xxgreg

> over the course of a century carbon dioxide is far worse.

Note that the methane molecule isn't removed from the atmosphere after it's "residency time", it oxidises into CO2 and water vapour.

i.e. a Methane molecule causes much more warming over a short timescale, but measured over millenia it's about the same as CO2.

Also - over 100 years the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 28-36x that of CO2.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

Or perhaps China would build more wind and solar instead. China generates more electricity from both wind and solar than nuclear, and the annual installation rates continue to increase.

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

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

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

Phasing out coal in Germany is a political battle against a large entrenched century old industry.

The phase-out looks to be gaining traction in recent years. Deals are being made to retrain coal miners and fund economic redevelopment of heavily coal dependent regions. All players including the power companies, network operators, miners unions, green NGOs, central and regional governments have been in discussion about how to manage the phase-out. A schedule for when plants will be turned off is being written into law.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/spelling-out-coal...

Coal powered electricity generation is dropping and renewable generation is increasing. See chart:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

From:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Where Germany has a bad record on emissions reductions is in other sectors such as transport and heat. Germany has had a centre-right political party running the show for 15 years, progress has been slow. The next election will likely be a CDU-Green coalition which will likely increase ambitions on emissions reductions.

Fixed that for you: "Because they have strong ties to the Chinese government. So they refuse to build backdoors for the NSA".

In the conclusion of a recent Spectre paper published by a number of Google security researchers they write:

"The community has assumed for decades that programming language security enforced with static and dynamic checks could guarantee confidentiality between computations in the same address space. Our work has discovered there are numerous vulnerabilities in today’s languages that when run on today’s CPUs allow construction of the universal read gadget, which completely destroys language-enforced confidentiality"

CloudFlare believes this doesn't apply to them and that they have created defences which allow them to run multiple customers' code in the same address space without leaking memory. I think the burden of proof is on CloudFlare, and I'm yet to see them actually publish any information about this.

> Seattle sits right next to the only temperate rainforest in the world, though

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_rainforest

You might be interested in the section "Global distribution".

> as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs

Chrome tabs usually run in different processes. It sounds like Cloudflare is using JS isolates within the same process to run many customers.

This sounds scary to me. For security, the Chrome team assumes that any code running in the same process has access to the whole address space of that process due to all of the recent speculative execution issues (Spectre/Meltdown).

I've seen comments on HN say that this isn't a problem for cloudflare because they do special things with all of JS timing APIs and a few others to mitigate.

Will be interesting if they are able to make this secure. Millisecond cold startup times will be amazing for development.

> Germany cannot procure gas from anywhere but Russia

"In 2015, 35 percent of gas imports came from Russia, 34 percent from Norway and 29 percent from the Netherlands."

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependen...

The Netherlands imports are in rapid decline. So shares from Norway and Russia will be increasing.

> In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, there were heavy protests in Germany that made the country shut down all its nuclear power plants permanently

In 2000 Germany agreed to phase out nuclear power over ~20 years. A few months before the tsunami at Fukushima, Merkel's government extended these deadlines by ~10 years, but did not cancel phase-out. The public opinion due to the events at Fukushima caused the government to move things back to a similar timeline to the original phase out. However a number of plants were shut immediately.

There's a good timeline here if you're curious to learn more:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/very-brief-timeli...

Edit: The bit in the timeline where is says Merkel cancelled the phase out is misleading. Here's a better article if you want to understand what happened in 2010:

"Merkel stated numbers for the planned extension of the lifespan of nuclear plants in Germany. "Technically, 10 to 15 years are reasonable," she said in an interview with public television station ARD. Instead of phasing out all nuclear plants by 2022 as established in current law, the plants would remain online at least until 2032 and possibly until 2037."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/slowing-the-phas...

Closed the very last __hard coal__ mine.

Unfortunately lignite (brown coal) mining continues.

Hard coal plants do a lot of load following in Germany, especially when it's windy.

For example the black in these charts is hard coal and the green is wind.

https://www.energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources...

The usual answer is "because Fukushima shut down the nuclear industry, duh". But this is obviously wrong as when looking at the data. Much of the increase was between 2000-2010.

I wonder if it's due to the monopoly structures of the energy business shielding them from the changes that the rest of the world has been seeing. I wonder how much of the coal is used for electricity vs steel making etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

Coal isn't just used for electricity generation.

If you look at the 2017 BP energy report numbers the US is still about 20% above Germany in coal consumption per capita. (Not sure when 2018 numbers come out.)

I'm glad to see the US is reducing emissions. However ideally it wouldn't be due to swapping one fossil fuel for another. Makes you wonder what will happen if the prices of coal/gas flip again.

The phase-out plan was designed and signed off by a committee which involves unions, environmental organisations, and power/mining companies. Future governments can use this fact to hold the power companies to account.

What I find even more absurd is the United States, despite producing a huge amount of natural gas, consumes more coal per-capita than Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/604946/per-capita-coal-c...

Edit: sorry that link got pay walled. Try this one.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...

This is 2015 data - and the US has narrowed the gap since.

"Germany have been build coal plants in the past decade as they were phasing out nuclear."

Note that no coal plants have started construction since the events at Fukushima. (But perhaps you're referring to the original phase-out agreement from 2000.)

> After 2011, when Germany decided once and for all to phase out nuclear power, a total of 6.7 GW came into service while coal plants with a capacity of some 3.8 GW were retired. Since planning and construction of a coal-fired power station takes at least three years, capacity added after 2011 had been planned before the accident in Fukushima, Japan – the event that led to Germany’s final nuclear phase-out policy.

> As of 2017, no new lignite-powered stations are planned, according to the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur). The possibly last new hard coal unit ever built in Germany is envisaged to come online in 2018: Uniper’s Datteln 4, with a capacity of 1,055 MW, after years of legal struggle with local environmental organisations.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany

Getting the big power plant and mine operators to agree to a 2038 deadline is meaningful. They were involved in the process for coming up with the phase-out path.

I can't imagine Peabody or Koch signing off on a 2038 deadline in the US.

A commission has been set up to plan for the phase-out of coal in Germany. Seems like all agree coal will be phased out, the debate is more around the timescale, and compensation for those affected.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-coal-exi...

"Today, the Federal Cabinet decided to establish the Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment. By December 2018, the Commission will prepare a roadmap for the phase-out of coal, which will ensure that the short-, medium- and long-term climate targets are achieved. The Commission will also submit proposals for structural development in the affected regions that will serve to strengthen growth and employment."

https://www.bmu.de/en/report/kommission-wachstum-strukturwan...

Given the number of times I've seen pjmlp complain about Flutter choosing Dart. I think he/she could have learned the language in less time than writing all of those comments.

The project originally started with JS. It wasn't possible to make it run fast enough on iOS. iOS requires AOT, or a byte code interpreter. JS isn't very suitable for AOT, and JS byte code interpreters tend to be pretty slow too.

Also quoting one of the project founders: "FWIW what we've seen in usability studies is that people who know JavaScript can pick up Dart without even noticing. (Literally, after an hour in a usability study we'd ask people what language they'd been using and they would respond with surprise, having not even noticed that it was a new language."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477143

Thanks for the links. Had a bit of a google for Helias. Looks like the Wendelstein team are exploring using something called a "Helium Cooled Pebble Bed Blanket", which was designed for ITER. To me it looks like a closed loop heat exchanger using helium. This would then be fed into a typical steam system.

Though I don't really understand the significance of the "pebbles" in this system.

Do you have any links to a high level description of how this would be hooked up to a powerplant? Would this be used to heat water as per a typical fission plant?

So seems similar to GWT which also saw little adoption outside of Google, and was used by the AdWords team. But here we are in 2018 and GWT is still ticking along with regular commits. I guess that means Dart is here to stay too.

And now Flutter is becoming popular and is being used by external developers. "Struggling for survival" is hyperbole today, and pre-Flutter, but agree this was true in the pre-AdWords days.

https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/commits/master

Back to where this started: "is there any feature of Dart that is required by Flutter?"

This is me paraphrasing why the Flutter team think Dart is a good fit:

It's a familiar language for developers who have written JS, Java, C#, or C++. It has types to allow working on large codebases, and efficient AOT compilation. It has tooling for popular IDEs. Does subsecond hot-reload on iOS and Android (also more than just method bodies). It's performance, even on iOS dev mode is sufficient to do all of the layout and widget code. It's open source under liberal license which allows you to embed it your app.

Your claim: "There are plenty of programming languages that offer these applicabilities."

I don't think this is true. Even if you want to count Eiffel that's one, not plenty.

Nor could Eiffel have been used for Flutter since the GPL means you can't embed the VM in your app. Nor is it particular familiar for developers of existing mainstream languages.

Anyways, I agree that there's nothing "special snowflakey" about any of this technology, but no-one else, that I'm aware of, is shipping a language and toolchain that ticks all of these boxes at the moment. Hopefully someone will build this stuff for other popular stacks too.

(I am also aware of Eiffel. I remember hearing about it at uni back in the mid-90s when discussing CBD. I think it may be older than mid-90s too. I also don't think it would have been a very good choice for Flutter.)

Also what's with this whole "Dart struggling for survival" meme of yours. It comes off as kinda unhinged. Feel free to ignore the language. And people who like using it can happily ignore you.

Hopefully Flutter's popularity will bump the priorities of the other VM developers to improve code reloading.

Haven't used Eiffel. Seems to compile to C and CIL, also GPL and likely even less popular than Dart. Jrebel dicontinued android support. Does hotswapagent support android?

Cool watching Fuchsia evolve. It will definitely support Android apps, otherwise google throws away their playstore monopoly.

Well for the mainstream VMs: Hotswap on the JVM is very limited, likewise with edit and continue on the CLR. Xamarin has live XAML updates, only for markup though. V8 is better at hot reloading, but then suffers on the performance front, since it's basically impossible to do efficient AOT for it.

So which languages/platforms do you mean?

So much arm chair theorising, lol. Meanwhile someone has picked up the Dart tool chain and built a compelling framework with it. There is nothing "theoretically" special about this, but it is special in the "practical" sense that it exists, and I can use it today.

I can download it, install it, and get hot-reload on Android and iOS mobile devices while coding. I can swap out code at any layer of the framework since all of the framework's layout code and widgets are implemented in the same language as used to build an app.

Dart's performance characteristics and the combination of the AOT, JIT, and bytecode interpreter make this possible.

I write Clojure for a living. I like the elegance of Lisps. Clojure is mostly tolerable. The thing I like most about it is loading code immediately into the REPL. I hope more of the industry moves towards live programming. (or moves back to live programming, since I guess back in the Smalltalk days it used to be mainstream.)

"is there any feature of Dart that is required by Flutter?"

The Dart platform provides the following features:

- Subsecond hot reload

- AOT to ARM

- Bytecode interpreter for debug mode on IOS

- JIT for debug mode on Android

- GC tuned for Flutter's build methods. (like React's render)

Not aware of any other platform provides all of these features. Bolting these features on to another existing language and platform which wasn't designed with these goals would be hard.