Scientists Back Kiera Wilmot by Tweeting About All the Stuff They've Blown Up - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/05/scientists_back_kiera_wilmot_b.php <comment><USER3> I "invited" the LAPD Bomb Squad to my High School Graduation when some punk kid crawling on a roof he was not authorized to be on found a little science demonstration a friend and I had set up for the time of graduation and told a gym teacher who took the science demonstration from where it had been safely installed and placed it in his enclosed office and called the LAPD Bomb Squad (on my behalf.)

I was uh, fingered by our Physics professor who ran into me before graduation, and said, "Jerry, what did you do?"

Was pulled off the grad night school bus just before it left for a talk with Nick the Narc, Principal, and LAPD.

We talked for a bit, I explained I hadn't done anything terribly unique, pissed them off by telling them I copied my designs from the Rockford Files (google it), and then they sent me off to Disneyland with the rest of my graduating class.

(Had I known how popular that made me on the bus that night, I would have done it sooner.)

Went to college, found one other engineering student in my small class of engineering students that had done practically the same thing I had done the same week within the same state.

This was back before zero tolerance of course, and back before GWOT, and back before we decided we had to burn down our own village in order to save our village.

Back when folks grew a sense of humor.

So Kiera, I think what is being done to you is a gross abuse.

<comment><USER4> I really cannot parse that first paragraph, can anyone translate? (Or OP change it)

<comment><USER5> > _I "invited" the LAPD Bomb Squad to my High School Graduation when some punk > kid crawling on a roof he was not authorized to be on found a little science > demonstration a friend and I had set up for the time of graduation and told > a gym teacher who took the science demonstration from where it had been > safely installed and placed it in his enclosed office and called the LAPD > Bomb Squad (on my behalf.)_

"Punk kid" was crawling on a roof. He was not authorized to be on said roof. He found the OP's science demonstration that he set up on the roof to go off during graduation. The "punk kid" told a gym teacher, who contained the experiment to his office and called the LAPD. The bomb squad arrived to investigate.

<comment><USER3> (Where science demonstration is probably something like fireworks, skyrockets, roman candles, m-80s, but OP is being vague, so we can't be sure.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I put a little salt water in a 3 liter bottle (remember those... Shasta, baby) and melted 2 wires through the cap. I connected those to a 12 volt battery and let that cook until it was good and bulging, flipped it over and then used the firing coil from a motocycle to make a spark between the wires.

It made a much bigger boom than we had expected. I believe the hole in the ground it left was nearly 2 feet deep. I think I was 13.

<comment><USER7> Right. But you didn't do it during school.

edit: Do I really need to point out that 2 felonies for this is obviously a gross overreaction by authorities and I hope all charges are dropped? That said, if you don't agree that it was universally horrible judgement to make a drano bomb during school, then there really isn't much to discuss between us and you can carry on downvoting (although I hope none of you are in charge of my future children). my longform response: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651593>

<comment><USER8> Oh, come on, having horrible judgement is the whole point of being a kid. The process of growing up and becoming an adult is all about learning and acquiring good judgement. How can you expect people to gain the judgement that comes with experience without allowing them to gain that experience by trying things, some of which will turn out to be mistakes? How are they supposed to know which things are going to be the mistakes without trying some of them and thereby learning the patterns?

I once did more or less the same thing as Ms Wilmot did, and you bet I did it during school, and I didn't even bother to tell anyone about my intentions first! I set up an apparatus under one of the fume hoods in the back of the chemistry lab, dissolved a bunch of aluminum, captured the hydrogen in a balloon, and then blew the whole thing up. It made a hell of a big bang, shattered a bunch of glassware, and startled the hell out of my lab-mates. Bad judgement? Well, yeah. Duh. But I didn't actually hurt anyone, and I sure learned something from the experience, and I'll bet that all my classmates learned something from it too, without having to deal with the embarrassment and clean-up that landed on my shoulders for being the nitwit who tried it.

Just imagine how fucked I'd have been if I'd had to face felony charges after that. My whole life might have been different, my whole software engineering career derailed before it had even started. What a stupid waste that would have been. What a stupid waste it is going to be for all of us if this idiotic treatment of Ms Wilmot is allowed to stand.

<comment><USER7> Did you read my post? I do not agree with these felony charges at all. I don't know what the reprimand should be, whether it's a lecture or 1 detention or expulsion. But I know the felony charges are wrong based on the few facts we currently have.

<comment><USER8> I did read your post, and I don't agree that any formal reprimand was necessary. What did she do that deserves punishment? She found chemistry so interesting that she went beyond her classes and came up with her own experiment, which taught her something she hadn't expected. Cool! Give her extra credit, put her in AP classes, sign her up for community college - <USER2> is exactly the kind of curiosity and independent initiative we need to _encourage_ , not punish.

<comment><USER9> I think that was gavinlynch's point: there's got to be some kind of discipline, but a felony is insane. And by discipline, I'd imagine something like what happened to you would be reasonable.

"Ok, someone could have gotten hurt. Be more careful next time, and now clean up your mess!" With the severity of the lecture following the actual damage.

Kids should be encouraged to involve themselves with the immensely powerful forces so easily available today - but they've got to fear it (as in respect it). They need to know how destructive it can be, and then _harness that_. That's my $0.02 on it.

<comment><USER10> In the abstract, the severity of the lecture should not necessarily follow the actual damage - sometimes it should follow the potential for damage, perhaps? For instance, when I was a kid, I ran out into the road to chase a ball. A car stopped about 1 meter from me. Nobody and nothing was hurt (unless you count terrifying the driver and my mother on the sidewalk watching). Was I in trouble? Hell yes. If my mother had said 'well, nobody was hurt, no problem' then how was I supposed to learn how stupid it was?

<comment><USER9> Yup, you're right. In industry, that's called a near miss. It's treated with the motions as though you were hit by that car, but none of the consequences are enacted, since nothing in fact happened (YMMV). Basically, it's a freebie: lessons are learned without anyone getting hurt, which is about as good as it gets.

<comment><USER11> Near misses must be analysed and acted upon to be a useful force in accident or disaster prevention. Such actions can include changes to the facility, changes to protocol, but also educating or punishing workers.

As an example: Misconduct causing a near miss, such as smoking or using open fire near chemical storage, is grounds for instant dismissal, even in the "socialist" countries of NW Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll make an exception to being vague about my personal details (although this is my personal HN account) and chime in with something eerily relevant.

At my school, we literally had a chemistry teacher who went by the name Bombe Bo ( _Bob the Bomber_ , if you fancy a quasi-translation of the Danish moniker). The teachers amiably called him by the name as well—possibly because he once set an adult's hair on fire during one of his experiments.

He was, is, possibly the most beloved teacher at the school, and he was known for—you guessed it!—blowing things up. The man would seize any opportunity to make something go boom, and we all loved him for it.

At our final class with him before graduation, he assigned his students to mix, I believe, bromide and acetone (and some). The students just saw it as another experiment, but as some of you have already realized

        ... unbeknownst to them, the students
        had created tear gas!

To add insult to injury, he had brought a camera to snap photos of everyone's faces. The guy was a black-belt in pranks.

It was inconceivable for students not to love the guy—he was also one of the nicest people in the world and never had to scold anyone—ever. Because as hard as the course material could be, it was impossible to hate him—and chemistry.

<comment><USER13> Wow, that's pretty funny that your chemistry teacher would go so far as to violate the Geneva convention for the sake of a prank.

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry, what? How in the world does an international convention on warfare apply to a high school experiment?

<comment><USER15> Meant in the spirit of [http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2012/01/07/domestic- chem...](http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2012/01/07/domestic-chemical- warfare/), I presume.

<comment><USER14> Alright that makes more sense. I totally haven't read that, and it got a chuckle out of me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a page out of the anarchists cookbook. Ah, to be young again... ;)

But seriously, unless this was sanctioned, why the hell would you be doing this at school?? She wasn't at the flippin' science fair, how exactly did she expect all this to go down? Did she expect the teaching staff to give her a standing ovation for successfully making a "drano bomb" on campus? You do it in the vacant lot across the street, or in the alley, or... literally just about anywhere besides a school.

>>> "She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too."

This quote is silly. "She wanted to see what happened"? I don't think she's being intellectually honest here. The chances of mixing those chemicals by happenstance just "to see what would happen"..? Let's not be disingenuous. The only reason you mix those ingredients is if you know what they are capable of together. And extrapolating from that, we can re-write this as "she just wanted to see what the explosion would be like."

And that, is horrible, horrible judgement that deserves to be met with reprimand from the school system. Without being part of an actual science project led by an actual teacher, you can't just light off fireworks in school because the science of it is fun. This is overwhelmingly obvious. That's behavior that can't be tolerated. I just wish we weren't in this insane system of zero tolerance where poor judgement by children in their teens--where ultimately nobody was hurt--can result in their lives being ruined forever.

I've done things like this before, I empathize with all the stories i've read of people doing similar things. But this fist pumping about "oh it's no big deal it's in the name of science!" is a little confusing to me. She showed horrible, horrible judgement and could have actually hurt somebody. I understand that 2 felonies is ridiculous, but I don't know why many of you are acting as if we should be actively -encouraging- this behavior unless it's supervised by someone with authority at the school, and there is an actual learning experience. Many are jumping to the conclusion that this is the innocence of a curious mind that loves science and nothing more. I find it hard to make that jump without seeing more information; there are too few facts in this article.

So I agree with part of your sentiments, and disagree with others where I feel you're thinking irrationally because of your own love of science.

<comment><USER16> > _And that, is horrible, horrible judgement_

That's what being a child is all about. Some people want to see things for themselves.

If I told a younger you about 42.zip, wouldn't you be just a teeny-tiny bit curious about it? Wouldn't you think it would be _so funny_ to email it to a friend of yours at school because of what it did to your machine? What if your school had a zero-tolerance policy for "hacking"?

<comment><USER17> > _That's what being a child is all about._

That may be true, but it does not exonerate her from any wrongdoing. Just because some kids aren't cognizant of what is appropriate or safe to do in certain situations doesn't mean that those things aren't objectively bad or that they shouldn't be discouraged.

She did something that was clearly against school policy and created a dangerous situation. She might not have had the foresight to realize how dumb it was, but that doesn't mean that it was ok to do.

(And believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of students aren't inclined towards harm, and are aware, like everyone else, of the explicit or implicit bounds on what they can do. I've never understood where the perception of kids as oblivious troublemakers with no notion of nor respect for basic social norms and the law.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad she didn't make a dry-ice bomb. I think a lot of states don't categorize it properly as an explosive device because it is caused by a phase- change and not a chemical reaction.

Oh and response to the officials that said this:

>Their response: kids should learn that "there are consequences to their actions."

That is a disingenuous response that could be used for any punishment. Kids can learn about consequences without needing a draconian punishment. No one every suggested not punishing her.

<comment><USER19> My high school had a dry ice fogger in the theatre department for making the close to the ground fog effect for productions.

Basically, it was an 80 gallon drum with a heating element in it, a basket that could be lowered and tubes for the fog to escape. You heated the water, then put the dry ice in the basket, _clamped the top down tight_ , then plunged the dry ice into the water. Makes great fog that is mostly CO2 gas.

Well, if you don't clamp the top down tight enough, it'll go flying off, throwing hot water everywhere. This happened during one production and did quite a bit of set damage. Thankfully nobody was scalded badly.

Note, don't use this if you're doing a musical with an orchestra, or the fog flowing into the orchestra pit can result in woozy, oxygen deprived musicians.

<comment><USER20> Well, it's not out of the question that the pit orchestra might appreciate that effect.

What was the necessity of clamping down the top, given that there were open tubes for the fog (and pressure) to escape?

<comment><USER19> The gas expansion is extremely fast - you're basically turning a few pounds of dry ice from solid to gas + water vapor in a matter of seconds.

With the pressures involved, if the top isn't on securely, shooting the top off is the path of least resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The amount of times my friends and I made pressure bombs (in a 600ml bottle) using NaOH and Al (exactly what was described in the article, and frankly, my first thought when reading this) at school and at home I can't even count on two hands. It was initially shown to us by our Chemistry teachers as a method for creating H2. The real danger isn't the expanding/produced hydrogen, it is the highly basic solution that is still reacting within the bottle. If you're nearby, and it explodes, depending on your volumes, the resultant spray can be seriously ... painful. Safety goggles and a nearby water source is a must have. Been a few times where I've rushed to the shower after my face started bleeding from corrosive spray after a mis timed attempt at this... If she was just capturing the hydrogen and igniting it... then it was completely harmless.

</comment><comment><USER22> I convinced my little brother to do a science experiment where we measured the explosive power of black powder by seeing how high it would launch a metal ball out of a tube ( We basically made a vertically fixed homemade cannon ) He brought our apparatus the balls and black powder to his presentation. Had he done this today I imagine he would have been arrested for possessing a weapon of mass destruction.

<comment><USER18> NJ has classified bb guns as firearms. If you are a 17 year old kid goofing around with a bb gun and shoot your friend (who hasn't?), you can be tried as an adult (felonies) for firearms violations.

[http://www.mercercountycriminallawyer.com/Trenton-NJ-BB- Gun-...](http://www.mercercountycriminallawyer.com/Trenton-NJ-BB-Gun- Lawyer.shtml)

<comment><USER23> To hear my dad tell it, "back in the day" kids just had shoot-outs in the backyard with Red Ryder BB guns...

<comment><USER18> I've been shot with a BB gun a few times (late 80s, early 90s). Now, the way the law is that would be prison time for the shooter in NJ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Chemical engineer here. What haven't I done?

\- Shattered stuff with liquid nitrogen: PB&J sandwich, bouncy balls, etc.

\- Melted various metals in crucibles over Fisher burners. Got burned a few times when I didn't realize the crucible lids were still hot.

\- Made ferrofluid. Not particularly dangerous, but very cool stuff. Search for it on Youtube.

\- Thermite reactions. These were fun. You had to start them with sparklers (or a lit magnesium strip).

\- Lit hydrogen bubbles (we used to have "fire Friday")

\- Chlorine and sodium reaction to make salt

\- Nitrogen triiodide (an explosive; can be detonated with one alpha particle)

\- Aluminum sulfur reaction: This one was interesting; the science lab book specified a small zinc sulfur reaction. I wanted to up the ante with aluminum and sulfur. Per the Wikipedia page which I read _after_ the experiment:

"This reaction is extremely exothermic and it is not necessary or desirable to heat the whole mass of the sulfur-aluminium mixture; (except possibly for very small amounts of reactants). The product will be created in a fused form; it reaches a temperature greater than 1100 °C and may melt its way through steel. The cooled product is very hard."

Yeah, my friend and I finely ground up a HUGE batch of that aluminum and sulfer in a mortar and lit it in the fume hood. It looked like a rocket was going off. What we also didn't realize was that the product, aluminum sulfide, should NOT go in water, and water is exactly where I dumped the stuff. It stunk up the lab with hydrogen sulfide. I wonder how many brain cells I killed with that.

\- Burned some chromium compound. Can't remember what it was, but when I showed the instructor the product, he got really upset. He began scooping it out of the sink because apparently I'd created a carcinogen.

\- Found a container of mercuric (II) nitrate. It was the one thing the instructor wouldn't let us play with.

That was all in high school. Mostly in the fume hood. College was a lot more boring (we had to wear goggles and gloves to handle Kool-aid), although I did accidentally spill a container of concentrated sulfuric acid all over the place in organic synth lab.

<comment><USER25> Potassium permanganate + Glycerin was my go-to as an amateur experimentalist in middle school / high school.

My second favorite was common electrolysis, filling the garage with the smell of chlorine from impurities in the tap water / whatever container I was using at the time.

I wonder if kids get to experience the unbridled joy of discovering chemistry on their own, nowadays.

Of course, I'm sure parents are better off. My poor mother rushed me to the ER far too many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the government wants leaders in STEM, and, say, rocketry, they have to let people play.

Heck, even if you're looking for new military ordnance engineers... Nobody gets good at building things that blow things up without playing with things that blow up.

Play is important; it's how we learn.

<comment><USER27> The government does not want free thinkers who explore their curiosity designing its bombs. What the government wants are people who do what they are told, who follow procedures, and who do not ask unnecessary questions. The government wants the kids who only made little explosions when their chemistry teacher told them to and only using the chemicals they were told to use.

<comment><USER28> In a debate between what the government _wants_ and what the rest of the world _needs_ , I'm going to go with the latter, pretty much every time.

<comment><USER27> The post I was replying to suggested that the government should not be punishing someone who could do great work in relevant chemistry work. My point was that the government may have a need for rockets and bombs, but that they will find the chemists with a conservative approach to science and work ethics rather than free thinkers. I do agree that the world needs more free thinkers, but the government does have substantial power in determining what sort of people will do society's intellectual work.

For what it's worth, this is a problem that goes back a long way:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates>

<comment><USER29> Socrates should have never even been at that trial; I've got to say that I have always found Socrates' response to Crito to be immensely dissatisfying.

It seems to me that it assumes the true nature of the law will never take take one by surprise, and (although it may have been practical at the time) I think it is a mistake to think that opting out of the law before being a victim of it is a practical thing to expect of people. His reasoning is basically just a more principled cry of _"if you don't like it, leave it"_ :

 _"we further proclaim to any Athenian by the liberty which we allow him, that if he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his goods with him. None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him. Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property."_

Immensely dissatisfying. I cannot stand Plato's telling of that entire series of events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My Dad was a police officer. Had he chosen to indict me for all the stuff I destroyed in the name of science, I'd still be in jail.

Luckily, when he was young, he did similarly stupid things (like chopping down a tree...onto his house). Whenever I'd cause particular mayhem, he'd take me to the local library to learn where my latest experiment had gone badly. Heck, thanks to his good attitude and interest in my passions, by the time I was 14, I could have gotten a job fixing VCRs, computers, televisions, radios, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> I really think the Mythbusters need to weigh in on this. Adam Savage seems to have a big presence in science education, and I can't think of anyone more qualified to speak on the matter.

<comment><USER32> I was just listening to Adam Savage's "Still Untitled" podcast where he talks about blowing stuff up as the least favorite part of what he does.

That's not to say he won't come to her defense, but I was surprised to hear that.

<comment><USER33> I think Jamie is the explosives guy. After all, two of his more well-known lines are "Jamie wants big boom!" and "When in doubt, C4!" I always got the impression that Adam liked building things more than he liked blowing them up. But I'm sure he enjoys a good fireball nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Adult-induced fear should not be a reason for stifling childhood-inate curiosity. I remember as a kid we were extremely good at taking apart fireworks, putting them into other objects, and blowing those things up. Was that a good idea? Well, we were careful about and we had lots of fun and no one got hurt, so maybe yes, maybe no. Most importantly: at the end of the day it was just another way to explore the world and revel in the wonder.

It pains me to see kids beaten down by adults who may never have experienced that thrill of experimentation and the simple "whoa!" that comes from blowing something up. Clearly missing out on that has damaged those adults in some fundamental way.

(*I'll always feel a bit bad about blowing up my friend's sister's Barbie Dream Camper in this way...)

<comment><USER35> Tell her it was a concept visualisation for Breaking Bad, but that the idea was stolen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The part that is being missed here is the implications of a felony arrest:

\- can no longer vote

\- won't be able to get financial aid

\- can't go to a state college

\- can't get a loan

In addition, being expelled means that she will have to move in order to continue school.

Educators who don't understand the implications of what they are doing are demonstrating terrible judgment.

You can read more: <http://www.cfjj.org/arrestedfutures.php>

<comment><USER37> > won't be able to get financial aid

This is huge. To anyone who believes this punishment is appropriate, keep in mind that it means she _will not go to college_ (unless her family is wealthy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> When I was 14, my friends and I used to blow up snowbanks in the backyard with these all the time. However, we were not doing it in the name of science. We were doing it because we were pre "Jackass" skater dickheads. I believe we found the instructions in either Thrasher or Big Brother magazine.

I can't help but think the "science" angle is actually working against this young girl. This was obviously not a science project, and there are few things rednecks hate more than being told how to approach their business by people who think they are smarter than they are. It would be more beneficial to donate to the girl's defense fund than to pay lip service to some phony "it was science" defense.

<comment><USER39> "This was obviously not a science project"

That's not obvious to me at all. It's obvious to me that it was science, a chemistry experiment in particular. Hard to see how it wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yeah, I'm a member of a hackerspace which is almost entirely made up of PhD's, engineers, security specialists, artists, creatives, inventors and innovators and almost all of what we do is related to fire and explosions (and electronics and art!). So yeah. Total support for this lady. I would contribute to a defense fund or college fund.

</comment><comment><USER41> I emptied out the entire science building by reducing DMSO. You've smelled nothing until you've smelled DMS.

<comment><USER5> I caused a small brush fire playing with an Estes rocket. Fire department told me "try to be more careful."

<comment><USER42> I remember hooking a D motor up to a guide wire (no rocket!) and firing it off in a lot behind my friend Jason's house. It took the predictably chaotic trajectory and again predictably shot straight through the closed window at a house under construction across the otherwise empty lot. I think we stuck around long enough to make sure that the place didn't catch fire, which, in retrospect, was probably the dumbest thing of all.

Good times.

<comment><USER5> That's almost exactly how I started the fire. We launched the rocket several times, progressively losing more parts of it. First the nose cone. Then the body. All we had left was one last rocket, so we launched the rocket alone without a body. It sort of spiralled into the air. It didn't make it very high ---maybe about 100 feet---then fell into the brush. I think the parachute charge went off after the engine landed in the brush.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I am glad to see that this is getting proper attention, probably enough for Kiera's life not to be totally ruined by it.

The exact same punishment was given to me for doing the same thing in 2004: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5637272>

</comment><comment><USER44> Before I ever did a science experiment, I had to write a lab report and detail (1) what I was going to do, (2) how I was going to do it, and (3) what I expected the results to be.

If you aren't following the scientific method[1] and are just skipping straight to the "lets see what happens" step, are you really doing science? or are you just blowing things up?

What happens when a student does one of these "science experiments" and actually blows up a classroom (or bathroom or playground) and kills a bunch of kids?

Does it matter if he did it on purpose? Was he just doing science? Kids being kids? Was the teacher to blame? Were the parents to blame? If it was your kid that was maimed/killed in the explosion, would you even care if it was a "science experiment"?

On the flip side, is it worth worrying about the rare case of a rogue-science- experiment-gone-wrong?

Is it worth worrying about the signal sent to aspiring "school massacre-ists" by saying "You can get away with blowing stuff up at school as long as you say it's for science."

Maybe not.

I hope my kids are responsible with science. I hope the people around my kids are responsible with science.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method>

<comment><USER45> Lab reports and notebooks are not what makes "Science". Science is developing a hypothesis, performing an experiment, observing the results, and re- evaluating your hypothesis. That's it. It doesn't matter if you write it down or turn it in.

Kids do science all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Considering the amount of nonsense I got up to in 11th grade chemistry lab including but not limited to lighting various metals on fire to see what colour they burned and handling hydrochloric acid, a little aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner should have been met with a slap on the wrist and possibly a talk from someone in the science department about what mixing chemicals you're not familiar with can do.

It was definitely not a smart choice to do it at school, and she was definitely aware of the fact that what she was going to do was going to go bang. Allowing for that, though - kids are curious, and with the advent of the Internet, if a kid's curiosity is piqued enough by something they saw on YouTube, I expect they're gonna try it, whether it's a Drano bomb or Mentos in Diet Coke.

Were I the teacher I'd have provided a controlled demonstration of why not to do things and some resources for experimenting safely. Expelling the poor girl just discourages her from experimenting with anything ever again.

<comment><USER47> > discourages her from experimenting with anything ever again

Maybe that's exactly the desired result for the sort of people who choose a bureaucratic career, and maybe it's exactly such people who decide her fate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> We tried making thermite, but got sloppy and used pellets rather than powder. Our chemistry teacher (whom we did not inform of this) had fooled with stuff that went bang when he was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER49> I work at a hardware company - high-current and high-voltage power electronics. Things occasionnaly blow-up, but there have never been any serious consequences, because eveyone has _very_ safe working habits, even the individuals who act like they don't care. Unfortunately this is not always the case for our clients..

</comment><comment><USER50> While the felony charges are clearly overkill, I think it is counterproductive to defend a moment of very bad judgment by calling it science.

<comment><USER29> Bad judgement and science are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they have quite a colorful shared history.

The only reason to say that this was not _both_ seems to be a (frankly, rather suspicious) attitude about the likelihood that this girl had curiosity about science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> During a chemistry class where we were doing batteries by inserting metals into acid to light a small light bulb, i theorized that since the voltage depended on the area of contact with the metal, then using steel wool would make mads voltage.

it did not work at first (maybe i had anything that would start a current with steel, don't really remember the details, or any chemistry from high school) but eventually i got some current (maybe some of the previous metal rod was still in the solution?). the light bulb wasn't burning brighter then before, but the part of the steel wool that was out of the acid sure was.

burning metal in a cup of acid. and no eye protection.

</comment><comment><USER52> I am surprised to see this happening in the USA, I thought that UK had the title sewn up for "Unbelievably Stupid Jobsworths"

<comment><USER53> It is metastazing in the whole world. The whole overprotection thing. Our parents assumed that we were both smart and reckless. And parented accordingly. The current generation is brought up as if they are retards. The child safety is blown out of proportion ... in a friends house every edge was child proofed ...

<comment><USER47> Part of the problem is that people these days have fewer children, closer together. Before, say, 1970, people learned parenting because there were lots of both much younger siblings and large families with lots of uncles/cousins living close by.

Now families are small and geographically spread out, so people don't have lots of exposure to younger children. This means they don't get as much practical experience at dealing with kids, which makes them do stupid things, listen to stupid advice, or fall into groupthink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> My old chemistry teacher once welded the school doors together after he learned about thermite. His punishment was to repair the door and write an essay about the possible dangers handling thermite plus a few days helping the janitor clean the school grounds. He reminded us that while we might be tempted to repeat this he would recommend against destroying school property. So we locked the the school by attaching tie down straps to the school doors and leaving through a window in the second story.

</comment><comment><USER55> In my freshman Chemistry lab, this, uh, underperforming student decided to put a beaker of some extremely volatile solvent (carbon tet, acetone, toluene?) on a lit bunsen burner, shooting flames about 12 feet high, damaging the facility pretty badly, and putting a stop to his medical school aspirations.

That was one of the first events in my life where I realized i needed to suspend morbid fascination, and develop a fear of getting killed.

<comment><USER56> During my A levels, I had a friend who somehow managed to set the entire fume cabinet on fire, and in panic, he accidentally unlodged the tap controlling the bunsen burner, causing fire to come out of the tap as well.

He's now a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Ahhh ... lets say I painted the floor with nitrogen triiodide in front of the teachers toilet when the philosophy teacher was taking a dump there. She jumped and screamed maybe a minute and on every jump she landed on a nice patch of substance and small new explosion and scream and so on ... It was fun being in eight grade.

</comment><comment><USER57> At MIT we did some fun things:

1) Dropping whole blocks of sodium metal (5-10 pounds) into the Charles River, off a bridge. This is an annual thing, although I think it may have stopped at some point.

2) Taking non-dairy coffee creamer (a very fine powder) into a 5-story fireproof stairwell in a dorm, dropping the powder so it filled the air in the stairwell, and then demonstrating fuel air explosive

3) Soaking a tennis ball in gasoline, lighting it on fire, and playing soccer in a relatively fireproof hallway. Hilarity ensued when an RA decided to try to put out some minor secondary fire using a ... synthetic nylon sleeping bag as a fire blanket.

Outside college but not in a warzone, I did a lot more interesting stuff. Tannerite, LPG cylinders, etc.

In Iraq, I got to play with much more fun stuff, sometimes under competent supervision. I still have never gotten to fire an RPG or set off a claymore, though.

<comment><USER58> When I was there, the coffeemate explosion was typically done in the EC courtyard right after the sodium drop. I think there might have been a hiatus on the sodium drop after someone found some unexploded on the bank near mass ave in 07 and it caused a fire when they chucked it in with some other wet debris.Not sure if it actually did stop or come back. Sad if it's gone, that was always one of my favorite events of the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Charges dropped: [https://www.change.org/petitions/state-attorney-jerry- hill-d...](https://www.change.org/petitions/state-attorney-jerry-hill-drop- charges-against-kiera- wilmot?utm_campaign=twitter_link_action_box&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition)

<comment><USER60> That link only says the charges haven't yet been filed, and advocates that they be dropped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> YouTube of a similar experiment - "The Works" cleaner with HCl + aluminum foil

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgDhizxCeIY&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgDhizxCeIY&feature=youtu.be)

The same DA didn't press charges against a kid who shot his brother dead with a BB gun. Not saying there should have been charges in that case, just highlights the absurdity of felony charges for a soda bottle bomb.

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57582808-71/expelled- girls...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57582808-71/expelled-girls-bomb- toilet-cleaner-and-foil/)

</comment><comment><USER62> I was suspended for 3 days in high school for burning a small strip of magnesium in the school. I did it exactly the way we did in my chemistry class. Personally, I think it was not dangerous. I was in a room without any wooden furniture, and with a concrete floor.

Earlier that year someone had intentionally (according to investigators) started a fire in a stairwell that was being used to store chairs and desks, so the subject of fire in the school was a bit touchy. The incident also led to the installation of surveillance cameras throughout the school.

</comment><comment><USER63> As a social mechanism, I think this is a great idea. This is vetted members of the scientific community (as well as just about anyone) speaking their support and hopefully lending to the thought that punishing this girl is unfair.

This is a pretty awesome use of twitter. Hashtags allow a common chain of discussion, and the low-barrier-to-contribution encourages anyone and everyone to weigh in their support.

A lot of the comments here are "I did this similar thing when I was in school too". If you want to contribute, tweet as well with the hashtag.

</comment><comment><USER64> One of my friends did the same thing in high school, except he put too much in the bottle. When he out the cap on, it instantly exploded. He had severe burns on his face, and if he wasn't wearing glasses, he might have ended up blind.

While I don't think Kiera should be charged with a felony, the encouragement to experiment needs to be tempered with an understanding of risks and proper safety procedures.

</comment><comment><USER65> I wonder though if a 16-year old high school student who descends from the Middle East, Muslim would get the same public support. Uhm...

<comment><USER66> They would from me.

<comment><USER67> Me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Here is my contribution to the curious confessions:

Before I built my own computer, I was obviously in to electronics, preceded by electrics. My crimes are ones of electrocution. Both me and innocents. Every one was relieved when I moved from electrical stuff to electronics, then micro electronics. The all clear came when I got my first proper computer and focused on that instead.

</comment><comment><USER68> Me and several of my friends blew up a menagerie of large objects for the sheer joy of seeing an explosion, and the challenge of making an even bigger explosion the next time. Now we're all engineers, grad students, teachers, etc... I guess we're lucky we were in high school before the country went insane with fear.

</comment><comment><USER69> At this rate when a student opens a Coke or Pepsi in school it will be considered an explosive device.

</comment><comment><USER70> This story has been haunting me for a week.

So far the only news I've seen cover it on a national basis on TV is Chris Hayes - anyone else?

<http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/51740447>

</comment><comment><USER71> In high school I got suspended for 2 days for creating a "broadcast storm" by plugging an ethernet wall outlet to itself. The school was without computer network for days. No felony charges.

</comment><comment><USER72> I knew a guy who got a perfect standardized test score, went to a pretty nice, selective college, and then got in some trouble there for making napalm. Not like felony trouble, but trouble.

</comment><comment><USER73> I put a capacitor in backwards once, went away from my circuit, and came back to smell and see it smoking and flaming.

</comment><comment><USER74> When 12, I tried electrolysis of hydrochloric acid for hydrogen, but nearly poisoned me and my friend with chlorine.

</comment><comment><USER75> Santiago Ramón y Cajal... shoot a homemade cannon at the age of eleven.

</comment><comment><USER76> Safety is important during science experiments but accidents happen.

</comment><comment><USER77> reminds me of when i accidentally started a fire in study hall ...

</comment><comment><USER78> I wish the race card wouldn't be played as much in all of this, and that it's a conversation about schooling, science, and the risks that we should be willing to accept in a free country.

<comment><USER79> Except that there are numerous cases of white kids doing similar things and not, you know, having their lives ruined by felony charges.

<comment><USER27> I am inclined to think that the school would have had the same reaction regardless of the student's race. It sounds like a classic case of, "How dare she learn things we did not sanction in our curriculum?! She needs to be punished!"

<comment><USER79> That would be a comforting fiction. However it seems that this prosecutor might have a pattern of behavior consistent with taking race into account:

[http://raniakhalek.com/2013/05/02/prosecutor-behind-kiera- wi...](http://raniakhalek.com/2013/05/02/prosecutor-behind-kiera-wilmot- arrest-filed-no-charges-for-white-teen-who-killed-little-brother/)

While the component you're talking about is real, I'm sure, I suspect that the part of it where a young girl curious about science has her life ruined is probably at least as motivated by race as by control issues in the school.

<comment><USER80> That link you gave could equally well be used to support the argument that the prosecutor is prejudiced AGAINST white people. Set off a minor explosion at a school where it will put black people at a slight risk, he prosecutes. Kill a white kid, he does not prosecute.

<comment><USER79> Maybe, if America doesn't have a history of white-oppresses-black racism stretching back to before its founding as a country. Since it does, I do not thing any rational reader could com to that conclusion.

In either case, it doesn't matter. The point is the prosecutor really seems to be taking race into account on juvenile cases. Were they favoring black kids or unduly penalizing them is immaterial.

<comment><USER80> A rational reader could not come to any conclusion from the link you provided, because the two cases considered there are so different, and even if they were similar the sample size is way too small.

<comment><USER79> It is not small at all in the context of American history. It was really not so long ago that we were requiring black people to use separate water fountains from white people and blocking them from whole classes of employment. Many places in that region of the US still cling–perhaps unwittingly, I suppose–to extremely racist traditions like segregated public and private events. The statistics on black incarceration and economic status are _well_ established.

So when someone raises the specter of racism in a powerful public office like this, the accusation _warrants investigation_ if nothing else. And other people here have asked for hundreds of samples, but this prosecutor's data set (which is really the thing in question here) is really not that large.

What's more, it loses sight of the real problem! The real problem is a curious girl is being overly punished for experimenting. The laws that put her in this jeopardy should also be under attack in addition to investigating the racist factors that come to light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> What a horrible title. Had to read it few times before I decided I don't understand it. Why are some word capitalized and some not blows my mind. I won't even bother reading the article.</comment>


Helsinki server room heats 500 houses - <AUTHOR> http://www.helen.fi/tiedotteet/tiedotteet.aspx?id=248&lang=en

<comment><AUTHOR> The English translation is not so good. The essence is that they are using the heat from the underground server rooms to heat 500 homes in Helsinki.

Helsinki already has "town heating" - a network of hot water pipes that take heat from the power station cooling systems into many houses and buildings, and even a couple of streets in the city are heated to prevent ice. This system feeds into that.

Corrections from Finns welcome.

Edit: Some more info - <http://www.helen.fi/energia/konesali.html>

<comment><USER2> BTW, a lot more close Toronto use it's river to cool air in AC units in office buildings.

<comment><USER3> Manhattan does something similar - waste steam from power plants is piped through to customers who use it for hot water, heating, and AC (most likely via absorption refrigeration: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_absorption_refrigerator> ).

I read once that some buildings use the steam to run backup generators in case of power failure, but I can't seem to find that source anymore - so take it with a grain, so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A more accurate title would be "Helsinki server room may eventually heat houses."

Perhaps it's a small point, but anyone can plan to heat houses with waste heat. Actually doing it is what counts.

<comment><USER5> No it wouldn't, since there already is a functioning heat transfer network and the server room heat will be lead into it.

District heating has been functional in Helsinki since 1953.

"Helsinki district heating covers more than 93 percent of the heating energy demand. More than 90 percent of buildings are heated with co-generated district heat."

[http://www.energy- enviro.fi/index.php?PAGE=2298&NODE_ID=...](http://www.energy- enviro.fi/index.php?PAGE=2298&NODE_ID=2298&LANG=1)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reuters article: [http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco- SP/idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco- SP/idUSGEE5AS01D20091130?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=11617&sp=true)

</comment><comment><USER6> As it starts getting colder, I've thought about doing this in our office</comment>


Migrate Bitbucket repositories over to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pouriaa/bitbucket-to-github <comment><USER2> This looks useful! I glanced over the code to make sure it's not gonna exfiltrate my repos. Surprisingly simple and clean code!</comment>


Effective examples of startup commercials - <AUTHOR> http://chill.com/Brian/collection/startup-commercials

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to give the nod to Dollar Shave Club. It's hard to make a commercial that's actually funny without it feeling forced, and they pulled it off.

<comment><USER2> Did you see the bald guy with cream on his head is reading "The Lean Startup" at about 25s?

<comment><USER3> An amazing nod to the tech / HN / startup community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most memorable for me this year would be Path 2.0 and AirBnB. Both told a story. They got out of the malaise of screencasting demos and into the living rooms of its users. Not easy to do, and choosing the right on camera talent is essential.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would love to see the ROI each of these had for their respective startups. IE, when is it worth it to drop $15k+ and create an adam lisagor masterpiece.

</comment><comment><USER6> They should really define what "effective" means.</comment>


TRAI says no to differential pricing, supports net neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/trai-s-says-no-to-content-based-differential-tariff-offers-supports-net-neutrality/story-1pOAI14aHvXYRu3AQNzMjP.html <comment><USER2> This is historic and is going to set a precedent for a number of countries. TRAI has taken a stance against zero-rating/differential pricing when even FCC did not (leaving scope for T-Mobile and Verizon's net-neutrality-violating schemes)

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, TRAI restored our faith. They literally saves us.</comment>


What is most important to you in picking a business application? - <AUTHOR> http://www.stampedeblog.com/2008/04/what-is-most-important-to-you-in.html

<comment><USER2> The most important thing is not on the author's list.

It's the value produced by the use of your application in your customer's business. If it's a simple easy to use app that perfectly addresses their needs, they won't care about price, service, or much else for that matter.

Never forget, they're not buying your software; they're buying a solution to their own problem.

<comment><USER3> Maybe an easier way to frame it:

The most important thing is to add value to the customers of the business user.</comment></comment>


Navy says release of files into UFO sightings would 'damage' security - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/navy-says-release-files-into-ufo-sightings-would-damage-security-2020-1 <comment><USER2> >The Navy previously confirmed it was treating these objects as UFOs — which means they are being treated as unexplained but not necessarily extraterrestrial.

Very important point here that I think laymen gloss over as the term UFO has come to be (incorrectly) synonymous with extraterrestrial (due in large part to sensationalist media including, shamefully, outlets like the once educational history channel).

Probably just some cutting edge tech that we don't want other states knowing exist.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Three scenarios exist. Either it's aliens, or it's natural, or it's terrestrial tech. Releasing info on which of those would damage national security? Not natural phenomena. Not aliens, unless they're helping us against other nations, and would stop doing so if we exposed them. And not terrestrial tech, unless it's _our_ terrestrial tech.

My money is on it being our terrestrial tech.

<comment><USER4> If it's aliens, releasing that information could cause mass panic over the entire planet, which could indeed impact national security. But I'd agree with you that it's most likely of human origin.

<comment><USER5> If those aliens have the technology to get here, and mostly be only accidentally spotted as the odd blip in the sky and some yokel's recounting of an anal probe (a weirdly common reporting, so they must account for something!), then I'd surmise that even the government and military folk are completely out of their league, and gain nothing by hiding the facts.

Ever wondered why an alien ufo has never accidentally started a war with all these oddball sightings? Surely they don't just appear everywhere except around contentious zones.

It's most likely because those oddball sightings aren't alien ufos. But I only have as much proof as those who believe "they're here."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lack of trust engendered when ostensibly democratic institutions restrict information about basic and important truths(?) seems like a national security issue, too.</comment>


Angel Investing Basics: Valuation, Due Diligence, More - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/angel-investing-joey-zhou <comment><USER2> Look forward to seeing the upcoming posts</comment>


Airbnb Tech Talk: Minted's Niniane Wang on Fulfillment Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.airbnb.com/meetups/ryhndbpet-tech-talk-niniane-wang

<comment><USER2> Niniane's really smart, this should be a good talk!

<comment><USER3> I hope it's a good talk as well however I have heard from a couple people I know well that minted is kind of a meat grinder in terms of turnover and not a very fun place to work and also not awesome from the designer side either. I understand the business is pretty seasonal but I don't think the people running it realize what that kind of environment does to people. (or maybe they do...)</comment></comment>


Behavioral analytics tackles advanced threats - <AUTHOR> https://jpmellojr.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-behavioral-analytics-tackles.html <comment><AUTHOR> Advanced attacks can be carried out over months or even years, so security teams need to act quickly when a foe eventually does tip his hand. One way to do that is to deploy the powerful combination of user and entity behavioral analytics with endpoint monitoring, detection, and response.</comment>


Flappy bash – Flappy Bird in 1234 bytes of Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Xion/flappybash <comment><USER2> If you are using GNU screen, you can also see how each "frame" is drawn by looking through the scrollback buffer.</comment>


Send your own Pocket Spacecraft on a Mission to the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1677943140/send-your-own-pocket-spacecraft-on-a-mission-to-th

<comment><USER2> that looks super cool</comment>


Los Angeles hospital paid $17,000 in Bitcoin to ransomware hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/los-angeles-hospital-hacked-ransom-bitcoin-hollywood-presbyterian-medical-center?CMP=twt_gu <comment><USER2> This article misses three very important things.

1\. The IT staff really messed up by not having backups available. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone making that decision was fired now.

2\. They got lucky - if the data loss was due to hardware failure / fire / flood / ..., they couldn't pay anyone. That $17k is literally the price for a real data recovery drill and they know they failed it.

3\. Again, nobody mentions that people can trivially avoid this issue by using backups. (Online, offline, whatever - as long as it's not mounted as a normal filesystem)

<comment><USER3> I regularly back up to shares. I'd expect that these are not safe, either. For this very reason I do regular backups of the backup (on the NAS, which is a Linux box). These backups can only be seen as read-only share (and are not advertized).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an aside, Radiolab recently did a podcast on Darkode and the way Ransomware affects the lives of everyday folks.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/darkode/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/darkode/)

It was interesting.</comment>


Where are the Voyagers? - <AUTHOR> http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html <comment><USER2> > Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is traveling from > Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at > certain times of the year.

So obvious yet so mind blowing.

<comment><USER3> We really are on a fragile blue ball doing loop-de-loops through space!

<comment><USER4> If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a ping-pong ball, earth would be a poppy seed orbiting ten meters away. Pluto would be 100m away. The Voyagers would be 300m away.

The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 500 miles away.

<comment><USER5> Proxima Centauri is so far away that's depressing...

<comment><USER6> the proxima is almost a joke in the name.

<comment><USER7> Well, there are three stars in the alpha centauri system. Proxima is the most proximate

<comment><USER6> It is, but it's almost marginal:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#/media/File:Rel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#/media/File:Relative_positions_of_Sun,_Alpha_Centauri_AB_and_Proxima_Centauri.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As amazing as space technologies are, we are in the stone ages when it comes to spaceflight:

> Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 2 is traveling from Earth, > the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain > times of the year.

We don't even have the technology to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot from other planets, and that still leaves us with a space craft moving slower than the earth.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Problem is we don't really know where to go next. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin tried to cook up alternate space travel methods for years and still couldn't come up with anything better than the same basic rocket model that put Gagarin into space.

Most theorized "warp drives" either require more energy than humanity is capable of producing or necessitate breaking a law of physics or two just to move anything organic or larger than a postage stamp.

Then again, the answer could be right under our noses. There's a Sci-fi story - I forget the name - where space travel is actually quite simple if you know the math to make it happen, and when a peaceful alien race visits Earth, the humans - with their thousands of years of armed conflict - kill the aliens and take their spaceships.

Makes me wonder that if we treat the rest of the universe the way we have treated our planet, do we truly deserve the right to roam the stars?

<comment><USER9> There's the EM drive, maybe. Some recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995125)

If you can create trust out of electricty (ion drives also come to mind), then if you have nuclear power or fusion, things get interesting again in terms of propulsion.

To reach orbit, there are a bunch of interesting proposals: skyhooks (i.e. space elevator light), launch loops, railguns.

<comment><USER10> The EM drive is reported as producing maybe 1 mN per kW. The largest power plant in the world produces about 22 GW of energy--at that ratio, an EM drive could produce maybe 22 kN. The first stage of the Saturn V rockets produced 35,000 kN of thrust.

As a practical engine, EM drives are worse than chemical rockets or even ion thrusters (which produce about 25-250 mN/kW, according to Wikipedia).

<comment><USER11> If your numbers are correct, and I did the math correctly in my head, that's about five thousand pounds of thrust. A nuclear submarine might weigh ten thousand times that. Obviously a nuclear sub operates at much lower power level and obviously the hull doesn't have to be as thick for a spacecraft so I think it not a ridiculous comparison. Also you're spacecraft need not carry dozens of ICBMs, torpedoes, hundreds of sailors, etc.

Obviously the first engine ever exhaustively tested is usually not the highest performance achievable. A factor of a thousand seems possible although a hundred is more likely.

So for a very large nuclear plant, if the EM drive were weightless (LOL) then maybe 1/10th G applied to that nuclear sub is some kind of theoretical limit not entirely ridiculous but possible.

Now consider that to one sig fig a G of acceleration for a year is the speed of light. And if you're careful maybe you could run the plant for three decades.

So a round trip to the speed of light and back again is more or less back of the envelope possible to visit some distant star.

Relativity rears its ugly head and ten years of ship time around the speed of light is a lot further than 10 lightyears and time passing on earth is a lot longer than ten years.

Of course at the speed of light you're going to need a rather substantial hull, an active radar that can avoid interstellar crud, etc. If you can detect "stuff" at a day out, at a tenth of a G accelerating for an entire day you can be quite far away indeed by the time you pass it.

I can't run the numbers in my head like above, but even 1/100th G slices a very substantial amount of time off a Mars mission. Some unverified google results imply 1/100th G means Mars in a month not a year and a half.

At least as a back of the envelope calculation its quite a useful vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's sad to think they only have about 9 years of life remaining before they run out of power.

And only a couple of years of useful life remaining.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is all very well, but where are they in the night sky is what I would like to know.

And no I'm not expecting to see them, just to think about them in the right direction.

<comment><USER14> Right Ascension: 17h 11m 31.0s Declination: 11° 57' 50.9" (J2000) [http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker](http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker) It's in the constellation Ophiucus.

It'll be doing a flyby of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years, but it'll be brick'd by then. [http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space- star...](http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-star- flyby.html)

<comment><USER15> Geez, I wonder if anyone will find it.

And since we won't even survive this century due to climate change, it'll be "a relic of a civilization long gone."

<comment><USER14> We are totally gonna survive climate change! Humans are adaptable as fuck. We might lose 90% of life and our global economy might temporarily go away, but we'll survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know why in the second video (side plane view of solar system), they show 4 separate items moving out into deep space? I could pick Voyager 1 and 2, but no idea what the other 2 probes are?

<comment><USER12> Probably Pioneer 10 and 11.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can ride along with Voyager in "Eyes on the Solar System" ([https://eyes.nasa.gov](https://eyes.nasa.gov)) It's an open world Solar system with NASA missions and imagery.

<comment><USER18> I love NASA's work but I find it's websites are very messy and without a decent standard framework or layout. I really wish someone go to a GOV.UK job on them and get some decent standardisation going with them.

<comment><USER19> There are some standards for NASA websites, but I think they have more to do with responsibility for content and other bureaucratic matters than design concerns. The group I used to be with, the Scientific Visualization Studio, at svs.gsfc.nasa.gov has a pretty decent website, in my biased opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish my code runs without maintenance for so long as these "babies" fly.

<comment><USER21> I recently experienced a VxWorks system completely crashing due to a sequence of simple ftp (reading) commands. We had to go and manually restart the machine on-site.

Then I read about VxWorks being used for space exploration and was glad they never tried to read data from curiosity through ftp...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well, I find it hard to relate to such huge distances. 62 thousand kilometres per hour feels larger because I can kind of comprehend it.

Though really cool anyway, I was going to say that Voyager 1 managed short of 30 light seconds a year until I realised the question is one of acceleration and deceleration not velocity. If I wasn't on my way to bed I would dig around for some data to make acceleration graphs for them (hint hint :P ).

<comment><USER12> > Would be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well

Bottom of this page: [http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly- reports/index.htm](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly- reports/index.htm)

<comment><USER22> That is a great resource, thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Leaving the solar system, as usual.[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1189/](https://xkcd.com/1189/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years....

</comment><comment><USER25> I love that you can almost reasonably measure their distance in lightyears.

</comment><comment><USER26> Um, what about Voyager 6? I'm worried...

<comment><USER27> It's programmed to learn all that is learnable, then return to the creator. I wouldn't worry.

<comment><USER28> > I wouldn't worry

Yeah... what could go wrong, eh?</comment></comment></comment>


I got stuck trying to make confluence more usable - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/kd/2018/01/trying-to-make-confluence-usable.html <comment><AUTHOR> the sticking point is finding a way to make markdown round trip from and to confluence via the REST API.</comment>


Why does soap work so well on the coronavirus and other viruses? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PalliThordarson/status/1236549305189597189 <comment><USER2> Has anyone seen the film of oil that may appear on the surface of the water when washing dishes? You add a little bit of washing liquid, and kind of like a popped balloon, the surface retreats to the edges of the sink pretty fast?

On the BBC yesterday they had a virologist who said the envelope would be destroyed by soap, sanitiser, alcohol and bleach.

Later there was a different expert, and she said that it would have to be anti viral specifically, anything with 60%+ alcohol.

I know this is getting into the details a little but I wondered about this discrepancy.

<comment><USER3> How do I remember to check this comment back without commenting myself?

<comment><USER4> You can favorite comments when you click on the post time and then click on favorite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, I wouldn't expect soap to be good at destroying viruses, only at removing it. Is there any research on this?

BTW these multi-tweets are just ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> Soap is a surfactant [0], and one of its most useful properties is that it reduces the reluctance of oils and fats to disperse in water, which is why soaps are useful at cleaning your dishes, hair, and skin. Many viruses like coronavirus (so called "enveloped" viruses) are only held together by a thin lipid (fatty) layer, so in the presence of soap and water, they basically just fall apart.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Long form interview instead of a tweet stream - [https://www.vox.com/science- and-health/2020/3/11/21173187/co...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/3/11/21173187/coronavirus-covid-19-hand-washing-sanitizer- compared-soap-is-dope)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of an Applied Science video on cleaning in general (appropriate solvents, rinsing): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiL6uPNlqRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiL6uPNlqRw)</comment>


Billions in tax breaks offered to Amazon for second headquarters - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/amazon-offered-billions-in-tax-breaks-for-second-u-s-headquarters-idUSKBN1CO1IP <comment><AUTHOR> I like this one:

 _And in a far different proposal, the mayor of the Atlanta suburb of Stonecrest, Jason Lary, said his city would use 345 acres of industrial land to create a new city called Amazon. Bezos would be its mayor for life, Lary said._

I wonder if they'd be willing to make the title heritable. It's not often these days that you get an offer to become a feudal lord.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Google own the weather? - <AUTHOR> Weather visualization and forecasting seems right in Google's wheelhouse. Nearly infinite data to train on, a perfect platform for visualizing the data (google earth), etc. Is there just no upside for them? <comment><USER2> Couple things involved here: 1\. There's actually not much to train the data on. Say you have 1 weather station (that is maintained and calibrated) in each major or minor city. The GFS[1] has a resolution of ~18 miles. This is fine over densely populated areas, but oceans, forests, deserts? No data

2\. Additionally you don't need to train a model, since most of the math is pretty well defined. All you need to do is initialize with latest data and let it crank. Where most of the development happens is in learning more about how the physical planet it set up, then adjusting your model to incorporate that newly known aspect

3\. The weather forecasting market is actually rather robust, especially for an industry largely propped up by government grants. This probably isn't a great candidate for 10x disruption here and may not pass the "toothbrush test" either.

[1] [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model- datas...](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model- datasets/global-forcast-system-gfs)

</comment><comment><USER3> monetizing it in a very competitive industry without a very compelling reason in the overall company mission?

looks like just a market to me which they could dip into and make some cash, without a deeper sense of vision nor a real change and impact. (which is where I usually see google/alphabet striving for)

maybe you see something deeper into that which i'm missing the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I'm not thinking of it as a product to monetize but a data problem to solve.

I choose my weather services based on presentation, because they all basically rely on the forecasting from NOAA [in the states, at least and from what I can tell].

In my imagination of Google, they could slurp up all the public weather data and make it better and more relevant and more present than other websites.

But the incentives are probably not there and my imagination is probably out of touch with the difficulty of chaotic systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> dont their phones have thermometers and barometers? If they dont they should add them and use all the phones as tiny little weather stations.

<comment><USER5> 98+% of the time my phone thermometer would just report the temperature of my office, my house or my pocket. Barometric pressure would be slightly more useful if you could use the GPS to know position and height above sea level. Of course that assumes that enough people will be cool with continually sending their current position to Google.

We have lots of cool ideas at work which basically start (and end) with "if we could just convince a N thousand people to install this app and agree to continually send us all their phone data then it would be really easy to..."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't tech companies build dorms on campus? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There's a history surrounding the notion of company housing. During the industrial revolution, many factories and mills operated dormatories. The problem is that when you lose your job you lose your housing as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Zoning - in most places this is simply illegal.

Facebook is currently attempting to get some land re-zoned so they can do exactly this. Local NIMBYs are opposed.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27717752/facebook- flo...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27717752/facebook-floats-idea- more-housing-menlo-park)

<comment><USER4> I remember driving away from the Facebook campus -- having being creeped out by the degree to which it is designed to keep you from ever having to leave -- thinking "if they could build dormitories, they would".

It disturbs me, but doesn't surprise me, to learn that my joke isn't that funny.

<comment><USER5> They will probably also pay 85% of your salary in Facecoins which can only spend on campus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Company towns ended in the early 20th century, for a good reason.

Imagine losing your job and housing at the same time.

It also doesn't get favorable tax treatment. The value of the housing winds up as taxable income for the employee anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> Because it's a really bad idea, and company towns are specifically something we've tried and found (as a society) to end badly, every time?

More usefully--consider the extra deal of personal bullshit that the company now has to take on. Think about the sorts of things that happen:

Does HR deal with two people, one who can't get to work because the other is having really loud sex into the wee hours of the morning?

If you have kids, and they fall over while horsing around, is the company liable?

Is the company harassment policy violated if somebody leaves the window open while having kinky sex?

How do renter's rights get invoked in the event of being fired?

It's just all a big headache.

</comment><comment><USER8> One explanation may be: living in a golden cage is still living in a cage.

The other may be a society, people want or rather need to be part of society to be 'normal'.

One may argue that such dorm would be a society and that's kind of right, but it would be rather a mock of society. It would be super artificial.

FYI: some companies build apartments on campus.

<comment><USER9> And both the UK and USA have had issues with company towns - what next company police to keep the workers in check and to run out of town or kill those who make to much of a fuss

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Because they could reasonably be expected to pay their staff enough for them to have their own home, and not expect them to work unreasonable hours?

Especially if they're well-established and wealthy enough to have a campus.

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't they, though? I thought Qualcomm had dorms on campus in China.

Someone landed zoning issues, but I can only think of the deafening echo chamber this would create. Discrimination against people who are in a different stage in life and would much rather prefer to not be surrounded by the same type of environment at work and at home

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe they don't want to have to be good at, and compliant with, managing dorms.

</comment><comment><USER13> Although it isn't on-campus (6 blocks away), the Internet Archive folks purchased a house in order to rent to employees at cost:

[https://blog.archive.org/2015/03/17/open-source-housing- for-...](https://blog.archive.org/2015/03/17/open-source-housing-for-good/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this asking why don't tech companies house their employees? Or why they don't sponsor dorms on college campuses?

</comment><comment><USER15> This sounds like a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER16> Because they employ people who wouldn't live in a dorm.

</comment><comment><USER17> insurance, zoning

</comment><comment><USER18> Ask HN: Why don't tech companies put golden leg cuffs on their staff to chain them to their desk? Ask HN: How do these questions even end up on the front page?

<comment><USER19> Great question! Gold is a very poor choice of materials for cuffs; it's soft, not very strong, and extremely expensive. Since cuffs made of gold would be easy to break, they would not only be ineffective restraints but would likely be stolen by escapees as well.

Most companies opt for the more conventional steel cuffs, typically one of the harder stainless alloys for resistance to corrosion and tool damage. However, some still swear by simple leg irons of a design little-changed for centuries. A few have experimented with "free range" employees, bound to their workstations only by personal debt and vesting schedules, but this approach has proven much less effective.

<comment><USER20> I think the market of employee retention is ripe for disruption with innovations like these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some accelerators do provide housing as part of the program.</comment>


How WeWork spiraled from a $47B valuation to talk of bankruptcy in just 6 weeks - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.de/weworks-nightmare-ipo <comment><USER2> This is a fascinating account of the happenings. I'm sure there's an entertaining movie in all this. Perhaps Neumann can profit from a book and movie deal</comment>


I Left Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> https://jlericson.com/2020/01/17/leaving_stack.html <comment><USER2> You may want to update your HN profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reminder. So many places to fix. ;-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bootstrap Dashboard for Angular 2 – Free Admin Template - <AUTHOR> http://lbd-angular2.creative-tim.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, we just released one of our most popular dashboards to Angular 2, it is released under MIT so feel free to play with it and use it for your projects. We would be glad if you want to give any feedback or if you want to contribute to this project. It is our first Angular 2 project so I'm 100% sure that we can make it better.

Live Preview: [http://lbd-angular2.creative-tim.com/](http://lbd- angular2.creative-tim.com/)

Github Repo here: [https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light-bootstrap- dashb...](https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light-bootstrap-dashboard- angular)

Report Issues here: [https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light-bootstrap- dashb...](https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light-bootstrap-dashboard- angular/issues)

Simple HTML Repo Here: [https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light- bootstrap-dashb...](https://github.com/creativetimofficial/light-bootstrap- dashboard)

Thank you, Alex

</comment><comment><USER2> Good job, do you plan to add more components?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Sebastian! Thank you for the kind words! Yes, we have in plan to create a PRO version which will have calendars, datetimepickers, maps, vector maps, login/register/lock screen pages etc.

Best, Alex</comment></comment>


Digital Dark Age Could Destroy Our Cultural Record - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5070084/digital-dark-age-could-destroy-our-cultural-record

<comment><USER2> FTA:

 _Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?_

Here comes the difference: I still have all of the data that was important from my first commodore 64. I literally have papers I wrote when I was a 5th grader. I can't read the c64 disks now of course but I copied them. From tape to 5 1/4, from low density to high, from c64 to amiga from high desnsity to 3.5, from amiga to pc, from 3.5 to zip, from zip to cd, and now to dvd. My parents lost nearly all of their records and photos in a fire in the mid 80s.

There is no "digital dark ages" because _you can copy it_. Easily. With no degradation. Yes, NASA lost some data from the viking landing. They learned the same hard lesson as the rest of us. Have backups.

Digital media has its faults but then so do Libraries at Alexandria. Digital's faults are just easier to work around.</comment>


FreeMind maps for IT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hellseher/mms <comment><USER2> Unable to download FreeMind from the link on the github repo at the moment.

People can use [https://en.softonic.com/download/freemind/windows/post- downl...](https://en.softonic.com/download/freemind/windows/post- download?sl=1)

<comment><USER3> Apparently it's the wiki that is down. Google "Freemind download" and you should see a link that don't point to the wiki.</comment></comment>


Who Has Your Back? 2013 - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013 <comment><USER2> Odd... I remember reading links on HN that Google did tell users about requests. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

<comment><USER2> Found it. \----- However, this year Google stated in an official policy:

>We notify users about legal demands when appropriate, unless prohibited by law or court order. Accessed on April 24, 2013.

The nebulous language of "when appropriate" is not the firm commitment that should be the gold standard for transparency around handing data to the government. While we're disappointed by Google's decision to make its policy language so open-ended, we hope the strong commitments made by other major Internet companies will inspire Google to adopt a clearer public stance in the years to come.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm a solo junior dev, what should i focus on? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a junior dev working for freelance clients and working on my own projects. I've noticed that in the recent couple of months, I've not progressed as well as I hoped I would.
Yes, I gained experience and whenever I'm going to work with framework x again, I'll be a lot quicker. However, I don't have full insight in the tradeoffs that I'm making when chosing a certain architecture for example. I'll just code what seems logical in my head, and build further upon that.
I'm mostly coding in OO languages. Should I focus on programming concepts? Should I dive deeper into API methods?
Also, Since I'm able to 'build', there's the fact that spending more time on figuring out what approach is best, I'm developing on a lower pace. <comment><USER2> If you want to grow as a developer the best thing to learn is normally always the same.

Data Structures.

Nothing will help you more in interviews, day-to-day dev work, general problem solving, and even application planning. The goal is eventually to transition your mindset into thinking about structures holding your data, and how they act, and interact. Once you do this the optimal architecture, and what you need to write as code becomes clear as day (really regardless of the language).

<comment><AUTHOR> How should one go about 'training' that? Is it experience, or are there books etc? I'd love to dive into that.

<comment><USER2> Tons of online resources. Books are all a bit dense. The ones I'll suggest are bit _hard_ to get into, I'm a huge fan of _The Art of Computer Programming_ Vol 1-3 all a master piece, but very very dense, very very mathy and challenging even if you've taken college level discrete mathematics courses. But a HUGE amount of the field is contained within them, and the information density is staggering. Donald Knuth's writing is just absolutely brilliant and pointed in places.

Simply searching on Amazon, "Your language of choice" \+ Algorithms/Data Structures I.E.: "Javascript Algorithsm", "Ruby Data Structures", "Java Algorithms", etc.. Will likely pull up a few options, check reviews, find something in your price range and read it.

A lot of it is self study. Just be willing to explore docs, watch videos, a lot of reading, try things out on your own.

<comment><USER3> If I were to recommend three of the four volumes of _TAoCP_ , I would drop _Volume 2: Semi-Numerical Algorithms_ in favor of _Volume 4a: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1_. Developers, junior or otherwise are simply less likely to find themselves in situations where there is a good reason to implement a psuedo-random number generator or a complete numeric system than to wind up dealing with problems of non-polynomial order or boolean functions.

Of course, I don't know why anyone would recommend three but not all four if that were an option, so I guess I really could just say, there's no reason not to get volume 4a too, for a person heading down that road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just to counter everyone who says "learn another language like Haskell", I completely disagree.

You're at the point where you know some language and OOP at a decent level. You now need to invest time learning things like data structures and algorithms that are APPLICABLE to your work.

Keep adding incremental knowledge, but make sure it is having a direct benefit to your work at all times.

The "learning paradox" of having to master languages repeatedly is a waste of time at a junior level. You'll continuously invest in a new language without ever finding it applicable (eg. "learn java, learn JS, learn CSS/HTML, learn python, learn ruby, learn haskell, learn rust, then learn x-framework for each language, learn y-framework cause someone on the internet said x-framework is too bloated, learn this, learn that ...").

As your questions on line 3 asks, I say invest in the higher-level concepts that work across languages. Focus on a domain (some language, 1 or 2 frameworks, a DB) and stick with it.

And, as others have said, find a mentor. If you want to keep freelancing, you'll find a mentor at a meetup. You will definitely gain a lot from experience over a book/tutorial in certain situations.

</comment><comment><USER5> > I'm a solo junior dev, what should i focus on?

Beyond technologies-- Focus on building a solid consulting practice, client management, how to prospect & pitch new business. Recommend reading Alan Weiss, [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260218.Million_Dollar_Con...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260218.Million_Dollar_Consulting)

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends on your planned career path- do you want to run a business, or be a developing badass? Few can do both extremely well- If its development, move towards learning more about Software architecture, including SOLID principles, Patterns, best practices(as it pertains to Computer Science as a whole, not a particular technology or framework). While doing this, blog about it so your current and future clients can see your humble nature (rare for up-and-coming- to experienced developers) and progress. More importantly, if you think about doing a personal project or have an idea for an app- don't focus on making money, focus on the knowledge and experience gained through the work itself.

<comment><USER7> how do you learn how to make software architecture decisions and learn solid principles? I am struggling with this myself, my current position is about solving bugs and maintenance, and while this may be a godd position to learn how more seniors implement certain features i often feel that i am not learning how the decisions about the architecture, and due to the senior members working remotely it's difficult to ask them about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the best way to learn to be a better programmer in your position is to find a more stable job with a good team of people. Learn from other people's experiences and mistakes. Working as a freelancer early doesn't have many advantages if you want to build a career, in my opinion.

Other than that - Keep trying different things. Go deeper with the frameworks and libraries you use to understand why do they work the way they do. Read about things that are interesting to you and you have some use for. When you have a problem, don't just "fix" it, understand exactly where, why and when it's happening.

<comment><USER9> Agree 100% - I only am now starting to approach freelancing seriously after 2 years of development at several companies, and I found I have learned a lot from working with other people. Working with other people means you can bounce a lot of ideas between each other and you can see how others code in code reviews or just browsing their code.

You will never get as strong feedback being a solo programmer - in fact, the feedback will likely be minimal.

<comment><USER8> There is also one other disadvantage of being a solo junior dev - you will often work on very simple things. Complex systems usually require more than one person, and even if you are working as a junior dev who is just assigned tasks, you get to see how larger applications are built and gradually get into the design process. This is not something you get when building simple web apps as a freelancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You need a mentor.

Freelancing as a junior dev is not a good move. Find a full time position somewhere that will train you and give you access to more experienced developers.

<comment><USER11> As a counterpoint anecdote, I did freelancing as a junior dev and believe I've turned out alright ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, how did you turn out? And how did you turn out different from other people (with a mentor)?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure to be honest. I know about 15-20 languages and have written at least a 500-1000 lines in each of them (most more), specialize in Python, trying to specialize in Haskell.

Did Django web development for quite a while. Now I'm working for a large company using Coldfusion (bleh), PHP, and some Python.

I frequently feel that I'm not good enough and that my knowledge is in the wrong areas though. I've learned a lot about accumulating domain knowledge and working with legacy codebases lately.

A huge blind spot I had was only passing familiarity with mysql, being used to only using ORM's. I've mostly remedied that however and it's something I feel most webdevs should know more about.

So... I can't really answer either of your questions and I'm not sure it would be economical for either of us to try and test it. However I'm open to ideas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Warewolf-ESB Get involved in the open source community. You will be able to see how bigger systems are built. Right now you know what you know and you know what you don't know. But the gaping hole is that you don't know what you don't know! Unfortunately working solo can be a bit of a trap in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER12> Keep reading Hacker News, cross your fingers and learn Haskell

<comment><USER2> I really do support your last statement (even if you made it as a joke).

OP stated s/he comes from an OOP background, and expanding into FP is a big step into expanding the ways you think about programming, and gives you new tools to solve problems with.

My job is still OOP, but the experience I've gained learning FP has helped me a lot to come up with different solutions I may have never thought up before.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am excited to dive into FP, however, there doesn't seem to be a 'good' language yet. I noticed that oCaml is running up but that's still a bit too much 'scientific' as you might say. eg it doesn't really come close to anything web/app related. If I'm wrong, please tell me! I'd love to do FP.

<comment><USER2> Common LISP is a great language, but it spoils you since it has so few restrictions, its kinda in a class of its own because its just so unrestricted.

Scala is a fine language, but limited, largely serves as gate way drug to other FP languages. Its a very good starting point.

Haskell is odd and the type system is I feel restrictive. Also the community is really addicted to big mathy words. I do love its notation at the same time :\

F# is pretty much universally loved (from what I gather, I haven't used it myself), and now that the .NET run time is unbolted from windows it might start gaining traction.

oCaml I haven't used so I can't comment.

Erlang is VERY popular, especially with the backend FP crowd since it does concurrency very simply. I haven't used it.

<comment><USER11> > Haskell is odd and the type system is I feel restrictive.

Can you elaborate on this? After using Haskell for some time now I can't seem to come up with use cases where the type system is/would be restrictive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting screwed out of rent by my non-ebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.webiphany.com/2011/05/20/ebooks-are-only-licensed-well-at-least-they-are-not-living-rent-free-in-my-house/

<comment><USER2> The true cost of books is not the price you pay for them, or the space they take up on your shelf - it's the time you spend reading them.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last time I moved, my books were the single biggest pain. I resolved to start getting rid of them (and promptly donated about 1/6th of them right off) and I'm watching for more of my favorites as drm-free ebooks to handle them, too.

I'm starting to consider ripping the covers off, throwing the rest away, and downloading them.</comment>


These Guys Just Built the Website Healthcare.gov Should Have Been - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/these-guys-just-built-the-website-healthcare-gov-should-1458215436

<comment><USER2> This is silly for a few reasons. The main reason I see is that HealthCare.Gov does a lot more than search for the plans. It also calculates an adjustment that depends on how much you make a year.

To me, that part is a lote more important than a search-by-zip website. Not to defend HealthCare.Gov. It was horribly launched.

<comment><USER3> And if you're due a subsidy (what I think you mean by "an adjustment"), which plenty of private sites like the Kaiser Foundation's will calculate for you ([http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy- calculator/](http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/)), it validates that. Which has to be done _somewhere_ in the process, since it results in a draw on the Federal fisc, payments from the treasury to an insurance company.</comment></comment>


Color Psychology In Creative Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.merttol.com/articles/web/color-psychology-in-creative-design.html <comment><USER2> So what is the psychological effect of unreadable contrast between text and background?

<comment><USER3> I guess you're blind or wearing black glasses. Focus on the content. I can read very well.</comment></comment>


Nuclear could be the clean energy source the world needs - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/16/perspectives/nuclear-energy-green-goals/index.html <comment><USER2> If only it didn't leave behind all that toxic effluent, which has a half life measured in thousands of years.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Our brains are wired to notice big, red, unusual, and alarming signals, while ignoring more mundane, unclear, gradual and constant risks. Air pollution? We breathe all the time and we're still here. It doesn't end up on the brain's 'red list' the same way. Wind and solar tech with rare earth minerals, mining waste, future landfills sites stuffed with problematic elements? These wastes are also toxic, but they just don't ring our bells. Mining of rare earth minerals and the toxic waste left over from that process (which is also radioactive, by the way) is an actual dystopian wasteland -level disaster in Baotou, China, at this very moment, but this does not really get on our radar. Mining operations, in fact, all result in harmful consequences to the environment, and the volumes of materials needed are a major factor in that impact. Nuclear's material requirements per energy produced, and thus its mining waste, are considerably much lower than most other energy forms."

[https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/04/nuclear-waste-ideas- vs...](https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/04/nuclear-waste-ideas-vs-reality/)</comment></comment>


Maybe Yahoo Shouldn't Have Bought All This Sh*t - <AUTHOR> http://uncov.com/maybe-yahoo-shouldnt-have-bought-all-this-shit

<comment><USER2> This is class uncov flamebait. The author sets up several straw men, and then proceeds to valiantly strike them down. Yahoo, like all companies, has made a number of investments in startups. Some of them work out (viaweb, anyone?), some don't. Unfortunately, this article lacks a concrete analysis of all the investments yahoo has made. Instead, the author makes the argument that yahoo shouldn't have made $2.5bn in investments because three (totaling $0.248BN) haven't turned out well.

<comment><USER2> The author also fails to provide data that backs up the implied argument that the capital expenditures would've yielded a better return if applied towards the salaries of existing employees.

He's making classic "sunk cost" conceptual gaffe: Future decisions should be made independent of past ones. Even if yahoo had that extra $2.5BN, that doesn't mean the company should hold onto underperforming employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _In the typical American fashion, Yahoo bought a bunch of shit it didn't > need with money it didn't have._

This is priceless ... even if it's not exactly accurate :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I wonder if I know anyone that built something and sold it to Yahoo!?

<comment><USER5> does it still make money?

<comment><USER6> Yahoo Stores does.

<comment><USER7> Cool, where did you get your source for this?

I've been trying to find a breakdown of which services make money, as far as I can tell they don't even track it internally at Yahoo for every service, which is why I couldn't find any data for yahoo store.

<comment><USER6> Sorry I interpreted his question/comment "make money" as "still exists and has revenue" not "has profits" since many companies that are acquired become defunct surprisingly quick (see: Broadcast.com & many of Google's acquisitions).

I was only speaking in terms of my own knowledge. The baseball team I used to work for (Toledo Mud Hens) used Yahoo Stores to power our online store.

<comment><USER5> Still gets mentioned whenever someone posts a 'how to start an online shop' post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, did they buy pressflip?

</comment><comment><USER9> A few of their sites are about the only value there, delicious, flickr, finance is about all I use there. They lost my on tv long long ago and I can't remember the last time I searched with Yahoo.

<comment><USER10> In fairness to Yahoo Search I have been hearing some commenters in HN actually saying that it gives better search results than Google. Of course there's this thing called brand awareness...

<comment><USER11> I'm coming around on Yahoo. They've always seemed a bit ghetto since Google came around, but their results are pretty good these days. If you just avoid going to yahoo.com, the experience isn't any worse than Google.

I'd guess, though, that the problem for Yahoo is that their results aren't _dramatically_ better than Google. The bulk of searches are for proper nouns, company names, etc. that both of them serve up perfectly well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I for one was surprised to learn the author of this post was 23. Based on the writing style, I would have figured 13.</comment>