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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

This has to be the most opaque title I’ve ever seen on Hacker News. For anyone wondering, this is about a potential development in cold fusion reactors.

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Standard (hot) fusion, not cold fusion.

Having read a few articles previous on fusion, I'm familiar with the words tokamak and stellarator, so it was obvious to me that it was about fusion from the title.

I wonder how many other titles you would consider opaque if you didn't happen to know the terms?

Hot fusion, not cold fusion. It runs at a hundred million degrees C.

Hot fusion is a well-known process that powers the sun. Cold fusion is a supposed low-temperature process that most scientists doubt is real, and if it is real we don't understand the physics of it.

Sometimes I like to say that the 15 million kelvin core of the sun is actually a cold fusion reactor, on the grounds that fusion within it is dominated by quantum tunnelling, rather than classical kinematics, overcoming the Columb barrier.

Also like to surprise people with a fusion process that works at temperatures in the single-digit kelvin range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

But yes, the linked reactor isn’t that, and the thing commonly referred to as “cold fusion” probably isn’t real.

More opaque than every nth HN title referring to some cutely-monikered code framework that presses all the wrong mental buttons in those oblivious to its nature? Surely not.

Splark: a new phlinto framework built in blenk.

And the thread is just Blenk fans arguing with Fobl fans.

As a fan of Fobl and their work on Spoogum, i'm not sure you would call it 'arguing' more sharing the obvious downsides of the dinglepop pipeline when combined with the grumpkin anti-pattern.

Meh. This was all solved decades ago with the turbo encabulator.

Others are pointing out that this is (very) hot fusion. But I'd just say that if you know the first thing about fusion, the title is actually very simple, ie, stellarators and tokamaks are competing designs for magnetic confinement fusion. Of course, no one is born knowing anything about nuclear physics, and it's not really a casual subject of conversation, so there might be a lesson here that people could take about writing in domain specific jargon and how inaccessible it is for outsiders.

And if you know nothing about fusion, the title seems to be crafted of made up words.

But if you take one glance at the comments, it becomes clear. So I guess the title was sufficient to pique my interest, which, after all, is the purpose of a title.

> cold fusion

This isn't "cold".

How did you get cold anything from this?!

I dunno I thought hot fusion was a waste of time unless you’re doing it inside of a star. So I just assumed it was about cold fusion.

You have no idea what you're talking about, but felt you need to leave a comment , waste everyone's time and potentially mislead someone.

The plasma in a fusion reactor is actually hotter than even the core of the sun, afaik.

There's nothing cold about this.

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