be to use solar thermal collectors (although a heat pump water heater would be cheaper still). PV has gotten THAT cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Eh. In my view, nuclear is very clearly safe enough, and has been for some time.

What's more interesting to me is whether it's _cheap_ enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1% of commercial reactors Have failed catastrophically. Seems like terrible track record.

<comment><USER26> > 1% of commercial reactors Have failed catastrophically.

That seems a bit high to me. There have been a _lot_ of commercial reactors.

> Seems like terrible track record.

Even if true, everything fails sometimes. Rooftop solar has a surprisingly high death rate from _people falling off of roofs while installing it_.

Ultimately it's a question how safe nuclear is relative to other power methods, probably in terms of deaths per terawatt hour. And even counting those catastrophic failures, it turns out it's actually extremely safe. (...which really underscores just how horribly dangerous some of the alternatives are...)

None of which means nuclear power is _economic_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it.

The sun is a giant, free nuclear fusion plant in the sky. We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!

The wind -- caused by solar heating -- also generates free power.

The cost of harvesting it is now so low, and will always continue to decline as any technology will, that any fuel-based generation mechanism is going to be rendered uneconomic with time alone. They depreciate faster as time goes on!

Investing in any such generator needs to be for other reasons like land scarcity.

<comment><USER28> >We can capture 1/5th of its output per square meter. For free!

except you know, the solar panels. by the same logic you can you can capture fission power for free, all you need is set up the reactor.

<comment> semi-extrinsic There was a comment here about cleanup costs of nuclear vs. solar, that was deleted while I was typing my response to that. I'm just gonna copy in my response here, because I think it's an interesting topic:

Are we really sure solar panels are much easier to dismantle on a euro-per-kWh basis though? That is, if you divide the total cost of dismantling and recycling a solar power plant, divided by the total amount of energy produced over the lifetime, does solar power do much better than nuclear?

Nuclear power in Germany (17 powerplants) has produced well over 5 million gigawatthours over the lifetime so far. It's hard to put good numbers on the cleanup costs, but somewhere in the ballpark of 50 billion euros is probably correct. (Keep in mind that some cost is the government paying the powerplant owners compensation because they are forcing them to shut down long before end-of-life).

So that gives you around 0.01 euros per kWh. A solar panel with 20% efficiency placed close to the equator produces 500 kWh/m2/yr. Over 30 years of lifetime that would produce 15 000 kWh/m2.

Are you sure you would spend significantly less than 150 euros per square meter of panel to dismantle, transport and recycle the solar panels?

<comment><USER29> Solar panels aren't the only way to generate energy using the sun. You can build a concentrated solar farm (see: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco- solar-...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-farm- formula-e-spt-intl/index.html)) which uses mirrors and salt to produce up to 580mw of power, with a cost of just under $1bil.

My neighbor heats their pool using solar, it's just a bunch of tubes that cycle water over their roof. They got rid of their gas heater. Given that most backyard pools are used in the summer, why can't we swap these to using solar?

<comment><USER6> Concentrated solar has lost to PV. It's simply not competitive now.

For domestic hot water, it's now cheaper to use PV and a heat pump (or even resistive!) water heater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I once wondered if it would be possible to have a nuclear power station which operated subcritically with extra neutrons injected from an outside source. The advantage I saw was that turning off the outside source would instantly stop the reaction, no worrying about articulating fuel rods and poison injectors. Unfortunately decay heat is still an issue.

Turns out it's potentially a thing but has some technical challenges.

<comment><USER31> The problem is less about preventing criticality and more about handling the decay heat from all the isotopes produced when it was critical. That's going to give you 10% of the heat you had been producing with the reactor on for a little while after you stop the chain reaction.

<comment><USER30> Yes, that has been the common factor in most incidents. Chernobyl being the exception, they didn't manage even manage to get the control rods fully inserted before the shit hit the fan (poor reactor and control rod design).

Still, the British AGCRs were recently fitted with articulating control rods because if the reactor core was damaged they might not be able to insert them normally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm all for the concept, but so far, everything I've seen has been nothing but concept.

<comment><USER33> Large awesome graphic page on the fuel, and how its super safe. Nothing about how they 'conceptualize' disposing of their waste.

<comment><USER34> The video on their homepage explains their approach to waste disposal. About 60 seconds into the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nice animation but but... I think nuclear is bad because the technology to make it is in the hands of a few big corps. That's the major downside, and of course, toxic waste.

<comment><USER36> > the technology to make it is in the hands of a few big corps

On a practical, mass-deployable scale, this is true of any power generation technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> At 5 MW, these MMR (Micro Modular Reactor) look like a specialized alternative to diesel generators servicing remote locations unserviced by the regular power grid. 20 year lifetime without refuelling is an attractive proposition if the capital costs are competitive.

</comment><comment><USER38> Dr. Chris Morrison from USNC's space division presented to the Seattle Friends of Fission at Ada's

[https://youtu.be/39LGrJkDmho](https://youtu.be/39LGrJkDmho)

</comment><comment><USER39> What would be the ballpark cost for this reactor producing 5MWe?

<comment><USER40> It would be great to know the capital and ongoing maintenance cost per MWe of load, and the lifecycle cost per gWh. This product is pitched at remote sites, so presumably the costs aren't low enough (yet?) for places where power grid connection is an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Illinois EnergyProf recently did a video on USNC's design: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtog_gOaGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtog_gOaGQ)

(Though I think he used audio from the wrong microphone; the earlier videos sound much better.)

</comment><comment><USER42> Summary of discussion in this thread (from The West Wing)

[https://youtu.be/7fkMR96I0sw](https://youtu.be/7fkMR96I0sw)

</comment><comment><USER43> In the page it isn't explained how it shuts down passively in a loss of coolant event? Since the coolant is not doing moderation, removing it doesn't reduce reactivity at all.

You have a 30 bar helium pressure vessel and heat exchangers etc. I wonder how much it's going to leak.

Not saying it's bad, just interested in these questions. Some other designs have these issues in focus.

</comment><comment><USER44> Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either accidentally or on purpose?

Have they actually designed a solution or is this a fundamental safety risk with all nuclear fuels? All I see addressed is proliferation / reprocessing which is a different thing.

<comment><USER18> > Serious question: what happens when you take one of these fuel pellets and > blow it up and disperse it in the atmosphere / water supply, either > accidentally or on purpose?

Hmm, nothing? There are already billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater (there are actually efforts to try to "mine" uranium from seawater), why would a few grams more matter?

As for fission products, humanity has made hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests, as well as the Chernobyl disaster that spewed lots of fission products into the atmoshpere. Unfortunate and stupid, yes, but not the end of humanity either. And fortunately, fission products decay away relatively quickly. So yes, a few grams of fission products from a spent fuel pellet will not make any impact if it's dispersed enough.

<comment><USER44> Chernobyl caused the near permanent evacuation of a nearby city, and nearly poisoned the water supply for millions. Not a good example if you're trying to argue a release of fission products is no big deal.

I would like to understand exactly if/how this reactor design gets around the risks inherent to explosions of radioactive fuel. If it's not a problem then why does the marketing take pains to say it will never leave its capsule?

<comment><USER18> The question of you asked and which I answered was what if we take _one_ fuel pellet and disperse it.

I never said Chernobyl wasn't bad (heck, I called it a disaster for a reason!). But that was tons of spent fuel (rather than the few grams being contained in one fuel pellet) being blown out of the reactor building due to the steam explosion, or going up in smoke during the subsequent fires, and even that was far from the end of the world.

In this case, I guess marketing takes pains, because one of the main ideas of this fuel type is to make them even safer, even during severe accident scenarios. Is it absolutely fool proof? Of course not; you shouldn't grind up the spent fuel and inhale the dust, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "Ultra Safe" will come with Molten Salt Reactors. Hang tight until then. They can even safely reuse nuclear waste.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd love to see these built in San Francisco. If we were serious about a Carbon free future we would build nuclear

</comment><comment><USER47> Wasn't something very similar in size proposed for use in Alaska?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S)

<comment><USER2> Seems like they used a sodium coolant - great thermal properties as it allows for atmospheric pressure loop. But sodium introduces the chemical hazard and all the associated maintenance and materials woes and accident scenarios. Also, the power density on the 4S was relatively high.

<comment><USER2> also they used a strange control system. No control rods. Instead they moved the whole core up and down to change reactivity. wtf?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Countries that go nuclear will have an advantage in the 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is this a company with a product or is this a concept?

</comment><comment><USER50> "ultra safe" seems a weird marketing term for me. "safe" should be enough, no? Unless they know that it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is this a rebranding of the same modular reactor plans I read about 24 years ago? Why are they not being produced?

</comment><comment><USER52> This reminds me of that guy that "invented" the microwave heater (for people) in the show Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER53> I find it a little odd that a site called Hacker News is so bullish on nuclear power. Could there be anything less _hacker_ than a centralized, exclusively government owned and operated source of power?

No thanks. I'd rather put more resources into solar, wind, and other sources of power that don't depend on the government to not explode and irradiate the immediate area for hundreds of years.

<comment><USER54> Centralisation is more efficient. Centralisation is good. Because of centralisation and interconnection (power grid is a network) we only need to have power generation capacity equivalent to less than a third of the total power of all electrically powered machinery.

If every household had to produce its own power, we would need either to carefully plan our usage, or to have as much production capacity as our peak usage, so globally we'd have 3 times as much production capacity as we have nowadays. That would amount to a tremendous waste or resources, an awful misallocation... It would be absolutely anti-ecological.

The more you're using unpredictable energy sources such as wind and solar, the more you need backup power (batteries, gas, coal, nuclear, etc). Case in point: in the EU, there has been virtually no wind at all for two weeks (except in Denmark). So we burn coal and gas, massively.

Germany has a power generation capacity 68% larger than France for roughly the same number of TWh produced annually, because it needs backup production capacity for all its windmills and PV solar. What's the result? Electricity is 58% more expensive in Germany than in France.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> So North Korea getting nuclear weapons is a big deal and using every text book measure to prevent Iran from building these things is quite an effort. But providing the whole world with material which can be used to build these damn things is not a problem?

Also there is big security problems all around the world due to terrorist. So how do we manage security with this small scale things?

</comment><comment><USER56> I want to see how safe is this underground graveyard in case of a volcanic eruption... I'm sorry but I don't believe in nuclear, I think at the pace renewable and batteries are evolving now, they will be better alternative before a new nuclear plant is planned and constructed which takes many years.

</comment><comment><USER57> What about graphite fires?</comment>


High school grad builds 8-bit computer from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/wow-high-school-grad-builds-8-bit-computer-from-scratch-complete-with-custom-os-and-pong/ <comment><USER2> Wow, tough crowd here. When I was in high school, the extent of my computer knowledge was a little visual basic. After watching all of his videos, I'm extremely impressed - it looks like he designed (or at least integrated) a lot of the hardware, operating systems, and applications himself. After a BS and now almost a MS in computer engineering I think I could (...eventually) pull something like this off, but this guy clearly spent a lot of time and effort on learning the ins and outs of computer architecture on his own, in high school no less.

To those complaining that this could be done on a fpga in verilog or something, I think that might be kind of missing the point. There is just something about building the logic up from the ground that is very satisfying. Hooking up the physical wires makes it all that much more real. A huge time investment, but i got the feeling the kid spent a good deal of his free time on it.

So again, mad props. Hope it gets him into a sweet school.

<comment><USER3> "Wow, tough crowd here."

Yeah, no kidding. I just graduated from a computer engineering program and I still find this impressive, especially for a high school student. What could I do with a computer right out of high school? Code some java or c++ (poorly) and install linux on it? That's about it.

<comment><USER4> Not speaking against this kid in particular, what he did was cool, but there are plenty of high school kids who can write professional quality code (in a multitude of languages) and know a lot about the internals of a computer. Speaking from experience, its annoying when age becomes a matter of importance.

<comment><USER3> It might just be the high school I attended but I can only think of one kid out of about 3000 in the entire school who was intimidatingly competent with computers. I can see where you're coming from. Making too big of a deal out of his age might be annoying to some people but with age comes experience and all the anecdotal evidence at my disposal says that most high schoolers don't have this experience yet. :/

<comment><USER3> To be clear, the reason why I find this impressive is because I would assume it implies a significant amount of studying in his free time since computer architecture isn't exactly standard high school curriculum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By some definition of "scratch", we've also built 8-bit computers from scratch in my Electronics class. My respect for this student's accomplishment is proportional to how much of the processor he has designed and built himself; opcode design and management is a highly nontrivial task. On the other hand, if he has built the processor from pre-existing schematics, the accomplishment simply shows a steady soldering hand and good mental endurance.

<comment><USER6> Did you watch the video? This is inspiring to me on many levels.

This probably earned him a salaried job at essentially any place he wants to work. Or at the very least an internship.

I hope he considers skipping college. There's no reason for him to be driven into ~$50k worth of debt, and I've certainly been happy with my decision not to go.

<comment><USER7> While I think the kid is awesome, I don't think it follows that skipping college is the best choice. If he's as brilliant as he seems, he ought to be able to get scholarships to some pretty good schools...where he can learn to go well beyond this, probably faster than he could on his own; even if it's just for the resources a good technical university (like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc.) provides.

He could be working with supercomputing, nanotech, quantum computing, Internet-scale problems, etc. in a couple of years at one of those schools. It would take much longer to get there on the DIY path. I know of what I speak: I went the path of most resistance and I was in my late 20s by the time I really started working with people I considered on or above my level and getting paid fairly for it...i.e. building things that millions of people use. I'm probably not as smart as this kid, admittedly, but I'm enough above average to know what his career path will most likely look like if he opts to skip university.

I'm not suggesting he won't be a monstrous success in the future. I'm pretty confident he will be. But, why not take the short cut?

It's the folks who _aren't_ brilliant, that I think should skip college, or choose a super cheap school. Brilliant people should at least spend a few years in the environment of a great school so they can get a feel for how wide and accommodating the world is for a brilliant individual with drive and ambition.

<comment><USER6> This is an excellent and important point. If your ambitions lie along the lines of "supercomputing, nanotech, quantum computing, Internet-scale problems," etc, then skipping college is a terrible mistake, obviously.

It comes down to what _he_ wants. Personally, I wanted freedom from debt, freedom from high school, and the freedom to work with creative people. Those factors made me decide to drop out of high school ( _after_ I had landed a game development internship, i.e. a solid job and therefore a solid resume for the future).

<comment><USER8> I think it's important to not seem like you're looking down on people who DO chose to go to college. Because surely you wouldn't like it if they looked down upon you?

Truth is you do get a lot more from college for your debt load than just job training.

(And just so you know, I went, but didn't finish, largely because I found myself making a very good living developing software and also because my personality has never accommodated being part of the student-underclass.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Connecting this with the article about the person who smelted his own sword, I wonder if it's possible for one person to single-handedly build a computer starting from Stone Age technology and raw materials?

<comment><USER10> Sure it is, but you have to define it better. He could build a difference engine much easier than he could build a system-on-chip. The difference engine would require metalworking and precision tools; the SoC would require a working digital computer to design, which requires lasers and other production technologies that in turn require advanced production technologies to make. Even if you just wanted to make a basic 4-bit machine with vacuum tubes, you'd still have to invent all of the preceding requisite technologies just to make the constituent components.

A mechanical device would be much easier, and would be well within the capability of a single person with all of the prerequisite knowledge to make. Just look at the Antikythera Mechanism.

<comment><USER11> This french HAM just about has it covered. He makes his tubes from nearly scratch.

<http://boingboing.net/2008/09/18/video-of-a-guy-who-m.html>

<comment><USER10> That's hardly from scratch, though. Just look at all the different tools he uses. We didn't even have glasswork precise enough to use until the 18th century. Add arc welders, all of the chemicals (and chemi _stry_ , mining, etc) needed to make filaments, and everything else required and I doubt a person with full knowledge and access to all of the base materials, as they exist in nature, would be able to build a computer in their lifetime.

<comment><USER12> > full knowledge and access to all of the base materials, as they exist in > nature, would be able to build a computer in their lifetime.

Even that's a huge head start over having to mine the raw materials.

It would probably take several lifetimes to build even the most basic computer from complete scratch even with all the manufacturing knowledge available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> misuse-permit I'm sure it helps to have the right parents too. When I was in elementary school, I showed great curiosity for how our old Macintosh worked, but the internet wasn't around, there were no relevant books in the public library, and my parents didn't know jack-shit about computers.

My point is, with the right upbringing, we would all be like this. I'd like to learn more about this kids childhood. I wonder if, like me, he also went to run-down public high school and had technologically illiterate parents. If that the case, I'd be super impressed. Until then, I'm just mildly impressed and slightly jealous.

<comment><USER13> On that tangent: I've always wondered how things would have turned out if my parents had been savvy enough to provide me with the right book, when it turned out I couldn't understand enough of the English (not my native language) BASIC manual that came with my dad's first PC somewhere mid-to-end- eighties (when I was < 10).

However, I don't think any advantages in that regard detract from this achievement. Even if our parents had nudged us in the right direction, we may have been content doing many 'half' programs. Technical abilities are independent of the persistence required for a larger project such as this (or beginning a startup, for what that is concerned!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is great. Here's another one from a 15/16 year old in 1981. <http://unauthorised.org/dhog/ruse.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667357> for his website documenting this.

</comment><comment><USER16> The instruction set looks pretty nice — a small but practical set of opcodes and a 6502-like zero page to simplify instruction encoding and address calculation.

The article is pretty bad. For me, <http://web.mac.com/teisenmann/iWeb/adeptpage/menu.html> is much better, although it doesn't contextualize the project as well as it might.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it bad if I have mixed feelings about this? With such skills, why not invent something new?

I think if I were to build some stuff from scratch, maybe I would try to build a gene assembler (whatever they called that thing, where you can feed a gene sequence into it and it assembles a real gene from it). That's something you can't buy in every supermarket yet.

<comment><USER18> You have to start somewhere, don't you think? He can't just start at the top and assume he knows how to build something. And there are certainly many lessons to be learned by building something that is already well understood (as many people seem to be attesting to in these comments). Consider it "practice before the big game," where "the big game" is hopefully something he does in ten years that makes people's lives a little better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> To choose to go to this level of depth shows remarkable curiosity in a highschool student.

</comment><comment><USER20> _You think you're smart? Well, not as smart as this guy_

Challenge accepted.

But I still think using just TTL chips is a little over the top. There are much better ways than that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought we all did this?

<comment><USER19> Where is your computer?

<comment><USER21> Sold the parts to an undergrad cmpe student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This one is from 2007...

[http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/DIY-CPU-demod- runnin...](http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/DIY-CPU-demod-running- Minix/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I built one in redstone in Minecraft. Did I win an internet?

</comment><comment><USER24> Nothing new, but still pretty cool. Good for him.</comment>


Rocketbox Lifts Off With Better Email Search For Apple Mail - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/rocketbox-email-search-apple/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working my butt off on this product for about the past 9 months during after hours (I have a 9-5 job right now).

I'd love to here what HN thinks of it!</comment>


Noteslate - <AUTHOR> http://www.noteslate.com/ <comment><USER2> Thingy itself is interesting but that website! It goes on, and on, and on, and on, in an almost endless stream of pseudo-intellectual, grandiose gibberish. Needs a brutal edit, and then what's left needs rewriting by an English- speaking copywriter.

<comment><USER3> I was quite stunned by how long it was, I don't think I've ever seen a longer product page before. Once you get down to it though the resolution of that thing is quite impressive, I didn't know that you could get 1080x1440 px 6.8" e-ink panels. That's impressive. Not sure you could ever use it like they are picturing though, some of the examples have lines close to the edge where it is surely impossible to actually get the stylus.

<comment><USER4> The SHIRO pre-order seems to be priced at $199

<comment><USER3> Cheaper than I expected, but not cheap enough I'm willing to buy one just for the screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately, this device doesn't solve a thing, and it's good that they're at least honest and didn't edit it out of the video. The deal-breaker here? Lag.

There's a reason people don't use tablets as paper even though they're almost ubiquitous, and perfectly able to act like it. It's because the few hundreds milliseconds it takes to react to user input is enough to make handwriting insanely irritating.

Interestingly, one of the recent Windows tablets (I don't remember the model; I had the opportunity to play with it few months ago) seem to have input lag so low, that you can actually write comfortably on it. So it's most definitely possible.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't even need to have 0 lag, just the _illusion_ of having 0 lag would be enough, like faking the stroke until the actual stroke is digitally rendered/saved, maybe with the help of a film that responds to pressure such as this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oikY3mKkAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oikY3mKkAs)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. The point is, you need _instant_ feedback.

Very interesting video, I've never seen such sorcery before. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea, and the device looks neat. But, man:

Lag.

With the half- or full-second lag between a drawing action and seeing the line on the screen, this feels like it'd be maddening to use.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, if they didn't have awful lag even in their own marketing video I might have been interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> See previous discussion (1700 days ago!):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180623)

<comment><USER10> In that case, it's probably gonna be the iPad Pro with the Pencil. I really like pen and paper. It looks like Apple got it right:

[http://9to5mac.com/2015/09/29/pixar-ipad-pro- pencil/](http://9to5mac.com/2015/09/29/pixar-ipad-pro-pencil/)

Apple tricked everyone into thinking a stylus was dumb, right up until they shipped a great one.

<comment><USER11> Remember when Apple tricked everyone into thinking Netbooks were underpowered and lame, right up until they shipped the iPad?

When Apple does the "I'm sure those grapes are sour" routine, you can bet they've got the fix in their pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you search Google for "noteslate wiki"[1], the first result is the Wikipedia entry for Vaporware[2].

1\. [http://google.com/search?q=noteslate+wiki](http://google.com/search?q=noteslate+wiki)

2\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware)

<comment><USER3> That's because the product was first announced half a decade ago.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems like a neat product, a mashup of an ereader and a [http://www.myboogieboard.com/](http://www.myboogieboard.com/) with some added web.

The initial hero image has terrible contrast and readability though, and the site does too much unnecessary fanciness with scroll-ability.

<comment><USER13> So so agree. Did the designers not look at the page after they put it up? The white text on red and white plaid tablecloth one was even worse!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that these products are like 5 years behind the market. There will be need for pencils only in niche markets and definitely not for writing. It looks beautiful, but I don't see go this mainstream....

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool product. I always wanted something like this when I was more interested in architecture than coding.

I opened this in another tab and went back to coding. I was wondering why everything started to slow down. Then I looked at how much memory chrome was easting again.

Anyways, site looks nice, but the UX is another story. You might want a copywriter, and speed up your site by alot. Also, might want to change the header fonts and color. I find some stuff hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why do they keep saying 1-bit but then 16-level grayscale? That's 4 bits.

Looks neat but a bit small at 6.8". I'm nervous that the stylus might be small and cramping for my hand. I'm not big, just that a lot of stuff is small for design purposes first, usability second. (See: every MS mouse after the Intellimouse Explorer.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused how this is so high right now. This really is not that innovative or interesting.

</comment><comment> d--b I would totally buy this if it came with a magnet on the back so that it can stick to my fridge door, and if I could nicely plug it so as to not have to reload the battery...

Think about it, the fridge door is the only place where you're going to remember to use this thing: Open the door, no more figs, write a reminder on your slate, and later when grocery shopping, access the slate from your device. Any other use case is gadgety and you're going to use it 5 minutes and give it up. That said, it's quite expensive for a fridge door post it replacement.

In fact, I think the guys who created this should partner with fridge companies to embed their product in fridge doors. That would be freaking awesome.

Just saying...

</comment><comment><USER18> Quick heads up, you've got a syntax error in your landing page copy.

"Discover the potential and simplicity of a monocrhome handwriting interface."

Moncrhome should read Monochrome :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Was watching the video, and near the end it said "Buy now at noteslate.com", and I was like "wow I give these guys 1000 points for actually SHIPPING IT instead of being just another lame kickstarter scam". And then I read some more, and it says "Pre-order" at the bottom of the page. Why of course, just another vaporware :(

</comment><comment><USER20> Much better versions of this already exist, e.g. The Sharp WG-S20 ([http://www.amazon.com/SHARP-Electronic-Memo- WG-S20-White/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/SHARP-Electronic-Memo- WG-S20-White/dp/B00GGCB3AC))

I believe Sony makes one as well nut significantly more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER21> For a product seemingly targetted at designers, the site design is pretty awful. Too much text, a billion fonts, hard-to-read text+background combination (the "picnic cloth" is nigh unreadable).

And why does it claim to be "sustainable"?

I'd say the execution/presentation needs serious work.

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember hearing about this 5 years ago when it was first announced, with the $99 price point. I thought it was the perfect device for me as I was starting college and would work well for taking CS and math notes. Glad it finally shipped but boy does it feel like a dated.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reading another thread for the same website from a half decade ago, I can't help but doubt that they will actually ship [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180623)

</comment><comment><USER23> How exactly is this better than [http://www.amazon.com/Tomy-Megasketcher- Magnetic-Drawing-Boa...](http://www.amazon.com/Tomy-Megasketcher-Magnetic- Drawing-Board/dp/B00005LWJ6) ?

</comment><comment><USER24> Such a confusing website, I had no idea what this thing does even after watching the video, it looks like an etch a sketch or a boogie board. I'm sure those buttons do something.

</comment><comment><USER25> the form factor looks terrible...imagine writing/drawing for any length of time with your wrist sitting on the corner of the device...can you say carpal tunnel?

<comment><USER26> It's a damn shame that they was unable to keep to their original A4 / Thin concepts. Looks as chunky as my current Toshiba M700 convertible laptop.

Still looking for a tablet like device with Wacom Digitizer and very high PPI. Hopefully the upcoming SP4 and Dell XPS 12 will tick all the boxes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Criticisms aside, I really appreciate how the non-anti-aliased and pixelated quality of the display is incorporated into the product's overall visual language.

</comment><comment><USER28> Would like to see this with Evernote integration.

Also that website is a good example of bad transitions. I shouldn't have to wait so long for the text to appear when I scroll.

<comment><USER29> Have you used scannable? Works great, and you still can use plain old pencil and paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> That lazy-loading isn't really working well, scrolling down through the page quickly leaves me with a white webpage all the way down...

<comment><USER31> Worked for me. Too bad they kept repeating themselves to the point where I wondered if the page was just infinite loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The old classic, now we have invented noun X, somehow the real problems of verbs Y will also be solved.

The old Minority Report gesturing fallacy.

</comment><comment><USER33> The website will be the doom of that product

</comment><comment><USER34> If you are interested in spending some cash on a writing experience, you may be much better off just buying some high quality pencils and paper. Get some Palomino Blackwing pencils and the branded sharpener. (This is not an ad, but) Just go to jetpens.com and spend the price of this device on some nice stuff. You'll love it. They have mechanical pencils that automatically rotate the lead as you write!

</comment><comment><USER35> I know this is kind of weak but I have a hard time reading it other than "No To Slate".

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish I could get one of these in Brazil without having to sell my entire blood.

</comment><comment><USER37> Amazing product, amazing presentation music, amazing pictures.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm glad I stopped loading the page.

</comment><comment><USER39> hmm bic camera has all sorts of similar devices available today in various sizes, but white on black via LCD

<comment><USER40> Yeah, I've seen them too. But they don't save (maybe the do) the images. And most importantly for me, no undo button. I'll keep with my note pro 12.2 for now.

<comment><USER40> replying to my own comment...ok. I found the american site for them, There is a saving version: [http://www.myboogieboard.com/](http://www.myboogieboard.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I pulled this up first in a mobile app that strips out CSS and JS. I started reading the copy and thought that someone had a grandiose satire page trying to sell a pad of paper as a device. I kept waiting for them to talk about a real time communication network involving stamps and grandparents.

EDIT: I know that complaining about downvotes is stupid, but I'm curious what might have invited them in this comment? A bit cavalier perhaps, but they had me genuinely fooled without the javascript to load the images. Any insight?</comment>


The Seed+ vs Pre-A Round Financing - <AUTHOR> http://hunterwalk.com/2013/08/09/the-seed-vs-pre-a-round-financing/

<comment><USER2> Seriously, who would pitch "it's worth bridging because it's a small technical team and they can probably soft land if this doesn't work out" to an investor?</comment>


PopcornTi.me is down - <AUTHOR> http://popcornti.me/ First the installers got pulled off and now the landing page is giving 502. <comment><USER2> Good. This isn't just a file sharing app... it's an app designed explicitly to make piracy convenient. That's its only real purpose.

This is why people are throwing rocks at Google buses: the idea that computer technology is working to create a world where only programmers can get paid.

I used to be on this "information wants to be free" bandwagon, but then I met some actual artists. Lots of things "want" to happen. Nuclear power plants "want" to melt down, dams "want" to break, influenza "wants" to spread, etc. That doesn't mean it's always in our best interest to allow the default second law of thermodynamics thing to occur. There _must_ be some mechanism in our economy for artists and the people who support them to get paid, otherwise you can kiss anything but the most trite (read: cheap to produce) pop music and plotless explosion-fest movies goodbye. That's because that stuff appeals to people who are either too young or too dumb to know how to pirate.

If people can't get paid to pursue their dreams, they have to shelve their dreams in order to get paid. Then you have one less author, one less musician, one less movie being made.

<comment><USER3> It's designed to make watching movies easy, as the current solutions are all subpar. But piracy isn't the goal, it's just the only existing method to make the functionality work.

<comment><USER2> If there were any easy way to unlock and start any car, it would sure be easier to just grab one off the lot than to go through the annoyingly slow lines at car rental agencies.

<comment><USER4> Your sarcastic reply is actually the world today, and it's terrific.

I can use my phone to unlock a large number of cars within a few blocks of me and drive wherever I want.

<comment><USER5> What you're talking about and music distribution have in common is this: the provider gets paid. Terrific services often have costs, and/or require someone to be compensated for their efforts.

Unless, of course, Zipcar et al now have free accounts, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Their actual URL is [http://getpopcornti.me/](http://getpopcornti.me/), which still appears to be up and running.

</comment><comment><USER7> Adding a dead link to a three-word sentence does not qualify it as "news"\--not even if the sentence is true, which it isn't. I really wish I could downvote newsposts right now.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty sure the URL is [http://getpopcornti.me](http://getpopcornti.me) which is functioning just fine</comment>


Show HN: Check promo video of my app for net worth tracking – BalanceViewer - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/oTSrMhNa0QQ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All,

My name is Artem, I'm a founder of BalanceViewer. This IOS app was created to minimize time on tracking net worth, income and expenses without linking bank accounts, registration or providing any sensitive data about yourself.

I would be happy to hear your feedback about:

App: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balanceviewer-personal- finance...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balanceviewer-personal- finance/id1476048552?ls=1)

Site: [https://www.balanceviewer.com/](https://www.balanceviewer.com/)

or promo video :)

In case of any questions, feel free to ask!

</comment><comment><USER2> Some feedback for you.

Personally I'm not very comfortable with inputting all of my finances into an app.

Maybe others see it differently. I personally think it's a bit of a taboo topic and would prefer to keep it private in my own brain as opposed to listing it all down in an app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Its hard to track the progress using brain only (at least for me). Many people even provide access to their bank accounts to allow the apps to track finances automatically. We are at the middle. To give a balance between privacy and simplicity of tracking :)</comment></comment>


Duck Duck Go Traffic & Sponsorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/duck-duck-go-traffic-sponsorship.html

<comment><USER2> That's a $4.23 CPM if my math is right, based on $5,000/1182204 qualified page views in April. That's awfully high.

<comment><USER3> What do you think is appropriate?

<comment><USER4> Try to get in to CPC right away, CPM is not very useful unless you are targeting a specific niche.

$0.05 to $0.10 should get you some traction, evaluate at the end of the first period with your advertiser if they got value for their money. It should be a win-win if you expect it to become a steady money supply otherwise you'll just be hopping from advertiser to advertiser. Ideally you want your first advertiser to be jumping up and down to be allowed to sign up for all ads for the rest of the year based on that first month :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just a stop-gap measure to get some income before you implement context-sensitive ads, right? Most advertisers won't get any value from most searches.

<comment><USER3> I think the traffic is still too low to offer a unique context-sensitive ads approach. So this is an experiment for now. I believe this exclusive approach offers a unique branding experience, but we'll see :)

<comment><USER2> If you don't want to run AdSense ads, Microsoft's AdCenter allows (I believe) more customization with look and feel: <https://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher>

<comment><USER6> Only that, monetizing a search engine with other search engines' ad products would be a bit funny.

<comment><USER7> well he is, in part, driving his search engine with other search engines' indexes so it would be entirely fitting! :)

<comment><USER8> What does that mean exactly. Are you talking about the no click stuff, or do you mean that DDG isn't crawling the web and indexing it, but using results from other search engines to build its own?

<comment><USER7> > or do you mean that DDG isn't crawling the web and indexing it,

He does his own indexing - but also uses (IIRC) Yahoo BOSS and Bing API's.

<comment><USER8> I wasn't familiar with Yahoo BOSS.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/>

So Yahoo is letting people use its search technology free of charge? Wow.

Edit: it looks like Gabriel answers my question here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder_of_a_search_engine_duck_duck_go/c0lyff9)

<comment><USER3> Note that Yahoo BOSS has an unclear future pending the final Microsoft/Yahoo search integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the current CPM comes in too high for most advertisers (given your current traffic), why not try auctioning off that exclusive ad space?

<comment><USER8> An auction would have the benefit of helping you figure out what kind of CPM potential advertisers are ready to pay for.

<comment><USER3> I was just trying to keep it simple. I considered an auction, and might move to it eventually though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always liked the Daring Fireball approach to advertising (not sure if he should get credit for it, but he was the first one I saw doing it), and I really hope it works out well for you, Gabriel.

I love DDG.

<comment><USER11> Daring Fireball is a member of the invite-only advertising network called The Deck. To be a member is to be in an elite group of influencers.

<http://decknetwork.net/>

<comment><USER10> I'm not referring to his sidebar. I'm referring to his weekly sponsorship by a single company.

<comment><USER11> Sorry knee-jerk reply. Daring Fireball has multiple lucrative revenue streams.

I wonder what kind of metrics DDG will offer - I think it would be interesting to know what the user was searching for when there is a click through on the sole sponsor banner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's the traffic link: <http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html>

<comment><USER12> Hrm, you can't trust aws stats. In my opinion they are frequently over- reporting traffic. I recommend using a JavaScript based logger such as Google Analytics or Site Catalyst if you want better numbers.

<comment><USER3> I'm not using it straight up, but just for display purposes. I manually wrote a script to ferret out the correct page views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> good luck</comment>


Skier Vanishes from New York Mountain, Mysteriously Ends Up in California - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/amp/amp.si.com/more-sports/2018/02/16/skier-vanishes-new-york-california-no-idea-how-he-got-there <comment><USER2> Things like this have happened to a considerable number of people: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state)

<comment><USER3> It doesn't even have to be something psychogenic; skiers and head trauma are not unusual combinations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > he bought an iPhone to call his wife

interesting - I could have thought of more economical ways to do so.</comment>


Wirecard shares plunge as EY says no proof for 1.9b € of cash on balance sheet - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wirecard-shares-plunge-as-ernst-young-says-no-evidence-for-19-billion-euros-of-cash-on-balance-sheet-2020-06-18 <comment><USER2> Isn't SoftBank heavily invested in Wirecard?</comment>