Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/opinion/nuclear-power-germany.html <comment><USER2> "Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe, and the Germans have always been particularly uneasy with it. After the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the "Atomausstieg," the exit from nuclear energy once and for all. Why? Because, as Ms. Merkel put it back then: "The residual risk of nuclear energy can be accepted only if one is convinced that — as far as it is humanly possible to judge — it won't come to pass." After Fukushima, Ms. Merkel, a trained physicist, was no longer able to believe that a nuclear disaster would not occur. That there was a catastrophe even in a high-tech country like Japan made her change her mind."

This article dismisses nuclear power as "not safe" with nothing more than the decision of Merkel to justify it. Yes, Merkel has a background in physics, but she made that decision as a politician. It's an unfortunate truth that science is rarely the first consideration in political decisions.

Merkel's decision ignored the truly extraordinary circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that, each individually, exceeded the design parameters of the reactor, which was 40 years old at the time of the disaster. Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly.

The reactors of 40-50 years ago can indeed be unsafe if operated poorly (e.g. Chernobyl) or if necessary threat mitigation is totally ignored. Newer designs are safer, and older designs can be made safer if people don't bury their heads in the sand about necessary updates.

Ultimately, nuclear reactors are designed and operated by humans, and mistakes do happen. However, the fact is that the Fukushima disaster has killed fewer people in total than coal power kills every year under normal operating conditions.

Is Germany paranoid about nuclear power? Yes.

<comment><USER3> But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what's not covered by the previous two is lack of knowledge & understanding.

Said in other words, if you wait long enough, a catastrophe is inevitable. And history, both old and recent, has told us that the time you'll have to wait is much shorter that you'd think.

I work in aerospace operations and every freakin' day things go different than planned and anomalies happen. In "my" "industry", we try to prepare for off- nominal situations and that buffers the effects, but you can only do so much and you end up in contingencies very often. You can also easily see when a new player enters the stage as they very quickly (should) learn that you'll have to react and adapt your plans very often and tone down any promises …

Long story short, whatever means you put up to prevent catastrophic events, they will never be enough. Then the question of cost arises, which is undoubtedly extremely high for nuclear events, especially in such a densely populated and small country like Germany, and you'll quickly realise that you probably do not want to take that risk even if probability is very low.

And finally, we have yet to find a working way to handle our nuclear waste for the next 10k-100k years. (I am aware of the options but obviously we are not there yet and it's unclear if we ever reach the state of "acceptable solution" instead of pushing the issue to generations to come.)

<comment><USER4> Coal has already killed far more beings than the highly rare nuclear power station disaster. If you care about wellbeing and human lives, swapping nuclear for coal is downright stupid.

<comment><USER5> This millennia is not ended yet, so it is too early to count total number of victims of nuclear accidents.

<comment><USER6> This argument makes no sense

<comment><USER5> Radioactive contamination of soil has very long tail, so we should wait until radioactivity will be lower than background level to count total number of victims. I.e. 1 victim per year x 100 years = 100 victims, while 1 victim per year x 1000 years = 1000 victims, order of magnitude more victims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pro-nuclear, but I find these articles about Germany's anti-nuclear stance extremely frustrating.

Blaming the current situation on Fukushima is historically inaccurate. Imo, there are 2 major reasons for the current stance:

1\. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns. [1]

2\. "Endlager"-discussion: The search for a permanent nuclear waste deposit was/is a political shitshow. The trial run at Asse (in the 70s) failed: We are currently getting all canisters out of there, after they found contaminated sludge and flooded areas. [2] Further, the decision to select Gorleben as one possible locations was mostly political. The whole process is politically loaded, expensive and devoid of any scientific reasoning. [3]

The anti-nuclear decision has been made years before Fukushima for imo valid concerns. The "latest" reactor in Germany went online in 1989, and the decision to phase-out was made in 2002. So the reactors being phased out now are all 30+ years old. Nowadays, I don't think any energy provider in Germany would be willing to invest in NEW fission plants. By the time they will be online, renewables might be way cheaper per kWh.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- nuclear_movement_in_Germa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- nuclear_movement_in_Germany) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine) [3] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_\(Kerntechnik\))

<comment><USER8> > 1\. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained > massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany > and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a > real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns.

That is true. And also, still today, when in our forests a boar gets killed by a hunter it has to be brought to the administration to meter the radioactivity (due to Cesium 137). A lot of boar gets discarded instead of being eaten because it exceeds the threshold (600 Bq/kg). I don't know what they are doing with it though.

<comment><USER9> According to my neighbour (hunter), every 2nd has to be discarded due to radioactivity.

Being in South-East Germany, we've been hit pretty hard by the fallout winds in 86...

<comment><USER8> That's probably worst case but a figure I have heard/read, too. With some animals the radiation level is as high as 5000-10000 Bq/kg.

Here's an interactive map on the topic: [http://www.umweltinstitut.org/themen/radioaktivitaet/messung...](http://www.umweltinstitut.org/themen/radioaktivitaet/messungen/wildschweine.html)

To put that figure into perspective, it is said that eating 6 kg of boar meat with 3000 Bq/kg is equivalent to 240 micro Sievert which equates 12 x-rays of the lung.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, _it 's diminishing virtually across the entire world_ (with very few exceptions).

It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unable to compete in price in most countries including the US.[1] Even China, the large last country to buckle the trend as of late seems to have reduced the role of its nuclear energy policy and seems to be missing targets [2].

[1] [https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era- of-n...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-nuclear- power-coming-to-an-end) [2] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas- losing-its-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its- taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/)

<comment><USER11> Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable.

Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe so: we don't have the storage technology yet.

<comment><USER12> Compared to renewables. One of the unanticipated side effects of our current focus on solar/wind is that being decentralized technologies compared to a single complex for coal/gas/hydro/nuclear/whatever mandated a focus on unit reliability since you can't have someone babysit each unit when those units are smeared across a 10 square miles or mounted on an entire suburbs' rooflines. This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs. Turns out using a power source that works by restructuring everything around it on the atomic level is a bit hard on the surrounding infrastructure.

<comment><USER13> > This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one > talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs.

You say weakness - and I say that more people die from falls, from installing rooftop solar panels, than do in nuclear accidents.

Power generation is inherentantly dangerous. Just because you distribute the danger around, instead of centralizing it, does not mean that you've reduced the danger.

As for the economics of nuclear, as time goes on we are finding that the _actual_ alternative to nuclear is not renewables. It's natural gas, sourced from either fracking, or Russia.

Compared to the uptick in natural gas, renewables are a rounding error.

<comment><USER12> Manpower salary weakness, not literal life/death weakness. Paying the population of Rhode Island to use exercise bikes connected to generators all day would also be a way to generate pollution-free safe power (in fact considering the obesity rate it would probably end up saving lives), yet there's still an obvious economic reason why such an idea would be completely stupid.

<comment><USER13> Sure, the economics of nuclear aren't great.

The economics of non-nuclear are _terrible_ , though. All roads that don't include it as a major generator of electricity rely on burning carbon, in the form of natural gas.

If you think I'm wrong - would you mind explaining why natural gas deployment _last two years_ (~20% increase, so about ~5% of global energy generation) was as much as the deployment of renewables, for the last decade? (also ~5% of global generation)

If you are right - could you give me your best guess for when you expect gas plant deployment to go net negative? 2020? 2025? 2050? 20-never? What mechanism (political, economic, etc) do you expect to drive that inflection point?

[1] [https://yearbook.enerdata.net/natural-gas/gas-consumption- da...](https://yearbook.enerdata.net/natural-gas/gas-consumption-data.html)

[2] [https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share- el...](https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-electricity- production.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking at the list of nuclear reactors in Germany Wikipedia has, while there are quite a few they don't seem to be very "good". There are disparate classes with little commonality and nothing in operation that has been built after ~1990.

A far cry for the massive french nuclear power program, which managed to achieve large cost benefits by deciding on a single reactor type and then deploying at a large scale, with only incremental updates in later generations.

In this light their decision to shutdown seems a little less insane, still could be bad to loose all the related knowledge and industry as a result, which might make deployment of new reactors in the future hard.

<comment><USER15> I think France made one of the few smart moves with nuclear in the day, but today even France is closely studying tradeoffs between reinvesting in the next gen of nuclear fission plans vs renewable. In publicised studies renewable is looking like the better option.

<comment><USER14> Still, it at least so far it worked well, they avoided releasing a lot of emissions and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french- po...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs- will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped)

"France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said."

If France with it's experience with last gen, and one of the most built next gen designs is thinking this, then it doesn't really bode well for fission plants. I think the world should go hard for renewable and storage as imperfect as they are, while increasing research for fusion plants.

The basic tech/economic balance point is that fission plant tech is highly matured to a high-cost point that is unlikely to shift downwards anytime soon, while renewables and even more so storage tech is on a rapid cost decrease in the manufacturing s-curve - with quite a bit more to run, and they're at pretty close to parity with nuclear in price/watt. Renewables + storage are faster to put up at watt/time - which factors into even more reduced project costs - and more importantly a much wider range of financing options and players who have or can rapidly develop capability to put up renewable plants, leading to even more cost reductions.

<comment><USER16> Someone from EDF's US division came to our department (this was late 2016) to give a colloquium and try to recruit undergrads to work in their renewables research division. He and I got into a massive fight about what would happen if they had any revenue bonds out on peaker plants (or nuclear) and something like this happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> German subsidies in the 2000-2010 decade almost single-handedly financed the improvements in solar cells that sees them competitive with even coal today.

And because the environmental goals had higher rank than economic and selfish ones, they did not enact trade barriers, or lobby for them on an EU Level, even when it became clear it would be Chinese manufacturers reaping the profits of mass production.

<comment><USER18> _A Brussels committee [in 2017] agreed to set minimum import duties for Chinese solar modules and cells that could price them up to 30% above market levels with "huge negative effects" for the industry, according to trade groups._

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar- in...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar-industry- says-eu-tariffs-chinese-imports-will-raise-panel-prices)

EDIT: they scrapped the tariffs in 2018: [http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904](http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sadly, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is very strong. Germany also has a declining Coal industry. So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. The worst part? German coal is some of the worst in terms of sulfur and pollutants.

<comment><USER20> > So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and > return to coal.

That's not true. The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in the late 90s after the Social Democrats and Greens had taken over the government. This was part of a larger green energy package. This had been a major issue for the Greens since at least the 80s when the party was founded.

The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy.

Please stop spreading this misinformation that the end of nuclear energy in Germany was caused by Fukushima.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, well, the phasing out of coal has been decided long time even before that - and still nothing happened. So "was decided long time ago by the Green party" is more a "who cares - I believe it when I see it". Merkel made it happen for real (unfortunately).

The decision to end nuclear power has been one of the "Merkel just decides without really caring" decisions. Germans are not entirely stupid. We have lived through Chernobyl, we know what a Tsunami is - the French and Belgians run much more unreliable reactors in direct vicinity of large densely populated areas. It was not "the will of the people" - but Merkel. Just like the end of the compulsory military service, the bailouts for southern Europe, the refugee crisis... Nothing democratic about that. The German public has nothing to say in these decisions and I don't recall that ANY of these topics were actually discussed agenda points by any party. The stock prices of publicly traded energy companies folded - keep in mind: they PURCHASED the power plants from the government and were then told to shut them down. The stock price development is an economic reflection how fair the "compensation payment" was.

Electricity prices are now about 30 Ct/kWh in Germany. That is 50% higher than the UK and 100% higher than France. And they keep rising.

I would not infer that Bild headlines (aka the German Sun) are "public opinion". Of course nuclear power was discussed quite heavily - but ever rising electricity prices, coal's contribution to electricity remaining flat and the increasing resistance against wind farms certainly paint a more differentiated picture.

<comment><USER22> Coal's contribution to German electricity is not flat. It declined markedly in 2019:

[https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/drop-coal-use-pushes- ge...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/drop-coal-use-pushes-germany- closer-2020-climate-target)

German electricity from coal is down 35% since 2010 and 46% since 2000:

[https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/20191212-BRD_Stromerzeug...](https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/20191212-BRD_Stromerzeugung1991-2019.pdf)

<comment><USER23> These percentages are largely irrelevant because coal remains the only non- intermittent source that Germany can rely on (in the absence of nuclear), and it's so much more carbon-intensive than the rest that the average figures are still terrible.

Because of the intermittence problem, there is simply no chance that Germany can catch up with the best gCO2/kWh results (France and Nordic countries) without an hypothetical breakthrough in battery storage for renewables. Its electricity's carbon intensity is currently 5-10 times higher. Pretty much only Poland is doing worse.

<comment><USER24> It's worth noting that none of Germany's reactors were ever run in load following mode (1). So the nuclear reactors also didn't/don't contribute to stabilising the German grid. Also note a 1GW nuclear plant also needs to be backed up to a certain degree by load following plants in-case it trips.

The unflexibility of the nuclear reactors is also a problem to network operators, as is the intermittency of wind and solar.

1) Brokdorf was run in loading following mode as an experiment, but the reactor failed, and begun decommissioning early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article misses to mention that Germany is actually quite active in fusion reactor research (eg. Wendelstein 7x the world's largest stellerator was just opened a few years ago). Its yet to be seen if fusion power will ever reach production level. But stating that Germany cut itself off of nuclear energy research is not exactly right.

<comment><USER26> Nuclear Fusion should be treated completely differently though.

It shares nuclear in the name and the similarities pretty much end there (the 'waste' from neutron activation of plasma facing components is negligible).

Fusion seems to be doing well these days with good progress on ITER, nice results from MAST and the approval of STEP. I remember Chen liked the idea of the Stellarator as it removed the need for the plasma current so perhaps we can expect good results from W7x as well.

The last thing I want is for fusion to have political issues due to being linked with fission power just because of the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Every time this topic comes up, I find it useful to share this fascinating real time map of electricity production and its carbon intensity around the world :

[https://www.electricitymap.org/](https://www.electricitymap.org/)

I think it helps frame the debate and put things in perspective. Needless to say that Germany's mediocre figures here are not worthy of the country's reputation for pragmatism and engineering excellence.

<comment><USER27> That reputation has suffered anyway quite significantly in the recent past: BER (Berlin's hilariously failed "new" airport) VW et al. cheating on emissions tests...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rainer Moormann's [0] recent statement concerning current nuclear costs Germany is facing in a single case:

" Here an info about #NuclearWaste. A particularly bad kind are the 900,000 HTR-balls from Hamm and Jülich. It is being considered to export them to the USA against the resistance of the ecosystem. Would cost about 1 billion €, including transportation. From the globes, 4.4 TWh, i.e. 0.15% of the German nuclear power was produced. If disposal would be generally so expensive, we would have 700 billion €, but even with LWR=factor 5 cheaper (more realistic) we would end up with 6 times what is available (24 billion €) Addendum: In the USA the graphite of the spheres is to be gasified and the CO2 is to be released into the atmosphere together with the radioactive C14. It's a military facility, they're allowed to do that. In the EU this would be excluded in the civilian sector. But it makes disposal cheaper. Here detailed information on the Jülich spherical castors radientelex.com/Stx_18_748-749... There are a total of 453 Castors with balls. The castors are however smaller than LWR castors (25 t instead of 120 t) One more addendum: The acquisition costs of the 455 castors alone were almost as high as the value of the electricity generated with the balls. And one more thing: The transport is to be carried out by an armed special ship, some dozens of trips would be necessary " [1]

(sorry, dirty twitter unroll & deepl translation)

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann) [1] [https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/120112832873803776...](https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/1201128328738037761?s=19)

Edit: Typo

<comment><USER29> Note that Jülich was not exactly a typical nuclear power plant: it was a prototype pebble bed reactor linked to a research facility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Germany invested 300 billions euros in windmills and solar, and achieved 0% emission reduction, thanks to its abandonment of nuclear power. Worse, they now realise that windmills last only about 20 years, while nuclear plants last at the very least 40 to 60 years. With similar amounts invested in nuclear they would be coal free by now.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why do we still talk about "safety" when discussing nuclear even though this has been handled over 30 years ago. Or in other words I haven't seen any arguments presented in this paper "debunked". [http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/)

In short a few points:

\- nuclear power is the safest form of energy production by far

\- storing the waste is an easy problem (store on site and reuse later with better technologies), or just make glass cubes of it and dump in the ocean (yes really)!

\- the high price of building nuclear power plants is in many ways the result of "nucular paranoia"

\- non-military reactors (ie. all "western reactors") can't have the same failure modes as chernobyl had

</comment><comment><USER32> Germans do not have to decide between Nuclear Energy or Climate Catastrophe. They have to decide between the potential risks of radioactive pollution or the impairment of landscape by wind turbines and power lines. There is not much tragedy in this decision.

<comment><USER33> In France and Belgium, which are West of Germany, there are plenty of nuclear reactors. This is in a region with prevailing west winds.

If Germany would want to minimize the risk of radioactive pollution, it would have to build plenty nuclear reactors at its eastern border and sell that energy to France below market value.

Then, as long as France doesn't cut Germany off, the French nuclear reactors would be shut down and the risk of nuclear pollution for Germany would be reduced.

<comment><USER21> And adding to that: the public DOES understand this. People in Western Germany (especially in NRW where they have to suffer from coal and are close to French and Belgium reactors) just shake heads in disbelief while having to swallow the highest electricity prices in Europe...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here is a by the minute diagram of the german energy consumption. Germany would be fine with all the nuclear power plants switched off. They invest heavily in renewable energy which shows off.

[https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all- sources&yea...](https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all- sources&year=2019&week=51&fbclid=IwAR2JVsfqMXAFKj5b21u0Rzj_0-Rpz6iyxngF3vvmEzNfzv- GkBRzZaj4O58)

<comment><USER23> Their "heavy investment" in renewables doesn't do much for Germany. It's really coal and gas "saving" them from nuclear, and that's problematic.

[https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...](https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=DE)

#1: coal, 34% #2: wind, 18% #3: gas, 13% #4: nuclear, 12% (Solar is zero of course, it's night right now : inconveniently, this tends to happen rather regularly)

for a whopping average of 400gCO2/kW, compared to France 68, Sweden's 42, or Iceland's 28.

"It shows" indeed, but nothing to be proud of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> to add some geopolitics - shutting down nuclear&coal and relying on renewables Germany would need more and more of natural gas plants - the cleanest option and most convenient one due to high speed of bringing up/down among the "dirty" ones - with more and more of the natural gas coming from Russia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_N...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_Nord_Stream_1)). While Germans seem to be ok with it (Stockholm syndrome?:), other countries, like US and various Germany neighbors, are naturally either don't like it or actively against it, and as result i think a lot of anti- German anti-nuclear PR and renewables scaremongering is coming from here.

</comment><comment><USER36> Bittner ignores that energy will be imported — from Danish windmills sure, but also French and Czech nukes

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not surprised this happened, but it is bitter. Glad to see the failure is being pointed out to the public.

</comment><comment><USER38> people are using the words 'nuclear power' like the word 'disease'. There multiple different kinds of nuc power. I disagree with our use of fast breeders and other reactions that also keep our supply of weapons grade fissile material 'fresh'. However there are other much safer reactions that are much safer and aimed more at energy generation like molten salt reactors - thorium, fluoride?

Just like there are diseases with which we can cope(chickenpox) and others which are horrible(smallpox), we should not use the words 'nuclear power' in planning or discussion among educated people. 'Nuclear power' is only useful in third grade science class.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, let's see: wind parks are a tough sell to the public, will new nuclear plants be an easier sell? I doubt it. So they seem to be on the right path.

And yeah, proportion of renewables in total net energy consumption has been 46% in 2019 already.

</comment><comment><USER40> Try pointing this out in Germany. Most people have no idea what kind of electricity they are actually buying, apart from choosing a greenwashed energy provider and paying through the nose.

<comment><USER41> Im sure there's large variance in different pockets of people, but I dont think this holds true based on my convenience sample

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Greenpeace won. They killed millions by denying access to GMO rice and they will make the planet more polluted too

</comment><comment> Christmas-8 Climate change is much in the news these days, but one important reason for it is never even mentioned: the "nuclear industry".

A radioactive gas, Krypton 85, is released into the atmosphere by the reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods. It is considered harmless because it rises to the upper atmosphere and will not come into contact with any life. There is now several million times as much KR85 as in 1945, at the start of the Atomic Age.

KR85 is a radioactive gas, and radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter a magnetic field, they migrate to the poles. The earth is a giant magnet, so the KR85 ends up equally at the North and South poles. There it interacts with the charged stream entering the earth's atmosphere from space, known to astronomers as the Wilson Current, a part of the Wilson Circuit, which keeps the earth charged up.

The discharge portion of the Wilson Circuit is lightning, most of which is in the belt of constant thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the Equator. As the inflow of charge at the poles weakens, so does the amount of lightning decrease everywhere on earth.

And lightning is essential to plants. Plant life cannot use the nitrogen in the atmosphere unless it is "fixed" into compounds, which can be done by two processes: certain types of bacteria, and lightning strikes.

There are some plants that have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots and do not need lightning, but many plants, especially in tropical forest areas where there is normally a lot of lightning, are lightning-dependent, and cannot get enough nitrogen to thrive without lightning.

So the widespread use of nuclear power is decreasing the amount of lightning all over this planet, and causing deterioration of forests, especially in the tropics, from nitrogen starvation.

And that is the worst form of climate breakdown currently happening. The mass extinction of countless species of plant life all over the world is much more significant than all other effects of climate destabilization combined.

The increase in both frequency and severity of storms in the temperate and polar zones is also being augmented by the build-up of charge at the poles from KR85.

The strong tropical storms that form along the Equator are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the Equator toward the poles is determined by two factors: The strength of the charge of the storm itself, and that of the pole that is attracting it. As KR85 builds up at the poles, these strong tropical storms are drawn farther from their normal home in the tropics and sub-tropics toward the poles, bringing with them tropical heat, as well as more frequent and stronger storm activity to areas not formerly accustomed to such weather.

The observations of decrease of ice in the polar zones and more frequent and severe storms in the polar and temperate regions is only one more symptom of the build-up of charge at the poles caused by radioactivity from the nuclear industry.

Another side-effect of particular consequence in the Arctic is the damaging ultra-violet radiation that has been observed reaching the surface of the earth from above. It seems to be from beyond the atmosphere, and is conventionally thought to be from outer space, and reaching the surface because of a thinning of a filtering layer of ozone, but is actually being produced in the upper atmosphere by the interaction between the influx of charge of the Wilson Current, and the layer of KR85 that now exists there.

The conventional explanations being thought up to explain what is happening in the atmosphere fall far short of the mark. So far, none of the mainstream scientific community has dared to mention the possible role of radioactivity in causing the breakdown of the climatic regime that has prevailed for the last 5,000 years or so. A large part of the reason for this glaring omission is the lack of any mechanism understood by orthodox meteorology that could account for the observations.

There IS a well-worked out theory that explains all the manifold observations, and is supported by enough solid evidence to be convincing to anyone who examines it objectively. But the history of this theory, along with the personal reputation of it's originator, ensures that it will not be examined at all. That, however, is a defect in the education of the scientific community, not a defect in the theory.

<comment><USER43> This is wild, can you please point to the literature that links Kr85 release into the environment leads definitively to decreasing the atmospheric charge? I was able to source descriptions of how nitrogen fixing is performed by lightning [1], and that Kr85 is released in nuclear fuel re-processing [2], but that Wikipedia article leads to a study [3] that says the release increases conductivity with uncertain meteorologic effects, so I'm stymied trying to look up more detailed explanations of the mechanism behind your fascinating description.

[1] [https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2018/07/09/lightning/](https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2018/07/09/lightning/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85)

[3] [https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994AtmEn..28..637H/abstra...](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994AtmEn..28..637H/abstract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> _Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe_

Solar kills more people than nuclear per watt, so that's the reporter's personal agenda talking

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate- worldw...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by- energy-source/)

<comment><USER15> The killings that nuclear may make are difficult to pin down (did that cancer come from nuclear exposure, or a chemical, or just a chance cosmic ray?) and so may be unattributed.

<comment><USER45> A well-developed statistical model should be able to take that into account. My understanding is that the academic consensus is fairly strongly leaning towards nuclear being the safest energy option, based on robust statistical models. Would be interested in hearing the opinions on this from someone actually in this academic field though...

<comment><USER15> A model could provide an estimate there, but nuclear deaths are not estimated that way from the posted source. They are only directly attributable deaths. e.g. cherynobyl was attributed from the posted source as 7 deaths while statistical modeling puts it in at least the tens of thousands range. Even the 7 of the link is questionable as reports of firefighter deaths during the accident as 27.

e.g. [https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at- chern...](https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at-chernobyl/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Let's assume for a moment there would be no opposition to nuclear in Germany. How does nuclear energy help with climate change?

Looking back to 2000, nuclear energy at peak was responsible for 32.1% of electricity production[1].

We'd need to at least double that. That would take a huge amount of money. More importantly it would take time. We can barely manage to build a single fucking airport in 1-2 decades. Building this many nuclear reactors would easily take this long, if not longer.

It seems to me that nuclear energy as a solution to climate change might look good on paper. Sci-fi also looks good on paper though and it's just as realistic.

[1]: [https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage...](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage/anteil- der-atomenergie-an-der-stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/)

<comment><USER47> There were great strides in increasing the overall percentage of renewable power. If the proportion of nuclear power had stayed constant, that would mean usage of coal could have been reduced even further than it already has been, which helps fight climate change.

<comment><USER48> That's not how it works. Energy production is a huge market with lots of political corruption and huge amounts of money involved.

Nuclear AND coal is both owned by a few monopolistic companies. In Germany there were four regions for electricity production and these four companies each owned one: basically all production and distribution of electricity.

None of these companies had any interest to invest in renewable energy or to open up their markets for competition. Politicians were given jobs in these companies after their political career.

It took literally decades to break up this system and the Energiewende was the first movement towards open energy markets, competition and renewable energy production. It's a system which takes decades to reform and rebuild. Whether nuclear or coal is first to go out is a minor issue over that time scale.

The money invested into renewable created a lot of effects which will drive down electricity prices in many other countries much faster than nuclear will do. Germany served as a first example how to build up technology, increase efficiency, etc. For example, the real benefit for solar will not be in Germany, but in many other countries which have lots of sunshine and lots of ways to deploy that kind of lower tech - compared to extremely complex nuclear technology.

And this was kickstarted here.

<comment><USER47> It's not at all a minor issue. These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn't need to. You've made zero argument to refute that fact.

<comment><USER48> > These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn't need to

They won't continue. Renewable will replace them much faster than nuclear could. Nuclear simply does scale much slower and much more expensive than nuclear.

<comment><USER49> While the statements you made might _coincide_ with reality, you don't support any of them with an actual credible source. And you ignore the fact that you keep comparing bleeding edge tech to 50 year old tech to prove that the old one shouldn't be researched and improved, a line of argumentation that makes no sense. You insist nuclear should be gimped by not doing any research and then use that as an argument for it not performing well enough now. The tech is old because politicians are weary of promoting research into improving nuclear tech (not talking about "holy grails" like cold fusion) due to the stigma associated with the "nuclear" label and losing their average Joe constituents.

By your own line of argumentation research in renewables should stop because coal and oil are cheaper and scale much better than them. If you can't keep your reasoning consistent it's not much of a reasoning. 20 years ago people like you insisted that electric tech in cars doesn't make sense because it was tried around the 1900s and didn't take off, proof that it should not be researched further.

In the meantime in 2013 the BARD Offshore 1 400MW wind turbine farm cost 3bn Euros and for a long time it cost ratepayers 2m Euros per day by not supplying most of the planned energy. So you see, anything can be disastrous if you don't do it right. If you don't invest in technology don't complain that it's not up to date. You don't blame technology for the blunders of mega-project management unless you're doing it in bad faith or truly have little understanding of the topic.

<comment><USER48> The World Nuclear Report:

> Renewables Continue to Thrive

> * A record 165 GW of renewables were added to the world's power grids in > 2018, up from 157 GW added the previous year. The nuclear operating capacity > increased by 9 GW6 to reach 370 GW (excluding 25 GW in LTO), a new historic > maxi- mum, slightly exceeding the previous peak of 368 GW in 2006.

> * Globally, wind power output grew by 29% in 2018, solar by 13%, nuclear by > 2.4%. Compared to a decade ago, non-hydro renewables generate over 1,900 TWh > more power, exceeding coal and natural gas, while nuclear produces less.

> * Over the past decade, levelized cost estimates for utility-scale solar > dropped by 88%, wind by 69%, while nuclear increased by 23%. Renewables now > come in below the cost of coal and natural gas.

That's today.

If you want more research into Nuclear (which has research in the range of hundreds of billions since the 50s) then you need to say: where, what for and with what goal.

Currently it's clear that the investing even more money into nuclear won't bring any breakthrough with visible effects in the next 20 years.

<comment><USER49> > it's clear that the investing even more money into nuclear won't bring any > breakthrough with visible effects in the next 20 years

The world will never become carbon neutral with PV and wind turbines. Our needs grow much faster than this tech will, short of an unexpected breakthrough, much like the one nuclear is still looking for and might actually be closer. It's just a great stopgap solution.

Your _assumption_ (mind you, not a fact) that it will never happen does not preclude the investment in nuclear tech. We invested in PV for decades before they became anything near economically feasible. And they're not great for places that don't have the land to spare and/or are far away from the places that do. Not great when you are at the mercy of (ever changing) weather and climate.

But as usual your quotes have nothing to do with my point - that renewables projects can be astonishingly expensive too (nuclear level expensive for some wind turbines) and underdeliver, or that the reason there's no nuclear research has nothing to do with lack of potential but with preconceptions that it _must_ be dangerous. So it's a self inflicted wound where you oppose improving nuclear tech and then you blame it for being old and inefficient. You are part of the reason we don't have good nuclear.

And to highlight the dissonance of your point you insist that there should be no investment in new nuclear tech because _old_ tech is expensive and doesn't scale compared to renewables. And then insist we should invest in new renewables even if they are more expensive and don't scale as well as fossil. How is that? You either invest in the tech that scales and is cheap, or you don't. Or perhaps you invest in the technology that shows promise. And scary- nuclear-label aside, nuclear tech always showed a lot of promise, if only people like you didn't shoot it in the foot and then whined that it's limping.

Just google for "breakthrough in nuclear power" and see what advancements have been made even with a strong opposition of the uneducated. Now imagine what could be achieved if it actually received some solid support. In the meantime we're burning coal.

<comment><USER48> > The world will never become carbon neutral with PV and wind turbines.

That's your assumption. Fact is: currently only renewable has a chance to make an actual impact for the next 30 years.

> that renewables projects can be astonishingly expensive

That was long ago and in the case of German offshore the reason was that the technology was challenging (because of deep and rough water in the North Sea) and needed to be developed and deployed. Today scaling it is a bit easier and more cost effective. Solar (PV) was also expensive in the first years, but it was always clear that mass-production would bring prices down.

> the reason there's no nuclear research has nothing

There is nuclear research.

> you insist that there should be no investment in new nuclear tech because > old tech

No, I insist that there is no need to invest in DEPLOYMENT of nuclear, because the current nuclear has been proven to be a dead end.

> insist we should invest in new renewables even if they are more expensive > and don't scale as well as fossil

No I insist to invest in renewables, because they are the cheapest and fastest way to REPLACE fossil.

> And scary-nuclear-label aside, nuclear tech always showed a lot of promise, > if only people like you didn't shoot it in the foot and then whined that > it's limping.

Nuclear has totally shown its own failure: remember Russia? Worst security. Remember Japan? Fully nuclear. One event took out ALL reactors. Remember the US? No expansion of Nuclear despite having all the technology in the last 30 years. Remember France? A single reactor under construction in last 20 years. Late and cost explosion. 70 years and no storage solution. 70 years and the cost building them is increasing. In the US, in France, ... in core nuclear power countries.

> Now imagine what could be achieved if it actually received some solid > support

You believe in Santa Claus. Look around. Read the 'Nuclear World Report' and it paints a bleak picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The pro-nuclear lobby likes to pretend it offers a clean solution. I really want to believe, as it would make things easy. Sadly, not only is nuclear not clean, the worst part is humans can't handle the required responsibility for this technology.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya- yF35g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU)

<comment><USER11> The French seem to have handled nuclear technology quite well for many decades now.

<comment><USER50> If by "handling well" you mean examples like buying the Belgian energy sector and then buying the Belgian politicians with generous revolving doors to keep open extremely dated and deteriorating reactors in Wallonia (Thiange) and Flanders (Doel) and playing deaf to the objections of neighboring states scared shitless of having these things operating in a dilapidated state so close to their borders, then yes, I guess they are doing a-ok.

<comment><USER23> Part of the German public and political class can be "scared shitless" until they're blue in the face, they have no leg to stand on.

If I were Belgian, I sure would remain deaf to a lecture about energy and the environment, by one of the worst European contributors to CO2 emissions and emitter of deadly fine coal particles causing dozens of thousands of deaths _now_

Germany, this is so out of character for you. You have the resources and smarts to be leading this effort instead of clinging to one terribly misguided populist decision 20 years ago. Until you do though, I would keep a low profile on these matters.

<comment><USER50> Have you ever considered that maybe it is because they have the smarts that they are getting out of both nuclear and coal?

And you might want to read up on Thiange before you tell Belgians to ignore and carry on.

<comment><USER23> Whatever you say, the hard inconvenient facts remain and as I write this around midnight CET, coal is the #1 source of electricity in Germany, and their CO2 emissions per kWh are 5.71 times those of France.

You simply cannot solve this problem (the most urgent in our times) today by getting out of both nuclear and coal, because battery storage technology isn't ready, the sun doesn't shine at night, the wind isn't always blowing, and Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro like Sweden or geothermal sources like Iceland. It really is as simple as that, in the current state of technology.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Systemd timer units have the unfortunate practical effect of hiding errors - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTimersAndErrors <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 ".. since it was using a systemd timer unit, that error output went to the journal and was effectively invisible to us, lost within a flood of messages". One a side note - the comments section of the article contains an example of why some people are just so toxic these days From xxx at 2019-11-05 12:25:37: dozzie: It doesn't require knowing systemd inside and out because it is on the Arch Wiki. You are just bad.</comment>


A OpenSource password management system like LetPass based on Laravel5.3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Elvenisboy/CocoPass <comment><AUTHOR> Of course, it is the first version. I wanna more issues :)</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite scripting language? - <AUTHOR> For programs that are too complex for bash, but still need to use shell commands and process command line input. Props if it's included by default in major Linux distros. <comment><USER2> Perl 5 is old, but reliable. Many people deride it as a write-only language or executable line noise, but you can write ugly code in any language.

Perl 5 can be terse or verbose depending on your needs. It is not "one size fits all" like Python, it fits many different sizes depending on your needs (TIMTOWTDI).

You also have tons of modules available via CPAN, so you can get a script done quickly.

Don't get me wrong: I use Python too, but some systems only have Python 2 and Python's significant white space can be problematic at times. Perl is an old, reliable camel that you can trust to get you through your problem desert quickly, frequently before the Python caravan has started out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also like Perl, and it's common on Linux. My issue is that perl 5 is obsolete, and perl 6 isn't included in most distros.

<comment><USER2> How exactly is Perl 5 obsolete?

Perl 5.30 just came out in May. So it is still actively being maintained and improved.

Perl 5 is included by default in most Linux distros and there are Perl distributions available for all major operating systems and platforms. (See [http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html](http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html) for the comprehensive list.)

Obsolete != Trendy / popular

<comment><AUTHOR> I just mean that it's not the latest version of perl (now that perl 6 exists).

<comment><USER3> That's factually incorrect. Perl 6 also known as Raku is an unrelated language. The latest version of Perl is 5.30.0 as shown on [http://www.perl.org/](http://www.perl.org/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This won't be popular but... NodeJS. It's easy to grab input from the CLI, "shelling out" isn't really all that bad and often I want to do some "business logic" type stuff in code really quick and I know the toolset very well. It's much faster for me to do stuff in JS even if it might be slightly slower to execute. Execution time is rarely what I'm optimizing for in one-off scripts or even things I might run on a regular basis. My ability to understand the code and make changes is valued much higher for me.

<comment><USER5> So, a language where the average program has something like 1900 dependencies and sub-dependencies?

Seriously?

<comment><USER6> Please don't do programming flamewars here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favourite scripting language is POSIX shell. It is also my most used language in terms of different "projects" I write with it; most of these projects are very small and focused. I feel that shell programming is very misunderstood, this is conjectural of course, but people dismiss it out of hand and _move on up_ to something like Python usually. I have some rules of thumb: if you need to use a hash data type _then_ move on to something else; if your LOC starts getting big then probably move on; always use ShellCheck.

Just like every language ever, it has some warts, and it has some features that make it less readable and maintainable, but POSIX shell above all others (to me) having less features actually makes it easy to avoid the pitfalls.

Of course in general I don't write massively complicated programs in POSIX shell but that's not the point, but it can take you very far, you just have to wrap your mind around how to implement certain things compared to other languages. I think the time taken to do that, in the long run will pay off. Of course if figuring it out takes too long, then move on to something else.

As for the something else Perl is a very good candidate and is influenced in certain ways by shell programming. It just makes things easier. To me Perl is as readable as Python. I say this as someone who uses Python and Node.js in the day job, so in terms of LOC they are my main used languages, it's just that POSIX shell and Perl are better suited to the tasks as stated by the question. Also they are more portable, as in, both seem to be already present on a lot of Unices (I have no idea about macOS which I never have to touch or really care about).

</comment><comment><USER8> Python's the only serious candidate that fits those requirements. Node is popular recently but I don't think e.g. Ubuntu installs it by default, or even has a modern version in its apt repos.

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO Python makes it too hard to run shell commands & perform other Unix magic. Personally, I like perl5, perl6, and tcl in these respects, but those languages aren't especially popular now.

EDIT: also virtualenvs make my head explode. I think node/npm is currently the best in terms of dependency management.

<comment><USER9> It's not hard, just too much noise.

from subprocess import run run("ls -la".split())

This is what I do to reduce noise

<comment><USER10> Try Groovy:

        $groovy -e ' println "ls -l /".execute().text'

Without the "run the example on the command line" baggage, it reduces to:

        println "ls -l".execute().text

assuming you just want to spit out the results. What's nice about this is that it's ultimately just syntactic sugar over the standard Java ProcessBuilder / Process mechanism, and it's relatively easy to support more advanced cases like defining your own input, output, and error streams for the underlying process, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved Ruby. For me it had most of the niceties Perl had, plus a much cleaner design.

Sadly Rails outshined plain Ruby, except in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER12> Lua. I never really got behind importing a package for everything, so the lack luster package management/community doesn't bother me. The syntax is fairly clean (its a nice break from braces and semi colons everywhere), it's easy to extend, and it's perf under LuaJIT is hard to argue with.

</comment><comment><USER5> My favorite scripting language is still bash.

<comment><USER13> Most things I need to get done can be done in bash. I know it, I am comfortable using it, and everything I log into has it. So it's what I use. Python is great too of course, but I don't really know it- I haven't had a need.

I tried learning Perl once but reverted back to Bash the first thing I needed to do something in a hurry. And, my IDE is also my interpreter. It's pretty hard to argue with. I can just take a one-liner and throw it in a file and now I can distribute it. It's that simple.

I suppose if I could write Python one-liners (maybe you can, I don't know...) and it was as universally installed and configured, I'd use it- if I needed to.

What it comes down to is this: My needs are simple, and if I can't do it in bash, then I'm probably going about it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Groovy and/or Python depending on what I'm doing. If I want to do something where I know using some Java library that I'm already familiar with will help, I will definitely use Groovy.

<comment><USER10> I especially like the .execute() method in Groovy. Just create a String that represents a valid command, call .execute() on it, and use the .text property to get the output. For example:

        $groovy -e ' println "ls /".execute().text'

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The title should be "What's your favorite Linux scripting language?" Presumably you don't want to talk about Powershell (Windows), Javascript (Web), or Apache Groovy (JVM).

<comment><USER15> Or, for good grief, REXX.

<comment><USER10> > Or, for good grief, REXX.

FWIW, Rexx is readily available on Linux.

        [prhodes@whiskey pdfs]$ dnf search rexx
        Last metadata expiration check: 0:29:48 ago on Sat 06 Jul 2019 10:50:28 PM EDT.
        </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==== Name & Summary Matched: rexx </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====
        oorexx.x86_64 : Open Object Rexx
        oorexx.x86_64 : Open Object Rexx
        oorexx-libs.x86_64 : Libraries for ooRexx
        oorexx-libs.i686 : Libraries for ooRexx
        oorexx-libs.x86_64 : Libraries for ooRexx
        brexx.x86_64 : Classic Rexx Implementation
        oorexx-docs.x86_64 : Documentation for ooRexx
        oorexx-docs.x86_64 : Documentation for ooRexx
        rexx-imc.x86_64 : IMC's interpreter for the Rexx
        oorexx-devel.x86_64 : Header files and libraries for ooRexx
        oorexx-devel.i686 : Header files and libraries for ooRexx
        oorexx-devel.x86_64 : Header files and libraries for ooRexx

<comment><USER10> Addendum:

NetRexx is also open source and readily available, which is one more option for any Rexx junkies out there.

[http://netrexx.org](http://netrexx.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This question belongs to Randall Schwarz, author of Learning Perl and presenter of Floss Weekly. His default answer to this question, Perl, has changed a bit recently, and might surprise.

<comment><USER2> Would you please provide a link to Randall's response?

I know he has taken a liking to Dart / Flutter, but I have not seen / heard what he said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People definitely shouldn't overlook Groovy for this kind of scripting. Especially if you are doing anything with the JVM it has the huge advantage of allowing you to easily integrate your actual application code into your scripts and call it directly, all while using a scripting language that is more powerful, versatile and cross-platform than other obvious options such as Python.

</comment><comment><USER18> Python. You can do pretty much anything with it, yet it's easy to grok and become quickly productive in.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really enjoy Wren ([https://github.com/wren- lang/wren](https://github.com/wren-lang/wren)) and have used it for a few of my personal programs.

</comment><comment><USER20> Haskell is pretty nice for scripting, too. It's very concise, and the strong static type system gives assurance that the code will probably work before even running it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Pike Language ([https://pike.lysator.liu.se](https://pike.lysator.liu.se))

</comment><comment><USER22> Redlang

<comment><USER23> I've used it a bit. Care to elaborate.

I mostly use ruby, but perl5 and python will do, too.

<comment><USER22> It's so much fun! Red view is my favorite scripting language

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Python. I use it on Windows and on Linux and sometimes a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER25> Python as it's default on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER26> To read: AppleScript

To write: escript (part of Erlang)

</comment><comment><USER27> Joker (Clojure syntax written in Go).</comment>


The developer dilemma: idea is easy, building is easy, selling is impossible - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dievolution.net/meinung/the-developer-dilemma-idea-is-easy-building-is-easy-selling-is-impossible/

<comment><USER2> I think you're doing the right thing by writing this story up and posting it on HN. You certainly got me to check the game out. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> I would lie if I said I didnt write the story to generate some buzz for the game, but I really think if I have those problems, many others have them, too. There must be ways for developers to market their ideas, people who can't be 24/7 online for social connections like a garyvee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Selling doesn't matter. Just get users and people will give you money to be a startup. It's the thing to do you know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, getting users is the first obstacle, where I really got problems with. If you are developing apps and doing websites 24/7, its really hard to be a marketing expert, too, thats what my blogpost is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your article is an interesesting read and despite it's length I stuck with it to the end.

I didn't try the game but I did click thru and have a look at your homepage / landing page and to be honest it's not very inspiring.

It really didn't motivate me to register. There is too much text and to be brutal it's not pretty enough.

You game us being compared to an iPhone app... If you take a look at a typical iPhone apps landing page ( if they have a web presence) they are visually stunning. They are also very simple and you immediately (in 5 seconds) get what the app is all about.

Fir example you need a big button for a user to get started. It's too confusing at the moment.

There are loads of web tutorials on 'landing page optimisation' you should start with this.

Then once that is sorted then you can work on driving some targeted traffic and see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, you are right about the landing page. This is one of the things you just forget about when you develop the whole app, but its the first thing the future users see, so it should be really nice. will start working on it immediately</comment></comment>


Why you should contribute to Open Source? - <AUTHOR> http://shal.in/post/285909694/why-you-should-contribute-to-open-source

<comment><USER2> The biggest problem with contributing to [edit: established] Open Source projects is the barrier to entry. As someone who gets paid to work on a popular open source project full time, I can tell you it's often way harder than it's worth to get involved.

You need to download and get the code running on your computer, and configure everything to run correctly. You need to learn the ins and outs of how everything works. You need to install and learn about the code the project depends on (and, most projects will have numerous vendor libraries). You need to get acquainted with the main developers on IRC, so you don't step on any toes. You have to learn how they do bug ticketing, and you need to find bugs you can do. And your first code review? Trust me, it'll be painful. It's not easy to get started.

If I left my job today, would I continue to contribute? Sure. But only because I already have a foot in the door, and know my way around.

All that being said, I truly believe universities should require students contribute to at least one open source project- it's a great learning experience, and the projects and their users benefit from the volunteer labor.

<comment><USER3> GitHub has massively reduced the amount of work needed to start contributing to a project - click "fork", make your changes, send a pull request. That said, actually learning how to use git in the first place is quite a bit of work.

<comment><USER4> While I agree that Github has made it _easier_ , it is still not easy. First they will reject because of some subtle formatting error. Then they will reject because you didn't document it enough (or wrong). Then they will reject because your tests aren't done the way they do it. Then they refuse it because you merged and didn't rebase.

There are hundreds of reasons why they won't pull your changes. This doesn't apply to small, single dev programs. They are usually, at least in my experience, pretty happy that someone wrote a patch, but the big ones are really, really bad.

<comment><USER5> I'm happy if the upstream project is concerned with the quality of commits going into their software. That makes sure that the software will work great and it'll be easier to fix a bug in the future (if the history is reasonably clean)

Basically, if upstream doesn't accept your patch, you have two options:

Either you really want to see your patch upstream. In that case you invest the time it takes knowing that your contribution will be measured by the same scale that everyone else's contribution has been measured with. You also know that your contribution will be usable and part of a stable project. And you'll be confident that it probably won't be your mistake taking hundreds of sites down that are using the project you contributed to and are now hitting a bug you introduced.

On the other hand, you can feel that it's not worth the hassle. That's totally fine. You'll just have to manage your patch on your own from now on (in the end maybe creating an even bigger hassle in the long run).

Git gave you a very nice toolset for merging patches to an externally updated project, so that should be way easier than it was in the SVN days.

What Github did was to actually make it possible to decide either way.

Before Git and Github, your options were to either have it integrated upstream or to be stuck with whatever version you were patching (due to severely lacking merge support)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the author is missing an important point: You should also contribute to Open Source projects because _you are using them_.

This is the most natural motivation for contribution. You care about the project not just because it's cool and Free Software and you want to exercise. You mainly care because you're using it everyday - be it your favorite game or an important library (like jQuery, Qt) you use at work.

It is often most sensible to fix the bug where it appears, instead of working around it in your application. And with Free Software (aka Open Source) you can simply do that, without having to ask anyone for permission.

Getting this bugfix/improvement into the official version is a separate step. But it is worth the effort, because the alternative is to maintain your patches separately from new versions of the library. Or, worse, to maintain workarounds for bugs in the library that might or might not be fixed in future versions.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Open Source projects offer you a chance to work on something that you want rather than something that others want you to work on."

As far as I am concerned starting my own project is more what I want rather than fixing bugs in other people's complicated code which code might also be philosophically very alien to me. To take compromises there is my day job. To work on cool things I start my own project/startup.

<comment><USER8> This lecture was given to _students_ to start to understand how real software development works and get an edge on their classmates while applying their technical skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think in some ideal world I'd like to see all companies that benefit from oss donate some employee time back to the community.

Ultimately it's mainly the business community that benefits, rather than the coder who are typically paid just around the cost of living.

So, why can't more businesses allocate time to contribute back?

</comment><comment><USER10> For me, as a designer, contributing to Open Source is a great exercise. But as gkoberger states, it's hard to get 'a foot in the door'. And getting your GUI implemented is also a long process.

How could this be made more lucrative?

</comment><comment><USER11> If you have spare dev cycles, I'd say it's in your better interest to build a software product that will make you money.

You get all the advantages the author talks about, with none of the disadvantages that the commenters here point out. You get income, and you get something concrete you can point to when it comes time to interview for your next job:

"I built and designed somerandomthing.com from scratch. It's built on the mZungu stack and handles peak loads of 14k requests per second. Check it out when you get a chance. It pays my rent."

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I find it admirable that people can produce code for purely altruistic purposes. I wish I had the time to do that in between my work that pays the bills and my work on my own project that will hopefully soon earn some money.

At the same time, I do end up using a lot of open source software as part of that work, and when I have issues with it, I do submit fixes back to the project. Sometimes they are accepted (in some form), sometimes they're ignored. This isn't overly time consuming, and if nobody did it, I'd be spending a lot more time fixing bugs myself.

Likewise, I occasionally open-source stuff I build that happens to be reusable. As far as I can tell, none of that code is widely used, but on the off chance that someone is looking for something exactly like it, it might save them some time.

<comment><USER13> > purely altruistic purposes

Nah, it's because it's more fun to work on open source code! I don't work on stuff that's not fun or not interesting in some way, so there's definitely always an element of self-interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's my answer on HOW to contribute to Open Source, if you're not a programmer:

[http://www.granneman.com/techinfo/linux/contributewithoutcod...](http://www.granneman.com/techinfo/linux/contributewithoutcoding.htm)

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice advice for the original target audience of people with lots of spare time who have already sorted out where the rent money is coming from. For the other 90%+ of us not so relevant.

<comment><USER16> This could be very helpful for _those who have not already sorted out where to get rent money_ to get the job they want.

<comment><USER15> If people don't have rent money they don't have the time to work on open source as they are too busy working (i.e. in a short-term job unrelated to developing software). So the advice only applies to people who are financially stable but also have spare time such as students.</comment></comment></comment>


Returning the "killed" RSS of Reuters from the dead - <AUTHOR> https://codarium.substack.com/p/returning-the-killed-rss-of-reuters <comment><USER2> I work on a project which helps you produce RSS feeds from web pages that don't offer their own using the page URL as input and simple selectors to identify the web page elements to be used in the feed.

Here's what it can produce for the Reuters World News mobile page:

[https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F...](https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmobile.reuters.com%2Fnews%2Fworld&in_id_or_class=article- heading)

Here's what it can do for the main site:

[http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%...](http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Fnews%2Fworld&item=.story- content&item_desc=p)

The downside is that certain changes to the HTML structure (e.g site renaming/removing class attribute values used as selectors) could cause the feeds to break.

<comment><USER3> As a dev I really like your website. Ultimate no bullshit product and I got all the information I need in a single page. Congrats.

<comment><USER2> Thank you! Glad you liked it. :)

<comment><USER4> +1 to GP. Seeing this kind of products make happy in general. (Or at least appeal to my confirmation bias about how products should be built)

FYI, you _probably_ have a typo on pricing page "Term Extraction" should be "Term Extension"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A major problem with Reuters' RSS feeds while they lasted is that Reuters pushes new URLs with updates to existing stories and kills or redirects the previous URLs. So for a major developing story you'd see the same article in your feed 5+ times, since the feed was just a dumb push of every URL added to whatever category you were subscribed to. Still better than nothing, I guess.

The issue with this solution is that there doesn't seem to be any way to specialize it at all. I was subscribed to Reuters' politics feed [1] specifically, and I got other types of news from other sources. But I don't see any way to do that with this method. The articles unfortunately do not have the category in the URL.

[1] [http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/PoliticsNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/PoliticsNews)

<comment><USER6> Printing each story exactly once is tough. The RSS feed serial number thing never worked. Sites with multiple RSS servers and a load balancer would return a different serial number. I ended up taking the MD5 of the title and description fields, with HTML markup deleted, and discarding new feed items with a duplicated MD5.

<comment><USER5> That would be a start, but unfortunately Reuters frequently changes their article titles too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Artem, do you know if there is a parameter for ordering the RSS results by time for the Google News RSS results? This is very helpful.

Finally, I pay $2000+ annually for a competitor to NewsCatcherAPI. It may be worth connecting. I signed up for a trial earlier and the two issues for me would be (i) the range and depth of publications and (ii) not being about to track mentions / references in the body of the article.

I may not be your target audience but one of your competitors is pulling in 10m articles with the full article content per day. I use the API for timely alerts for PR monitoring -- my priority is that I pick up mentions of companies / individuals wherever they happen quickly.

Your pricing is a lot more competitive. I just wonder whether you are looking to move in the direction of range and depth in the future, or whether you're targeting a different market segment.

<comment><USER8> What competitor is this, if you don't mind me asking? Could use a service like that for my own project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you connect with me at firstname.lastname@example.com?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just curious, what are reasons businesses would pay for a NewsCatcher API subscription? What are they using it for?

Fun API, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Integrate some kind of news feed to their platforms.

Analyzing the PR campaigns, market.

Building their own news aggregators (usually theme specific).

<comment><USER10> Would I be able to build a niche topic focused site (e.g. video gaming news) based on the NewsCatcher API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is exactly how our service works.

Ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com, or go to a live chat on our website

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a question about NewsCatcherAPI: what is the legal framework around indexing copyrighted articles and provide a paid API to search them?

Edit: particularly when Reuters' business is selling its newswire feed

<comment><AUTHOR> Short answer: seems like OK as long as you do not resell the full body text.

Long answer: Google does the same thing everyday. Each country has its own laws. Usually, news are in a special category that is less protected with copyrights.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, and Google was sued and settled by agreeing to pay a fee to the news wire:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-afp/afp-google- new...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-afp/afp-google-news-settle- lawsuit-over-google-news-idUSN0728115420070407)

<comment><USER9> To an organization in France. Doesn't sound like concerning precedent to a startup that doesn't share much in common with google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was worried they had removed it completely. I'm using this for a simple web page which shows RSS feeds from multiple news sources across the political spectrum, and the Reuters feeds have been the essential pivot for me. It is the only source I significantly trust to be neutral in these trying times.

Thank you so incredibly much for this very simple solution. I was worried I'd have to spend many hours on some complicated fix. I'm glad I no longer have to (unless Google kills of their news RSS).

<comment><USER14> I have to agree on Reuters... They seem to make the effort to keep the context with unbiased framing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have an antique Teletype set up to print news from the Reuters news feed, and it's stopped working because of this. So I tried this new approach via Google. All you get is the RSS feed titles, not the content. The "description" is just a link to content elsewhere, with the title as link text. The real Reuters RSS feed had a few sentences of copy for each story, roughly what radio stations would read.

Associated Press seems to have dropped their RSS feeds too, or hidden them well.

The New York Times still has a usable RSS feed at: [https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/World.xml](https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/World.xml)

This gets me, in Teletype format:

        CHINA SLAMS TRUMP OVER UIGHUR LAW AMID BOLTON ACCUSATIONS
        (JUNE 18TH, 7:16 PM)
        A NEW LAW AIMED AT PUNISHING CHINESE OFFICIALS INVOLVED IN MASS
        INTERNMENTS OF UIGHURS AND OTHER MINORITIES IN XINJIANG CAME AS
        JOHN BOLTON ACCUSED PRESIDENT TRUMP OF SUPPORTING BEIJING?S
        CRACKDOWN.

<comment><USER15> Do you ever tare off the latest breaking headline and rush into another room and slam it on a desk and say "you're gunna want to see this!"?

<comment><USER6> It's at home.[1] This was from my steampunk period.

[1] [http://www.aetherltd.com/images/tty14ro/printerathome1.jpg](http://www.aetherltd.com/images/tty14ro/printerathome1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read RSS feeds with an app on Android called Aggregator. Reuters feeds included a short description of the story inside the feed, but Google News doesn't have them. The descriptions in the feed allowed me to precisely filter and label the entries based on keywords.

Anyway, I also use the Google News RSS trick described in the article, as replacement for now. Not sure how long it will last, however.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've always wondered how the copyright for the Google RSS works..

As far as I am aware it is an undocumented API that can be called without authentication or acceptance of any EULA.

The response includes an explicit copyright field.

Does that mean the feed can not be reproduced? Can a derivative work be created from it?

<comment><USER18> "Can a derivative work be created from it?"

Grey area, lived in it for a while and made some money there, but at the end of the day it depends on how the original creator feels about your derivative work - or you personally :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this trick work for apnews.com as well?

<comment><USER20> Yep. It works for most news sites, it's just filtering the recent news from Google News based off the URL. Oddly, it doesn't work for CNN. Never understood why. Maybe "cnn" is a stop word to this search engine and ignored. Dunno.

And, of course, it works today. It's a Google product, so enjoy it while it lasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Brilliant. Thank yo!

</comment><comment><USER22> Probably someone there read NH?

</comment><comment><USER23> > Did it work? Consider subscribing to my newsletter to get more useful > content like that. It's free: (...) I am a co-founder of NewsCatcherAPI — > ultra-fast API to find news articles by any topic, country, language, > website, or keyword. ...

It looks like an unfortunately automatically placed ad, making me look for a continuaton of the actual content (a direct answer to the question) that never came.

Weird writing style.</comment>


Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/final-tweet-the-twitter-reality-tv-show-pitch/ <comment><USER2> The name is awful. Mashing up social media and a Tv show is a decent idea, but this formulation is a bit off.

</comment><comment><USER3> what a stupid idea</comment>


Show HN: Handsome JS - UI Toolkit - <AUTHOR> http://dubmediagroup.com/handsomejs/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, it's a work in progress. Going to add a ton of different modules like modals, lightboxes, typeahead and some more mobile centric stuff.

<comment><USER2> Seems to be a bug on the dropdown menu, once it's open i can't seem to close it without clicking on one of the items in the dropdown menu.

Also the code on your demo page hasn't been compressed, that is to say there's lots of whitespace making the files larger

<comment><AUTHOR> Good eye. Fixed now, uses native mobile select functionality

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is cool, I especially like the dropdown.</comment>


Show HN: Linux sysadmin course – eight years on - <AUTHOR> Almost eight years ago I launched an online "Linux sysadmin course for newbies" here at HN.
It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn't have the time. Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can't be involved any longer.
it's a month-long course which restarts each month, so "Day 1" of August is this coming Monday. It would be great if you could pass the word on to anyone you know who may be the target market of those who: "...aspire to get Linux-related jobs in industry - junior Linux sysadmin, devops-related work and similar".
[0] http://www.linuxupskillchallenge.org/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge/
[2] http://snori74.blogspot.com/2020/04/health-status.html <comment><USER2> I hope your health gets better. Thanks for the course!</comment>


Italy suspends mortgage payments amid corona lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-economy-mortgage-payments-symptoms-lockdown-latest-a9389486.html <comment><USER2> How common is it to pay mortgage/rent in person in other parts of the world? I would think that something as serious as a mortgage payment would automatically be deducted from the payer's bank account so they don't have to worry about it. Or am I assuming too much?

What about other recurring services that also has to be paid?

<comment><USER3> Mortgage payments are being suspended to ease the financial burden on people rather than because people make payment in person.

Two banks in the UK have already voluntarily announced similar measures. Not that it's a particularly altruistic measure - payment holidays result in more interest being paid over the lifetime of the mortgage...

<comment><USER2> It's still a strange thing to do for me. Dunno. Maybe I'm tone-deaf.

Are people not allowed to work, thus not getting salaries during this month, thus needing the payment holiday?

What about those who are in a position to still earn a salary during this time, like remote workers. Are they now forced to not pay their mortgage, or can they pay like normally?

Like you said, the interest on that one payment holiday is shocking!

Below calcs are for my home country, South Africa:

R1,000,000 loan, 20 year mortgage, results in a ~R9,700/month payment. Skipping one month within the first two years of this term results in additional interest of more than R60,000 and extending the term by at least 7 months.

<comment><USER4> The article states that the country is on lockdown, and there are fines for violating that. I assume a very significant portion of the workforce cannot work from home, and I didn't see anything about pay being continued if you can't work.

I don't know anything else about the state of things, but I'm sure automated systems and things that can be done remotely are allowed to continue, so if you want to pay your mortgage, I'm sure you can continue to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would love to see my rent payments suspended. Am I elligible to join the protected class?

<comment><USER6> I doubt they would do it that way. I suspect you could just stop paying and not be evicted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Must be nice. What about the poor renter schmucks?</comment>


UCSB Researchers Demonstrate That 15=3x5 About Half of the Time  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2803

<comment><USER2> The title of this submission does NOT do it justice. This looks rather important to me: researchers at UCSB have apparently built a Quantum computer that successfully executes Shor's Algorithm for factoring numbers into their prime components. So far, they have successfully factored 15 into 3 and 5, but according to the UCSB release, the system can be scaled up to factor arbitrarily larger numbers.

If true, this has major implications for cryptography, because virtually all modern encryption and hashing/signing algorithms in use today are based on the assumption that factoring large numbers into their prime components is computationally very costly.

Does anyone here have the expertise necessary to judge whether these results are as ground-breaking as they look to me?

<comment><USER3> _To conduct the research, Lucero and his colleagues designed and fabricated a quantum processor to map the problem of factoring the number 15 onto a purpose-built superconducting quantum circuit._

\-- Is the superconducting element of the circuit - commercially feasible? [serious question]

<comment><USER3> _If such a processor enters the market, traditional encrypting will be forced to change completely. According to Lucero, the quantum processors power can be used for both sides of the process, allowing "quantum cryptography" to replace traditional RSA. Quantum encrypting would be more difficult to crack and far easier to keep secure — Lucero says quantum cryptography systems immediately notify both user and potential intruder when the system has been tampered with. For example, Lucero said a voice conversation over quantum encrypted lines would immediately become "jumbled" when a third party attempted to access the system._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Using a classical computer and the best-known classical algorithm, factoring something like RSA Laboratory's largest published number –– which contains over 600 decimal digits –– would take longer than the age of the universe, he continued.

A quantum computer could reduce this wait time to a few tens of minutes._

\-- The synopsis.</comment>


Ask HN: Does this exist or would it appeal? - <AUTHOR>

For ages now I've been looking for this tool, with no success. So I reckon it might be something others would want. Maybe I'll build it. Maybe someone else would like to?
I want to be able to see the bigger picture of the systems I develop. How files connect to each other, the variables they pass, the database tables they update, the functions and classes they use etc. A bit like a database schema but not.
I'd love to be able to zoom in to a line of code or out to show how the api connects externally.
I can picture myself using it on an enormous hi-res touch screen, but guess it should also function on a tablet.
Is there anything like this already or is it something others might use? <comment><USER2> It's a solution in a search of the problem, I think.

If it's a poorly designed system, then the view will be a muddy web of connections. On the other hand, if it's a well designed system, it will be highly modular, with each module being small enough to be readily comprehensible in one go and with very few connections between the modules. So I basically don't see a use for the system that you are describing.

<comment><USER3> Well, I think the muddy pool of connections is what this is a solution for. While I see it as practically impossible to implement, it would be great for huge legacy systems that grew rather than were designed. For instance, all of a sudden my patient certification table is getting weird records appearing in it. I would be able to find that table in this cloud, filter to connections to objects that have changed recently and individually inspect each one to see if it was the source of the problem.

The big problem is automating this to a degree that it's not a full time job to maintain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rational (IBM) have tools that can do it for C/C++ - what language are you looking for ?

</comment><comment><USER5> What you're describing sounds a little bit like LightTable to me (<http://kodowa.com>)

<comment><USER6> What does kodowa do? I really don't understand.

<comment><USER5> Here's a demo <http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/> (2 clicks from the linked page)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wanted something like that !

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I might try a light version as a weekend project sometime soon, cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> don't know of any such tools, so instead I perform the task manually. If I want to better understand how some feature works, I write down in a text file what methods are involved, what method calls which etc. That way at any given time I have to answer fairly simple questions, but the accumulated info in the notes can then be used for more sophisticated reasoning. In other words, _analysis_ :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I find myself doing, but: I don't like paper As things change I find myself rewriting the same stuff over and over It feels like it should be easier/more effective if automated

<comment><USER8> yep, that's why my comment mentioned using a text file for notes, not paper. I usually edit it using IDE rather than text editor to take advantage of the convenient cut-paste a line of text with CTRL-X / CTRL-V without highlighting by mouse.

Then again, my nestgrid project <http://www.nestgrid.org> (the desktop version) is IMHO, among other things. the future of this sort of notes taking but I have not yet gotten around to using it "in production".</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hipmob for iPhone - add live chat to your iPhone app - <AUTHOR> http://www.hipmob.com/documentation/ios.html

<comment><USER2> The functionality is handy, but it is down to the execution of each app developer to decide if this goes the annoying hosting-provider-chat-with-our- advisor thing, or genuine customer/prospect management. There's definitely a gap in the market in real time customer conversations on mobile, which is counter-intuitive of everything being more immediate on the mobile. Integrating with a click-to-call VOIP feature would be neat. Even if it is just a Skype implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There's definitely a gap in the market in real time customer conversations > on mobile

Agreed. We realized this when we users would chat with us live via our site(s), and solving their problem right away would bring them real pleasure. There's currently no way to do this on mobile (outside of a phone call), and we're working on a click-to-call solution like you've mentioned.

The bigger barrier is that a lot of mobile developers are afraid of opening the floodgates - time spent talking to users, is not time spent writing code. We believe that ultimately though, as more folks sell stuff through apps, and start thinking of users as "customers" providing live support this way (similar to how a lot of ecommerce sites on the web have live & phone support) will become more mainstream.

<comment><USER2> As long as big companies are adopting mobile as a service channel, there will be a market for click to call. Their army of reps in a low cost location somewhere won't worry about floodgates opening. It will take you into the large enterprise space where the big bucks are. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We released Android a couple weeks back and we're already seeing as many conversations come in through the app, as we see through the web. We're releasing the iPhone app today, and more stuff in the coming weeks!</comment>