Google employee ports Amiga emulator to Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57615373-93/google-emulates-1980s-era-amiga-computer-in-chrome/ <comment><USER3> The Amiga had a recognizably modern GUI, multi-tasking, interprocess communication, a universal scripting language and a bunch of other stuff, in 256k of memory (later 512k), running on a 7.1Mhz CPU. What's amazing is not that you can emulate it in a browser now, but how little real progress has been made.

<comment><USER4> Just goes to show how modern computer resources are being wasted in this pile of VMs and bending an application for showing interactive documents into a platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nicely done. I feel a bit about the Amiga like I do about the Moon landings in 1969. So much of a feeling of "wow, the future has arrived" and then it didn't.

Nothing was quite so cool as 'pulling down the screen' to reveal another screen behind it.

<comment><USER6> It took me until 2005 to have a computer I liked nearly as much as the Amiga: I bought a Mac mini running OS X to tinker with and I ended up switching to Mac OS about 9 - 10 months later. It still wasn't the same though.

I think the frustrating thing about the Amiga is how painfully long we had to wait to get all of that stuff again. When I relented and got a PC in the early 1990's, I had to screw with getting a Pro Audio16 (Soundblaster competitor) to work in DOS. You had to mess with jumpers, DMA settings, IRQ settings, conflicts, etc.... All to get stereo sound that the Amiga had in 1987. And the sound produced by the card wasn't even that good! Same with video. PC's were stuck with 256 color VGA for what seemed like an eternity.

Having an Amiga was like being teleported to the future in a time machine and then being cruelly yanked back to the present and being forced to watch people "discover" all of this stuff you had grown accustomed to.

<comment><USER7> I always described the Amiga experience as "a computer from ten years in the future... then Commodore sat on their thumbs for twenty." Or at least that's what it felt like when I got my A1000 versus abandoning my 1200.

I've been using Macs since the time I put my last Amiga away, and it's never felt as cool as the Amiga did. More useful, much more powerful, but never as flat-out _cool_.

God I'm getting old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you missed the Ars series on the history of the Amiga, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing: [http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of- the-amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

I missed it when it came out, but got sucked in while reading the history of OS/2 that was posted here a couple of weeks ago. I was too young to care about all that stuff at the time, but it was a fascinating read. Especially since I now live a stone's throw from where the Commodore headquarters once was.

<comment><USER8> Reading this at the moment, and I found this quote:

> Amiga, Inc. didn't have a lot of money left over for shipping its prototype > to the show, and the engineers were understandably nervous about putting > such a delicate device through the rigors of commercial package transport. > Instead, RJ Mical and Dale Luck purchased an extra airline seat between the > two of them and wrapped the fledgling Amiga in pillows for extra security. > According to airline regulations, the extra "passenger" required a name on > the ticket, so the Lorraine became "Joe Pillow," and the engineers drew a > happy face on the front pillowcase and added a tie! They even tried to get > an extra meal for Joe, but the flight attendants refused to feed the > already-stuffed passenger.

Somehow I can't imagine that working on a modern airline...

<comment><USER9> Musicians often book an extra seat for their instrument, because fine musical instruments are often irreplaceable antiques. These days you can just book a ticket in the name EXTRA SEAT, but it used to be common to book a guitar in as Mr Gibson or a cello as Mr Stradivarius.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title is misleading. It should read "Google employee ports Amiga emulator to Chrome"

From the FAQ:

"The code was forked from PUAE, the Portable Universal Amiga Emulator, from GnoStiC's GitHub repo [1]"

[1] [https://github.com/GnoStiC/PUAE](https://github.com/GnoStiC/PUAE)

"I work for Google. I was a member of the Chrome team, and more specifically the Native Client team, from August 2010 to June 2013."

</comment><comment><USER11> In 1990 I worked for 5 weeks during holidays at Ikea so I could afford that box :)

Lattice C was spread across 4 disks. After 7 minutes of disk swapping, I'd get my linker errors.

Anyway, need to check it out and see if it does run Shadow of the Beast!

<comment><USER12> I was an Aztec C user. That was the second compiler I ever purchased (after Abacus C for the C64). Damn... I'm still buying compilers today thanks to Microsoft.

<comment><USER13> Bit of topic, but out of interest, why do you buy/use/need the Microsoft toolchain?

(I work on open source stuff and I've only ever used GCC and Clang - I'm not asking this as a rhetorical way to say you're stupid, I'm genuinely ignorant of the advantages).

<comment><USER14> I can't speak for the original poster's use case, but wanted to point out that the Microsoft compilers are free (as in beer) anyway. They do charge an arm and a leg for things like Team Foundation Server or whatever but the fully functional (32 and 64 bit) compilers, linkers, nmake, etc ship with the free Windows SDK. And even most of the useful IDE stuff is available for free in the VS Express editions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone should do an asm.js version to compare performance.

"Chrome emulates the old operating system by a Chrome-specific version of the Open Source Universal Amiga Emulator. Stefansen brought its 400,000 lines of code, written in the C programming language originally, to the Portable Native Client (PNaCl) foundation built into Chrome."

</comment><comment><USER16> Basically this is emulation using PNaCl, an almost-native-code execution layer in Chrome. A little bit like ActiveX, but multi-platform.

I wonder if a complete QEMU can be shoehorned into this technology, so that you could more old OSes in a browser.

I also wonder how hard it would be to create an Amiga emulator in pure JS. Probably a lot harder than a Linux console-more emulator which already exists.

<comment><USER17> I wish people would stop mentioning ActiveX and PNaCl in the same sentence, because the two are nothing alike at all :) ActiveX (and NPAPI) plugins run completely unprotected code and are OS and CPU specific. PNaCl runs in a security sandbox, and provides a CPU and OS agnostic runtime environment.

<comment><USER18> But like ActiveX, it still needs to be supported by the underlying architecture.

<comment><USER19> No, PNaCl is CPU-agnostic. It runs on both x86 and ARM, and could be ported to others.

You may be thinking of NaCl, which is CPU-specific.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I was definitely mistaking it for NaCl, the CPU-specific approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 40 year olds? My first machine was an A500, and I'm early 30s!

<comment><USER21> I'm 31 and grew up with a C64 and then an A500. My first PC was a 486-DX2 66 MHz in the middle of the nineties. In the 386 days, the PC still felt far inferior to much older Amigas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall covers quite a bit of the Amiga development.

[http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall- Commodore/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall- Commodore/dp/0973864907)

However, the rewritten / "second edition", "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" stops with the 8-bit machines, as there were plans to have two volumes - <USER2> for the 8-bit systems, and one for the Amiga days:

[http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian- Bagnall/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian- Bagnall/dp/0973864966)

The second edition, "Commodore: The Amiga Years" has been unfortunately cancelled, but is still listed on Amazon:

[http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian- Bagnall/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian- Bagnall/dp/0973864990)

How does Maher's book on the Amiga compare to Bagnall's first edition?

<comment><USER23> Maher's book takes a very different approach. It focuses on presenting an outsider view on the technology and its impact on computing, rather than on the company and all the drama surrounding Commodore and its people.

There were times reading Maher's book that I was annoyed that he seemed to me to miss the point, though I'd say probably with the best of intentions (there were no issues that were so egrerious to me that I still remember the specifics), but it is relatively even-handed and worth a read, and presents a very interesting counter-point to Bagnall's book(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is awesome... really takes me back. Amazing what you can deliver in a browser these days. I'd simply love to run my first product again (its been 20 years!)

PS: Anyone know the process to get AmigaDOS 2.04 running on one of these (and download a LHA file and install it?)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is highly interesting, considering RJ Mical works at Google now.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ported to Chrome? That editorialized headline is kinda wrong. It's pNaCl. With pNaCl, you can have an Emscripten fallback, if you want.

<comment><USER27> Not with this emulator, since it uses threads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> hey amiga fans - - - i have exactly one Amiga disk left that boots into an amazing cracktro with music that I have wanted to record.... I can't find the song on youtube anywhere...

but my A500 as a broken floppy drive. Are there any fanatics anywhere near Boston within 100 miles who would be willing to let me boot this disk on their machine and record the song?

<comment><USER29> Are you able to give any more information on the cracktro? Which group? What was cracked?

<comment><USER28> Bamiga Sector One was the group. The game was either Virus or Mah Jong. From about 1991. It's a beautiful, 4-voice counterpoint tune with somewhat unusual synth patches (sampled Kawaii-ish).

I would be totally fine if the tune is out there somewhere, but I scan youtube every few months/years and it hasn't tu

<comment><USER29> Worth a tweet to @textfiles (Jason Scott) about preserving the disk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The C Object System (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.2547 <comment><USER2> This has been done before many times in many ways for many different purposes, some worse than others, as object systems for C (Xtk intrinsics widgets, GTK's GObjects), object systems written in C for other languages (ScriptX's "Objects in C", TCL/Tk widgets, Lua objects), cross-language object systems (Microsoft COM, IBM SOM, OpenDoc), distributed object proxy systems (CORBA, DCOM, DSOM), and object oriented C language dialects (Objective C, C++, Java).

Not that it's not worth doing again for fun or to explore different techniques and purposes. But the ones that are in use in the real world are incredibly clumsy and complex, require a lot of boilerplate and yak shaving, and you have to buy into a big toolchain and religion.

"The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The real genius was the guy who invented the other three." -Sid Caesar

<comment><USER3> Marcel's corollary to Greenspun's tenth rule: any sufficiently large C/C++ contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of most of Objective-C.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just say no, that path leads to madness. C is not the right language for fancy abstractions, it will come back and bite your head off when you least expect it. It can be done, but that doesn't mean worth doing. GObject suffers from some of the same delusions.

The whole point of writing C is to keep it simple and only build exactly what's needed. No other language I've tried comes close to supporting the same level of custom fitting. This is also the reason it's potentially really fast; more because it encourages simple, direct solutions than anything else.

Virtual dispatch is a function pointer, either embedded directly in the value or together with others in a shared vtable. A type id may be added to the vtable if needed. Avoid inheritance tricks, composition is mostly the right answer in C. Downcasting is a solved [0] problem [1].

[0] [https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl/blob/master/src/snigl/type.c#...](https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl/blob/master/src/snigl/type.c#L181)

[1] [https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl/blob/master/src/snigl/util.h#...](https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl/blob/master/src/snigl/util.h#L17)

<comment><USER5> [1] is #define[d] as sgl_baseof(type, field, ptr) that appears to used to return a pointer to a "type", which is a value stored in memory at run-time, of a field in an object (ptr)? I and many others would not consider a run-time type system to be "the" solution to downcasting in C. Regarding the use of C for "fancy abstractions" such as classes and objects, the derivatives of Cfront (Corneau C/C++), which is an implementation of C++ using C, are not just alive, but have been chosen to implement many production systems ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Design_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Design_Group)) used by millions today, although they too "inherit" the issues with the C standard. It is true that the GObject system has many problems one of which is the reference counting (sink/sunk) process as requiring a certain memory (de)allocation mechanics as a requirement of the object system is not the most applicable in certain situations.

<comment><USER4> The type in question is the containing C struct type. Think of sgl_baseof as the opposite of offsetof. I didn't come up with it myself of course, it's probably older than I am; I borrowed it from the Linux kernel. The other link is an example of how it's used.

<comment><USER5> sql_baseof as shown is defined in the header using offsetof. offsetof is an implementation-specific macro. Whatever it does is specific to the compiler that provides it. You cannot generalize from its definition for one or many compilers to a language requirement. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26906621/does-struct- nam...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26906621/does-struct-name-null-b- cause-undefined-behaviour-in-c11)

<comment><USER4> I fail to see your point here.

sgl_baseof uses offsetof with a valid struct type and a valid field name, so where is the UB? Unless you feed it an invalid pointer, but then all bets are off.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, still not getting it.

If an implementation provides offsetof and it doesn't work, that implementation would go out of fashion in a heart beat.

Where is the practical use of this information?

How is this even an argument?

<comment><USER5> The use of the Offsetof macro in a program will cause undefined behavior when compiled with GCC or Clang and they are still "in fashion" as far as I am aware. The practical use of this information is to prevent the occurrence of undefined behavior by knowing not to use offsetof for example with GCC and instead use __builtin_offsetof in the specific case of GCC. The argument appears to be that you are claiming that what sgl_baseof does is not undefined behavior and I am claiming that it is not possible to infer that without specifying the implementation of the offsetof macro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Why not just write object oriented shell scripts and classes in the file system? ;)

The patent's expired (I like to think of this as a Mercy Patent, that benefits society by keeping people from doing this for 20 years):

Method for apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US5187786](https://patents.google.com/patent/US5187786)

Abstract

A method and apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system is disclosed, which does not require the support of additional file attributes by the hierarchical file system, and has particular application to object oriented programming in window-based computer systems. The class hierarchy comprises a root class, a plurality of classes and a plurality of class instances. The root class is implemented with a hierarchy of root class directory and root class files. Each class is implemented with a hierarchy of class directories and class files comprising the class methods, and the initial values of the class instance variables. Each class instance is implemented with a hierarchy of class instance directory and class instance files comprising the class instance variables. Each hierarchy of directories and files also comprises a path file. The content of these path files are logically related to each other, based on their class' relationships. By controlling the invocation of class methods, using these path files, inheritance is achieved. By accessing the class instance variables through the class methods, data abstraction is also achieved. Additionally, the method and apparatus also supports the pseudo class instance/class "Self" and "Super" when invoking another class method by a class method.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is cute, albeit a terrible idea in practice. It's also misleading to compare it favorably to CLOS and come up with statements like "a framework that brings C to the level of other high level programming languages and beyond". It's a bad idea to examine CLOS in isolation and try to replicate its features, without understanding - or ignoring - how it fits in with the rest of Common Lisp and how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. CLOS is extremely powerful because there is tremendous synergy with the interactive, image-based development style that CL is designed around.

You focus on CLOS in isolation and you not only end up missing the point completely but also end up with a frankenstein monstrosity that can be very destructive. This also reminds me of Alan Kay talking about how most OO languages completely missed the point unlike Lisp that got it: Late binding.

<comment><USER7> The Alan Kay talk sounds interesting; do you have a link to it?

<comment><USER6> It is his OOPSLA 97 keynote. I am sure you can find it online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there anything similar for Go?</comment>


Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don't know why - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why <comment><USER3> There is a big observational campaign happening right now that is trying to get to the heart of this called EUREC4A (main website: [http://eurec4a.eu](http://eurec4a.eu) and information sheet: [http://eurec4a.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eurec4a/2019/Press/E...](http://eurec4a.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/eurec4a/2019/Press/EURECA4A_factsheet_uk_10_12_2019.pdf)). The key uncertainty between different climate models is whether shallow clouds in the tropics (which in general cool the Earth through radiation) will disappear or not and make our planet even warmer - some models predict this (!)

We are 100s of individuals from more than 30 national and international partner institutions with planes, drones, ships, ground stations and autonomous buoys trying to understand how and why these clouds form, how that links to their environment, dust from Africa, the ocean current, the jetstream aloft, etc. The positions of the different platforms can be seen live on the main website and the data we are producing is appearing on there too.

If you have any questions about what we're doing I'd be very happy to help or point you towards the right people :)

<comment><USER4> I suppose my immediate question is - is there any way for an non-professional with a pair of eyes and a smartphone to contribute in a crowd-sourcy way?

<comment><USER5> Seems like a recipe for bad data and undiscoverable flaws.

<comment><USER6> Not really; you'd probably take the Folding@Home approach† to work distribution: assign each small piece as a job to N non-trustworthy "workers" (humans, computers), and then trust the results if all N results concur. If they don't, fail the job back into the work queue to be tried again later with different workers. (And maybe give the workers a reputation score, kicking out the ones who participate in enough failed jobs.)

† does this general strategy have a name?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's called BOINC[1] platform. And as another comment mentioned there is already a climate prediction project[2] based on that platform.

[1] [https://boinc.berkeley.edu/](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/)

[2] [https://www.cpdn.org](https://www.cpdn.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm reminded of Feynman's famous anecdote about the Millikan oil drop experiment: Millikan underestimated the charge of the electron, and over the ensuing years, subsequent measurements slowly but surely converged on the correct value.

Why? Because experimenters who got the correct value figured it must be too high, and ran the experiment again until they got a more-erroneous value, one that was nonetheless higher. Eventually it worked itself out.

But climate modeling isn't measuring something objective and static like the charge of the electron. It's prediction. I'm afraid that the incentives are to credit models that predict more warming _just a bit_ more than those which predict less; the expected effect would be that the predicted warming effect would get larger over time.

Please note that I'm not calling climate science a "Cargo Cult", as Feynman put it; I accept the basic premise of anthropogenic warming on first principles, and see that historic measurements (not to speak of recent ones) show a warming trend. There is cause to be concerned.

Nonetheless, it would be surprising if climate modeling, which is inherently inexact and involves irreducible guesswork, _didn 't_ drift toward the more alarming, due to similar social forces to those identified in Feynman's essay.

<comment><USER9> So close, but not quite.

The oil drop results (Millikan was less than 1% off, by the way) show the pressure on scientists to conform with the current status quo, the pressure NOT to release shocking or unexpected results. In climate science, that means underplaying the results, biasing them towards less catastrophic findings, and there's a great deal of evidence that that is what has been happening. For instance, the gold standard climate documents, the IPCC reports, represent a consensus and therefore if 99% of scientists believe 100 units of climate change is coming, and 1% of scientists believe no more than 30 units of climate change is coming, 30 units is what is reported (the amount everyone can agree on). This is a huge underreporting bias, only slowly corrected with each new report.

Good on you for your scientific approach, you just basically reversed the signs in your equation.

<comment><USER8> I've read the AR5 synthesis report, and your description is simply inaccurate.

To use your numbers, the IPCC reports that 99% of scientists believe 100 units of climate change is coming, and 1% believe no more than 30.

It's less than 200 pages, I recommend actually reading it, rather than just guessing how the sausage is made, as you've done here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title seems like clickbait, and the last part of the article does explain that the scientists actually know that new cloud models are mostly responsible for the change.

The big question is then of course whether the new cloud model is wrong and the temperature increase therefore as well, or whether the new cloud model is more accurate than previous ones and the temperature increase is a real effect.

I found another article that looks at this in a bit more detail:

[https://news.ucar.edu/132678/ncars-new-climate-model- running...](https://news.ucar.edu/132678/ncars-new-climate-model-running-hot)

The linked paper this is based on has the following as the last sentence:

> What scares us is not that the CESM2ECS is wrong (all models are wrong, > [Box, 1976]) but that it might be right.

<comment><USER11> Or a third, frustrating possibility—the new cloud model is more accurate, but some other inaccuracy in the model used to be balanced out by the inaccurate cloud model.

<comment><USER12> Or that there are multiple inaccuracies in the model which interact, so finding and correcting each one makes progress but still doesn't improve the model overall.

<comment><USER13> Having built some models to simulate very basic things myself, I've seen first-hand how the slightest deviation of the model from reality can completely invalidate the entire output of the model.

For this reason, I'm skeptical of models that try to simulate very complex systems with a lot of variables and feedback loops. Models that have a large number of variables are particularly difficult to get right because different tiny mistakes in various parts of the model can compound and yield completely arbitrary and contradictory results. Approximating the reality in software is almost impossible.

<comment><USER14> It's not impossible. Listen to this podcast, it's a discussion about weather forecasting models with the scientists that create them. They discuss model verification for weather models and they touch how this also applies to climate modelling. [http://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the- ec...](http://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not a climate change denier by a long shot, but stories like these give a ding to the credibility of climate scientists.

> "So we can't throw them out yet."

This might be an elementary view of science, but I think there is a danger here that while everyone is making their models, if anyone is an outlier they go and tweak their model to match the patterns of others: 'Klaus Wyser's group "switched off" some of the new cloud and aerosol settings in their model, he said, and that sent climate sensitivity back down to previous levels'. That seems to me a questionable reason to "switch off" part of the model - <USER2> should create the most accurate simulation possible and trust the output, not tweak the inputs to match literature data.

<comment><USER16> Tweaking the inputs would help one to identify what factor is causing the difference, which allows you to focus on that. It doesn't mean you permanently leave it out.

And it does not make a credibility issue. This is how science works — it is a _process_ that strives to be as accurate as possible, not come up with a static answer and stick to it (that's what religion does).

The ability for science to change and adapt is what makes it so strong. That is the message that needs to always be driven when discussing science; not throwing hands in the air and saying "why do these scientists keep changing their answers? They obviously don't know what they're doing"

<comment><USER17> It certainly does hurt the credibility of people saying we need drastic changes now based upon the models. If the answer might change next year, then making a drastic change based upon the current projections seems foolhardy.

<comment><USER18> Yes it would be terribly foolhardy for us to stop polluting the atmosphere prematurely.

<comment><USER19> This isn't really a helpful reply, because of course it's not a question of magically reducing pollution.

There are two basic modes of reducing pollution. Technological advancement, and conservation.

In the case of technological advancement, you get less pollution per unit of output as the same or lower cost. As long as capital is fairly cheap, these advances tend to propagate quickly through a competitive market.

In the case of conservation, it's more a question of which groups of people should conserve (i.e. suffer) for this outcome, and by how much.

<comment><USER20> Why do governments fail to take advantage of this opportunity to inject money into their economy? Didn't Trump promise to bring the manufacturing jobs back? How is he going to achieve that if he's not going to rebuild the current power infrastructure or discourages companies from investing into the lucrative EV market?

I'm seriously wondering why there is any reason to oppose technological progress at all. What can they possibly gain by sticking to the old technology? Who's going to benefit from something so short sighted?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, politicians aren't doing anything anyway, whether the models predict catastrophe or CATASTROPHE. Already according to the 3° sensitivity predictions we would need an effort that rivals WW2 to stay below 1.5°. Yet major countries are led by climate denialists.

<comment><USER22> Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements to housing and urban planning would end up looking?

Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing.

<comment><USER23> > Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and > well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing.

The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. _Tens of millions of people_ died of starvation as a result. It turns out that governments are bad at running economies.

I don't know why so many people think that the same _mechanism_ (a command- and-control economy) will lead to a different result just because you change the _goal_ from food or industrial production to climate change mitigation.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something.

Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good.

<comment><USER25> It's not a straw man, and your examples are no more apt than Rayiner's.

America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount _every year_ , and lasting for decades [2].

It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.

The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.

In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to _modern_ military spending is actually quite appropriate.

1 - [https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during- worl...](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war- ii/)

2 - [https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert- polli...](https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-pollin-de- growth-vs-a-green-new-deal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >The scientists went on to try 300 configurations of rain, pollution, and heat flows—something they can do as gods of their own digital earth—before matching the model to history.

Having worked with complex geologic (not climate) models in the past, this is the part that gives me pause. The scientists have set out as a first principle to _find warming_ and then are working backwards and, ostensibly, everything is legitimate because model results are calibrated to previous real data.

But here's the problem. When you have complex, chaotic models with hundreds of freely tweekable parameters, it's fairly easy to fit data and simultaneously get any future prediction you (or your bias) want. Even when individually each variable is within a reasonable range.

We arguably have proof of this happening - climate models have been consistently overpredicting dT for what, 10 years now? There is an institutional problem with climate science, in that there is no real penalty for being wrong, and in fact the more aggressive results probably get the most attention. Because the modeling is so far removed from any sort of experimental or observational data collection, I think the field is dangerously susceptible to institutional bias.

<comment><USER27> As to your first point, I believe they are looking for the best fit to decades of data, not to a single point in time. As to your second argument, both historically and presently in science the tall nail gets hammered, it's a very conservative field. They look for a consensus (agreed minimum warming of x) rather than (an expected average warming of x).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's disheartening to read some of the comments here. Scientists are basically saying "we're not sure if it's going to be a disaster or a catastrophe", and some folk's response seems to be "see! scientists don't know! why should we listen to them?"

<comment><USER29> Some people will do anything to change the subject when the subject makes them uncomfortable. Better to quibble about models than to confront the disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know if this is actually true? I was under the impression that climate models have been mostly overshooting reality over the past 40 years

> One question modeling can help answer is called "climate sensitivity," an > estimate of how much warmer the planet will be once it has adjusted to > atmospheric CO₂ at double the pre-industrial level. (At current rates, CO₂ > could reach a doubling point in the last decades of this century.) This is > the old, reliable number that's come out to 3°C for 40 years. It was as > close as anything gets to certainty.

<comment><USER31> Here's a systematic comparison of climate model predictions vs reality, since the 1970s. It turns out that the models have done a great job of predicting reality. [https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have- climate-m...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate- models-projected-global-warming)

I'd be curious where your impression comes from, in terms of what sources of information you're receiving.

<comment><USER30> I was thinking of the same data, I guess it's not quite as clear as I thought, but the majority are overestimating the warming: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/10/Scree...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/10/Screen-Shot-2017-10-05-at-16.49.21.png)

<comment><USER32> If the idea is that the error in estimation is random around 0, you would expect about half to be overestimating.

I think 5 out of 8 is not a very strong difference from 4 out of 8, which is the comparison that makes sense in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems to me that the problem has never been a "lack of Science", but rather a lack of political wherewithal to actually implement the drastic, necessary steps.

There's probably been a collective tendency to (try) to view what was coming our way through rose-tinted glasses, some unconscious effort to lowball the projections in order to have a less catastrophic outlook. Maybe the computers models are finally beginning to converge on a more realistic scenario as they factor in the actual changes that have occurred so far.

It has never ceased to amaze me how we have oodles of science fiction films that feature a lone astronomer spotting an incoming asteroid and that then segue into the whole of humanity pulling together to build a fleet of spacecraft to flee on or thermonuclear weapons to blast the thing out of the sky with, but in reality we've had people warning us of approaching doom for seventy years and haven't managed much more than a collective "YOLO LOL".

I have some experience in sensitivity analysis on stochastic systems such as climate models, and it seems to me that feedback loops are probably becoming increasingly tightly correlated, which in my field (macroeconomics) tends to herald massive discontinuities.

I am not at all happy about this. At all.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you are like me, you hate reading articles like this. You know there is a problem but you feel like you can't do anything about it. You recycle, you turn off lights, you have a programmable thermostat but you know it's a drop in the ocean.

I finally decided to do something about it last fall. I researched and have committed to purchasing green power. Every month I purchase 850 kWh for $22 from Bullfrog Power (a Canadian company, I have no affiliation). It's much more reasonable than I thought. I still conserve as much as I can but $22/month allows me to feel like I am doing something. If in 40 years, my kids ask me what I did to prevent climate change, I feel like I'll have an answer I'll be proud of.

<comment><USER35> There is a problem and _you_ can't do anything about it. We are way past the point where individual action is going to cut it. You have to vote. _No other action_ is going to have a meaningful impact and you shouldn't pretend otherwise because it makes you feel better about yourself.

<comment><USER36> You going to vote out Xi Jinping?

<comment><USER37> China is actually also doing a lot pro-climate. Also, reading this as a German: I think the U. S. can do a lot first, before pointing their finger to China. Same for Germany btw., because we have similar discussions here as well like "why should we do anything? The US and China are the culprits".

You can follow this logic all the way down to an individual level.

If China doesn't do anyting, the US doesn't have to do anything either. If the US doesn't do anything, Germany doesn't have to do anything either. If not Germany, then not Munich. If not Munich, then not our little town. If not our neighbor, then me neither.

Everybody and every country should do whatever they can. Will it be enough? Probably not. But you gotta start where you actually have some control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Those now attempting to figure out the mystery of the hot climate models > think one factor might have caused the recent unusual results: clouds. It > turns out simulated clouds often cause headaches for climate modelers.

The impact of cloud cover in these models has been incorrect, and has such a large impact. Doesn't this strike anyone as a major problem?

We're burning about 100 billion gallons of aviation fuel per year.

> This means each gallon of jet fuel (6.5lbs) will combine with 23lbs of > Oxygen and turn into twenty pounds of CO2, and just over nine pounds of > water! (see: [https://paullaherty.com/2015/01/10/calculating-aircraft- > co2-...](https://paullaherty.com/2015/01/10/calculating-aircraft- > co2-emissions/)).

So that's 100B gallons * 9lbs is about a half a billion metric tons of water vapor going into the dry upper troposphere annually from commercial aviation.

Which, evidence would seem to suggest, has _not_ been modeled properly (at all?) by these climate models?

If I was producing these models, I would be embarassed.

<comment><USER39> Rough estimate: There are 1.4 × 10^17 liters of water in atmosphere ([https://whyfiles.org/2010/how-much-water-is-in-the- atmospher...](https://whyfiles.org/2010/how-much-water-is-in-the- atmosphere/index.html)).

Your number "about a half a billion metric tons" is 0.5 × 10^12 liters of water, which is 5 orders of magnitude lower number. Or, less than 1/10 000 of atmospheric water.

To say in your words, "If I was quoting this number as a significant contribution, I would be embarassed."

<comment><USER38> The atmosphere at FL300 is _super_ cold and dry. Injecting water _there_ has an enormous impact -- much greater than at lower altitudes, where the bulk of atmospheric water resides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'd like to know others' thoughts on this talk/discussion

[https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...](https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change/discussion?language=en)

<comment><USER41> legit. He's trying to mimic nature and keep the photosynthesis running by using ruminants to speed up the decomposition of organic matter and by timely management, have the regrowth sequester more atmospheric CO2 without overgrazing and compromising the grass plant or ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's surprising the article doesn't mention CFCs:

> The simulations showed that the rate of Arctic warming in a world without > CFCs would be cut in half – a striking effect for a category of substances > that are only present in small quantities to begin with. To ensure the > result was not simply a quirk of the simulation, the researchers ran the > experiment using two different climate models and arrived at a similar > outcome.

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-cfcs-are-a- ma...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-cfcs-are-a-major-driver- of-arctic-warming-study-finds/)

The danger here is that there's something else we fundamentally don't understand about the atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know if these models use floating point? If the do, are they properly handling the many subtleties[1] of IEEE 754 (and other floating point implementations)? Many years ago I read something about a model that produced very different results depending on the hardware architecture. If a model is sometimes chaotically sensitive to initial conditions, improper handling of rounding could be catastrophic.

[1] [https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h...](https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html)

<comment><USER44> No doubt they are using floats (well, doubles) - these models are usually coupled partial differential equations, propagated forward through time over the earth's surface using finite-difference or finite-element methods.

It's unlikely IMHO that floating point rounding oddities would cause catastrophically erroneous results. In my experience from other physics simulations, you usually validate some known behaviour you're not trying to predict, e.g. that energy is conserved, or that total mass of fluid is conserved. Bad numerics will usually violate these conservation laws, so you can use the fact that they are conserved as some evidence that your numerics are actually solving the differential equation relatively correctly.

Basically, people would notice broken numerics in this case.

There are situations where it is harder to validate numerics (e.g. if your numerics _inherently_ conserve some quantity by construction, then you can't use it to validate the behaviour of the numerics), and to be sure, a concerning fraction of all publications with numerical results contain mistakes.

But I don't think floating point rounding is near the top of the list of issues to go looking for in these models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I live in a small, old apartment in the EU, without proper AC. I'm pretty worried about the next summer. I can crash at a friend where the temperature never went above 26C last summer, despite a heatwave.

I always hope that if heatwaves keep coming summer after summer, governments/the UN will take tough decisions.

If nothing is done and summers are too hot, I clearly see people protesting/striking/blocking roads/etc until governments concede. My biggest fear are consumers that will refuse to adapt their consumption because they will see this as unfair rich-vs-poor restrictions. People addicted to consumerism would easily riot to denounce how capitalism ruined their living standard.

<comment><USER46> You should get an AC unit. A window one if you have the right kind of window, or a larger, mobile one.

<comment><USER47> More AC units are going to make the problem worse as long as we are not using solar/wind/hydro/nuclear-power.

Last summer when there was a heat wave here, lot of people bought ACs. Next year, they are also switching them on when it's 30 degrees Celsius outside.

The irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...](https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change/discussion?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER48> The 27-model average referenced in this article is 3.86 degrees C.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just a question, does the temperature of the core of the earth have any influence?

<comment><USER50> Its a quite small influence, about 50 milliWatts per square meter iirc. Overall we are well insulated from heat circulating inside the Earth (by miles of rock) while hundreds of watts per square meter enters the atmosphere from solar radiation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is it not possible to backtest these sorts of things? If it were, I would assume results would be the first bullet point on articles like this, but I also don't understand why it wouldn't be possible.

<comment><USER52> The article does sort of address this for one of the models: "The model run by NCAR, one of American's main climate-science institutions, started producing unusual data last year while trying to reproduce the recent past. "We got some really strange results," Gettelman said. The scientists went on to try 300 configurations of rain, pollution, and heat flows—something they can do as gods of their own digital earth—before matching the model to history. But by solving that puzzle, Gettelman's team sent future projections upward at an unheard-of rate."

Basically, the backtesting failed to match reality for the recent past, they tweaked parameters to get it to fit, and that produced surprisingly high predictions for the future. I don't think that would leave them anything to backtest on, since they'd used effectively all their historical data to fit the model to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Why the heck are we debating about 1 degree or 2 degrees or whatever. The imperative should be to reduce emisssions as much as possible as soon as possible.

<comment><USER54> Its just easier to think about a concrete number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> At the end of the article, apparently it has something to do with clouds.

<comment><USER56> I've read a few times that clouds are a big problem for climate modelers as they are far more complex in their implications for the climate than my grade school planet heats > evaporation > cloud forms > rain falls understanding of them suggests.

There's a nice article here on the issue and frustration of clouds for climate modelers by the head of the Royal Meteorological Society here: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-clouds-hold- key-b...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-clouds-hold-key-better- climate-models)

<comment><USER57> Yes water vapor specifically has been a big asterisk for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> wasn'T there something called global dimming which counters global warming? Since we do filter out more of those particles, we allow for more global warming?

</comment><comment><USER59> ...

<comment><USER60> I don't see how you brought socialism into any of this.

Ironically, socialism is being sold as a solution that you yourself make very clear. That, the pace of scientific progress is really fast ,and automation is going to make a lot of jobs obsolete.

Socialism (in the nordic sense, ie. capitalism with social welfare) is being proposed as a solution to rising inequality and unregulated for-profit forces in the free market of industries where the consumer has no choice. (medicine, education)

<comment><USER59> Unbelievable that people believe that the Nordic model of capitalism is "socialism". Capitalism with social welfare is not socialism.

<comment><USER61> Socialism isn't as narrow a term as you seem to think it is... It's quite a broad concept that can (and does) coexist with Capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Could it be a selection bias?

<comment><USER52> "In all, as many as a fifth of new results published in the last year have come in with anomalously high climate sensitivity." The article suggests that a consensus may well form around the new, higher estimates. So, quite possibly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> If they are based on models, then you can get any result you want!

</comment><comment><USER64> Not a good title when the "science is settled"

</comment><comment> vincent-toups I guess climate scientists don't use version control?

<comment><USER65> The article isn't very precise, but my understanding was that the run some kind of machine learning based on past data. Adding in the more recent data changed the predictions dramatically.

So it's not an issue of versioning (I assume they could reproduce the old results using the old data).

<comment><USER66> It's not machine learning, it's a physical model. Computers solve a big differential equation that takes in all of the physical things we know about the Earth's climate system and runs them forward in time. The increase in thermal predictions are due to changes in the cloud and aerosol models which were made due to an improved understanding of the physics involved.

<comment><USER67> The line can be a bit blurry, because they are actually running inverse problems with the PDEs to fit the data. This needs regularization just like statistical ML models. Usually this amounts to solving an iterated least square problem, just like logistic regression. Bayesian methods are becoming more popular, though.

<comment><USER68> > because they are actually running inverse problems with the PDEs to fit the > data

Could you explain this a bit more? Are you talking about data assimilation?

<comment><USER67> Yes, that's right. The issue is that systems like these have a lot of free parameters that have to be estimated from the data. This is basically because you have to make assumptions if you don't want to simulate Earth's systems down to the subatomic level. The inferred values of these parameters are usually very important as well for interpretation.

All PDEs are solved numerically by discretizing them into linear or nonlinear systems. If it's convex enough, Tikhonov regularization is often used.

Linear PDEs, where the solution depends only linearly on its derivatives, can be discretized into matrices. This gives a system like A m = d, where A is the discretized PDE, m is the "model" or parameter values, and d is the data. This is usually over or under-determined from the data, so it has to be solved by least squares. Since the resulting system is usually almost singular, regularization is applied, usually by penalizing the L2 norm of the model:

min || A m -d || + r ||m||^2

If it's nonlinear but convex enough, one can just solve it by fixed point iteration, with the above linear equation being solved at every step (Newton's method often doesn't work well). If it's too nonconvex, then MCMC or other Bayesian methods are better, since a single solution is useless if the parameter values could plausibly around widely separated minima.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I saw that chart in the article and thought "the predicted warming correlates with the level of wokeness of the country" From Russia 1.83 to Canada 5.64.

</comment><comment><USER70> "You are in private mode. Subscribe to continue reading." Ok, that's one more I will not open anymore; seems Bloomberg started using similar "privacy mode" detection as NYT.

<comment><USER71> If you happen to be on Firefox, you can use this extension to get around it:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary- con...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> scientific models != scientific facts.

They are educate guesses or educated estimates to be more charitable. Our computing capabilities are much too weak to accurately model systems as complex as the entire earth's climate.

</comment><comment><USER73> Because they're made by alarmists who are trying to increase political pressure.

</comment><comment><USER74> Hold my beer :) [http://climatechangereconsidered.org/](http://climatechangereconsidered.org/)

</comment><comment><USER75> Scientists making the models prly thought the politicans needed a helping hand.

</comment><comment><USER36> A model isn't reality. A lot of climate research is based entirely on experimenting with these climate models. Of course, the climate is a non- linear dynamic system, so even if you had a perfect model (we don't), if your input parameters were off by the slightest bit, reality would veer off wildly from your prediction within a short time. This is why weather forecasts don't work beyond 10 days.

<comment><USER47> _A lot of climate research is based entirely on experimenting with these climate models._

We have a lot of data measured at many points on Earth spanning many decades. The data clearly shows that our planet is warming up and that there is a strong correlation with greenhouse gasses. One can extrapolate from these data points with certain reliability.

What is hard is to take into account are tipping points (which is why the IPCC excludes them in their projections), such as the effects of methane release from warming tundra soil. As far as I understand, most known possible tipping points only make things worse, not better.

At this point the question is not if climate change is happening (there is near universal agreement on that among climatologists), but whether it will be _bad, but manageable_ , _it will be ugly_ , or _life-threatening to mankind_. In any of these cases, we have to act now.

<comment><USER36> We have data that shows warming in the early 20th century, cooling in the mid 20th century (through the 70s) and warming in the decades after that. CO2 ppm was increasing steadily through those ups and downs, so it's not correlated perfectly. Meanwhile there are natural phenomenon like the Atlantic Multi- decadal Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, ENSO, NAO, etc that also correlate quite well with climate change.

In the terms of "bad, unmanageable" climate change, I would invite you to research the early Holocene, which had temps as much as 7 degrees hotter than modern temps. The early Holocene began about 12K years ago and ended about 6K years ago. The warm temperatures correlate with boom times for humanity.

See: Early Holocene Temperature Oscillations Exceed Amplitude of Observed and Projected Warming in Svalbard Lakes

[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL084384)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'm a climate change skeptic almost entirely because I don't trust models. I believe there are too many dynamic things happening in the world for anyone to be able to predict accurately say the next 100 years (solar, earthquakes, volcanoes etc). One way to make me a believer though is an experiment: if I were to give you a 100 year stretch of history and you were able to accurately predict with the models what exactly happened in those 100 years.

The article talks about it a little bit about how the models are used to predict the 19th century to see if they are correct. But the models use the last 100 years as input so of course it will give you accurate output. But the real challenge of the models would be to accurately predict things that are not part of the inputs into the model. I don't believe that these models can do this and are thus an exercise in straight extrapolation based on very complex and interconnected inputs.

<comment><USER77> So if I asked you to bet at 50/50 odds that next year would be colder on average than this year, you'd take the bet?

<comment><USER73> That's not what climate is about. Also, it depends on location, in many places it was colder in 2019 than in 2018. If you're talking about some calculated "global" temperature, it doesn't exist in a valid form.

<comment><USER78> Are you claiming that it is not possible to find a trend in a mean temperature of a great many points across the globe, over a long period of time?

What makes such a measurement an "invalid form"?

<comment><USER73> It is not possible if there aren't valid temperature measurements available for all points throughout the measured period of time, so that many temperatures are "interpolated", estimated etc.

<comment><USER78> Except that we do have a massive number of recorded temperatures across a massive number of locations in the last 100 years. Climate models, some dating back to the 1970s, have correctly predicted global temperature changes in the 50 years since based on this data.

The measurements are real, and there is an established history of the models being generally correct (if not in specific details) by now. Climate study is not the new science you seem to think it is.

<comment><USER73> > _Climate models, some dating back to the 1970s, have correctly predicted > global temperature changes in the 50 years since based on this data._

Can you point me to one such model? One that actually predicted temperatures correctly back in the 1970s and not after various recent "adaptations" like "corrected" emission data?

> _The measurements are real_

Yes, measurements are real. Interpolations, resulting "global" temperatures and predictions aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> So, holistically, it would seem like warming (a fever) or Coronavirus (anti- bodies) is part of the planets immune system, but humans are too advanced.

<comment><USER80> Let's not anthropomorphize things, they don't like it.

<comment><USER79> Animals have immune systems too. It's not a phenomenon unique to humans, as Anthropomorphism would suggest.

> they don't like it

Who? HNers? I don't care. I think it more that people don't like seeing themselves as the virus or cancer, when we could easily change our behavior and we wouldn't be.</comment></comment></comment>


Fracking banned in UK as government makes major U-turn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/02/fracking-banned-in-uk-as-government-makes-major-u-turn <comment><USER2> "The decision was taken after a new scientific study warned it was not possible to rule out "unacceptable" consequences for those living near fracking sites.

The report, undertaken by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), also warned it was not possible to predict the magnitude of earthquakes fracking might trigger."

In Ohio, where I grew up, I know, home of the fault lines, right? We have had several earthquakes and tremors. Fracking, despite environmentalist messages to Congress, is alive and well. And the deeper the well, the stronger the earthquake.

<comment><USER3> Economics will kill it eventually; which is an additional reason that British conservatives are less enthusiastic about the notion of fracking now. A few years ago it was sold as a clean and cheap way to get gas and oil. Indeed there has been a bit of an investment bubble around this.

However, ROI for fracking investments is very dependent on a combination of a lack of accountability for the damage the process causes (which proponents deny is a thing) and the ability to sell at a high price. Neither is a sure bet. Rather the opposite. With clean energy becoming price competitive in the UK, the high price of fracking gas means less demand and people expecting more bang for their buck in terms of cleanness.

In the UK they've already deployed a lot of wind power and more is coming. That means expensive gas surrounded by scandals of pollution, minor earth quakes are not just inconvenient but major obstacles for any financial returns. Grumpy citizens translates into wide popular support for action against companies involved; which could be costly. Additionally, politicians are very sensitive about not pissing off their voters. Fracking never had much popular support to begin with and the topic is increasingly politically toxic. So, they shut it down. Wise choice.

The US is a bit of wild west in terms of accountability when it comes to this but it will eventually face the same economics.

<comment><USER4> It's one thing to say there are externalities; it's another thing to say that nobody can put bounds on them.

There is an equivocation in saying something is not economical while implicitly rejecting the idea of measuring it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Britain is small and densely populated - everywhere is a suburb of somewhere - and fracking sites tend to fall in wealthy exurbs. How much future would US fracking have if most sites were in Westchester and Orange counties?</comment>


Joke about how software developers are hired - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/08/how-to-not-hire.html#comment-80872835

<comment><USER2> Guy Kawasaki is sorely mistaken. I do know all of those applications (illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver, flash, etc) and all of those languages (javascript,actionscript) and did learn them on a pc.</comment>


Movebubble, an app that aims to make renting in London suck less, raises $1.6M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/15/movebubble/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't appear to solve the real issues I have with flat-hunting in London, namely that the agents are terrible people, and that it's impossible to search for the things you want. You can't search for "is not falling apart", "has internet over 2Mbps", "has a supermarket nearby", or "is under a 30 min commute for these 2 offices". These are the things I care about, but no one is solving these as issues.

<comment><USER3> Add to that:

Landlord is not a criminal

Does not have rats

<comment><USER4> Is not next to a squat

Not a council house

Was not previously occupied by criminals

It doesn't have elderly neighbours

No kebab / chicken shops within x metres

<comment><USER5> I'm curious - why would you not want elderly neighbours?

<comment><USER6> Actually, I don't think any of those criteria should definitively rule a place out.

<comment><USER5> Personally me neither but I can understand the other reasons to some extent

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd feel more excited about something that comes up with a way to completely get rid of agents. In my opinion, services for letting should look at establishing a more transparent and direct operating channel between the tenants and landlords. The paperwork is generally standard. There are deposit protection schemes to protect the tenant's deposit. Landlords can directly get in touch with agencies that do reference checks and property damage checks before and after tenancy. This information can be made available on the app/website for those interested. If an app makes it easy enough to do all this, even for the not so tech-savvy (these are the types of landlords I've come across through agents), this letting agency menace can be gotten rid of altogether. I always thought this was the point of using the internet for property letting. Of course, my opinion is biased from the point of view of someone who has not had such a good experience with letting agents.

I know openrent.co.uk is trying to head in that direction. Universities also have their own housing departments that put students in touch with prospective landlords who have registered with them at no cost at all to either party. Maybe employers/corporates could also start doing the same.

<comment><USER8> Agents are mostly there to promote the property and conduct viewings. Many landlords don't have the time or inclination to handle that side of things. Software can do a lot of the agent's work, but not all of it for all people.

The reference checks are just profit centres for the agents, so they actually _want_ you to overpay for a new check each time.

<comment><USER9> Also, a lot of the landlors just live outside of London (usually in a cheaper city/country).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unless you change the quantity and quality of rental flats available in London, you will not make it suck less; you will just make the existing suck happen faster.

There is no shortage of estate agents, in fact it's often said that there are too many. There's no lack of aggregation sites either.

<comment><USER11> I disagree. I think that if you have listings with two flats side by side for £1700pcm and one of them has a review with photos showing mold and cramp and the other has a review saying it was OK then you will start to force a price differential and eventually will force landlords and agents to stop being so crap.

Personally I'm hoping these guys launch their solution and fix the issues in the next few weeks (lol) as I'm about to dive back into that particular abyss (no lol).

<comment><USER8> The reality of London is that even the property with mould and crap won't be on the market for long enough for somebody to bother reviewing it if it's in a popular area.

Unlike other reviewed products, properties are exclusive and don't regularly appear on the market, and there are very strong incentives for people that want to bid the price up or down to lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an easy problem to solve, and others have pointed out what needs to happen.

1\. Provide automatic contract and deposit protection flows into the middle

2\. Renters and landlords should both be credit-checked and reviewed by others. If guarantors are necessary, manage that process and credit check them too.

3\. Provide check-in/check-out inventories that can be ticked off and checked by all parties.

This is 90% of the value letting agents provide.

The rest is about better listings themselves: commute times to key locations; what broadband options and speeds are available in that location; the average price and food safety rating of local pubs, cafes, restaurants and takeaways; crime rates; ambulance response times; council tax rates (everybody forgets these and then gets surprised unless they move to LBH&F which has some of the lowest in the country); parking details and costs; night bus routes in the vicinity; voting histories in recent elections; and so on.

All of this data is out there, and easy to build tools for and it's the only way to make things better AND get rid of the letting agency model that needs to happen almost urgently.

Just providing a veneer over the letting agent? Doomed to fail like so many that have come before it.

<comment><USER13> You mean like OpenRent [1]?

OpenRent is the largest agency in the UK. Why? Because it solves these pain points, and does so at scale.

There a few steps you've missed out, like giving tenants protection against bad data and rogues (not solved by typical classifieds) - and fulfilling the other legal requirements for landlords (gas safety certs, etc). So whilst perhaps not an _easy_ problem to solve (many have tried and failed), there is a solution already in the market.

What is the number 1 tenant complaint? Admin fees. Something also solved by OpenRent, along with removing dead listings and providing a transparent process.

[1] - [https://www.openrent.co.uk](https://www.openrent.co.uk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" it's not currently possible to actually rent a property through the Movebubble app"_

So this is just another aggregator like Rightmove? They're promising real-time availability information, but why would a letting agent update the availability on Movebubble and not Rightmove? What makes it more likely to be real-time than any other aggregator?

</comment><comment><USER15> Now if only there were an app to make renting in London cost less...

<comment><USER9> It's called 'election'.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> "The problem with Rightmove and Zoopla is that they don't see the renter through to the point of viewing properties – renters have to ring up so many different estate agents (there are over 2,000 in London) that it's nearly impossible to keep track of bookings and you have to note down all these details elsewhere"

This is a problem? I've rented several times in London, including recently. Calling someone and writing a time down in your calendar is not a problem. I also don't see how feedback/review or properties is going to be useful. People have very different expectations. When moving and renting out my old room I've had people think the place was amazing and others think it was terrible. You need to see places yourself, in person. Honestly I think the whole 'renting in London is hard' thing is overblown. I'm working on a pretty low budget and I can find rooms that are good enough for me quite easily. I've also gone through the process of renting an entire apartment (as opposed to just a room) and it's even easier. You call several estate agents, tell them your budget and requirements, and when something comes up they call you. And it's free.

<comment><USER2> Having just finished this process (found a flat 2 days ago), I couldn't disagree more. Finding a flat was essentially a full time job for me for a week. Agents don't respect your time, or your budget, the good stuff isn't on Rightmove because it's gone by the time the agent gets around to adding it, viewings have to be within 48 hours or else the place is gone, etc. It's honestly one of the most stressful things I have to do. (although I don't think this app solves that)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Movebubble, the startup that wants to make renting in London suck a little less, has picked up $1.6 million in further funding, bringing total investment to just over $3.4 million.

>Meanwhile, it's not currently possible to actually rent a property through the Movebubble app

So I guess the MVP didn't include actually helping people rent a place and getting their perspective on the entire process in a "real world" sense before raising $3.5m?

Disclosure: I work for jumpshell ([https://www.jumpshell.com/](https://www.jumpshell.com/)), where we are launched in Boston and Chicago and people can actually complete the rental process through the platform as well getting your feedback about the entire process so we can better align the incentives of the different market participants.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is just another front for slimy estate agents.

<comment><USER18> Hi Ciudilo, I'm Nick from Movebubble. I understand why you'd be sceptical about the app simply taking estate agent properties and passing them along to users. But our model is renter first. We don't make any money from agents. We work very hard to make sure we deal with agents that offer a good service for renters. We are also continually monitoring property listings to help ensure they are good quality and of a certain standard.

<comment><USER14> So where does the money come from? The tenants?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will the rate stats include the history of rent increases? Or for that matter how the landlord behaved when the previous tenant moved out? Rental market in London is an absolute car crash. Most of us don't even bother doing anything about how we're treated and so the next tenant will have no way of knowing what they'll encounter within or at the end of their tenancy. I hope this app will make some difference but the best fix to London rental market bug is to move out of London.

</comment><comment><USER2> As a software developer, living in London, who was in the process of finding a new flat until 2 days ago, this was not marketed particularly well! I'm right in the middle of the target market and have never heard of this.

<comment><USER18> You're right. We're just starting to get our message out there with an increased focus on marketing. You will hopefully see and hear about us more over the coming weeks/months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there no way to search for properties on a desktop computer, or am I an idiot?

</comment><comment><USER21> Well. As a small landlord in Watford, I'd rather appreciate the service that brings me good tenants. Non smoking (hash included), tolerable to kids next door and caring for a shared garden.</comment>


How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2009/09/how_to_not_get_your_blog_hacked.htm

<comment><USER2> _> If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is 'be extremely zealous about updating your software', which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration._

Apparently this person has not used a recent build of Wordpress.

<comment><USER3> But they've got a point. Even if it takes "only 10 minutes" to upgrade, there have been so many new versions and so many security issues that it gets kind of old after a while. Especially if you have multiple sites all running it.

<comment><USER4>
      svn update

Not a complex command to run! I hear there are these things called cronjobs too, so you don't even have to run it yourself. Just pick the latest stable branch and svn switch when a new major version comes out.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense in theory, but our company has dozens of WordPress sites. Once you have more than a few, managing software and plugin versions becomes exponentially more challenging.

I'm in the process of upgrading all of them to 2.8.4 and installing the necessary plugins and params in the config file so they can all be "auto updated" in the future. I plan on having my VA manage them from there.

However sometimes strange things happen - for example, I auto upgraded one of our sites the other day and the whole thing broke and only rendered a blank page, so it's entirely possible my VA will break one or more sites even using the auto upgrade functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This advice is just silly. In other words throw out all of the advances of using php, python, ruby, etc. server side because software has bugs. Or rely on a centralized managed blog host that is also susceptible to bugs, except that when they are exploited there they can effect many more people at once.

My advice? If you host your own web apps at least take the responsibility to administer them. Wordpress has made huge improvements in their update process.

My upgrade process is this: * dump a copy of the database * disable plugins * copy the current public_html directory to a backup (just in case) * untar new release over the top of the old * run /wp-admin/upgrade.php * reenable plugins

<comment><USER6> What great advances is this approach throwing out?

Most bloggers have a very simple use case: publish stuff that looks nice, generates an RSS feed, and maybe allows a comment thread. Most bloggers are not, and have no interest in becoming, sysadmins or DBAs.

My contention is that it is easy to set things up so you can blog with whatever app you want without leaving your data at the mercy of the next person to find an exploit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A static version of your blog? That would be all well and good if it were not for comments...

<comment><USER8> I have a static blog and used to have Disqus for comments. I've since disabled Disqus, no fault of theirs, I just decided that I didn't want comments.

<comment><USER9> So can you put Disqus up on HTML pages?

<comment><USER8> Yep, Disqus can be added to a website by putting a Div that Disqus will fill from a piece of javascript.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


15 Year Old Kid Develops Pancreatic Cancer Detection Test - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/jack-andraka-15-wins-inte_n_1535741.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Money quote from the article, "Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka from Maryland, winner of the world's largest high school science research competition, developed a test for pancreatic cancer that is not only 28 times cheaper and faster than current tests in place, but also 100 times more sensitive."</comment>


Kentucky Miners Blocking a Coal Train, Demanding Their Stolen Wages - <AUTHOR> https://labornotes.org/2019/07/kentucky-miners-are-camped-out-railroad-tracks-blocking-coal-train-demanding-their-stolen <comment><USER2> I work as a diesel mechanic for a chain of midwest shops and was immediately "triggered" by this article because its been an on-and-off part of my career for 15 years now.

Ive had shops where I wasnt paid, and told to just 'take it out as vacation.' ive also had shops that cut me a check that bounces, and shops that cut me a check only to issue a "stop payment" a few months later because well, the shop got taken to court for secretly running a car theft ring. "evaporating" paychecks are caused by a judge telling the accountants to quit paying everyone ASAP. I only got that paycheck 4 years after we were all fired, and only because the state labor board stepped in. For around 3 years I only accepted cash for my work, which is a legal request to make in most states despite what the boss tells you.

now for coal companies...thats a weird beast in itself. We had a contract last spring to service a fleet of XDE240s and showed up with everything we needed. cranes, hydraulics, an entire mobile shop for maintenance and transport, and were told 2 months into the work that they never authorized the work. we presented our bill of lading, contracts, and signed invoices and they never responded. We decided this must have been a mistake, so we completed the work and returned the vehicles expecting payment. The entire company was run by a paranoid elderly southerner who had died that year in a gun accident, and the work site was basically _abandoned_. We waited 3 months for a judge to start liquidating his assets before his kids returned from Europe and demanded his estate. Long story short we got about 70% of the payment, and ended up with the rest after the trucks and most of the old mans estate were auctioned.

<comment><USER3> > We waited 3 months for a judge to start liquidating his assets before his > kids returned from Europe and demanded his estate.

Sadly, this is the only part of the story which stuck out to me as unusual, but then again, I'm not an heir to a coal fortune, so what do I know about such families.

Do you know what they were doing in Europe? My bias makes me think that they were coasting on the family fortune, but I suppose they could just as well be doing productive and industrious things over there. Either way, from what you write, it sounds like they weren't around for many months after their father's tragic end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not getting last paychecks is just one of the ways coal workers can expect to get screwed. Bankruptcy courts have been letting companies get out of pension and retiree health benefits, government will wind up picking up the tab in many cases. Same with reclamation work secured by insufficient bonds. The Black Lung fund has an exploding deficit while numbers of workers coming down with it are going up because of higher silica content due to declining seams.

This is of course on top of the air pollution killing thousands and sickening millions, the CO2 emissions, and the toxic coal ash poisoning waterways that we get from burning it.

Coal is in a death spiral in the US, unfortunately there's quite a bit more misery for it to cause before its gone.

<comment><USER5> Yet those same workers the industry loves to poison will fight tooth and nail to keep working in the mines, up to and including voting for someone who will work to remove any and all benefits that would try to cover for that coal mine's negligence

<comment><USER6> They are just fighting for a living. If you give rural virginians an option they will be all ears.

<comment><USER7> $30 billion [https://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476485650/fact-check- hillary-...](https://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476485650/fact-check-hillary- clinton-and-coal-jobs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Unfortunately, federal bankruptcy law puts workers far down the list of who gets paid, after business creditors and legal fees for the bankruptcy itself_

It's funny how the receiver's fees always add up to exactly however much money is left in the company.

<comment><USER9> It does?

When I had to wind down a company in Austin, Texas, pretty much everyone in arbitration and court on all sides of the table recognized that workers got paid first.

I wonder if that is local?

I seem to remember that just about everyone was terrified of contingent WARN_Act violation related claims that could take up to 4 years to trickle in, and that was definitely federal.

<comment><USER10> Workers generally have everything except the last paycheck already. No sane business (don't take that as any claim that most businesses are sane) doesn't pay their people first. If you don't get a paycheck on a regular basis you won't come back, so even when things are going bad employees are getting their money while suppliers aren't getting anything. When it finally gets to bankruptcy employees aren't really owed much, so it shouldn't matter.

Of course there are a lot of assumptions above. If any of the violations happen to you get ready to run before your good time is traded for more bad money.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. Thank you.

I was mostly addressing the regulatory environment. I do not believe (unless I am very mis-informed) that employee paid wages are at the back-of-the-line in a liquidation procedure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They're staunchly anti-union, anti-worker, and pro-corporation by vote. I think those workers are seeing the result of their votes.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Their second-to-last paycheck, already deposited, evaporated out of their > bank accounts.

Wait how is this possible? Doesn't your own bank represent you? On what basis can bank transfer he reversed. Here in Australia the employer generally can never reverse funds out. If say someone gets double paid you'd just have to leave it there and adjust what you pay in the next pay run.

<comment><USER13> Yeah if it's suddenly possible and legal for employers to start withdrawing from their employees accounts via direct deposit or something else then we have much bigger problems.

Your bank doesn't represent you, where did you get that naive idea from? I'd think a decade of Wells Fargo actively trying to rob their entire customer base in a blatantly illegal and out in the open scheme would shatter any of those illusions.

<comment><USER14> My public accounting prof. did a lot of consulting for smaller banks. Early in the semester, he made the entire class raise their right hand and repeat "Banks are not my friend" three times. He then advised us on things like keeping our checking account in a separate bank from our mortgage, etc. That lecture alone made the class worth the price, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe the reporter got it wrong, but in any case the song should obviously be "I Want My Back Pay," which fits the meter and maintains the original single- syllable word impact of the original Backstreet Boys/Max Martin song refrain and title.

Once you have the refrain, the rest of the song practically writes itself. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/kentucky](https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/kentucky)

Harlan county voted 85% for Trump. Kentucky has sent McConnell to the Senate in every election since 1984. I'm not claiming Democrats are perfect, but Clinton at least had a plan to help miners based on the reality that coal jobs aren't coming back:

[https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f1...](https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f13d/clinton- releases-30-billion-strategy-to-help-coal-communities.pdf)

> Unfortunately, federal bankruptcy law puts workers far down the list of who > gets paid, after business creditors and legal fees for the bankruptcy > itself.

Warren has a plan to address that:

[http://www.wicz.com/story/40877414/elizabeth-warren-wants- to...](http://www.wicz.com/story/40877414/elizabeth-warren-wants-to-change- the-bankruptcy-code-heres-what-that-could-mean-for-american-workers)

</comment><comment><USER17> >Both men said they are owed nearly $4,000 in their last two paychecks.

Wow! Either they're getting paid once a month or they make a LOT of money.

>Their second-to-last paycheck, already deposited, evaporated out of their bank accounts.

Uh, no. The checks were deposited and did NOT clear as they bounced. Because they were bankrupt. Omitting relevant facts to push a narrative is bad journalism at best. It makes it sound like the company removed funds from their accounts, instead they wrote bad checks.

>and their paychecks from the end of June bounced, leaving many with negative bank account balances.

[https://www.heraldcourier.com/news/local/resource-session- he...](https://www.heraldcourier.com/news/local/resource-session-held-for- blackjewel-employees-impacted-by- bankruptcy/article_9cd4a479-2459-524d-8587-d7757e69654a.html)

<comment><USER18> $4k/month is only $48k, bi-monthly it is $96k, which isn't unheard of for people working in natural resource extraction.

<comment><USER17> Ok? That's still surprising to me not knowing a single human being that's worked in a mine and constantly hearing about how poor mining towns are...

48k$ is a LOT of money to those outside of the Bay Area.

<comment><USER19> 48k is less than the median income in the US [1]. Miners also make generally around 100k, which is why they want to keep those jobs so hard. It's rare to find high paying jobs in low cost areas that don't require much education.

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

<comment><USER17> >48k is less than the median income in the US

Yet nearly half of workers in the United States earn less than $30,000[1] (people earning less than $30,000 accounts for 48.06% of the population[2]) and 1% of the country makes more than 250k a year[2]. Four states have a median HOUSEHOLD income under 48k[3].

The vast majority of people on HN seem to think that everyone is drawing a 6 figure software dev salary, federal minimum wage is 7.25 an hour. 13 years into my job and I'm one of the best paid people in my position and I'm around 36k now I think, new hires make considerably less than that at a fortune 500 company with 425k employees.

[1] [https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in- wage...](https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in-wages)

[2] [https://wallethacks.com/average-median-income-in- america/](https://wallethacks.com/average-median-income-in-america/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income)

<comment><USER18> That might be true, but you aren't working a drill site in North Dakota or a mine in West Virginia. Natural resource jobs have always been like that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Silicon 12-inch MacBook? Take my money - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/comment-apple-silicon-12-inch-macbook-take-my-money/ <comment><USER2> If you are working in the cloud the power of the machine doesn't matter that much</comment>


Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1209/Are-you-scientifically-literate-Take-our-quiz

<comment><USER2> 150 clicks to answer 50 questions? Lousy UX.

<comment><USER3> I got through 3 questions before I said "shove it."

Kind of funny how a quiz about being scientifically literate is completely design-and-experience illiterate.

edit: Actually, it's not funny. It's the reason a lot of people don't like science. If you're going to do this kind of thing as public awareness, you should make it fun and likable. Not annoying. It puts a bad face on science.

<comment><USER4> At the end of it, all it gives is a number of question answered, a number relative to what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What is the heaviest noble gas?

> What combustible compound, the principal component of natural gas, has the > chemical formula CH4?

Oh come on, you can be scientifically literate and not remember these factoids. Understanding and internalisation of the "scientific posture" does not equate to the ability to answer random multiple choice questions about chemistry.

<comment><USER6> I've been a programmer for a while and haven't taken a chemistry class in at least 6 or 7 years but neither question should be that difficult.

For the noble gas question, I've long since memorized the periodic table (since it's just a list and lists are easy to remember - especially using the method of loci).

As for CH4, methane is a basic elementary chemistry concept. I'm fairly certain it would qualify as basic scientific information.

Although I do agree there were some rather difficult ones I wasn't sure how I would know without having memorized it.

<comment><USER5> I am familiar with the alkanes, it's just the inconsistent names that I can't remember. If the question had asked what C8H18 was called, then "octane" would roll off my tongue.

Also, I obviously haven't memorised the periodic table, nor do I immediately see why doing so is necessary for scientific literacy. Isn't understanding it enough? I bet there's plenty of scientists who can't remember the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What terrible design! Truly awful. 50 questions? I bet nobody will actually finish this. I expect better, CSM.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm scientifically literate because I understand the scientific method.. How to set up a hypothesis and test it... Not because I'm good at memorizing factoids

I'm not surprised that a site with the words "Christian science" in the title doesn't get this :)

<comment><USER6> CSM is actually well established as a legitimate news source and journal; it's name has little to do with it's intentions.

The name simply derives from the wishes of one of the founders.

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

<comment><USER8> I know :) I was just enjoying being snarky

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone should post a quiz to test if people are morally literate. I bet we'd see lower scores there, especially from anyone working in the financial sector.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, I stuck with it, and got 46/50. Thanks, that was fun.

<comment><USER6> I got the same.

I'm surprised how many HNers are dismissing this as "memorizing" and regurgitating facts when a huge portion of them can be figured out through basic scientific knowledge.

For example: "Protium, which consists of a single proton and no neutrons, is the most common isotope of what element?"

I've never heard of Protium, but there is only a single element I could think of that would fit its description.</comment></comment>


$30 million and 30 people X boostraped single founder (Cuil X DuckDuckGo) - <AUTHOR> http://trends.google.com/websites?q=duckduckgo.com%2C+cuil.com&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0

<comment><USER2> vs instead of X would be more clear imho, but very nice.

It just goes to show you that money can't buy you competence at the top.</comment>


Online Credit Card Processing for Non-Americans - <AUTHOR>

A similar question was asked about a year ago [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88263], but there weren't any useful answers and I'm hoping there is better advice to be had these days, since I am running into the same problem.
Short story: I'm running a BVI-incorporated firm with a corporate bank account in Hong Kong and am trying to figure out ways to accept online credit card payments. The business is completely legitimate.
I've looked at several of the service providers recommended in other threads, but they all seem to require companies to have US merchant accounts. I am not an American citizen and it isn't feasible for me to travel to the US to open a corporate bank account there in person.
Does anyone have any recommendations on merchant service providers that "get it"? Providing the necessary documentation to establish legal merchant accounts or fulfill regulatory requirements is not the problem. The problem is location.
Anyone have suggestions or advice? <comment><USER2> Why not use PayPal?

Also checkout the Ask YC Archive: [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#toc81)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Capitalism Immoral?  - <AUTHOR> http://ramario.com/?p=14

<comment><USER2> When people make these arguments about poor working conditions for third world workers in internationally owned factories, what do they think these workers would be doing if the factory wasn't there? If Apple was going to pay through the nose for menial labor, then why would they do it in Asia instead of the USA?

<comment><AUTHOR> Differing laws and regulations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm actually not sure whether to flag, upvote, or answer this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would you flag it?

<comment><USER3> These things from the guidelines:

        Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

        Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

Also, the title is overly link-bait-y, and there's the thing about yes/no questions in headlines almost always being best answered with "No." Overall, I just don't think it's a great submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow is this ever a troll piece</comment>


Isomorphic-git: a pure JavaScript implementation of Git for node and browsers - <AUTHOR> https://isomorphic-git.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Coincidentally, I had just recently discovered this project a few days ago. The major thing going for it is that it works easily with Docker (for containerized CI) whereas nodegit requires compiling from C++ source files and more related shenanigans that I'd care to wrestle with.

Unfortunately, isomorphic-git isn't anywhere near as feature-complete as nodegit (e.g. no support for reading global configs, no revert, no stash, not even a `git add .` equivalent, etc)</comment>