Hacker News Reader

Worse than the Superconducting Supercollider?

Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.

Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.

Esoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s.

Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.

I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.

Documentation etc: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/glish/papers/index.html

I've read a lot of the science funded in the early engineering of the project around the magnets eventually rolled into the LHC, so there's that.

Otherwise it seems like we spent a lot of money on a 17-mile hole in the ground in North Texas.

The effective electricity rate in MA is already $0.37/kWh. How much further could it go?

That’s a joke right?

I see no reason why it couldn't rise to the equivalent of $37/mWs under the looming hyperinflation.

Cries in PG&E

Or that space telescope?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com