Ask HN: Best incorporation type for a consulting company? - <AUTHOR>

Is there one type of incorporation that is best used to establish a consulting company? Looks like most startups are recommended to be a DE incorporated C-corp, is there a similar "best of" set up for the consulting company case?
Looking to establish a legal entity with tax ID, will likely never take outside investment, profit / loss will vary year to year, and want legal separation between "the consultants" and "the company".
Have been advised that an S-corp or LLC would be the way to go, but wanted to hear from the HN community. <comment><USER2> If you are never going to take outside investment, an LLC would be simpler to set up and maintain. You would have a separate legal entity, limited personal liability for the members, and pass-through taxation. With an S or C corp, there are annual reporting requirements, and you need to elect a board and hold annual meetings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you very much! I can't foresee taking outside investment as this is really more of a shell company for our projects and not something that lends itself to outside investment.</comment></comment>


Implementing a DFS and BFS with Java 8 Streams - <AUTHOR> http://flyingbytes.blogspot.com/2017/01/implementing-depth-first-search-dfs-and.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everybody, this is my first attempt of writing a blog post about programming in Java. Please let me know what you think about it.</comment>


The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a29427713/navy-compact-fusion-reactor/ <comment><USER2> The patent in question: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/)

It doesn't seem to have been examined yet.

Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator" (which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor".

All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank.

[0] [https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais](https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais)

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, could this name be a pseudonym for the research group writ large? It assigns the patent to the whole group to avoid giving any particular team member the credit, and it also avoids identifying any individual who may be regularly dealing with classified information.

I've no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent system, though.

<comment><USER4> This link[0] seems to suggest that filing under a pseudonym is not possible. Full legal name, residence, and citizenship of each inventor must be provided.

And there are criminal penalties for knowingly supplying the patent office with false information[1]:

>1) All statements made therein of the party's own knowledge are true, all statements made therein on information and belief are believed to be true, and all statements made therein are made with the knowledge that whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the Office, knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact, or knowingly and willfully makes any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or knowingly and willfully makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be subject to the penalties set forth under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and any other applicable criminal statute, and violations of the provisions of this section may jeopardize the probative value of the paper; and ...

[0] [https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible- to...](https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible-to-file-a- patent-application-usin/)

[1] [https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html)

<comment><USER5> Remember that the NSA has illegally spied on US citizens for decades. I think the Navy could easily swing a waiver from the Patent Office under the rationale of "national security."

<comment><USER6> Why would anonymizing the actual inventor be a matter of national security when they could easily have prevented the patent from being disclosed in the first place:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a lot of skeptics that think this is conspiracy theory nonsense, but Lockheed has been open about working on fusion for a while and maybe some others too.

The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they're declassifying it.

Maybe they think world security will be better with this public, maybe the secret is already leaked, maybe they think a bigger advantage will come from having this commercially available, maybe this is useless for defense because it is trivially detectable, or maybe they're filing patents to mislead adversaries on operational details and delay them, or maybe knowing how it works is unimportant because there is some impossible to acquire secret sauce . There are lots of ways to think about it, and obsessive grabs on technology secrets is not the only one.

[https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact- fusion...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html)

<comment><USER8> >The tech could have been operational for twenty years and this is how they're declassifying it.

Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is secretive, but not that much... there's a strategic advantage to having more advanced tech than your enemies, but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power.

Not to mention that such a discovery would have been worth trillions of dollars to the energy industry, and the Navy has plenty of civilian firms working with them that would have pushed hard for this tech to be exclusively licensed to them if it worked.

AND it's unlikely that the tech wouldn't have been stolen in that time frame. It would be a major, major coup for whatever country got it, and in the past 20 years almost every secret military tech the US has created has ended up in the hands of the Chinese or others... the US military just isn't that good at security, and you can't keep all the docs needed for development of something like this offline or in paper form.

<comment><USER9> > Uh, no. Even a horrifically expensive to build but working fusion reactor > would have been released in that time frame. The military in the US is > secretive, but not that much...

The Glomar Explorer is an example of the US Military doing exactly that, they made a boat specifically for recovering a sunk sub and told every one it was a research vessel they kept it a secret for over 20 years.

There are countless other examples of this like the black bird.

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

<comment><USER10> You omitted the "... but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power"

There's no corresponding big advantage to the US for having the Glomar Explorer be public.

BTW, the CIA has paramilitary forces, but is not formally part of the military/armed forces.

<comment><USER11> >You omitted the "... but there's a much bigger one from your whole country having large amounts of cheap, clean power"

Not to go tinfoil hat here but... if we had a relatively small fusion reactor, lobbyists would do all they could to make sure they never became operational for connection to the grid.

\- Fossil fuel lobbyists

\- Power company lobbyists

\- Fossil fuel worker union lobbyists

\- Ship, train and semi industry/union lobbyists (that transport the insane amounts of coal and oil-related products)

You'd also possibly see the unions that cover anyone working with power lines as you'd be able to set up a bunch of independent grids and stop servicing/repairing, and start removing, high transmission lines that blanket the country which also could get various metal worker unions lobbying against it as production of these massive amounts of cable (if done domestically) would drastically be reduced as why bother crossing vast stretches of land when you can just drop a reactor in a rural area and just serve the region.

When/if we develop fusion reactors that are economically viable, you will remove thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively short period in the United States alone. Voters aren't too found of losing their jobs and the lobbyists of their industries have lots of money to burn fighting such changes (this is why you'll never see the IRS thrown out in exchange for something like a federal income tax only, it would cut 75,000 federal jobs over night and their union + the voting power of them and ever tax preparer, CPA etc would fight hard to prevent it).

\---

AS far as secrets, there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles. Those remain extremely closely guarded secrets where a very small number of people know at any given time where that stuff is stored/warehoused, how much, what variety etc. That's not conspiracy, that's just cold hard fact, and that's stuff like vaccines/medicine/fuel etc.

\---

A hypothetical stretgic use:

The strategic value of keeping such a reactor/technology secret. If you can power your known underground bases/alleged DUMBs (deep underground military base), without needing any energy input from the surface you'd want to keep that very hush hush because it gives you far longer backup power capabilities than generators and fossil fuels stored onsite could provide.

Having such a technology also allows you to actually create DUMBs. You can make an electrically powdered tunnel boring machine, go to something like a known cave or mine site, point it in a direction and go for mile after mile if you felt so inclined. If you're doing this in an area with known caverns/an old mine you never even need to bring what you bore out up to the surface, you just fill caverns/mine shafts. Such tunnels and bases have been alleged to exist since the cold war days and they may or may not exist, but if you had a compact fusion reactor technology that was classified from the start, the longer you keep it a secret the longer you have to exploit it for such hypothetical situations as this.

\---

Edit: Previous HN comment about him/his work

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229721)

Looks like he's previously worked on systems for 'Hybrid Aerospace-Undersea Craft' for something to operate both underwater and as an aircraft a compact fusion reactor would probably be what took it from being a novelty (like the various goofy boat-cars and car-planes) to an effective vehicle.

That's an interesting idea on its own. You could travel fast distances, presumably quite rapidly, through the air and drop below radar, slow down to enter the water and submerge, then proceed to whatever. Or you could act as a sub, if you're detected launch out of the water and accelerate away in the seconds of confusion you create when you suddenly go from a water target to an air target.

Similarly, it could simply be an awesome power source for a rather large seaplane. Rapid troop/cargo transport, even better if you could submerge for travelling in deep water then pop up in coastal water and seaplane in the rest of the way.

 _loses the rest of his afternoon to daydreaming about a compact fusion reactor_.

<comment><USER10> How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?

We can look at other projects, like Bussard's Polywell. Either all of these lobbyists could figure out that it wouldn't work out, so didn't fight the development, or there isn't a major lobbyist effort as you describe it. I strongly suspect the latter.

Or, consider nuclear power during the 1950s, when the fossil fuel worker union was far more powerful than now. What lobbying effort was there, and it doesn't seem that effective.

Or, consider whale oil, which once a major industrial oil. Despite the number of people involved in whaling, and the money involved, it was replaced with other oils. (Wikipedia says it was used in transmission oil until the 1970s!)

The strategic effort you mentioned are essentially the same as those used in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program) . Mining requires more than just electricity - look at how much work the Gotthard Base Tunnel took, and those were all electrically powered. Where do the spoils go? Where are the ventilation shafts?

As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" \- what are you talking about? The strategic oil reserve locations are located at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_\(United_States\)) , the National Helium Reserve is listed at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve) with lat/long even.

Again, the benefits of secrecy you mention are far, far outweighed by the benefits of it being public.

<comment><USER11> >How would those lobbyists find out, if it were so secret?

In a situations here this is rolled out for use to replace power plants and not for classified military applications, thus the various civilian industries and their lobbyists mentioned. I thought this was pretty obvious given I mention a laundry list of civilian industries that the bulk of which are comprised of private and publicly traded companies that are not defense related industries.

>As for "there are very few people that know where the United States keeps any of it's various strategic stock piles" \- what are you talking about?

Stuff like the SNS which is 1 (more likely than not there are multiple locations with only public acknowledgement that 1 warehouse exists given a natural disaster or nuclear attack to a single region could effectively destroy the only stockpile) plain, unmarked, warehouse that the location to is a closely guarded secret due to the fact that someone simply driving a tanker full of a flammable material, then igniting it, through one of the doors of the warehouse could destroy the government's strategic stockpile of antibiotics, vaccines, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, PPE equipment, respirators and other critical medical supplies making it a highly valuable target to both foreign governments and terrorists.

And the things that simply aren't public knowledge at all.

I mean, every few years someone stumbles upon Cold War stockpiles that had been forgotten like back in 2006 when stockpiles of rations and medical supplies were found in the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.

But I'm happy for you that you can google 'strategic stockpile' and link me to a helium supply that the government has already order shut down and sold off (which has been covered by podcasts like Planet Money this year).

<comment><USER10> No, it's not obvious. dangerface was talking about highly secretive projects.

Your statement was only "if we had a relatively small fusion reactor".

Nothing in what you wrote marked the transition from having a highly secretive small fusion reactor to one which was being 'rolled out for use to replace power plants'.

Please don't be so snide. I'm not completely ignorant.

I mentioned those strategic stockpiles because they were the ones I knew about, from years ago. I also know about Quebec's maple syrup reserves because of the theft a few years back.

And, the "any" in your statement "any of it's various strategic stock piles" typically means _all_ of them, not _some_ of them. Which is why I asked for clarification. And the National Helium Reserve _is_ still around, making it is a valid example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Current reactors are approximately the size of a building; a relatively > portable compact fusion reactor, one designed to power relatively small > vehicles, would be a game-changer.

Ummm... Isn't it more important to say that current reactors don't even work (at least not yet)? A _working_ one would be a game-changer, never mind how big or small it was.

<comment><USER13> They kind of work, longest fusion reaction is 70 seconds. The two main issues are:

* Keeping the reaction going indefinitely in a controlled way

* Doing so without the system power input being greater than the power output

<comment><USER14> They work as in produce fusion.

They don't work as in produce power.

Teenagers build "working" fusion reactors.

No one has built a fusion reactor that produces useful power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the military has developed several breakthrough technologies, why in the world would they patent them, thereby making them public? Given a revolutionary new tech, no foreign government would respect a U.S. patent, nor would it be enforceable in the first place.

It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these patents at face value.

As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc.

Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?

<comment><USER16> It's not so out of character. Consider the recent disclosure that certain famous UFO video clips are genuine and show unidentified phenomena. Why would they disclose _that_ when shutting up would work and was working?

The answer is they _want to_.

There are factions within the US government and it seems that the "tell them, but take it real slow" faction is presently in the ascendant.

<comment><USER15> The military verified that, yes, those were videos captured by the them. However, the videos themselves are inconclusive. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said (paraphrasing), "the 'O' in UFO is highly non-specific". Others have suggested explanations such as: equipment malfunction or misinterpretation, misinterpretation of known natural phenomena, or classified US gov tech. Further, these too could be an intentional ploy by the military/gov for unknown but rational and non-ET related motives. These are just a sampling of possible explanations.

You seem to be leaning toward an extraterrestrial explanation. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but it seems like a very low probability explanation and one that defies the principle of parsimony.

<comment><USER16> The videos are subsets of what they have, supposedly (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing things. It's not an accident that the inconclusive part is what got released. _It was chosen._

They have been sitting on this stuff. They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption. They are choosing, deliberately, to gradually change attitudes. Part of the gradualness is maintaining intentional levels of ambiguity that can be slowly, slowly dialled down.

All of this is kind of orthogonal to _what_ they are sitting on. Doesn't have to be ET.

<comment><USER15> > (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing > things

Link? Who are these people? Are they credible? Do they seem rational, reasonable, and (highly) skeptical?

> They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption

There is nothing reasonable about this assumption.

> All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on

Huh? How? Why?

This is all veering into conspiracy-theorist-cum-crackpot territory. You are doing some extreme extrapolation from very thin and inconclusive evidence.

<comment><USER16> The people in TTSA on their show Unidentified, said it, if my memory is correct. I forget exactly who but probably Luis Elizondo. TTSA is composed of ex-intelligence-insiders with clearances to see more than they are cleared to reveal.

<comment><USER15> Just so we're all clear, the TTSA you're referring to is "To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences", an org founded by former Blink-182 band member Tom DeLonge and staffed by kooks and wackadoos, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is the government filing patents? The research is paid for by our tax dollars. Patenting it doesn't seem right.

<comment><USER18> To stop someone else patenting it and then trying to claim license fees from the Navy.

<comment><USER19> > To stop someone else patenting it

prior art.

<comment><USER20> Prior art is very difficult to prove and patent reviewers often miss obvious examples. They can't so easily ignore a pre-existing patent. It also protects the invention from exploitation by foreign competitors, in jurisdictions with reciprocal patent protection.

<comment><USER21> It depends, obviously. Prior art is easy to prove by pointing at an existing patent. It is also easy to prove by pointing at an article in a mainstream publication in the local language. So "protective publication" or "defensive disclosure" is a reasonable alternative to getting a patent (and perhaps letting it expire at the first opportunity).

Prior art is only difficult to prove if you're relying on something along the lines of folk knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lands where the Jumblies live.

It's non-obviousness that is notoriously difficult to prove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Current [fusion] reactors are approximately the size of a building"

I was under the impression there isn't a fusion reactor of any size anywhere yet, am I wrong?

<comment><USER23> There are many fusion reactors, just none that produce more energy than they consume.

Barring some random research breakthrough by a small team somewhere, ITER is probably the best bet for reaching positive net energy first: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER)

<comment><USER24> Yeah, in fact many folks have created DIY _fusors_ in their garages. Just hook any sort of energy harnessing device onto that and you can claim you've got a fusion reactor too!

[https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear- fusor/](https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's the patent by Salvatore Cezar Pais. The same guy who patented gravitational wave generators, room temperature superconductor and "craft using an inertial mass reduction device".

</comment><comment><USER26> Relevant: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208051)

Seems like the HN community expressed scepticism/doubt about the science behind patents filed by this guy? (Also commented in the posts regarding the ufo sightings by us navy pilots).

</comment><comment><USER27> This is the original article: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war- zone/30256/scientist-behind...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war- zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a- compact-fusion-reactor)

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't quite work out what they're doing here.

> According to the patent, Pais' plasma chamber contains several pairs of > these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in > order to create a "concentrated magnetic energy flux" that can squish the > gases together.

If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to make?

<comment><USER29> They're both points of equilibrium; Lagrange points are both stable (like a ball rolling in a half-pipe) and unstable (like a pencil standing on its tip) equilibriums. A stable equilibrium means that when an object in that point is displaced, it starts oscillating around that point, and unstable means that an object at that point, when displaced, will uncontrollably move away from it, unless you push it back onto that point.

Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume it's a stable equilibrium.

<comment><USER30> Does the reasoning behind it all seem to make sense, or does it seem like meaningless sci-fi word-salad? I don't understand enough to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Source article: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist- behind...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the- navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor)

Also, it's a patent application, not an issued patent.

</comment><comment><USER32> Conspiracy theory... This is not a good reactor design, and therefore they files a patent for it, hoping to mislead foreign countries into using it.

Another idea is that by filing a patent, Congress could give that kind of patent extra long protection, extending the amount of time it could only be used by the US Navy.

</comment><comment><USER33> From TFA:

> Related Videos XXXXXX YYYY Dash Cam Captures Accident

Seems popularmechanics.com needs to tune their what-is-related algorithm a bit. Or is it a subtle jab at "yes my boss says I need to publish this even though it's an obvious crank and it's just clickbait"?

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks a bit similar to focus fusion.

See Google talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB- VxJWpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg)

</comment><comment><USER35> This looks like someone mashed a wankel engine and a tokamak together. Interesting, but I'd need to see it in action to believe it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Pointless, it's already been disrupted. Www.fusure.io

<comment><USER37> ... This site is a joke, right? You can buy a "fusure core" now, with a 4-week lead time, for $3000. The description gives some vague hand-wavey stuff about "thousands of nanoscale tokomaks [sic]", allowing the "Coulomb barrier to break via quantum tunneling".

Is it just an experiment to see who's dumb enough to give them their credit card information?

<comment><USER36> It just works. Does not produce net energy. This is our MVP and we want to ship fast into the hands of hardcore fusion hobbyists called fusioneers.

<comment><USER38> Hi, former and possible future fusioneer here, with disposable income. Care to post any specifications? If I just want some neutrons I can do that myself.

<comment><USER36> Sure, I will email you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> could this not just be a weird dude who happens to be funded by the Navy in some more mundane capacity, and therefore assigns patents to the Navy?

</comment><comment><USER40> Highly skeptical of "ground-breaking" innovation emerging from the Navy.

<comment><USER41> Same here. Those idiots have never come up with anything new or revolutionary, only stupid run of the mill stuff like nuclear submarines and carriers, planet spanning underwater listening systems, spy subs that can sit on the ocean floor, drones that can land on carriers, electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles at mach 6+, and other worthless crap.</comment></comment>


Boeing 777X: World's largest twin-engine jet completes first flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51253066 <comment><USER2> The 777X is a program, covering two (or more) models: the 777-8 and 777-9. The one that flew yesterday was the first 777-9 -- a replacement for the 777-300ER, with significantly increased range, a stretched fuselage (it's slightly longer than the 747-8), and up to 426 seats. Increased use of lightweight materials and those whizzy folding winglets mean it's no heavier than its predecessor.

Maximum cargo capacity is roughly three-quarters that of a 747-8 by weight.

There's also a possible 777-10X model that will seat up to 450 passengers and is being pitched as a rival to the A-380 superjumbo.

The real miracle here is that the big four-engine jumbos are being replaced by a twin-jet. (This says something profound about advances in engine technology since 1970. Or even 1990.)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't that make a plane less engine-fault tolerant? Completely noob here, but I would feel better if I flew in a 4-engine plane than 2-engine. In a 4-engine plane, even if 2 engines faults (like, bird strike), the other 2 will still make the plain airbone.

<comment><USER4> You don't necessarily lose engines instantly to bird strikes, they're most likely to happen at takeoff and landing, and it hasn't been an issue for the massive fleet of twin-engine short-haul jets.

The real concern is trans-oceanic long-haul. Supposedly modern engine failure rates have improved to the point that you're less likely to have problematic engine failures than a four-engine 70s-era 747.

<comment><USER5> Which is shown by statistics. There are thousands of daily flights over Atlantic & Pacific. Engine failures over the ocean are incredibly rare (I couldn't find any recent ones). Most reasons why airliners choose to divert at this stage are medical issues nowadays. And for the plane to crash not one but both engines would have to fail.

<comment><USER4> > for the plane to crash not one but both engines would have to fail

I recently rode in a 2-person jet. The pilot said the only reason we might bail out is an engine fire. If the engine fails, the plane's an excellent glider, and we'll glide to an airport/airstrip. Now, this was somewhere with airports all over, not an ocean.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS) is a good read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am fascinated by the wings, you can see that they have been heavily optimised and wonder how much compute time went into perfecting them. I'd love to see a documentary on the design & construction. I have a carbon-fibre road bike and it is incredible how much they can tune the materal. Where it is rigid and where/ even how it flexes to dampen vibrations.

Interestingly, most of that article is about the 737 Max issues (the MCAS software is a disaster, it's a push to even call it engineering).

<comment><USER7> Recently I've been doing a teeny tiny bit of CFD again. You might be amazed at how _little_ CFD goes in to wings. It's still a huge amount, but tunnel testing still wins. I was kind of surprised.

As best I can tell, CFD is still kind of like impedance-based home body fat scales. They're kind of directionally accurate but have a pretty high error.

I thought CFD would be a solved thing by now, but then I remembered how good (e.g. bad) weather prediction still is.

<comment><USER8> You might be interested in this bet on the LongNow site:

[http://longbets.org/753/](http://longbets.org/753/)

Some people think that wind tunnels will be obsoleted by computational fluid dynamics within the decade. Others think that the problems with CFD are not a lack of compute power but a lack of comprehensive understanding and modeling of the physics at play, and expect that wind tunnels will be with us for quite a while. (Personally, I believe in the progress of technology and expect an eventual if not near-term breakthrough in CFD software will eventually obsolete the wind tunnel, but I also think that institutional inertia will keep a lot of wind tunnels and businesses that purchase time in them in operation for a decade or more after CFD's big breakthrough...)

<comment><USER9> There are sources of error in wind tunnel testing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The 252-foot-long passenger plane had been due to launch this year but has > been delayed by some technical difficulties.

Is that related to the recent MAX issues, or to the fact shipping such a large aircraft on two engines only was much harder than expected?

<comment><USER11> Neither. The main delay is due to a problem with the GE9X engines. Some of the internal components were wearing out faster than expected so they had to redesign them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this plan have a market? I thought the airbus A380 was having a very bad time and airlines don't want it anymore because it's too big.

<comment><USER13> A crucial difference is that, ultimately, 777X is a much smaller plane with easier operations compared to huge A380.

It needs no new special handling compared to the existing 777, which already had a higher amount of airports available as destinations, if only because it didn't need two-level tunnels for speedy embarkation/disembarkation.

Also, 777 has always served the long distance market, and this plane is essentially an extension for it without many of the downsides of both A380 and 747

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Presumably the fuel efficiency (and emissions) are improved by a good chunk? 40 percent?

<comment><USER15> That would be amazing, given that current jets are already pretty efficient. Looks like its a little over 10% more efficient compared to older 777's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777X#Efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777X#Efficiency)

<comment><USER14> You're right. I didn't realize how much larger the new engines were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently they've only sold 300 of them. Same thing with the new updated 747.

<comment><USER17> Only 300? That's like $150 billion of orders.

<comment><USER16> I was told they need like 1500 sold to turn a profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> how many airlines are going to be thinking, hmmm lets let someone else fly them and see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER19> This site has some more info about the 777 etc. Some articles may be paywalled though.

[https://leehamnews.com/2020/01/25/third-time-is-the- charm-77...](https://leehamnews.com/2020/01/25/third-time-is-the- charm-777x-takes-to-the-sky-today/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Who wrote the software?

<comment><USER21> It wasn't a software problem.

<comment><USER20> It? I just mean in general, have their paid enough attention and money to the software as to the hardware?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If something comes out on the 777X that is similar to the 737MAX, it will break Boeing irreparably.

<comment><USER23> They can ride quite a while due to the fact that there is only one alternative in commercial flight (Airbus). I hope there is not a time when both companies have such an issue at the same time. That would disrupt travel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So this plane has : a different fuselage, different wings, and different engines than the "regular" 777 but somehow is still called a 777.

Has Boeing learned _anything_ from the past 12 month ?

<comment><USER25> It just needs to behave like a regular 777 and you can partly do that using software emulation.

<comment><USER22> Just like the 737MAX?

<comment><USER13> Actually the opposite. Had 737MAX gone the way of 777, there would have been no MCAS - but it would involve significant rework of control system, new avionics, and a lot of training.

The core difference is that even the original 777 is a Fly-By-Wire system with programmed behaviour, in fact it was a well known case study in building civilian safe FBW systems.

Because of that, there's no need to "patch over" differences like it was done with MCAS, as the minute adjustments can be done across the whole flight envelope protection system that is already there since first 777. In fact, 787 controls are derived from that and use software adjustment extensively in order to make control surface generate less drag yet still be usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Considering recent events I'm wouldn't be to interested in flying in it

<comment><USER27> No thanks. I don't mind beta testing software but I draw the line at beta testing the next Boeing aircraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did the military division of Boeing have a hand in engineering the folding wingtips? It would make sense since McDonnell Douglas/Boeing have decades of experience doing this with the F-18. Then again it wouldn't surprise me if the 777X team reinvented the wheel on this point.</comment>


Dozens of Scientific Papers Withdrawn After Peer-Review Fraud Uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dozens-scientific-papers-withdrawn-probably-more-come

<comment><USER2> In theory, the journal editors would have made sure that the reviewers were independent of the authors. This due diligence, however, takes work.</comment>


Ask YC: How to Hack & Have a Social Life - <AUTHOR>

I am a startup founder and i have come to a recent conclusion that my social life is now next to zero. The only people i "socialize" with, are fellow hackers and programmers like myself. This is beginning to bother me, because I have more of an online life than a real life and i am becoming somewhat awkward in real life social interactions. I will like to ask fellow hackers here, how can you hack and still have a "Real Social Life"? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer - I am not working on a startup right now, rather have a regular 9-5 job with a few projects on the side. I guess what I am saying is take my advice with a grain of salt.

Having said that, my simple advice is - Get Outside. Like a lot of other hackers, trivial social talk bored me. I love intellectual conversations and topics, and reached a point where the only "real" conversations I was having were online. But lately, I have been pushing myself to go outside and meet other people. Try taking a genuine interest in them, and you will come to realize that not only are other people as interesting and passionate as you, but a lot of them have the same issue as you, in that they find it hard to meet interesting people.

Over the weekends, I have been getting out of my apartment and heading out to a local coffee shop. Familiarity helps, going to the same place a few times means you get to know the staff and some of the regulars. Strike up a conversation with the person on the next table.

Throw a party. Ask your friends to call their friends. Its easier that way because you have overcome the first hurdle, and that is - "What do I say?". Start by asking someone knew how they came to know of the party!

Join some social groups - book clubs, dancing classes, martial arts or a meditation group (whatever interests you). These are great places to meet new people with similar interests (and no, the Local Linux groups does not count :D)

At the end of the day, social interactions take practice, much like anything else. You need to pursue it and treat it like any other task ("Deliberate Practice"). Over time you will come to realize that its not that hard. Yes, sometimes you fall flat on your face, but would you rather not try?

There are several books that can help, if you like to read up on it, two come to mind -

1\. How to Win Friends & Influence People 2\. Never Eat Alone 3\. How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> great advice here, i was going to say most of it myself.

here are a few other nuggets i was going to drop:

* set aside some time to work in public places with free wifi (coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc.). the point is to work some, and talk to people if you get the chance. some places won't mind you sitting around all day, but some will, so you might need to rotate.

* in addendum to the social group part, i'd suggest you pick a sport that interests you and join/learn that, whether it be martial arts or soccer or whatever (i personally suggest sport fencing). in addition, join a gym and go regularly. physical fitness directly affects mental fitness, which is important for a hacker. plus, you interact with peoples.

* SET A SCHEDULE AND KEEP IT. the only reasons to break it would be to meet some important deadlines. if you set yourself a 9-6 schedule, don't break it and skip your cool social thing at 6:30 just to get the next feature finished today. it can wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure why you are defining a 'real social life' as socializing with non-hackers. A 'Real Social Life' consists of hanging out with like-minded individuals. I would imagine that most people spend their down time with co- workers and school friends - people they see on a regular basis and build relationships with. It would follow then that if you are a programmer, you will be spending most of your time with other programmers.

Unless you mean that you are only talking with them online and stuff. In that case, you should probably just go out and get drunk or something.

<comment><USER5> I think that a 'Real Social Life' should consist of more than hanging out with like minded individuals.

It's important to get different perspectives on life non?</comment></comment>


Mozilla Openness facts - <AUTHOR> http://paulrouget.com/e/openness/ <comment><USER2> This built-in firefox page was new to me... about:crashes

<comment><USER3> Chrome has an about:crashes as well; but more importantly, both browsers have an about:about, which list all their about pages.

<comment><USER4> Opera has an about:about, but it doesn't list all about:X pages. It does gives version information, browser identification and folders where it has files (that one is very handy).

And a few pages of licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah heck, Mozilla really is a better organization than Google. That's it, I'm switching off of Chrome and going back to Firefox.

<comment><USER6> Ironic, considering they are largely funded by Google and the other search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find that my posts to their mailing lists don't go through half the time. I have no idea why. I guess my cordial comments fall through the cracks some times.

<comment><USER8> Don't go through as in a technical problem or don't get a response?

I'd be happy to ask around and try to see what might be going on with a technical problem if you send me the details of what happens when you try to post.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if it's a technical problem or if it's moderation, but I usually post from my email client and then later look on Google Groups to see if they show up there. Some times they do, some times not. When I post from Google Groups they seem to go through and show up twice, so I try and avoid posting that way.

<comment><USER9> It's a technical problem. The lists have a weird two-way email/NNTP bridge, and Google Groups is on the NNTP side. Frequently Google Groups falls behind the actual newsgroup, sometimes for several days at a time, e.g. <http://bugzil.la/667637>

When that happens, you can point an NNTP client (like Thunderbird) at news.mozilla.org to see if your message actually went through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Video shows tab in a browser as innovation from Mozilla. Opera anyone?

<comment><USER11> Eh, nope. The history of tabbed browsing is complicated. Neither Opera nor Firefox were the first to start using it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing>

You could say that Firefox brought it to the mainstream, as for many people that was the first introduction to it.

<comment><USER12> So Mozilla is jwz's name for the Netscape code that they open sourced. Does anybody know if there is a continual code-base going back through Firefox to Mozilla to Netscape to Mosaic? In which case, they could claim, they invented it all.

<comment><USER13> There isn't.

jwz mentions that he was unsuccessful lobbying the release of the 3.0 source.[1] For the purposes of this discussion (since you only ask about the browser here), according to Brendan, 4 was like 3.[2] Seibel mentions there that Brendan says _he_ tried to get it released, too. The big rewrite that everybody talks about is Gecko (under the stewardship of Gessner, I think), when 5 got ditched and the next release jumped to 6. It's still listed on the MXR homepage (under Classic). Then, ho-ho, there came another new flavor at the genesis of Firefox proper, Aviary, which is also indexed on MXR. I don't know what sets it apart from pre-Aviary besides that it ditched the old XPInstall stuff. (Yeah, XPIs still exist, but most people don't realize that's not XPInstall anymore. That's the new-ish "toolkit" install system.)

1\. <http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/09/that-duct-tape-silliness/>

2\. [http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/two-rewrites- red...](http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/two-rewrites-redux/)

<comment><USER12> Thankyou for the well-referenced response.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Man Who Solved the Mysterious Cicada 3301 Puzzle - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3025785/meet-the-man-who-solved-the-mysterious-cicada-3301-puzzle <comment><USER2> _It is most likely an underground organization, not related to any government or intelligence agency_

Or a few bored guys on an IRC channel. A few websites, couple of phone numbers, and some posters: once you have members in the targeted cities, the budget for an operation like this is in tens of dollars.

</comment><comment><USER3> All the links on that website link to the same page :S

</comment><comment><USER4> The technical details of the puzzle described in the article strike me as trivial.

<comment><USER5> Well, the last section wasn't. After you got a message on the e-mail account you made using TOR, you were asked a more complex mathematical question, and told not to tell anyone what it was, as they were tired of ircs and skype groups solving everything. I didn't realize I was one of the people selected to move on until a week later, though, and was too late to move forward.

<comment><USER6> So what was the math problem?

<comment><USER7> Find integers a, b, c such that a^20 + b^20 = c^20. The solution turned out to be 4110^20 + 4693^20 = 4709^20. You can verify this is correct using any old calculator, for example:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=4110%5E20+%2B+4693%5E20](https://www.google.com/search?q=4110%5E20+%2B+4693%5E20)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=4709%5E20](https://www.google.com/search?q=4709%5E20)

<comment><USER8> Am I missing something, doesn't this contradict Fermat's last theorem

> In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's > conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive > integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any > integer value of n greater than two.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem)

<comment><USER9> You're not missing anything.

His numbers do not add up to the same thing. In other words, 4709^20 != (4110^20 + 4693^20). (The difference is ~10^61 or so, whereas the numbers are ~10^73. In other words, they diverge at ~ the 12th digit, whereas many calculators only display 10.)

<comment><USER7> Hm, well, part 2 of the question was to find a solution for a^15 + b^15 = c^15, where a, b, c are integers > 0.

Google verifies the answer is 434437^15 + 588129^15 = 588544^15: [https://www.google.com/search?q=434437%5E15+%2B+588129%5E15+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=434437%5E15+%2B+588129%5E15+-+588544%5E15)

<comment><USER9> Nope. This is not correct either.

> >>> 434437* * 15 + 588129* * _15 - 588544_ * *15

> -604550152144288043930860169354171954730939671404246170822386878582482

(Edit: how do I display two asterisks in a row? It's supposed to be number(asterisk)(asterisk)number.)

This is using Python, which does arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic.

Google's calculator probably uses floating-point numbers internally, and hence starts losing precision.

<comment><USER7> It seems that advancements in technology have made mathematical trolling much more difficult. :)

In case anyone is curious, the above "solutions" are called near-misses, since they're _almost_ correct. A clever person came up with an algorithm to generate interesting near-misses for low exponents. See the table on page 15: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0005139v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0005139v1.pdf)

Related: [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/526330/fermats- last-...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/526330/fermats-last-theorem- near-misses)

Have fun!

<comment><USER10> What you really need is a "solution" that is wrong in just one digit somewhere in the middle that everyone would easily miss when comparing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish someone would finally report those fuckers to the FBI. Or straight-up murder them.

Secret societies like that make my skin crawl.

<comment><USER12> That's right, they are probably planning on taking all over the world now.</comment></comment>


Physicists observe 'negative mass' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39642992 <comment><USER2> It is still an open question as to whether anti-matter falls up or down - e.g. negative gravitational mass.

The ALPHA experiment is using anti-hydrogen at CERN to find out.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2787](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2787)

So far they have made some, but not enough to rule out experimental error.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this the same story as posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147264) (0 comments)

Or here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135929) (0 comments)

Or here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131417) (1 comment)

Or here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14130945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14130945) (2 comments)

Or here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093860) (40 comments)

If it's the same as that last one, the comments there are pretty scathing about the whole thing, so some scepticism advised.

<comment><USER4> > _so some scepticism advised._

I think it's a wrong attitude for this article. I prefer to use "beware that the naïve layman explanation may be misleading and wrong". The research article is good, the layman explanation is impossible to write.

This is a very technical subject. I don't understand all the details, so I'll mix some information with guess.

First a similar experiment: Inside a semiconductor, the conduction electrons are not isolated. You can image that an electron has a cloud of perturbations around it. So the effective mass of an electron inside a semiconductor is not the mass of an isolated electron.

Moreover, in some cases the effective mass can be negative. If you push them with an electric or magnetic field, they will move in the wrong direction.

So it's easier to understand their behavior thinking that they are positively charged particles with a positive mass, rather than negatively charged particles with a negative mass. The usual name for them is "holes" and any Engineer that use semiconductors will use them as if they were real particles. (A Physicist will be totally convinced that they are real particles, but real has here not the usual definition.)

So, there are some examples of "things" with negative mass. This case is different because it's a fluid (a bose condensate?) instead of a solid, and they are using rubidium atoms that are bosons instead of electrons that are fermions. So I'm not sure about the details ...

But this is probably a fluid with negative mass that only can live inside some weird material. It's not a fluid that can be isolated and put in a balance and get a negative result.

[And it can't be used to build an Alcubierre Drive.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I used the term "negative mass" on a physics pop quiz once. Had something to do with matter-antimatter reactions. Appears I was 23 years ahead of my time.</comment>


Hundreds of academics at top UK universities accused of bullying - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/28/academics-uk-universities-accused-bullying-students-colleagues <comment><USER2> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.

You know that The Guardian will present anything they can as an issue that requires institutional change. That's just what they do these say. If you're willing to engage in willful confirmation bias, you can take any large institution and find enough disgruntled people to to build a "case".

I see nothing in this article about the authors trying to disprove their own hypothesis.

 _" The Guardian sent freedom of information requests to 135 universities. Responses revealed a total of 294 complaints against academics at 55 institutions. A further 30 universities reported 337 complaints against all staff – academic and non-academic. Across 105 universities, at least 184 staff have been disciplined and 32 dismissed for bullying since 2013."_

Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.

Of course, these days any official statistic with inconveniently "good" numbers can be dismissed on the grounds that there are systematic attempts to cover things up and institutional pressure not to report incidents. But that in itself is often a form of confirmation bias.

<comment><USER3> > At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure > out whether there is an actual institutional problem.

I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I'm aware of) in journalism.

Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can't have been a mistake.

The way I consume news these days isn't the greatest, but it's the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.

I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don't read the body of the article, because it's usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non- expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.

If there's an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it's relevant to my interests, I research it independently.

<comment><USER4> Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you're the product being sold.

Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you'd rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies?

Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn't a problem? We're talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that's still not good.

<comment><USER5> Consider a city where the murder rate is half of the country wide one, it would be a little unusual to claim it has a institutionalized murder problem based on those numbers.

Maybe it has one (e.g. particularly bad neighborhoods) but it would be a weird conclusion from just the number

(I didn't read the article, did not feel that was relevant to this specific response)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was once told a story by a professor at my undergrad about a new sessional instructor that just arrived at the school. Apparently a couple of years before, this sessional instructor was one of the top PHD students the country. He was going to grad school at one of the most prestigious universities, and his supervisors were the leading authors in their field. He published regularly since undergrad, and was teaching a couple of classes. One day, he found out that his supervisors were faking their results. These results were crucial to a couple massive papers for his supervisors. So he blew the whistle on his supervisors, and the papers got redacted. There were a couple of disciplinary measures for his supervisors, but within a few months they were back at work. This sessional instructor, however, was now blacklisted in his field. His advisors were editors for the top journals, and they had many connections to other researchers. I don't think he ever managed to finish his PHD, but they hired him as a sessional instructor for a couple classes at my school anyway. I think he now sells cars on the side to pay his bills.

<comment><USER7> I know an ex-postdoc who's promising career was cut short by also identifying and exposing fraud. I suspect it's more common than we think, and it's thoroughly wrong that being honest and professional can ruin your career in a moment. If you find all your research was based on fabricated data, what choice do you have? Expose it, or knowingly continue the fraud and be equally culpable. You're ruined either way.

The deeper problem is the environment which drives people to commit fraud in the first place. These whistleblowers are victims of that.

As someone who left after my PhD due to not having a good publication record, I've seen the nature of the pressure to suceed at all costs to advance in your career. It's brutal. I doubt most start out with bad intentions, but fraud is the ticket to success for a significant minority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "Some students were driven to attempt suicide as a result, others broke down > and simply vanished from science."

It is hard to evaluate how much talent and how much suffering bullying causes. In every company I have been there had been some level of bullying. The result usually is that options were not discussed, people left or get depressed, long non-paid hours produced no real results as work was done in the wrong projects, etc... Bullying in school or politics has even worst consequences.

There is a lot of untapped potential in human society. Bullying has a high toll on society.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading that article conjured up some bad memories. I once as a grad student tried out for a big name scientist working at the LHC. The professor was harsh and abrasive, and while he called out bullshit, which was good and great, he also was extremely harsh and toxic in his criticism. I once attending a group meeting where everyone was walking on eggshells to avoid pissing him off. I remember as one of the more senior group members talking faster and faster as the professor tried to ask her whether she had finished some analysis. At that point I decided to leave and do something else, which ended up being the right decision both personally and scientifically (although the prof got promoted, their specific SUSY search ended up being unfruitful, and of course, the LHC didn't find evidence of SUSY).

Especially given the LHC's current negative results for physics beyond SM, is it not surprising few particle physicists are willing to confront the issues regarding SUSY's negative results? How many other leading scientists at CERN are like that and intimidate anyone who would dare to question them?

I guess this post did turn into a sort of a dig at CERN, but I think a more broader point is not only do these toxic people make everyone miserable, but they hamper science too when the bosses are abrasive AND end up being wrong. So, the whole argument of "abrasive => calls out BS => makes them effective managers" like that which was in the discussion about Linus is undermined.

</comment><comment><USER10> Being a PhD student is basically working 50-60 hours a week for low pay, for a boss who pretty much has absolute power over you.

I've seen it all - scientific misconduct of every kind imaginable, professors impregnating postdocs, professors who regularly make their grad students cry, professors who neglect their teaching, etc. There are no checks and balances. The system often creates monsters.

</comment><comment><USER11> There were three recent scandals at MPIs a few weeks to months back, the most recent one being: [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top- emp...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-empathy- researcher-colleagues-say-she-bullied-and-intimidated-them)

I'm glad that this new Guardian article highlights that it is a structural problem. When reading up on the MPI cases it seemed as if it was a problem of few labs only. Due to the power imbalance, as a to-be-PhD student you are strongly advised to experience several labs before making a decision where to go. Don't only look at metrics such as reputation. It is incredibly hard to find a good PhD advisor, and intuition trained by good and bad experiences does help.

Similarly bad are people in those labs who don't recognize the behaviour as such because they either have never experienced a non-dysfunctional lab or see benefit in licking upwards (they may hope they can be in the intimidating position one time). Every party enabling this seems to confuse abusiveness with strength and assertiveness. Is it Stockholm syndrome?

The supervisor's perspective is that grant pressure can be very stressful. But as soon as multiple people agree to the point that they file formal complaints the problem can't be the PhD student anymore.

I have still proportionally seen more functional than dysfunctional labs in science though, great labs do exist. I would expect that the problem is much worse in industry than in academia.

<comment><USER12> It should be noted that MPIs are extremely hierarchical organisations, where basically everything is run by directors who have a lot of freedom. When a director retires, the whole institute has to be reshaped.

<comment><USER13> How is it different from other German universities and institutes?

<comment><USER14> The MPIs are set up as director-driven research organizations. There is one person, typically a very prominent scientist, that oversees a group of junior faculty (who I believe have only fixed term positions---i.e., no possibility of tenure). Unlike most university settings, where each faculty member controls their research program independently, the Max Planck Institutes add another level to the hierarchy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The twist is the 'crybully' \-- someone who bullies others and claims victimhood when confronted. In this way an accusation or counter-accusation of bullying can itself be a form of bullying.

<comment><USER2> The term "bully" is not helpful in the first place. It's too vague. It used to refer to kids who beat up other kids in school. That's a specific behavior. Modern usage had deteriorated into meaninglessness. It's kinds of ridiculous that the terms is used to refer to adults.

But what you said is essentially valid, except I would state it in even broader terms. Accusations of bullying became an effective way to launch a social attack, either proactively or in retaliation.

This is why you can't solve this by simply instituting punitive rules and committees that "fight bullying". Beyond certain very basic level (you get fired if you punch someone at work, clear cut case) they will get mercilessly abused.

What you really need is to increase autonomy of all participants of the system so people can act in response. No one should be completely in thrall to their boss or adviser. At the very lease people should be able to leave without being harasses and sabotaged at their destination.

<comment><USER16> > The term "bully" is not helpful in the first place. It's too vague. It used > to refer to kids who beat up other kids in school. That's a specific > behavior. Modern usage had deteriorated into meaninglessness. It's kinds of > ridiculous that the terms is used to refer to adults.

A cursory look at the Wikipedia etymology contradicts the notion that it was ever limited to children, or that the current usage is significantly broader than it has been in the past. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying#Etymology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One peculiarity of the academic system (true to some extent in start-ups) is that people transition from researchers to managers without any real training or evaluation of their proclivity for management. While you may be a spectacular researcher, that does not mean that you have the disposition, skill, or compassion to be an effective leader. Of course, some are naturals and many others get ample experience in labs where there's a hierarchical structure. Still, the utter lack of evaluation and reflection on group dynamics, productivity, etc., strikes me as a real weakness for the way that we currently organize academic research.

<comment><USER17> It often frustrates me that this is true at universities that _have business schools_.

I can take an 8-week summer course on polishing my NSF CAREER proposal - I'd _kill_ to be able to do the same for basic management skills (including hiring).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My time in the UK as a postgrad EU foreigner ten years ago was ok and I never witnessed anything shady. The system was built to avoid any sort of public confrontation, this being the norm in the UK: just mind your own business, refer to your direct supervisor, be transparent and you will be fine.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel this way at Harvard too... Professors seem only to care about their professional goals and esteem and I will often feel dismissed when I'm not directly serving those goals. I think it's only natural, but I would hope that more awareness about the issue might serve to change the culture.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it is endemic across academia.

</comment><comment><USER21> Career sabotage, IP theft?! That's terrible. If it was a regular job it may be easy to leave or find another one, but doing a degree, especially a PhD, is a serious commitment and a lifestyle change. Outside of this, the bullying behavior is common enough across everywhere ... put a person with serious ego and control issues in a power position and they will end up a tyrant.

<comment><USER22> The article doesn't talk about IP theft at all. It doesn't even imply taking advantage by superiors. It doesn't explore motives for the abuse at all.

<comment><USER2> It does:

 _' Another PhD student spoke of "abuse of power" by their adviser, which included "career sabotage, IP [intellectual property] theft and more general bullying such as belittling comments, often in front of or in response to senior academics".'_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Similar abuses are happening here in Canada too.

They really have to forbid profs names to appear on student papers. It would remove a lot of the incentive.

<comment><USER24> What? The goal of a PhD is to train somebody to be a researcher and collaborator. The best way to do this is to collaborate with them on research. Collaborators deserve authorship.

I understand that many labs are hierarchical with ideas solely handed down from top to bottom, but _removing_ advisor authorship is a big step.

<comment><USER23> And thus, we are in the present conundrum:

Some profs are decent human beings, and the system runs. Some profs are sociopaths, and the system gets abused.

Other fields got their rules in place because of above. It is not fair to the profs that are decent human beings, but, ignoring the second point, makes it unfair to a lot more students that go through it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apropos to nothing, the headline reminded me of _Monty Python 's Meaning of Life_ rugby match between the students and the masters.

</comment><comment><USER26> Aside from the legitimate cases, there's a lot of trash complaints that you get when you lower the bar for accusations...

Every person with a pet grievance, no matter how BS it is, will come out of the woodwork...

Especially when everyone has been raised all emotionally, told they were little geniuses and would achieve everything "they wanted to", and was promised to be the King/Queen of the World just for showing up...

<comment><USER27> This situation is exasperated by the "everyone deserves to go to university" concept.

Taking the sub-105 IQ set and putting them situations where they are not capable of competing winds up creating unhappiness all around. No doubt some of that dynamic fosters a bullying mindset in professors.

<comment><USER28> I find it's the over 105 IQ set that's the problem. Especially when they find out IQ has nothing to do with success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _HR managers appearing more concerned about avoiding negative publicity than protecting staff_

But this is literally the job of the HR department. That is why Workers need guilds or unions as a counterweight.

</comment><comment><USER30> This article doesn't do a good job defining bullying, but the examples they give sound normal to mild compared to the private sector. "Extreme pressure to produce results" sounds more like typical (bad) management than bullying.

<comment><USER31> "At another internationally renowned laboratory, the pressure was reportedly so extreme people were driven to falsify data rather than incur the wrath of the director."

One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the product ships and is no good. As we have seen with the reproducibility crisis in many fields of science, the feedback loop is much slower in academia. "Extreme pressure to produce results" is a very imprecise statement, but one issue I worry about is the primary investigator wanting to get someone else to fake his data for him, so he has plausible deniability if it should come to light.

I agree the article is rather imprecise, but I think there is a real problem.

<comment><USER32> > One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if > you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the > product ships and is no good.

I dont really think so. Pretty often, at that point no one remembers or care who was responsible for what and someone else will be pressured to spend nights fixing your mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Professors often told me my choice of programming language (JS) or database (MySQL) wasn't real technology but only toys.

Somehow I expected them to be more reflected...

<comment><USER34> I'm fairly certain offhand comments like this are not quite at the magnitude the article is complaining about.

JS distaste is widespread in the industry, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The miscarriage story is really ambivalent. It supposes two extremely contrasting opinions without offering a solution.

So far, it's a case of miscommunication. To blame only the students and subordinate workers for lack of understanding would be one-sided. But the article doesn't offer a nice explanation nor a solution to the exemplary problem. I wouldn't expect either that pregnancy at the work place was a good idea. I am actually rather opposed to it in general, and for more free time for mothers.

By the way: One has to wonder whether the situation was any different at the newspaper producing this article.</comment>


Google engineer wrote his memo after he went to a shaming diversity program - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-wrote-his-memo-after-attending-a-google-diversity-programme-2017-8 <comment><AUTHOR> This is one angle I haven't heard. After diversity training he wrote the memo. I have never been through diversity training but could this help his court case?

<comment><USER2> I would imagine that the nature of this training would vary greatly between different companies.

And given the extremity of the reactions by certain left leaning people at Google this past week - I can imagine that the diversity training at Google is particularly irrational and cult-like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I highly, highly recommend watching Damore's interview with Jordan Peterson.

I am starting to think that Damore might be on the right side of all of this.

[https://youtu.be/SEDuVF7kiPU](https://youtu.be/SEDuVF7kiPU)

<comment><USER2> Yes, that was a good interview. Much better than the interview with the other guy, mentioned in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you claim to be impartial and scientific, but go on to be publicly interviewed by an alt-right media member, you lose your credibility.

If you claim to be impartial and scientific, but use terms like "virtue signaling", which are conservative straw men of liberals ("The only reason anyone would stand up for others is to prove that they are virtuous"), you lose your credibility.

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that _Jordan Peterson_ [0] is an interesting, thoughtful person who is very transparent about his personal journal to find meaning and understand... well, existence for lack of a better word.

I highly recommend his podcasts.

Dismissing him[1] as "alt-right" media does a terrible disservice to the spirit of learning and open inquiry.

As for that other guy that interviewed him - meh. But if everyone in the mainstream media were lying about me, I might accept help from such as him.

[0] Edit: While not mentioned in this article, James Damore's second interview this week was with Jordan Peterson. It is of higher quality.

[1] I see now that you were not, my apologies.

<comment><USER4> I have very deeply conflicted feelings about Jordan Peterson. On the one hand, I agree with you that his own personal writing and stances are fairly transparent and reasonable.

On the other hand, he actively attracts and covets the deeply right fringes, and claims no responsibility when they use his stances for extremist viewpoints and attacks.

Example:

Jordan Peterson: "I think making mis-gendering someone a federal hate crime is a step too far and infringes free speech more than it protects trans people."

His supporters: "Yeah, FUCK TRANS PEOPLE!"

Jordan Peterson: "<crickets>"</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with Burnout - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I have been dealing with the issue of programmer burnout for the last few weeks. The problem is that I cannot just stop working for a week or so.
I think its affecting my productivity on all areas and am looking to make adjustments in my life to help cope with the burnout, at least while there is so much work to do.
Things competing for my time: full time job, part-time work as a co-founder, wife + kid, physical exercise, friends, sanity. <comment><USER2> I don't understand why people choose to have so many things competing for their time, and then talk about "burnout". Of course you will be burned out.

I could be trying to go to college, work full-time, have 6 kids, train to be an olympic athlete, learn to be a master of 26 different musical instruments, write 16 novels in parallel, and then say: "I'm feeling burnt out".

The real problem isn't being burned out. The real problem is why you think you can do all of that and NOT be burned out. Why take on so many things?

I think it comes down to greed. You want it all. But basic economics says that you cannot have it all. If you don't find too many people trying to help you while you're trying to have everything all at once, it's probably because nobody really likes people who are that greedy.

If I was in your situation, I would get rid of my full-time job, get a divorce, make sure the kid goes to the mother with the divorce, stop exercising, get rid of friends who arn't related to my start-up, and forget about sanity. Sanity is for conformers.

It's kind of like a hoarder collecting so much junk that he can't let go of, that the junk weighs him down. You have to prioritize, and live with the necessities. Which is more important to you: your family or your start-up? And can't say both. It would be like saying I want to keep my $20,000 AND get that new Car. Well of course, everyone WANTS both, but that's not how the world works. Nobody WANTS to make sacrifices.

But you have to make sacrifices. Nature will sacrifice something in the end for you, if you don't want to decide. Your health will deteriorate, or your family will be troubled, or the start-up will fail. If you don't choose, something will be chosen at random for you and you probably won't like the result.

I'm not really making any suggestions to you, as your situation has many details I don't know about. But I ask you to at least consider whether or not you are simply desiring too many things and being stubborn about seeing reality.

The most important adjustment to make is to set expectations that allow you to do less.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a similar situation while I was at a university. I was taking extra classes, trying to work a part time job as close to 40 hours a week as I could to pay the bills, interviewing, and a significant other. I did this for about a year before it all came crashing down. When it did come crashing down, I was apathetic for about a month. I bombed out of classes, almost got fired from my job, and the SO stopped seeing me for a while.

My biggest suggestion is to find something that lets you blow off a lot of steam/release a lot of stress in a short amount of time. For some people it's sports or boxing or whatever. For others, it's partying. Whatever it is, it has to be something you do alone, away from everything else. When you do this activity, it has to be your full focus. You can't think about the startup or the job or anything else.

I didn't figure out what this release would be for me until I had graduated and was working. It turned out to be lifting weights and just fatiguing my body until I pretty much couldn't walk. I tried to do this before everyone else woke up so there was no one there to grab my time. I did my best to make it to the gym 3-4 times a week at 6am-7am. There were plenty of days I aimed to be in the office at 8:30, but I would be so exhausted that I would need to nap for 15-20 minutes. I still made it a point to get in by 9am.

My three requirements for something like this is:

1\. It has to be physical. 2\. You have to be alone. No one interrupts this sacred time. 3\. Whatever it is, put more than 110% effort into it. Make sure you are putting everything you got into it and that you aren't spending any energy thinking about something else.

On the other side of this coin, you need to talk to someone about it. Let them know what's going on and that you need someone to vent to. The worst thing you could possibly do is bottle it up.

This is what works for me, but at the same time, your mileage may vary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I actually just started hardcore biking. It does help. I'll keep this in mind. Biking fast = physical excersise which helps with the physical fatigue, and having to pay attention means that you can't think about other things. Also the more effort you put in the more you think about muscle movements and not about random thoughts (like those about work).

I actually used to play games, but they caused the same problems as working, too much mental engagement. I don't recommend video games as a form of stress release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I completely understand your struggle. I'm working on our startup with two other team members. We're all in our mid-twenty's, two of us married, one of us with a kid, working full-time (sometimes more-than-full-time jobs).

We've been doing it for a year, and as much as we continue to push, we just don't seem to have time for anything. Our finances have taken a hit, our personal lives have taken a hit... sometimes it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel and sometimes it feels like we're just building until someone notices.

The only thing I can tell you is that the harder you work now, the better you're life will be and the more fulfilled it will be later. Remember: entrepreneurs work 16+ hour/day jobs to avoid working 8 hour/day jobs for someone else. Keep your head up!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are not kidding there. Good to hear others are in the same boat. Definitely helps knowing people trying to deal with this as well.

<comment><USER4> No problem!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Step 1: Simplify - do less

Step 2: Build your foundation to decrease cortisol (it destroys your brain and makes you stupid):

\- Eat Primal/Paleo (marksdailyapple.com)

\- If you do chronic cardio or crossfit, ditch it and lift heavy (low reps) and sprint instead just a few times a week.

\- Say "fuck it" more and don't attach your sense of self to your results. As much as you can, treat things like playful practice rather than do-or-die. The book, "The Practicing Mind" is a great short read on this.

Step 3: If all else fails, take an epic road trip to re-understand who you are without defining yourself by what you do.

Step 4: Get enlightened. Its another project, so best done when you have a bit of breathing room. kennethfolkdharma.com is a great resource.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the problem with working on a startup while you are working a full- time job...you are essentially working all the time.

I can't imagine having a wife+kid to deal with too.

This is why I quit my main job to pursue my startup (with a year of savings). I now have time for my friends and personal life and can work on my own company.

I know it may not be possible in your position, but this is what you eventually need to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> no question, this can't be sustained for long periods of time. The goal is usually get funding and work on the startup, but for now that's not the case.</comment></comment>


For quick coronavirus testing, Israel turns to a clever algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/health/fast-coronavirus-testing-israel.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Efficient high-throughput SARS-CoV-2 testing to detect asymptomatic carriers

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/20/sci...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/20/sciadv.abc5961)</comment>


A Developing UEFI Secureboot Situation - <AUTHOR> http://benjaminkerensa.com/2012/06/20/uefi-secureboot-situation <comment><USER2> Good for Canonical. I'd hate to see a future where an OS has to be pre- approved by Microsoft for running on a machine that comes with Windows.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Imagine needing OS pre-approval from Google on a machine that comes with ChromeOS... or wait, by Apple on a machine that comes with OSX.

That's tongue-in-cheek.

And yes, I know Microsoft has the desktop market cornered. However that market is no longer what it was, and there is little (other than the economics of adoption) stopping any OS vendor from doing the same.

<comment><USER2> At least there are some encouraging trends with some manufacturers who are starting to be more interested in deploying laptops with Linux/Ubuntu:

[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dell-to-bring- Ubuntu-...](http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dell-to-bring-Ubuntu- laptops-to-850-retail-stores-in-India-1620657.html)

As Microsoft start selling hardware and compete with their own partners without even telling them, this trend will probably accelerate:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/19/us-microsoft- windo...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/19/us-microsoft-windows- tablets-asia-idUSBRE85I1NL20120619)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> mjg59, the Fedora employee whose posts about UEFI have earned a lot of HN karma, has posted about why Fedora considered and rejected the system Ubuntu is putting in place:

<http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/13713.html>

<comment><USER5> And the response from Mark Shuttleworth is in the post. Fedora is trying to justify why they were quick to pay for a signed bootloader but its not all adding up like everyone wants.</comment></comment>


Google Play Music will begin shutting down in September - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354136/google-play-music-shut-down-end-service-youtube-music-date <comment><USER2> Helpful of them to put "Google" in the name so that you know in advance that it will be cancelled soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use the Play Music app to play music stored locally on my phone's SD card since the app came with the phone. Does Youtube Music also have this functionality, or is it just for their streaming service?

<comment><USER4> Yes it does!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I moved to Deezer. YouTube music was not an improvement on Google Play music. At least now I can get better quality audio</comment>