The Next Supermodel  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-both-right-and-left-could-learn-nordic-countries-next-supermodel?fsrc=scn%2Ftw_ec%2Fthe_next_supermodel

<comment><USER2> Nina Schmidt, Danish professor in economics, calculated recently that every Danish baby girl born now, is expected to cost the government almost 300,000 dollars over her lifetime, and that every baby boy born, will contribute with merely 110,000 dollars. <https://www.mm.dk/kvinder-er-en-underskudsforretning> (in Danish).

The Danish government is running huge deficits on the budget and it is hard to see how that will change in the coming years. Had it not been for the oil and gas in the North Sea, which peaked in 2004 and 2000 respectively, we would have been in a much worse situation.

The Danish version of the Nordic model is not sustainable. Not sure how it is in the other Nordic countries.

<comment><USER3> Life is so much more than being a profitable servant. The Danes have more than enough food to feed themselves and enough houses to shelter everyone. Ensuring those basic needs, food and shelter requires at most 10% of the workforce. The remainder 90% can be allocated to schools, hospitals, retirement homes, tv production, professional athletes, accountants, hairdressers, etc.

There is no shortage of either resources or labor. The only problem is how it is allocated.

<comment><USER4> > Life is so much more than being a profitable servant.

It is. So a lot of people rightfully feel a bit screwed over going to work, having 56% marginal tax rate siphoned directly off the paycheck and then another 25% VAT at the till (no "essentials" VAT rate, all is 25%). That is on top of some of the most expensive groceries anywhere in Europe.

The system is setup to benefit those who spread their careers evenly over as many years as possible - indeed, it's very well tuned to make that life very comfortable. But save up for a few years, take a year off, be an entrepreneur? You'll get screwed on all fronts.

The the extend the "servant" idiom is useful, if you work in Denmark, you're as much a servant to the system as you'll ever be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leading the article with Britain under Thatcher as - presumably - a good example (of Government reform).. Not their brightest move to anyone British that grew up in the 80's and not in the "elite" classes. I was not compelled to read further, which is a pity, since the Economist can have some quite incisive articles sometimes.

But then again, I guess I'm not their target audience. I'll try and read it again, once I've stopped gnashing my teeth :/

<comment><USER6> As a Swede that's seen the change of the country growing up I couldn't stand this propagandic piece of nonsense. This article is clearly a right-wing view on what makes a country prosper.

Crime is up mainly because economic differences are bigger now than ever before in my lifetime. My children are going to grow up in a country fixated on doing budget cuts in the government spending. Sick people are no-longer supported by the government and cancer patients are being forced to look for work. Sweden haven't had this many homeless people for decades. This is not a society with moral standards anymore.

Clearly skewed article.

<comment><USER7> You are right that crimes are up*, and theft seems to be one category that has increased[2]. Don't know whether it's because of economic differences though.

That sick people aren't supported by the government and that cancer patients are being forced to look for work is a bit of an exaggeration.

Also, I'd say the main point of the article isn't that Sweden is heaven. Rather, it's trying to highlight some things that has worked well in Sweden (and other Nordic countries), but the article also points out quite a few bad things.

Sweden has many challenges ahead, and some things are worse nowadays compared to 20-30 years ago. Increased crime is certainly one of them. But, there are also things that have improved considerably, our debt is lower now than it used to be, we can still afford a public -- which I'm dearly happy for.

I'd say the article is fairly balanced, but I'd prefer a more critical view on the privatisation of the public sector. Some things have turned out well, but many haven't. There is a Swedish expression for naive, 'blue eyed' -- that word sums up many of our recent privatisations.

[1] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Anm%C3%A4...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Anm%C3%A4lda_brott_1950-2005.svg) [2]: <http://www.brottsrummet.se/sv/brott-och-statistik>

<comment><USER8> "our debt is lower now than it used to be"

Public debt that is. Private debt is higher than ever [0].

[0] [http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Ekonomi/Hushallens- ekono...](http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Ekonomi/Hushallens- ekonomi/Hushallens-skulder/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It might be so that there's a lot of clever Swedes living in London, but as far as I know Stockholm has a rather strong entrepreneurial scene. In my view, the main reasons why a Swedish entrepreneur wouldn't settle in Sweden is because of the high expenses when it comes to housing and consumption; not because of a high tax rate or other directly politically controlled factors per se.

Swedish entrepreneurs get many things in return as well. First of all, because the government covers most of the financing of studies, they don't get out of university with a significant study debt. This is great, because debt inhibits taking risks (i.e. becoming an entrepreneur.) Also, where most startups fail, an 'unfortunate' Swedish entrepreneur has a decent safety net he can count on.

Providing the example that Sweden is cutting on its government expenditure, in order to convince readers of the idea that small government is good is just wrong. Due to the differences in welfare state, a baby born in Sweden has a much greater probability of having good prospects than a baby born in the US or the UK.

<comment><USER8> Yes, more or less. People who care about tax go to Malta. There's also a lot of Swedish entrepreneurs in Berlin and I'm not sure taxes are much lower there, but rents are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started writing a comment about this article, but it got too big, read it here: [http://lazyfairyecon.tumblr.com/post/42208462291/the- economi...](http://lazyfairyecon.tumblr.com/post/42208462291/the-economist- magazine-no-analysis-and-cowardly)

tl;dr: The Economist magazine - no analysis and cowardly opinion. Centrism and charts without context instead

</comment><comment><USER11> The Nordic Model is horrid in the long term.

A better name would be the cut rose model.

Take a demographic that has little more than one child per woman fertility rates, then, with per capita debt double what you have in the US achieve spectacularly glowing vital statistics (happy, healthy, literate people).

Again you have almost two adults per child, their spending plus the spending of the state which, overall (despite recent belt tightening) is twice per capita what you have in the US. Throw in a culture that's been largely mono- ethnic and with a population level that looks like a single relatively small State in the US and you have something that looks pretty right now but is completely unsustainable and will collapse a la Greece or worse as the present demographic of youth come into the workforce with massive debt obligations yet with none of the options their parents had.

</comment><comment><USER12> The full special report (1720 words) is a worthy read. [http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21570840-nordic...](http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21570840-nordic-countries-are-reinventing-their-model-capitalism-says- adrian)

</comment><comment><USER13> Christ, the Ecomonist is hammering HN this weekend. Are they in cahoots with The Atlantic?

<comment><USER14> It's no wonder that people post all the articles in the Nordic feature, but I wonder how they consistently make it to the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fifth post I've seen this week from the Economist and nordic countries' economy.

What's the agenda? And what's with the astroturfing of articles here on HN?

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't Skype from Estonia? Not from one of the Nordic countries they list?

<comment><USER4> From Wikipedia: "Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden. The Skype software was developed by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, who together with Friis and Zennström were also behind the peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa."

All three countries lay claim to Skype, but the Skype main development centre (ie the juicy jobs) is (was? not sure after the sale to Microsoft) in Tallinn, and while Friis and Zennström met in Denmark, they'd moved to Amsterdam by the time they started work on Kazaa (from WP on Janus Friis).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> But OH NOES, they are teh socialist!!11oneeleventy And we all know that socialism always fails because socialist governments go bankrupt; at least, that's what rags like the Economist have been telling me for the last 30 years.

<sarc>This is why free-market, no-social-services USA has such a low public debt/GDP ratio, whereas quasi-socialist (public health: boo!) Australia has high debt/GDP, and socialist hell-holes like Denmark have off-the-scale debt/GDP ratios.</sarc>

Just look at the numbers in my (highly debatable and somewhat cherry picked) loosely ranked list of least to most socialist countries.

Debt to GDP ratios (2010) USA: 73% UK: 86.8% Australia: 30% Canada: 83% Germany: 82% Japan: 208% Finland: 49% Sweden: 38% Denmark: 46% Norway: 49% Singapore: 118.2% France: 86%

DERP. Oh dear, the numbers appear to have little correlation with with how socialist the country is, but may be more related to how 'innovative' a country's banking sector is, how many 'state owned enterprises' there are, national demographics, corporate political capture, and how distorting the tax system is.

Even the neo-liberals at the Economist are starting to understand that government provided social services, transport, health, and education aren't the primary factor that sends countries broke. Perhaps one day they'll notice the elephant in the room: the banking sector.

<comment><USER18> 2010 figures are a bit out of date given the deficits the US has been running (the US has risen over 100%). I think the Economist actually has noticed the banking sector (consider this invited column from 2010:[http://www.economist.com/economics/by-invitation/guest- contr...](http://www.economist.com/economics/by-invitation/guest- contributions/more_substantial_reform_needed)). By and large, the shift in US politics to the right has the Economist looking like a left-of-Democrat newspaper these days. The idea that Obama is a "socialist" is, to anyone versed in a tiny bit of history or political science, laughable.

<comment><USER17> Indeed; thanks for the update on the US.

I believe The Economist paid lip service to the role of the financial sector in the collapse; but that's mostly my opinion; as you say, they definitely covered it to some degree. At least they're apparently starting to realise that chanting "cut public services" over and over isn't the answer.

One problem with the USA left-right false dichotomy is that when you pick a middle point between the Republicans and the Democrats, you end up with something that resembles no political party anywhere else (including in the USA's history); everyone else's right wing parties (and the Republicans in the past) resemble the Democrats or are even further 'left'.

As far as I can tell, there's almost no difference between Obama and (for example) Reagan based on the left/right scale; yet US conservatives generally idolise Reagan and demonise Obama. It's bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why did the mods remove the relevant context from the title?</comment>


NYT Skimmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News

<comment><USER2> This is horrible. Why can't I scroll? Why do I have to use the sidebar to go through the sections? Why do I have to click the tiny arrow thing at the bottom to get to the next page?

<comment><USER3> Hi! Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

You can't scroll because I happen to think scrolling for reading is broken. Scrolling is a mechanism for micro-managing the position of content at a pixel level. As a creative producer, when I'm producing creative, I like this a lot. When I'm reading, I find it borderline exhausting; Scroll, re find position, think about when it's time to scroll again, do so, re find position. Did I scroll to far? So Skimmer uses pages whenever it can. You just activate "next", and there's more to read. "Next." "Next." "Next."

This wouldn't work at all for editing a photo. But if you haven't tried it for reading longform content, you really ought to try it.

Of course, if you really do like the classic web scrolling approach, you can just use nytimes.com, and neither I, nor anyone else at the Times would complain.

<comment><USER4> There are some usability concerns with your implementation.

1) A 24x20 arrow is a tiny target compared to using a scroll wheel anywhere on the page. Scroll bars are also an infinitely wide target when the window is maximized. Fitts' Law and all that.

2) Scrolling requires a lower cognitive load on the user because they don't have to make a decision about turning a page and having everything they're looking at vanish. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html>

3) This one is just a bug. I had to reload Skimmer because the first time it came up the pages would not turn. The animation would play, then it would jump back to the first page. Not all the little article squares were loaded, so that may have had something to do with it. Opera 11.50 on Vista with 80% zoom.

4) Not scrolling, but navigation-related. The site doesn't play nicely with my back button. I had to click the close button in the upper left corner of the screen instead of clicking the back button. Confusing.

<comment><USER5> With your #1, for many people the time to target is instantaneous with a scroll wheel or trackpad. They just scroll without having to search for a target. The time to target is essentially zero, so _any_ sort of control on the page will inevitably be slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find these types of sites that break normal browser behavior to be offensive. Why are developers like this and OnSwipe changing native scrolling in favor of javascript scrolling? What is the benefit, aside from lag, to moving sideways? Web pages aren't magazines, and they shouldn't be. I love javascript but just because something can be done with it, doesn't mean it should be.

<comment><USER3> Hi, Andre Behrens, creator of the app.

I would argue it is the web itself that is broken. At the very least, it's an infinite web, and there's room for an awful lot of stuff in there, even the parts you don't like or understand.

The advantage of moving sideways is that that's how every reading experience a user has ever experienced works, outside their computer. More importantly for us, it's how a newspaper works. The fact that this thing works a lot like a newspaper and they love it is something our customers literally won't shut up about.

The simple truth is, the only people I've ever heard complain about the navigation scheme, scrolling, javascript, etc are on Hacker News.

For instance, what you are calling lag is the animation. Most people find computer navigation hostile because things move around and they don't know where they are going.

Animations give their brain time to process that things are changing. Research over the years suggests that most people think animated transitions are faster, even if they are technically slower.

In the case of scrolling, I find scrolling long documents a hostile user interface. It requires a great deal of user interaction and minute control over position. Pagination simply requires "next", "next", "next". I don't think every web site should work this way. But for long form content, it works a treat.

And for the record, I didn't use JS just because I could. I used it because it helped me solve my design goals.

<comment><USER7> I think you're still designing for print, not the web.

Your aversion to scrolling seems like a personal preference. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean everybody feels that way, or should be denied scrolling.

In a distant past, books used to be scrolls, too ;-)

<comment><USER3> In the part of the past where books were scrolls, almost nobody could read, and most of what was written was data. Interestingly, relatively soon after the arrival of paginated books, public reading becomes commonplace.

Scrolls are for scribes.

<comment><USER8>
      relatively soon after the arrival of paginated books,
      public reading becomes commonplace.

Oh no, it was because of the alphabet changed everything. And because some nations required universal education (technically, first among boys).

Books (in the codex form, versus scrolls) were indeed very helpful in reading, the way dvd is an improvement over a cassette tape. It made navigation easier (reading in one case, listening in the other). So your example is indeed relevant to the point you are making, but not the way you made it. (IMHO.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Skimmer is there since early 2009 [http://www.google.bg/search?q=skimmer+nyt&hl=bg&clie...](http://www.google.bg/search?q=skimmer+nyt&hl=bg&client=firefox-a&hs=xhf&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen- US%3Aofficial&sa=X&ei=CZUuTufaM9C7hAe8wfwr&ved=0CA4QpwUoBg&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A01.01.2009%2Ccd_max%3A01.03.2009&tbm=)

</comment><comment><USER10> Would love to read Hacker news in a similar format.

Any suggestions on the best way to read hacker news on iPad? I tried Flipboard and Feedly but not very happy with them.

<comment><USER11> I've had to rely on Flipboard for now i'm afraid (i know you've mentioned it already). There was the news:yc app, but its iPhone only, so doesnt take advantage of the iPad screen real estate. I suspect the developer is working on an iPad version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not sure what "already did a redesign" means.

This was actually first released in 2009 [1] and then updated mid-year during 2010 [2]. I use it every day, and it has not substantially changed since last summer.

[1] [http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/article- skimme...](http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/article-skimmer- update-all-the-news/)

[2] [http://mashable.com/2010/12/07/new-york-times-google- chrome-...](http://mashable.com/2010/12/07/new-york-times-google-chrome-app/)

<comment><USER13> Presumably a response to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805658>

I for one would like HN headlines to be clear, concise and include context :P

<comment><USER14> I'd appreciate it if more submitters would make the first comment more context on the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The design is ok, but I don't like the way they've broken usability, standards and everything else.

I had hoped people would have learned from the Gawker disaster that requiring javascript to be able to see any content at all is a bad idea. I use the NoScript plugin in firefox and all I got was a blank screen at first.

<comment><USER3> Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

My inbox has been flooded over the years with effusive messages about how much people like the way this works. The only people I've _ever_ seen complain about usability are on hacker news.

Skimmer makes extensive use of standard javascript, css3, and HTML5 technologies. So I'm not sure what standards I've broken.

I think the meaning of the Gawker debacle might be open to interpretation without further data. For one thing, you should know that users with JS disabled make up a vanishingly small part of nytimes.com's readership.

And since Skimmer has enjoyed a largely enthusiastic response from readers, it stands to reason that most users are just fine with a js-heavy app. Most of our readers, anyway.

That said, if you hate this way of doing things, the entirety of nytimes.com is there for your classic web design enjoyment, and I certainly have no problem with your continuing to use it.

I would say maybe try the app for a while before you decide. Try the different layouts. Use the arrow keys. Try it on an iPad.

<comment><USER16> The standard you've broken is to not have some kind of message for those that don't have javascript on. even having a "Please enable javascript to use Skimmer" would be a huge boon to everyone in that boat.

<comment><USER3> It's a very very small boat with only nerds in it.

<comment><USER16> I have been trying out Skimmer and do thing it is certainly a very interesting way to lay things out and get at the news. I have not decided my full opinion on it yet.

However, this unprofessional response from you does make me wary of it. A personal attack like this I feel was entirely uncalled for.

Second, I think this boat may be larger than you believe it to be. According to Mozilla[1], there's nearly 2 million potential browsers out there with some form of JavaScript filtering on by default. This is calculated from the number of browsers checking for updates, not from the download statistics (88 million at current writing). While other browsers[2][3] do not boast this large of a user base they are continuing to grow (3000 a week for chrome).

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?q=noscript&...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?q=noscript&cat=all&x=0&y=0) [2]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn) [3]: [https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/notscript...](https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/notscripts/1.1.0/?display=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think NYT launched it as Google Chrome app.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see a blank white page with 3 links in the bottom right corner that appear to do nothing, and a lone copyright symbol in the bottom left corner.

Using Google Chrome 12.0.742.122 on Mac OS 10.6

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't like that browser back button has no effect.

<comment><USER20> That's easy enough to fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is awesome! Finally something online that gives me an experience which is close to reading an actual physical paper. Except this is a little more convenient because everything is on one page, no awkward folding or anything.

I have been waiting for this a long time, how come periodicals haven't done this before? (Or have they?)

</comment><comment><USER22> This redesign is an interesting step forward for a site who's future you would expect to be based primarily in the tablet scene. After a few moments, I found it particularly easy to use, however I believe integration with scrolling if they're going to use left-right, then let the user drag the page etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is more than that other guy (in other HN topic) was hoping for. it even lets him to change layout in click of a mouse as he see fit. as opposed to spending many hours on desining new layouts and templates like he did.

they did new things but didn't broke old things. i like that approach better

<comment><USER24> I assumed the other guy was angling for a job somewhere rather than trying to get himself a better NY Times layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems to be more suited to tablet use.

</comment><comment><USER26> Skimmer is an experiment that simply re-packaged the content of the times. There are lots of problems with contemporary news design that skimmer didn't even try to address:

• The article is a fundamentally bad unit of news for the internet. [http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-as- luxury-...](http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-as-luxury-or- byproduct/)

• Customization is one thing, but being able to choose from a dozen different layouts is a sign that none of them are likely right. Good design is about what's left out, not overflowing options.

• The complete lack of social/comments/human interaction is distrubing

</comment><comment><USER27> For those curious about the tech behind this: [http://www.quora.com/What-is- the-technology-behind-the-New-Y...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the- technology-behind-the-New-York-Times-HTML5-Chrome-app)

</comment><comment><USER28> It crashes my Android browser.

<comment><USER29> same here, pretty bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Am I the only one who can't read this? I find it almost painful to move my eyes from one headline to the next - there is nothing for my mind to anchor to. As a result, I'm just staring blankly at the screen.

</comment><comment><USER31> I like the interaction, my problem is with layout. There's information overload and lack of hierarchy (at least on the default layout theme). The typographic hierarchy is fantastic, but the squared grid is too standardized to communicate meaning/importance. The eye wants to be guided, not given a ton of equally-sized boxes.

newsmap.jp understands this principle and is a much better design. If only you could combine the hierarchy of newsmap with the typography, aesthetic, and interaction of the NYT skimmer...

<comment><USER3> Go to "layout" and try something like the Overview skin. Is that more what you're looking for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Doesn't seem to work on Epiphany 3.0.4 - but I like it in Firefox.

I don't mind the lack of scrolling, but it would be nice if the mousewheel event was used for page flipping.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find the right-scrolling thing unintuitive. Nice though.

<comment><USER34> from playing with it on my ipad I think it's optimised for tablets, where it's easy to move left and right with a swipe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love experiments like this. We can all learn alot. But the most import thing to take away is that there is no one way an article or website has to be presented.

The articles do remind me a bit of the IHT (International Herald Tribune) from 10 years ago.

<http://www.smokinggun.com/images/pages/page_22.swf> (last slide)

</comment><comment><USER36> This look exactly similar to their Chrome App: <http://www.nytimes.com/chrome/>

</comment><comment><USER37> -1. This is not a redesign, it's their Chrome app.

<comment><USER38> Somewhat amusingly it crashes the Chrome browser on my G2.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, your G2 is not running the Chrome browser. There is almost no relation between Chrome browser and the Android browser, save WebKit. This is puzzling, but true. And unfortunately, the Android browser just isn't up to snuff yet.

<comment><USER38> Well, shit.

At least that explains assorted dopey behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yea well look at this, execution is everything (choose smaller font in upper right on a 1680 by 1050 res monitor) [http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News//6t...](http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News//6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/who- made-that-penny/)

<comment><USER40> They scale that really beautiful. Try resizing the page.

<comment><USER39> On my Firefox at that resolution the last line of the quoted text is guillotined. My feeling is the text should display without requiring the user to do anything. I am sure this is a minor bug, but my experience is the fix sometimes is slow and cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why is it asking access to my local file system (Safari/OS X)? And if I say No the page doesn't show up at all?

<comment><USER6> It caches the articles.

<comment><USER42> And cache it does. Opera brought up a dialog box telling me that 5 MB wasn't enough persistent storage for NYT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Wow, so it's just like the Gridlocked Wordpress theme but way, way slower. Awesome!

[http://themeforest.net/item/gridlocked-minimalistic- wordpres...](http://themeforest.net/item/gridlocked-minimalistic-wordpress- portfolio-theme/245947/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Moving through the sections is ok, but reading an individual article is impractical, imho. There, I prefer the old way of scrolling through the whole article by mouse wheel...much more comfortable than using keys or clicking on small arrows.

</comment><comment><USER42> One more site that absolutely requires JavaScript. Disabling JS gives you a blank white page. While I understand such a decision for interactive apps like Twitter, I think quasi-static websites should at least have plain HTML fallback.

<comment><USER45>
      > I think quasi-static websites should at least
      > have plain HTML fallback.

<http://www.nytimes.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Its kind of like that Gawker redesign that everyone hated.

<comment><USER47> Except it pre-dates it (2009) and there has been nothing but positive feedback (years of it) going Andre's way since it launched.

<comment><USER48> That's because it's totally optional, and anyone who doesn't like it can stick with the default. I'd wager that if they switched the main site tomorrow, there would be some negative feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> That's more or less the same interface that their iPad app was (and maybe still is, I don't have an iPad anymore).

</comment><comment><USER50> Good job, I really like it, but I didn't understand I could use arrow keys until I came here and read comments

</comment><comment><USER51> Now, this design might actually work if they implemented click-dragging for changing pages/sections.

</comment><comment><USER52> If the mouse has a forward and back button, it is very easy to use. Great design for me.

</comment><comment><USER53> When I opened the page, my browser threw this warning.

 _The website "<http://www.nytimes.com"> is requesting 10 MB of disk space to store "Stored content for nytSkimmerSections" as a database on your disk._

I'll pass on that.

edits: formatting.

<comment><USER54> That's fine, it'll still work, you just won't be able to read content offline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The most compelling feature of the skimmer is that it circumvents the paywall!

</comment><comment><USER56> Gleebox doesnt work w/ the new version...anyone has the same problem?

</comment><comment><USER57> Trying it on OSX with Google Chrome. Broken.

This makes me sad.

</comment><comment><USER58> Makes xScope crash to desktop on my HTC Thunderbolt.

</comment><comment><USER59> It was originally made only for Chrome browsers.

</comment><comment><USER60> it's really nice with the keyboard shortcuts

</comment><comment><USER61> Another awful iPad experience.</comment>


How we made FlexJobs into a subscription-based site - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/flexjobs-sara-sutton-fell/ <comment><USER2> Pretty educational. I will pass this information to my team. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> Again! Great interview.</comment>


Is the AGPL best for a federated social network? - <AUTHOR>

I have a small social network that I am working on for friends that I want to turn in to something federated. I've been giving this a bit of thought over the last few month and was wondering what every ones opinions is on licensing. It is released under the AGPL at the moment but I have this itching feeling that it's not open enough for it to work. Has anyone given this any thought? <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Mark. I was thinking that because I would like the whole point to be that you can deploy it anywhere and if you would like to enable the federation (when we get round to writing it). Is their a license you would suggest?

</comment><comment><USER2> I think that the AGPL is great for some purposes - mainly when you don't want to allow commercial forks.

That said, I have received complaints before when I release projects under GPL or AGPL licenses. Some people won't use them.</comment>


Twenty years ago web pioneers met in Seattle to prepare world domination - <AUTHOR> http://www.kevcom.com/words/ht93/

<comment><AUTHOR> HyperText'93 was the first major conference where the web had a substantial presence. Yet the web as a topic was nearly absent from the papers and presentations due to its novelty. There were several posters at the conference though. We also had a BOF session bringing early web pioneers together to discuss how to take it forward.

Ted Nelson, who coined the term 'hypertext', said after his talk that he thought the web was an excellent step forward. By the next year it was everywhere. Twenty years later, many of the good ideas we discussed back then are mainstream.</comment>


The closest thing to a wonder drug is exercise - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/upshot/why-you-should-exercise-no-not-to-lose-weight.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=MostViewed&version=Full&src=mv&WT.nav=MostViewed <comment><USER2> I particularly found the following section in the article very compelling.

 _" Many people will be surprised at how little you need to do to achieve these results. Years ago, in an effort to get in shape, I tried the P90X routine. It proved too hard for me. Later, when I tried Insanity, it beat me so badly that people at work kept asking me if I was ill. Two years ago, I tried P90X3. It was a bit more manageable, but I still couldn't keep it up.

I'm not alone in thinking that physical activity to improve health should be hard. When I hear friends talk about exercising, they discuss running marathons, participating in cross-fit classes or sacrificing themselves on the altar of Soul Cycle. That misses the point, unfortunately. All of these are way, way more than you need to do to get the benefits I've already described.

The recommendations for exercise are 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity for adults, or about 30 minutes each weekday.

Moderate intensity is probably much less than you think. Walking briskly, at 3 to 4 miles per hour or so, qualifies. So does bicycling slower than 10 miles an hour. Anything that gets your heart rate somewhere between 110 and 140 beats per minute is enough. Even vacuuming, mowing the lawn or actively walking your dog might qualify."_

A lot of people abstain from exercise because they think it's "hard" and "scary," when really, 30 minutes of brisk walking to and from the grocery story would do just fine.

<comment><USER3> I actually found that part disappointing. I had sent this to my parents before I read to the end and now wish I could take it back. More and more research is pointing to strength being a leading predictor of mortality.

My father has loss of mobility and strength from disuse of his limbs through their entire ranges of motion. Walking and jogging at the rates indicated do almost nothing for this. He walks 4 miles twice a week with my mom, but can barely stand up from the couch. Human walking is very efficient and requires hardly any strength and that through a fractional range of motion.

Walking and jogging is better than not exercising at all, but on the walking and jogging regimen my father has steadily deteriorated in function as he approaches his 70s. His shoulders and knees have stiffened while his muscles are constantly sore from lack of conditioning.

The other problem is the "brisk" qualifier. Walking "briskly" actually takes significant motivation, and involves either subjectivity or more monitoring than people like to do while their walking. People are rationalization engines, and if you give them a way to skirt the essence by being lazy, they will. In my experience, the objectivity of resistance training is more effective.

<comment><USER4> He should add some basic range of motion exercises. I doubt lifting will help him. Also, walk one mile every day instead of 4 twice a week.

<comment><USER5> Strength training is the best exercise you can do to preserve function into old age. As an example:

ABSTRACT Muscle plays a central role in whole-body protein metabolism by serving as the principal reservoir for amino acids to maintain protein synthesis in vital tissues and organs in the absence of amino acid absorption from the gut and by providing hepatic gluconeogenic precursors. Furthermore, altered muscle metabolism plays a key role in the genesis, and therefore the prevention, of many common pathologic conditions and chronic diseases. Nonetheless, the maintenance of adequate muscle mass, strength, and metabolic function has rarely, if ever, been targeted as a relevant endpoint of recommendations for dietary intake. It is therefore imperative that factors directly related to muscle mass, strength, and metabolic function be included in future studies designed to demonstrate optimal lifestyle behaviors throughout the life span, including physical activity and diet

[http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/3/475.full.pdf](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/3/475.full.pdf)

<comment><USER4> The question is not what's best. Best is to mix strength, endurance, stretching and probably nutrition. People shouldn't pick one and neglect the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had a few occasions where I had to perform some strenuous work even when I was unwell, and in most cases, after the physical labor was concluded, I felt almost miraculously better. On one specific occasion I had a migraine type headache that 3 200 mg Advil's wouldn't touch, but then I was in a situation where I had to walk several miles carrying 50 lbs of gear. Headache was gone after a few miles.

<comment><USER7> That has been my experience as well, going hike when sick usually makes me feel much better during and after. I also recently broke a toe but continued to hike on it and found its level of pain much reduced after each hike compared to a day spent not moving around much. Assuming it wasn't my imagination (I could theorize that it felt better after because it felt worse while hiking on it) I imagine walking increases the bloodflow to the area and may assist with healing faster.

<comment><USER8> Depending on the type and location of the fracture, mobility can aid in healing.

<comment><USER9> I think the modern thought is that it helps almost anything, there's a technical term for this I can't remember, but basically resting up after nearly all injuries is considered worse than than moderate usage as part of the healing process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Anything that gets your heart rate somewhere between 110 and 140 beats per > minute is enough.

There's a related point that people often get really wrong when they take up distance running: you can (and should!) actually run within that easy heart rate range. It may seem unbearably slow at first, but that just means you aren't ready yet to go faster.

When the goal is "faster pace at low effort", it's tempting to think you can train at faster pace + high effort and wait for the effort to fall. But that doesn't reliably work. You're better off training at low pace + low effort and wait for the pace to rise, holding low effort constant. Mostly this is because you (definitely) reduce the risk of getting hurt and (probably) don't waste a bunch of energy training the wrong metabolic pathways.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wait until we get the pill that does what exercise does. Supposedly, many groups are trying to create a pill off this research:

[http://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2815...](http://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131%2815%2900458-1)

<comment><USER7> Just exercise. People are so lazy in that regard it baffles me.

<comment><USER12> What's to be baffled about? Exercise is tiring, time-consuming, and sometimes painful. People generally avoid such activities, absent any overriding motivation.

<comment><USER13> You're doing it wrong.

Exercise can certainly be tiring, if you're training for performance, or rehabilitating an injury. But, a basic yoga class, a few laps of the pool, or walk around the block isn't going to noticeably tire an otherwise healthy adult.

Time-consuming? That's likely short-sighted when you account for reduced longevity, time spent ill, etc. A few hours a week isn't that much time in the overall scheme of things.

And exercise should almost never be painful. The only exceptions would be rehab or training for a specific event.

<comment><USER14> Hours in a weekday: 24 \- Sleep: 7 \- Work: 8 \- Commute: 1 \- Personal maintenance (grooming/eating/etc): 2 \- Be a good dad: 2 \- Put kids to bed: 1 \- Household maintenance (dishes/laundry/etc): 1

What's left: 2 hours. If I spend 30 minutes exercising, that's 25% of my discretionary time every day. That feels pretty time-consuming, even though I do think it's worth it.

<comment><USER15> Your schedule just needs fixing. Designate one parent as the "put kids to bed" and the "household maintenance" for the day, that gives the other an extra 2 hours. Exercising every other day is practically as good or better as every day depending on the exercise.

Though even with 4 hours, depending on the person, every day after work might feel like they need their entire 8 hours of free time between work and sleep just to survive, ideally they'd have more. Technology was supposed to give us more leisure time we can put into things like exercise but here we are still slaving away at desk jobs for 40 hours a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Move more, eat mostly vegetables, sleep enough.

<comment><USER17> Comments like this sounds like saying to a depressed person: "have you tried being happy instead?"

In other words, it's pithy, not helpful and sounds smug and condescending.

We should be able to support maximal health in everyone, regardless of if they live the ideal middle class lifestyle that gives them time to exercise, money to afford food, and the many things that go in to a good nights sleep.

<comment><USER18> For the most part good food costs less than crap food as long as you cook.

<comment><USER19> Depends on where you live and what you are cooking... Living in Phoenix, produce is pretty expensive, as is fish. I can't speak for the rest of the country. I also tend to get produce from Sprouts, Whole Foods, Fry's (kroger) in that order, depending on what it is. I use celeriac, cauliflower, and parsnips regularly as a potato substitute, and it's pretty costly to do so.

I could get my calories from the dollar menu for quite a bit less. My target intake is around 2400-2800/day (metabolic support for 3800 at my size), trying to lose about 2#/week. Though, I'm diabetic, so tend to avoid a lot of fast- food, and often when I do indulge, I get only the sandwich/burger without the bread, with tea and/or water. Though the baked cod at ljs (green beans and broccoli), and chicken and green beans at kfc are serviceable options.

I also make soup a couple times a month, which gives me about a week's worth, give or take.... soup is usually suprisingly low in calories and glycemic load (even vichyssoise subbing the potatoes) but tend to have 3-4 cups to feel sated (usually coming in around 450-600 calories depending on the soup for 4 cups).

A big thing for me is getting a couple snacks in, especially for the afternoon (apple, carrots, nuts, kind bar), which helps with the cravings to overeat later in the day.

<comment><USER18> For a baseline a micdouble has 390 calories, 10 of then so that's 6-7$ / day to hit 2,400-2,800 kcal.

If you go for beans, rice, grain, that's under 1$ per day for 1/2 your calories. Leaving 5-6$ to for the other half. That's plenty for a 500-700 kcal in chicken breast / eggs / other cheap protean, and vegies etc.

PS: 9oz of meat per day will generally cover your protean needs. But, less is fine depending on the rest of your diet.

<comment><USER20> Plus an hour each day of cooking and cleaning up. The median american salary is about 50K, which is about $24 an hour, so lets say it costs $6/7 a day to eat crappy, and $25/30 to eat well.

<comment><USER18> First that's median _household_ income.

Second, eating out 3 times a day takes non zero time and you can spend less than 7 extra hours a week cooking / cleaning / shopping vs. eating at the Golden Arches / microwaveable meals etc. However, this is a case where being efficient tends to end up being boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I get on an exercise kick and do it every day (intense 15 minutes and warm down), after about two weeks, my life gets very smooth. It's fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER22> "23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health" [https://youtu.be/aUaInS6HIGo](https://youtu.be/aUaInS6HIGo)

<comment><USER23> I skimmed the video and couldn't figure it out -- what is it please?

<comment><USER8> Exercise. 30 minutes a day. Mild intensity (e.g. walking).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No. Youth is the real wonder drug. Exercise is a fallback once that stops being effective.

<comment><USER25> So true. In my 20s I did drugs and played in bands. In my 40s I build startups and run marathons. There's nothing like "the countdown" to kick your motivation into gear.

<comment><USER24> Im in my 30s now and am very happy to have skipped the 20s drinking/drugs/smoking phase. Too many of my 30-something friends look like 50-somethings. I just had a full eye exam as part of a security clearance thing for a new job. Supposedly my retinas look like a teenager's. The doc chalked it up to a lack of drugs/alcohol. When I was 20 nobody told me that was a thing. They should.

<comment><USER26> Apologies if this comes off as harsh, but I don't understand how this comments adds value to anyone but yourself. And to me, it seems like you're feeling rather inadequate about the possibility of missing out on experiences many tend to sensationalize.

<comment><USER24> Because this is a forum about sharing knowledge. Young people don't understand the damage certain behaviors can do to their bodies. Some people relate this by demonstrating how past errors are now effecting them later in life. That's the norm. Others explain it by showing that good decisions can actually pay off. I had no idea that eye health was tied to drugs/alcohol use. It's not the sort of thing discussed as once the damage is done there is little point. So I assume others here were equally oblivious.

<comment><USER26> The knowledge you claim to be sharing is a little flimsy isn't it? You took an eye test, great results, and the doctor chalked it up as lack of drugs and alcohol. That is an unbelievably broad statement. So broad, I'd argue it's worthless. Do _all_ drugs and alcohol damage your eyes? In what quantities does this damage take place? What about legal drugs? What about genetics? What about diet and exercise? I fail to see any practical knowledge being passed here. That's why I took the liberty to assume ulterior motives for posting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like to post this as a PSA in HN weight loss threads. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.

1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453))

2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."]([http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full))

3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."]([https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight- watchers/](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/))

4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.]([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker- pope-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat- trap.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)) This is borne out by the above data.

5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/))

Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.

<comment><USER28> Your link to the NYTimes article at [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker- pope-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat- trap.html) is cut off.

I think it's because HN does auto-link shortening and you copy and pasted a previous comment?

<comment><USER27> Thanks! Corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't like the "diet, not exercise, is the key to weight lose" matra because exercise goals(run a 5k in X minutes, bench press X lbs 6 times) in my experience are the far bigger motivators(though I've never been severely overweight).

<comment><USER30> key and motivation are not the same thing, if you have good genetics you can run fast even if you are overweight, as they say after all, you can't out- exercise a bad diet

<comment><USER29> ", if you have good genetics you can run fast even if you are overweight, as they say after all, you can't out-exercise a bad diet"

My entire point is that you won't want to have a bad diet if you're setting serious athletic goals.

<comment><USER31> Excellent point. I find that in a period when I exercise regularly I am more conscious of just how hard it is to burn 500 calories, while in more slothful periods it's really easy to take another piece of cake without thinking about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The revolutionary ion engine that took spacecraft to Ceres - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-03-revolutionary-ion-spacecraft-ceres.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _For example, keeping geostationary satellites in their correct orbit, to counteract the aerodynamic drag from the very tenuous atmosphere 200km above the Earth._

Hmm. Not sure geostationary satellites orbit at that distance, more like... 36,000km.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure it was meant to be parsed like this:

> [Real applications like] For example, (keeping geostationary satellites in > their correct orbit), (to counteract the aerodynamic drag from the very > tenuous atmosphere 200km above the Earth).

Of course there isn't any significant drag at GEO, but you still need to use engines to do station keeping, thanks to things like Earth's shape, other planets and solar winds messing up with your orbit in tiny ways that tend to accumulate. You can't keep a stable orbit forever without correction burns the way you can in Kerbal Space Program (because it doesn't do full n-body simulation).

More at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_station- keeping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_station-keeping).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An interesting description of Dawn's ion engine and its pros and cons: [http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journal_12_06.asp#ips](http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journal_12_06.asp#ips) (Marc Rayman, Chief Engineer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, 2006).

<comment><USER4> "The force of the ion thruster on the spacecraft is comparable to the weight of a single sheet of paper."

That is magnificent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this a good ripost to the hand wringing articles bemoaning the end of technology development; a breakthrough technology taking man's instruments and machines to a place that they couldn't previously have got to?

This explains a lot of the recent interest in LEO for telecoms I guess, I should imagine that the control that this gives you coupled with the longevity would enable you to do a lot more for a lot less than is currently the case.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's really a breakthrough - Hall Effect Thrusters and similar ion propulsion have been around for a while. The Soviets used them in the 70's. Its more the technology has reached a level of maturity and relability that it is now a good choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mention saving fuel as a cost saving. But the real issue is, what is the maximum mission delta-v? Fuel needs grow geometrically with needed acceleration over the mission. The ion engine can quadruple the mission possibilities or duration.

<comment><USER8> For those curious: Exhaust velocity is linearly related to impulse per fuel mass, so if you double the exhaust velocity, you double the engine's total impulse (force*burn time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ion drives are pretty amazing. I'm curious about what the fuel availability's like though. Xenon's not very abundant on Earth, and it's _really_ not very abundant in space, as mentioned in the article.

Its properities are highly useful: exceptionally nonreactive, not radioactive (e.g., Radon), but a heavy atom (so good specific impulse for this class of drive, and a high mass/volume ratio).

Anyone know what practical alternatives _do_ exist?

<comment><USER10> Wikipedia says Bismuth looks promising for Hall Effect-based thrusters, and VASIMR has been tested using both Xenon and Argon, the latter of which is in abundant supply, at least on Earth. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Propellants](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Propellants))

<comment><USER9> Argon does make sense -- it's higher up the table than xenon -- by _two_ rows, which tends to mean higher abundance. It's also a Nobel gas (largely inert). But a _lot_ lighter -- atomic weight ~40 vs. 131 -- only 30% the mass per atom.

But found with natural gas as a result of nuclear decay within the Earth's crust / mantel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a proposal for a manned mission to Ceres using nuclear powered ion engines: [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131118-ceres...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131118-ceres- asteroid-solar-system-space-science/).

</comment><comment><USER11> Deep Space 1, the first spacecraft to use an ion drive, also had Lisp on board: [https://baltazaar.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/a-story-about- lis...](https://baltazaar.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/a-story-about-lisp-remote- debugging/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The only down shot is the acceleration of an ion engine is god awful. But seems the best way to go if you don't care about time needed to get going (and slow down).</comment>


Learning CSS - <AUTHOR> http://xn--h4hg.ws/2015/07/20/learning-css/

<comment><USER2> Nice post! It's cool to see someone I follow on Twitter actively writing blogs - and posting on HN. I've reached out to you in the past about CSS & vim before.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not mentioned: read a book</comment>


Some mother cells kick DNA damage 'down the road' to offspring - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-mother-cells-dna-road-offspring.html <comment><USER2> Journal Reference: [http://www.cell.com/cell- reports/supplemental/S2211-1247(17)...](http://www.cell.com/cell- reports/supplemental/S2211-1247\(17\)30566-1)

Edit:

Also, I can't believe people are still getting away with not including scatter plots of x vs y when they claim x is correlated with (or causes) y. This paper needs a plot of daughter cell cycle length vs mother cell DNA damage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Biology is not my forte so more background on what cell dividing is and when it happens can be found here:

[https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/howgeneswork/cellsdivide](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/howgeneswork/cellsdivide)

<comment><USER3> The process of the mother cells kicking the DNA damage down the road happens through the cell division stage according to the article. That is why I posted the above link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I honestly don't understand why do some people think breast milk isn't superior to commercial formula milk.It took evolution eons to perfect it and here we humans think it's not good enough to opt for commercial product?

<comment><USER5> Um, do you know any of the people making the decision you're voicing an opinion on? I ask because when I've heard thoughts on this subject the thinking was nothing to do with the commercial product being "superior". Rather it was much more convenient, and also "good enough" to overcome any concerns about baby health and development.

<comment><USER6> Some people can't or do not want to take on the burden of providing breast milk. To make themselves feel better they sometimes demonize the choice of breast milk. Now in their minds they no longer have suffer the consequences of the choice they made for their child.</comment></comment></comment>


Detection of primordial gravitational waves: it was a mistake. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25762-big-bang-breakthrough-team-backpedals-on-major-result.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Here the TED talk where physicist Allan Adams explains what the discovery was about, with illustrations by XKCD's Randall Munroe: [http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_adams_the_discovery_that_coul...](http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_adams_the_discovery_that_could_rewrite_physics)

It was nice as it lasted...</comment>


Unsure if I understand TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14636178/unsure-if-i-understand-transactionawarepersistencemanagerfactoryproxy/14636231#14636231 <comment><USER2> Long names are a Good Thing as far as I'm concerned. Having spent FAR more time than I care to admit working with IBM crap that uses name like QXMGRTBL and QWRKQITM, I'll take TransactionAwarePersistanceManagerFactoryProxy any day... and twice on Sunday.

The only bit about this that even strikes me as a little bit unreasonable is the "Proxy" bit at the end. Not sure why you need another level of Proxy on top of TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactory, but it's not like you type that name particularly often. Most likely it's referenced once in a Spring config file somewhere, and given a bean name of "persistenceManagerFactory" which is what would be referenced in code once at most. Hell, probably not even that... that's probably wired into another bean that just gives you the PersistenceManager... which you might not actually ever reference in code either, since Spring can auto generate JPA implementation classes that use JPQL queries, etc., and eliminate the need for most hand coding of anything JPA related.

OK, sure, just to look at it, at first blush, the name looks long and silly, but when you actually think about what it is and how it's used, it's not exactly a big deal.

<comment><USER3> The problem is not the name, but the ridiculous overdesign of which it is a symptom.

At which point I bring you the story of the king's toaster [1] (which is a cautionary tale, not an aspirational story, just in case that should be unclear to anybody).

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said.

The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"

The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.

With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.

The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself'. The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.

Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.

We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface.

When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.

Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."

The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat, and they all lived happily ever after.

[1] [http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html)

<comment><USER2> It's an amusing story and a good cautionary tale, no doubt. But not all complex designs are over-engineering. Some problems are complex and require complex solutions. And sometimes complexity in one place is just a way of moving it from somewhere else, because somebody thought that tradeoff made their life better.

See what I said below about how much I prefer JPQL and Spring Data... Personally, I really do not have a problem with this.

<comment><USER4> > Some problems are complex and require complex solutions.

And yet some very complex solutions were solved with very simple languages, before Java was conceived.

<comment><USER5> Java is not a complicated language. Something about its affordances pushes developers into these giant labyrinthine swamps of abstraction violation, but the language isn't that complicated, either syntactically or semantically.

<comment><USER6> The heavy emphasis on classes is what is strange about it. Many programmers don't realize the strangeness since they've used classes their entire careers. A class isn't really a procedural concept. Nothing in a processor knows what a class is. It's more of a modeling language with an assumption that you'll architect your program to group similar methods into abstract trees of domain concepts, with your data at the leaves (instances).

So we're stuck with these complicated compile-time rules for defining everything in terms of a procedural language. We come up with complicated templates and generics for getting one set of methods to work with two types of data. Objects are needlessly serialized and deserialized to pass between systems, and programmers are needlessly spending time writing such methods.

I'm surprised that scala's paradigm of having actors work on data hasn't caught on more. When you separate them from the start, new modules are way easier to right, and integration time drops to near zero.

<comment><USER7> If I had to pin down Java's problem on one thing, I would say that its problem is really C.

Or more accurately, the problem is that Java was a new language shoehorned into being "like" a language that was never meant to hold the concepts that Java demands. In some cases this manifests itself in more syntactical ways; C's pragmatic but unsophisticated approach typing works well for C, but starts to become a real burden when you start adding more sophisticated concepts onto the language. (Were generics _really_ a concept that were ever appropriate for something like C? Generics deserve a more considered treatment; a language with structure and syntax designed with them in mind.) In other cases the impact is more clear but inexplicable; _" In Java Everything is an Object"_(tm)... except for the things that are not.

The end result is a language that is ugly and clumsy to work with without some pretty advanced tooling, all for reasons that _really_ have no business being real problems. Shameful (primarily cosmetic) flaws forced upon Java by the business decision: _" make it reminiscent of C"_.

I have the same complaint about C++. Had Java and C++ not burdened themselves with the design requirement of looking like C, they would be much better languages. Languages that stray further from the mold, like Scala or Go (I am thinking particularly of their abandonment of C inspired defines, in favor of a more Pascal approach), are more pleasant to work with for it. Perhaps this damages adoption.. but that is another matter I think.

<comment><USER8> I don't think I agree with your analysis. C# was originally designed to look a lot more like Java than Java ever looked like C, but it hasn't been hampered by that and has evolved to be a much more advanced language than Java has. It also doesn't have the over-engineering culture that Java has (aside from a number of "Enterprise-Class" add-on libraries Microsoft has tried to push out.)

The same could be said about Ruby and it's relationship to Perl and Python. It has cultural roots in those languages, but is often regarded to be better rather than worse. (As a die-hard Perl developer I disagree, but I don't hold a grudge.) All three are also considered to be C-like languages too, and they don't suffer the problems Java has.

One could argue that Java's problem was that it was designed for programming VCRs, DVD players, and Cable-TV boxes, and similar equipment, but the got stretched and pulled into environments it just wasn't ready for. That, plus Sun's hyper-aggressive marketing machine to turn Java into the language-for- everything, created the beast that it has become.

My personal view is that Sun turned Java into a programming language for charge-by-the-hour consultants. The culture of over-engineering exists because it takes a lot more time to design software that way, more time and larger teams to implement software that way, and specialized hard-to-transfer knowledge to maintain that kind of software. This all benefits the consultants and hurts the companies paying for the software to be built, which only makes sense if Sun was intentionally pushing Java that way.

<comment><USER7> I would say that all of those languages, while "officially" C-like (as Go is), all stray much further from C than Java or C++ (as Go has). _Particularly_ Perl, Python, and Ruby, which are dynamically typed which singlehandedly eliminates neutralizes a great deal of "C's baggage".

I wouldn't describe C# as a language that I like, but I think it too has benifited from breaking the mold of C more than Java did (though I attribute most of it's superiority to its designers simply making better decisions in several places). Named and optional arguments stand out in my mind as ways C# did something that had no precedence in C, while Java _still_ has not. (There is that double squiggly bracket trick, but you have to admit that is _pretty shoddy_ ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Java does not own the monopole on this one...

Ever heard of kBluetoothAMPManagerCreatePhysicalLinkResponseAMPDisconnectedPhysicalLinkRequestReceived

or

__AVAILABLE_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_0_AND_LATER_BUT_DEPRECATED_IN_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_5

or

cairo_atsui_font_face_create_for_atsu_font_id_REPLACED_BY_cairo_quartz_font_face_create_for_atsu_font_id

?

<comment><USER10> I'm not familiar with the first or the third, but the second example you cited is working as intended. No 3rd-party developer _ever_ types this (and I don't know if anyone at all ever types this or if it's machine-generated), and the long name is meant as a form of documentation for anyone reading the header file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Remember that Sun led by example.

com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter, anyone?

[http://javadoc.bugaco.com/com/sun/java/swing/plaf/nimbus/Int...](http://javadoc.bugaco.com/com/sun/java/swing/plaf/nimbus/InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter.html)

<comment><USER12> It's an internal, automatically generated class. No programmer is ever going to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Alternatively, this is why Java needs a real namespace mechanism. "package" doesn't cut it. See: namespaces in C# or C++, or alternately modules in ML.

One thing I like about DI implemented in a language itself is that is that it negates the need to make factories in all cases. So, essentially, imagine if Java had C# style namespace and this was done using Guice-style DI.

      bind(Persistance::Manager.class).toProvider(
        new Provider<>() {
          public Persistance::Manager get() {
            new Persistence::Manager::TransactionAware();
          }
      });

</comment><comment><USER14> I've come back to Java recently via Play Framework. To my surprise, Java can be a joy to use, so long as you avoid old-school frameworks, like Spring, entirely.

<comment><USER15> I'm starting to look more at play on the side, except for the SCala stuff I keep seeing, as long as I can use it from Java and not have to deal with Scala's weird syntax then I think Play could be the new best hope (since it's not clear what Google plans to do with GWT - which rocked).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Camel notation looks awful with so many words. C++ style with underscores is way more readable.

<comment><USER17> snake_case is 20% easier to read ( reference: [http://bit.ly/11T1FWY](http://bit.ly/11T1FWY) )

<comment><USER16> I always thought it's rather self explanatory. Reading a text without distance between the words requires more effort. Capital letters don't help much for that. Underscore gives a space between the words, which allows more fluent reading.

<comment><USER18> It might be self-explanatory, but there's a vast gulf between self-explanatory and _correct_.

<comment><USER16> In this case it's not only correct, it's easy to test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not necessarily a "Java" problem so much as it is a Spring problem.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's not limited to Java. We have a rule in Chromium where if your class name contains the same word twice you have to do a shot.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is obviously trolling but I'll take a stab at actually answering the question, based on the javadoc[0]. (I have never used Spring or JDO and haven't done Java server-side programming since 2002.)

The JDO framework has an interface called PersistenceManagerFactory that is used to... well, create objects that manage persistence. Spring has its own thread-bound PersistenceManager abstraction that you need to fiddle with when you're doing transactions. This class lets you use the former's interface but decorated with the latter's behavior, so code that is designed for JDO doesn't need to be modified to call the Spring APIs explicitly.

(Am I close??)

[0] [http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.7/api/org/spr...](http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.7/api/org/springframework/orm/jdo/TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Who keeps changing the title, it was "And this, dear children, is why Java should stop taking drugs"?

Quoting part of an article as the title is not necessarily editorialization, and when the link is not actually an article, but a SO question, the original "title" may not be particularly interesting or informative.

Obviously inventing provocative titles simply to spark a flame-war is not on, but in this case the title was humorous (and interesting). The new title which is literally someones question on SO seems out of place on the front page, and not really the point of discussion.

Interesting titles can form part of the culture of a site like this, and over- zealous editing of titles damages the sense of community. It's probably the thing I dislike most about HN right now.

<comment><USER10> The original title was garbage. The only thing at all it told me was that the article was somehow related to Java. I did click on it when it was the original title, and was very disappointed to see it was just a bad answer (which has at this point been deleted by the SO mods) to a stupid question.

The new title, on the other hand, tells me this is going to be about absurdly long factory classes, almost certainly using Java, and that I should probably be expecting humor rather than, say, a long article about an obscure interaction in Java that produces amusing results (which is what I had _hoped_ I was getting with the original title).

It also happens to be the title of the linked "article" as well, which I believe is what HN says you should be using rather than editorialized titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always maintained that java itself is not so bad. It's the things people have done with it that make angels cry. People are the problem, not java. Leave java alone.

<comment><USER24> Languages aren't just syntax rules; they're ecosystems. And unless you want to build everything from scratch, you're going to need to use libraries and frameworks from that ecosystem, and you'll have to play by their rules. Further, you'll probably end up impedance-matching your code to those frameworks, just to make your architecture cleaner. Later, you'll seek help on some aspect of your project and most of the respondents' advice will follow the basic patterns of How Java is Written. Then you're going to hire additional programmers with lots of Java experience to help you build it, and they'll come with a bunch of notions on what the best practices are. So I'm not sure there's a practical distinction between "Java itself" and "things people have done with it". Java _is_ people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's not so bad. If you haven't seen the Windows 8 API documentation yet, you should go ahead and have a laugh: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/br21137...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/br211377.aspx)

When most of your method/class names overflow your table of contents' width, you've got a serious problem.

<comment><USER26> The problem here isn't their class names. It's that everyone at the empire decided to go metro a few years back and made a bunch of sites like msdn a pain to use but with a nicer font and color pallet.

My guess is no one bothered to include UX in their annual commitments when they got the memo for the design change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't understood the question either...

I mean, it has so much jargon on it, that what I felt is what I think my mom feels when I am talking with my dad...

I read, and re-read, and read again... And the only thing that I would think was: "omgwhy? wtf? WHY THIS EXISTS IN FIRST PLACE???"

</comment><comment><USER28> _The problem with object-oriented languages is they 've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle._ \- Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER29> People are so easily trolled. This looks like a generated class name in Spring.

</comment><comment><USER30> knowing absolutely nothing about language design (and not many languages) other than occasional experiments in notepad... is there no language which attempts to allow spaces, maybe with quotes, for better legibility?

like instead of

        org.springframework.orm.jdo.TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy

something like

        org.'spring framework'.orm.jdo.'transaction aware persistence manager factory proxy'

or is that just a terrible idea?

<comment><USER31> I personally think that's worse. The original declaration is easier to read and immediately recognisable as to what it is, I can see clearly that it's a namespace and a class. The second version would require me to think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For my money, "ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean" is the most mind-blowing class name ever authored, especially when you realize it is actually useful on occasion!

</comment><comment><USER22> And I thought C++ led to complex abstractions.

It makes me wonder if it was just accident that Java developed this way, or if it could have been an xml free, simple interface language.

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of one of mine: [http://stackoverflow.com/q/137060/12048](http://stackoverflow.com/q/137060/12048)

</comment><comment><USER34> And people still complain about ObjC long method names...

<comment><AUTHOR> lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow. Naming really _is_ importantant.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5944101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5944101)

:)

</comment><comment><USER36> How did this post's title not get auto-modified?

</comment><comment><USER37> I kind of preferred the original title on HN that quoted a comment:

"And this, dear children, is why Java should stop taking drugs."</comment>


Triso particles have safety features that may power a new generation of reactors - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-balls-triso-fuel/ <comment><USER2> TRISO fuel has some very interesting capabilities as noted in the article. It also has some challenges. Traditionally, the challenges are:

* Very low power density requiring absolutely massive reactor vessels for a certain power level

* Very expensive fuel fabrication ($10k/kg), hopefully can be brought down

* Difficult to reprocess (this is probably fine until nuclear produces like 50% of the world's energy, at which we will begin to challenge the fuel resources)

Also traditionally, these are high temperature gas-cooled reactors. A new twist is the molten-salt cooled (basically just melted salt, not fluid fuel like in full-on molten salt reactors) TRISO-fueled reactors. These are called FHRs.

<comment><USER3> TRISO sounds like another example of solving the wrong problem. Nuclear's big problem isn't safety, it's cost.

TRISO will also make dealing with spent fuel more difficult, as the dry casks are going to have to be much larger.

<comment><USER4> But the high cost of nuclear power is probably due to the extraordinary (and perhaps very excessive) safety procedures, no? It's not like the raw material or basic principles are very expensive. So I presume the idea is to hope that having a more intrinsically safe fuel will allow those expensive safety procedures to be relaxed (although, given the sclerotic nature of nuclear regulation, probably not).

<comment><USER3> The safety procedures don't help the cost, but even the non-nuclear part of a nuclear power plant is expensive. The "nuclear island" is just 1/3rd the cost of a nuclear power plant. All externally heated thermal power plants have become uncompetitive now. Not just nuclear, but also coal, geothermal, and concentrating solar thermal.

So, TRISO is depending not just on the nuclear island being cheaper, but the non-nuclear part somehow becoming less expensive. This probably involves very high temperature, for example for nuclear air Brayton. But any time you go to higher temperature material problems rapidly accumulate.

In any case, there will always be a cost premium to the nuclear part of a nuclear power plant, if only because it has to be very reliable because it can't be repaired if something serious breaks. In (say) a coal fired power plant one can send workers into the guts of the shut down plant to fix or replace things. In a reactor, I don't think that's possible, even if the fuel has been removed. The residual radioactivity is too high.

<comment><USER4> Thanks.

> All externally heated thermal power plants have become uncompetitive now. > Not just nuclear, but also coal, geothermal, and concentrating solar thermal

Are you saying that an externally heated power plant is unlikely to be cost competitive even if the source of energy is _free_? If not, your overall comment doesn't make sense to me. If so, that's an extraordinary that could very well be true, but I haven't heard anyone argue it and I'd be _extremely_ interested in further reading/links/citations.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is the direction things are going in. The remaining thermal power technology that's still (for the moment) viable is combustion turbines, which are internally heated (combined cycle does have an externally heated bottoming cycle, but only 1/3 the power output goes through that, and it shares the generator with the combustion turbine proper.) But even combustion turbine sales are falling; that's what's gotten General Electric in such trouble lately.

<comment><USER4> Much appreciated! Are there any forward-looking doc's you can recommend that discuss this in more depth, especially any that try to get at the basic physics or economics? It's truly startling to me, and to the extent it's true it really changes the way people should think about future energy tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because the article isn't clear: no, this isn't about pebble bed reactors. This is about a type of fuel where a little bit of uranium has been encased in a number of protective layers, such that the fuel will remain safely contained in its tiny packaging even at very high temperatures. You take a bunch of these poppy-seed-sized things and embed them in graphite rods or pellets, which both keeps them in place and acts as a moderator for the reaction. These can then be used in a variety of reactors, including (but not limited to) pebble bed reactors.

<comment><USER6> The confusing part about the article was that it initially stated that they were very small, and then went on to speak about billiard ball size. Does that mean that the protective coating is very thick, or that there's a range of sizes for the actual uranium mass?

I remember reading in one of Feyman's biographies about how he visited an early fuel plant, and was horrified to see them storing what amounted to a near a critical mass in barrels, in long rows. we've come some way since.

<comment><USER5> The TRISO fuel particles are very small -- about a millimeter or so in diameter. The "billiard ball sized" fuel pebbles designed for the Xe-100 reactor are graphite balls with a bunch of TRISO fuel particles embedded in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went through a phase of reading about nuclear power and in particular the nuclear accidents. It feels like we kinda got to the Comet¹ stage of Nuclear power and gave up. We still learn lessons from each accident, for example Fukushima has resulted in Passive auto recombiners being installed which convert hydrogen back to water. It also added provisions for using mobile generation and cooling (fire trucks).

I certainly don't have the answer but to how we can make nuclear power fool proof but I do feel like we should still be asking the question.

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

<comment><USER8> Use of passive auto recombiners (PARs) started over 30 years ago on a large scale and has been state of the art for more than two decades now: [https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...](https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/33/020/33020098.pdf)

However, many operators didn't want to spend the money, which is why Fukushima didn't have a PAR at the time of the accident. The problem with Fukushima is that I fear we do not learn from accidents. Otherwise, Fukushima wouldn't even have been in operation at the time of the accident as it is an old reactor model well past its design life. The location was, as we have known before the accident, poorly chosen. Safety measures, such as PARs, seawalls and properly redundant power supplies were skipped or badly implemented due to the cost involved. All this was known before the accident, however neither the operator nor the national oversight took any action before it was too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Most nuclear reactors today operate well below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit

I have a background in chemical engineering and still had no clue that nuclear reactors operate at the temperature of a pizza oven. That's wild.

<comment><USER10> What's amazing to me is that the kind of graphite used in nuclear reactors doesn't burn until it's white hot, somewhere around 1650°C.

<comment><USER8> That is not a property of the graphite, its a property of the atmosphere (CO₂, He) or lack thereof (H₂O, molten salts) around the graphite. The Chernobyl core started burning as soon as external atmosphere hit the graphite after an explosion.

<comment><USER10> Actually, it is a property of graphite. You may be surprised.

[http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/03/does-nuclear- grade-...](http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/03/does-nuclear-grade- graphite-burn.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is conflating two very different kinds of "meltdown". A meltdown during actual reactor operation is the kind the article is talking about in the first paragraph, and the kind that the type of reactor discussed in the article is designed to make impossible, according to the rest of the article.

But the meltdown at Fukushima was caused by lack of decay heat removal after shutdown, which is different from what could or could not happen during actual reactor operation. So there are _two_ kinds of "prevent meltdown" that are required, not one. The article does not talk at all about how, or whether, the type of reactor it discusses would prevent a meltdown of the second kind, the kind that happened at Fukushima.

<comment><USER12> So apparently Fukishima's power failed and the generators were damaged by the tsumami.

Why can't nuclear reactors at least have the option to power themselves?

<comment><USER13> Normally they do, but when you shut it down you need something to get rid of the decay heat. That's why nuclear power plants have these emergency generators. Those failed at Fukushima, leading to the meltdown.

Some newer designs opt for passive decay heat removal, eg through convection.

<comment><USER14> In American PWR designs decay heat removal post loss of power is accomplished by natural circulation. Height and temperature differences between the steam generators and the reactor vessel produce flow of primary liquid between the two. Heat is rejected via the secondary system. The limiting factor becomes make up water to the secondary side of the steam generators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing that' slightly worrying:

> But during the INL tests, Demkowicz demonstrated that triso could withstand > reactor temperatures over 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

> ...

> Sell says. "It is physically impossible—as in, against the laws of > physics—for triso to melt in a reactor,"

3200 F = 1760 C

> The first phase lasted only several seconds, with temperatures locally > exceeding 2,600 °C, when a zirconium-uranium-oxide melt formed from no more > than 30% of the core.[1]

It seems like it's yet to be demonstrated that Triso fuel can withstand the highest recorded temperature inside a nuclear reactor. I get that the physically impossible quote is probably partially puffery, but IMO puffery is not appropriate when it comes to nuclear reactors.

___

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_(nuclear_reactor)#Chern...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_\(nuclear_reactor\)#Chernobyl_accident)

</comment><comment><USER16> All the major incidents with nuclear power are despite dozens of safety systems, redundancies, clever designs etc.

This is because nuclear power is tightly coupled and complex. Humans have never mastered such systems. We have them and we accept they fail sometimes (eg fires at conventional power plants: 200 plus years of engineering and they still happen). But with nuclear that isn't an option.

This is why people are unconvinced by clever new fuels or "it's totally guaranteed this time" engineering. You can't fix a systems/human nature problem with new fuel cells.

<comment><USER17> France is choke-full of nuclear power plants. Can you remember a major nuclear power incident in last, say, 30 years?

I think that reactor standardization really paid off there. They have few types, a wide operation experience, and apparently well thought-out procedures.

This, of course, is hard to achieve without a massive rollout planned ahead.

<comment><USER7> One thing I like to remember is that there are still 10 RMBK reactors in operation. Fundamentally the same design as the reactor 4 at Chernobyl. In fact, one thing a lot of people don't realise, the 3 other reactors at Chernobyl were restarted and ran until 2000 (actually, reactor 2 shut down earlier because of a non-nuclear accident with its generator) when the EU paid to have them shutdown.

<comment><USER16> The Chernobyl reactors were all perfectly safe. It was almost impossible for them to suffer a meltdown. That's the problem here: greed and incompetence and pride can't be fixed with better cooling systems. Today's perfect reactor is just as dangerous as the perfect reactor at Chernobyl once someone wants a bonus or needs to improve efficiency or doesn't want to admit he is confused and turn the thing off...

<comment><USER7> Perfectly safe is a long stretch. As originally installed they had numerous design faults, the control rods operated too slowly, the carbon tips of the control rods could locally increase reactivity when they were being inserted, the reactor was too large and consequently hard to control, they lacked the secondary containment structures which were common place in western reactors of the era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this the same thing as "pebble bed" reactors I read about many years ago?

<comment><USER19> I also believe it's true of liquid fluoride thorium reactors: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Safety)

I remember watching a documentary on nuclear power in the US and how the thorium reactor was the focus of a lot of research in the 70s, but I can't remember for sure.

<comment><USER5> To clarify: molten fueled reactors (like LFTRs) trivially can't have their fuel accidentally melt, because their fuel is already molten. (And there are some nice options for dumping their fuel into a subcritical passively-cooled configuration in case of an emergency.) This is different from TRISO fuel, which isn't supposed to be molten in normal operation but which structurally limits the spread of fuel and fission products at high temperatures.

<comment><USER2> They can melt. They all do during fuel synthesis. They're pre-melted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone speak to the implications for this type of Triso fuel and radioactive waste? Is there less radioactive waste once it is spent or how similar is it to other types of nuclear fuel in that regard?

<comment><USER13> It ought to be safer since the fission products are encased in the protective and non-corroding triso structure. That being said, used LWR fuel rods are also enclosed in protective cylinders (see eg the designs for the Finnish Onkalo storage site). Both safe enough per current best knowledge.

If one wants to do some fancier recycling and reprocessing rather than once through, I understand this is relatively undeveloped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the exact differences between this "new generation" of reactors and the failed AVR(1) and THTR-300(2)

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

2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300)

</comment><comment><USER22> What ever happened to thorium based nuclear energy?

</comment><comment><USER23> Capitalism being what it is, it doesn't matter how much this improves safety, newer plants will keep pushing for tighter and tighter safety tolerances chasing after efficiencies until this is just as risky as the current fuel.</comment>


WebGL Path Tracing - <AUTHOR> http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

<comment><USER2> This crashes for me (FF4, Win7).

I would have like to have seen it working, the image on the home page looks nice <http://madebyevan.com/#webgl-path-tracing>

<comment><USER3> really cool but completely hangs my computer for 1 minute after some interaction. chrome on macosx.

<comment><USER4> Same here, also Chrome on OS X. Had to manually hold down power button.

I appreciate this isn't the fault of the poster, but flagging this just so people know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thoroughly impressed. I didn't expect it to be so interactive! Lots of fun to be had with reflective surfaces and 'hiding' the light underneath a pyramid.

(using Webkit r83831 on 2009 13" MBP, works a treat!)</comment>


Ubuntu BlueBorne security update status - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/BlueBorne <comment><AUTHOR> Is it normal that the fix takes so long to push out?

Today marks one week since the kernel fix landed in the Linux git repository, and may have been known by Ubuntu's security folk earlier during the embargo period.

This is after all a pretty bad category of bug: remotely exploitable, no- interaction-required, un-firewallable kernel bug. And there's a simple localized fix.

Anyone know about other distributions?</comment>


Rate our app: iRewardChart on iPhone (free version) - <AUTHOR>

We launched our iPhone app for parents (geeks or otherwise) with young kids last month. Its a simple system to reward your kids on their good behavior and chores! Please install the Free version, even if you aren't a parent, and feel free to suggest features/bugs/enhancement request. Download & other links below. <comment><AUTHOR> iTunes link: <http://itunes.com/apps/iRewardChartLite>

TechCrunch: <http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/18/irewardchart-iphone/></comment>