Startups used to be a way to create your own solution to a non-trivial problem, and make money off selling it to people that will benefit from it and enjoy it. It was a highly rewarding experience for those who didn't want to play corporate politics (or at least, play it to a lesser extent).
But then it attracted too many people that would just emulate the KPI in order to get funded, and instead of letting it crash and rise from the ashes, we lowered the interest rates and bailed out a bunch of "too big to fail" banks in 2008, pretty much guaranteeing viability of shitty investments. Oh, and when people started calling it out in 2012 with Occupy Wall Street, they were redirected using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer techniques.
So now it's a shell of former self. Founders try to create something that looks like a great company. VCs pour money in, hoping to resell to the next fool. Founders are now more like figureheads than idea-driven people. Most big successes (Uber, AirBnb) could be attributed more to regulatory capture than a revolutional way of doing something.
Smart people understand it very well and it doesn't make you very optimistic. You can pretend well enough to convince an average layperson, but deep inside you know the game is fake, and it kinda builds up. Notably, game-changers that are appreciated by users (rather than speculative investors) now mostly come from China (e.g. TikTok), because the vibe there (with all the downsides) is now closer to the "good old SV" than the current SV.
To be fair to Uber and AirBnB, they did introduce some genuinely novel innovations. But the business model does heavily rely on the non-technological aspects for their competitive advantage.
The cynicism is an op, or something - because I don’t have the evidence to say it’s definitively an “op” - as the kids say.
But legitimately, there is a strong cynical bubble in the zeitgeist now, and it’s dangerous.
There are a few things this cynicism says.
1. “People suck and are terrible.”
2. “People are stupid.”
3. “We can’t change anything.”
4. “Great calamity is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it.”
This is a lie. The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be, people aren’t terrible - if people were more bad than good on average we’d still be hitting each other with clubs and going Conan on people. We aren’t stupid - it’s just that the stupid people are louder. And while the possibilities for great calamity exist, they are not guaranteed.
This may be more emergent than anything else, but trust your neighbors, treat people nicely, and you - yes individually each of you - need to start trying to make the world better.
Nobody is going to do it for us. I know what it’s like to feel bleak, trust me I do - but that’s just a call to action. It’s not “techno optimism” we need - it’s optimism, there are radical solutions that don’t use a single transistor.
In reading about the Weimar Republic, I encountered an observation (I think it was by Hannah Arendt) that cynicism emerges from a society that no longer believes in itself. In trying to confirm the quote, I found perhaps a better quote to explain (found on Arend't wiki article):
>> ...leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness
This all sounds rather familiar and feels like more a cultural question than one of personal virtue.
I also think that cynicism is the path of least resistance.
It’s dangerous to be optimistic. When you’re excited about stuff and it doesn’t work out culturally you look like a moron, when you’re a cynic if you’re wrong nobody cares because we’re all lucky that things didn’t turn out shittily. When things do turn out poorly you look like a genius because “you predicted the calamity.”
The “easy money” comes from being a pessimist because you don’t have to commit to anything.
Thank you. I think we really do need a return to some form of optimism. Growing up I was told endlessly that by now we'd be out of fossil fuels and things would be terrible for a variety of other reasons. Some of that has come to pass, some not, some has reversed (ozone).
Sometimes the positive effects of sustained efforts have had a real impact over time. Having a cynical and defeatist attitude works against that. I don't know the roots of those attitudes exactly, but from the people I know they're not related to climate change, the country's leader, cultural issues, etc. It's more like those are a good reason for them to be more vocal about their underlying cynicism which has different roots (family life, general temperament, etc).
We have real problems. Very big ones. A defeatist attitude will ensure we end up in the worst of all outcomes. I wonder if we just have too much change too fast for our society to keep up and figure out ways to function better with the new constraints.
"The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be"
Better then when and by what meassure?
It is quite subjective I think.
One satirical person offered this quote:
We optimized for the minimum of individual luck, to get the maximum of people.
I am not fully behind this quote, it is satirical, but I think there is too much truth behind it. Ecologically things look bad. Geopolitical the same.
But yes, the sun is still shining and spring is nice and we do are progressing to new technological heights every day. It is just how this awesome tech is used overwhelmingly, that is a bummer.
Hm. From the description I am not really convinced. It starts with people think "rich gets richer, poor gets poorer" ... and then states this is all wrong.
Isn't this book about the low-hanging fruit stuff like universal access to healthy drinking water? And isn't it about basically the course of history through the 20th century compared to the previous millennium? That's much more macro, world-wide kind of stuff than whether or not startups in developed countries nowadays feel almost exclusively exploitative versus how they felt innovative 15, 20 years ago.
They were just as exploitative 15 years ago (or 20, or 50).
We can still fix things. We can still change the world - and for the better. Largely we have to slough off the outdated and pernicious idea that “more money == better” first.
Fwiw to my memory, 8 years ago people complained about cynicism and negativism on HN just as much. Eg people never stopped quoting that famous top comment on Dropbox's HN launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224).
I strongly doubt this attitude ever changed. It's always been
- first comments are dismissive gut reactions
- a bit later some nuanced/positive comments arrive
- depending on mood and luck, one or the other kind floats to the top
I mean how often have you read a super positive top comment that starts out complaining about all the negativism in the thread? It's super commonplace! HN is still full of optimism and excitement, and also middlebrow dismissal. Just give it a few hours for every topic.
I can confirm this. If I happen to contradict some cynical comment, 5 minutes and I'm at minus-something. Then the positives start to build back up. Always. There could be some psychological explanation to this, why the quick reaction is negative and the better thought-of positive?
I genuinely think HN has been overrun by influence operations designed to make people resigned to the world being terrible. It sounds stupid and paranoid, but I can’t explain the patterns I observe any other way. I think the way HN is operated makes it impossible to avoid: no real authentication other than an email address. It is (or at least was) a juicy target due to the concentration of influential people in an influential industry.
I’m specifically not going to post examples because that will invite the same old conversations to be rehashed, and any one example is useless anyways. People will claim confirmation bias and they may even be right.
It's admittedly a 12 year old YouTube, but I always liked watching this when I was feeling especially cynical about the overall trajectory of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Before clicking that link I wondered what I would recommend to people who were feeling cynical about the world. It's a book by Hans Rosling - Factfulness, and it turns out that's the guy in your video.
I think it’s worth examining what we believe to be “reality”.
If your reality is the Internet, the apocalypse is upon us.
I’ve spent the past year reducing Internet one and increasing immersion in my local community and the world looks like a very different (better) place.
Honestly I think in this case the subject is so complex you'd have to be an expert to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The techno optimists really do a lot of grifting these days (especially on YouTube), and the knee-jerk cynics are predictably annoying as well. The fact that a knowledgeable fusion insider is criticizing this speaks volumes to me, and his criticisms seem on point.
I'm a lay person so my take on it is effectively of zero value. And I don't think I'm the only one in this thread in that position :)
I'll be updating this in the coming weeks, and one of the features is going to be a toggle switch to "Make HN Happy" where it detects negative sentiments and rewords the comment into something constructive:
Look for the article "Geeks, mops, and sociopaths" which has been posted here a few times. We are currently in the sociopath part of the cycle, and people recognize that.
I'm not rich, I'm broke af. Doesn't stop me from choosing happiness. What's the alternative? Spend my life in misery? I tried that for a decade, didn't work out well for me.
Now I choose to be happy. I choose to be the best I can be. Moping around sure as shit didn't fix my problems
Because the world has gotten markedly more shit for the vast majority of people, and YC is directly one of the reasons. Most of us have seen our disposable income drop, seen bullshit companies making connected dog feeders get funded dozens of millions by money-centralizing VCs, and overall have seen the world get more and more unfair, unbalanced and unjust. Major climate disruption is underway, wars are hitting all over the globe and governments are all getting more and more undemocratic.
Needless to say, the world doesn't exactly lend itself to positivity about yet another fucking startup promising you fusion powered dog feeders.
You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here.
However when it comes to startups dealing with biology or physics you’re literally battling the laws of nature. You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV (nano diamonds for cancer detection? Gut Micro biome sequencing?) and it’s looking like similar story with fusion.
In this case if you want real reasons why Helion looks suspect check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise: https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw
I won’t get my life against someone figuring out fusion in the next two decades but I wouldn’t bet money towards it either.
There are worse ways to destroy capital, and the VC capital destruction is going to happen anyways. Might as well put it towards fusion.
The criticisms raised in the video are fair, and also the first youtube comment has an interesting point:
> Why would he allow this reckless behavior? Why would he himself be standing right there with them next to the device while it was in operation? Then I watched the video more closely again - he never takes the grid potential higher than 6kV. There was no fusion and no x-rays that could penetrate the wall of the vessel or the glass window. It was a ruse. You need to have a potential difference on the grids of AT LEAST 30kV to even begin seeing any fusion reactions at all. He knows enough physics to be aware of all of this. He was therefore deliberately allowing them, and the credulous audience, to believe they were actually doing fusion reactions when nothing of the sort was happening at all - they were merely staring at a pretty glowing pink cool deuterium plasma in a bottle. I believe this to be very suspicious behavior from a CEO of a commercial nuclear fusion company.
Where "actual science" is defined (from a NSF/big granter perspective) by various science in-groups to benefit their respective communities. Having served my time in the grant-funded science world, this is hardly a panacea.
Yes, and what about using it to actually feed hungry people and build shelter for those that have none.
I feel like the cynicism is coming from the bullshit we can all see before our eyes. We just don't know how to change it because we're all so entrenched in capitalism and corporations.
I did make the SV (especially YC) VC funding distinction. Biotech has long been funded by VC money and while not perfect it worked better than what is happening now. I was particularly a fan of 3rd Rock ventures, their investments all followed (in my opinion) the most scientifically sound ideas.
> You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV
Yes, SV funds incredibly stupid biotechs. It also passes over really good biotechs. I think it's because honest founders are likely to do good work, and won't pitch with a $$ ask that doesn't make sense, and SV equity raises don't make sense for such capital intensive activities.
Yes but spacex didn’t promise anything physicists said is impossible. Engineers saying impossible is different from physicists saying it.
The equivalent would be if spacex said something that violated the rocket equation. They didn’t. And also while they promise the Mars, they can settle for the largest reusable rocket as a consolation prize. In fields like biotech and fusion there’s often no consolation prize. So spacex was well managed with the right level of optimism and practicality. Not so here.
Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real.
Helion can be a cool company with real tech, and this deal a marketing play, both possibly true.
> Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real.
This guideline needs to be revised: It is extremely easy to be a cynic compared to being an optimist, and the rewards for being such a cynic are mismatched, as per piloto_ciego's outline on the advantages that being a pessimist/cynic has over being an optimist.
The "cynicism" is what happens when you have a bunch of armchair critics who've done nothing significant in their life except engage in pointless nitpicking and flame wars on internet, see that their fantasies are being brought to life by more determined and talented people than they can ever be.
Or, maybe, seeing hustlers destroy last shreds of credibility of the incredible promise of fusion - which is what this is until they actually go energy positive in a sustainable manner. SpaceX also wasn't worth praise until they actually put payloads into orbit. Now they are worth extreme praise and people hate them instead. Everything is backwards.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I feel like there's been a marked decrease in the quality of comments here over the past couple of months. Lots of snark and vitriol. Maybe it's just the layoffs and people are venting here for some reason?
Why is the tech real this time? Why is it an awesome company?
Give us some substance. Dismissing critics as cynics doesn't tell me anything as a layman. A good exchange between a booster and a debunker adds something to the discussion.
>Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
Sure, but people here realize
there is a difference between hand waving away the complexity of a potential software implementation and hand waving away how you are going to overcome the strong nuclear force.
> Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real
How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.
This whole comment section is bizarre. It looks like the fusion-promoting bots and shills are out in full force. It might even be a pump-and-dump scheme.
There is certainly nothing about what Helion is willing to say about the technology that inspires confidence, and many glaring problems with their approach.
A healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely warranted.
The cynicism may come from the fact that no one has been able to generate system level break even on a fusion plant in a lab setting after decades of work. How can one be anything but skeptical that it'll be commercially available five years from now?
A lot of it is because nobody has actually really tried in a serious enough way. Nuclear technology would also be a pipe dream without the insane frenzy of mutually assured destruction.
I think it’s a lot easier to be cynical and negative than to put yourself out there a bit and say something positive. Or - at least that’s something I’ve struggled with personally.
"Microsoft's CEO Says No Raises for Full-Time Employees This Year" and then in the article [1]:
Satya Nadella, whose salary ballooned to $55 million last year, wrote to employees: “As a senior leadership team, we don’t take this decision lightly."
More and more of this, ad infinitum.
It's really hard to be excited about tech when your told your job is soon to be replaced with little recourse, "CDC data shows U.S. teen girls ‘in crisis’ with unprecedented rise in suicidal behavior", AI might kill humanity within 5 years etc.
I'm keeping an open mind about it all and the future, but there is also a thing called toxic positivity and I think this is what's creating the cynicism. There's not enough actual healthy critical debate and skepticism about tech and where it's taking us and it's role in causing the issues mentioned above. It's just rich people getting richer at the moment. So I can't say I blame people for being cynical, even though it's not very healthy or constructive.
What percentage of the negative comments come from chatbots that are part of foreign influence campaigns to spread negativity in this largely Western world (or even largely US) forum?
I feel some guilt about this, in that the vast majority of my comments are critical in some way. Mostly because I'm trying to dig deeper into the truth and expand the discussion into a meta-analysis. That style of big-picture thinking often reveals conceptual flaws, which is the point!
Anyway, we have the math and experimental evidence now to show that fusion reactors work, and it's just a scaling problem. Sure, it may cost a billion dollars, but Elon Musk could pay that 100 times over. Not only that, but science has become distracted by expensive projects, to the point that it would pour another billion into a particle accelerator rather than fund 1000 research projects for $1 million each. So the main thing stopping us is that financial barrier between the status quo and scalable progress for everyone. And the power of choice in the hands of the wealthy to deny us the catalyst (money) to overcome that barrier.
I thought that life was a meritocracy until the Dot Bomb, Great Recession and concentration of wealth post-pandemic revealed that a few key players pull all of the strings. The amounts of money we're used to dealing with are largely meaningless. So our life's work at countless dead-end jobs is just a rounding error for the wealthy.
Cynical comments could be seen as the outward projection of the jealousy we feel having to go to a job every day instead of doing meaningful deep work on projects like this. And sure, fusion might deliver 1 cent/kWh electricity. But it only costs 10 cents now. So it will not trigger a material improvement in quality of life like we might expect. Meanwhile a fusion plant might make another billion dollars for its owner, which is a material improvement. This is how injustice works as the primary commodity throughout history, and why seemingly egalitarian tech like fusion could and should be looked at with healthy skepticism. Because the people pursuing it would do more for us by taking on the real challenges like ending subjugation and empowering others (through education, automation, UBI, etc), but for all their wealth, they're fixated on egocentric solutions which may never materialize.
It's 2023. Even if they had a reactor ready and functional today, the NRC would not give them the approval by 2028, and once they gave them the approval, it would take them a decade to build a reactor.
In a world where the NRC does not exists maybe this makes sense, but that's (thankfully) not the world we have.
The infamous Dropbox thread is a good example of old HN culture - shitting on a billion dollar business idea because the tech problem is “so easy to solve I could build it over a weekend”.
In this thread people are arguing that the problem is too hard.
The general attitude in my circles is none of those technologies have had any positive impact on our or our loved one’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all “cool and awesome”, but when you put it into perspective of “is life easier” or “has our happiness increased”, my answer would be a strong no.
This general skepticism leads to younger generation to be more cynical, especially when things that have been promised just don’t work out. I can’t really support it with any reliable data, as I mentioned, could just be my circles and nobody else.
Hopefully fusion will work out though! That I’m looking forward to.
Here's one with an impact: one of my relatives was diagnosed seven years ago with stage 4 melanoma, which a couple decades ago was a one-year death sentence. She got three doses of immunotherapy, her tumors shrank, and last year her oncologist said don't even bother coming in for scans anymore, you're fine.
I'm reminded of a coworker who asked what has been more impactful of an invention to humanity than Steve Jobs and the iPhone and was speechless when I was like how about pasteurization, penicillin, or vaccination?
Perhaps many of tomorrow pasteurizations, penicillins, or vaccinations may never materialized if their inventors wouldn't have accessed to information at their fingertips, via their smartphones
Well what's the fraction of success stories compared to the promises given? And: The success stories you're mentioning would have been there (even earlier in many cases) if they'd be consistently developed over time.
Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space. Maybe it's just people being fed up with glossy techbro marketing whilst being fired because of "past overhiring"?
Too often I've seen people inventing things in a lab being denigrated for not commercialising and scaling their invention. That's the top comment on any battery announcement by a research group.
> Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space.
You're doing the opposite, taking credit away from people who've actually succeeded at scale. I don't like Twitter guy at all, but even I can give credit to Tesla and SpaceX for becoming commercially successful with fundamentally new ideas (electric cars, reusable rockets). That's a massive achievement.
Even Helion, the company this thread is about - they'd be nothing if they didn't actually operate a commercial power plant outputting 50MW at some point. If they fail despite trying everything and someone else does it years later are you going to be on that thread saying "yeah, commercialising fusion is no big deal, Helion had a prototype going years ago"? No you wouldn't, because it's actually a massive deal if someone could do that.
Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way.
That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternative approaches to fusion) or this weird "we were able to beam particles through a wormhole" story some months ago, make me very skeptic about the current startup economy.
It all reminds me so much of the movie "Don't look up".
Helion has built six reactors. Their sixth maintained a vacuum for 16 months while doing thousands of fusion shots, exceeding 100 million degrees. Now they're building their seventh reactor, which will attempt net electricity in 2024.
NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1% efficient. Equivalent lasers today are over 20% efficient, so their results were not as bad as many articles made out. They're still off by a factor of five, but also they got a 230% jump in output by increasing the laser power only 8%.
How does resetting the chamber after a pulse work? I would naively assume waste products are produced and probably need to be removed eventually, if not on every full "engine cycle".
How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?
I think you're on to something. A lot of it comes down to the expectation and what people feel they were promised.
I think people were sold/sold themselves on unrealistic expectations, but that doesn't mean that everything is shit. They're just jumping from one unrealistic extreme to another.
We don't live in some post scarcity Jetsons future, but that was never realistic. People are disappointed that they don't have what's the homes and Families they saw in the TV shows growing up, but those were always fiction and not an accurate depiction of how most people lived
From [0]
‘ This is a binding agreement that has financial penalties if we can’t build a fusion system,” Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley tells The Verge. “We’ve committed to be able to build a system and sell it commercially to [Microsoft].”
Assuming the financial penalties are a significant fraction (i.e they are, say, greater than 5%) of the agreement value, I would interpret it as a more serious / confident commitment and expression of intent and viability, than just a contract that’s hope + way to support.
Isn't their plan B being an economical way of generating helium-3? Their power generation plan sounds dubious but the helium-3 production might make some sense.
It's like taking an idea hostage. If you fail to pull it off, you make sure that nobody else has the chance to try it without first paying you for that privilege. It's supposed to help somehow.
Intellectual Property - so there might be trade secrets, patents, etc developed in the course of research. Even if the business goes bust, they might have learned valuable lessons.
They definitely have valuable IP already: whatever slide deck/demo reel/kompromat they used to pull this nonsense off is clearly worth its weight in unobtanium.
It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.
If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.
I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.
This announcement has nothing to do with physics. As stated, it's just an agreement for Microsoft to buy electricity, and not obviously an agreement to do so at any particular price. And why make this move now? Is Helion afraid that no one would buy their electricity? It's literally the most fungible commodity ever and we're heading into an era of unprecedented demand for charging EVs. Anyone offering reliable, environmentally friendly in 2028 will have no problem selling all they can produce. And why pick a specific customer at all? That's a weird way to sell bulk electricity, which is distributed by grids that cover millions of consumers. I could see Microsoft needing to make such an agreement before Constellation might be willing to finance new transmission from the grid to a remote Azure data center, but nothing in this announcement suggests that's the case. The only plausible explanation for this move is financial--Helion is going to leverage Microsoft's name to lure investment--and/or some sort of carbon credit/greenwashing play by Constellation & Microsoft.
It’s a sliding scale in the end. You can have a fusion system that barely breaks even, or only slightly breaks even, and then is still more expensive than traditional energy sources after factoring in fixed costs and maintenance.
Even then, are there no sales possible? I'd think that a borderline fusion reactor would be commercially viable if only for research. You could probably sell a dozen of those around the world. But unless something really weird's going on with the physics, a borderline system is just the mark 1, and everyone expects mark 2 to be more efficient.
For example, a DT fusion reactor based on ITER would be two orders of magnitude larger (in volume and mass) than a fission reactor of the same power output. It might "work" in some technical sense, but be completely economically impractical.
So it sounds like Microsoft have committed to buy the first system when it's ready. Without investing anything now? So i guess they get a good discount on that.
Elsewhere, i saw that Helion already raised billions.
So what's in it for Helion? If they can make it happen, and build a sustained fusion system, they will surely be able to sell the energy/systems once ready, and don't really need to sell it at discounted rates now. I could imagine a deal with Microsoft is good for marketing, but seems way too soon for that isn't it?
Sounds like Altman used his personal relationship with Microsoft CEO to do this meaningless PR stunt, so he can more easily pursaude stupid money to actually invest in this.
I mean I won’t put MY money in to Helion. From whatever I’ve read it’s not that simple for Helion to get their reactor to work and even if they did it likely won’t produce meaningful net power. But let’s see.
Of course you shouldn't unless you have billions lying dedicated for leaving your legacy. It is a semi moonshot semi charity project, I don't think even investors would disagree with this. Similar to what OpenAI was like 4 years ago when it raised $1B as a non profit.
Well as a small investor there's no way to get in really. But if they sold shares at a modest valuation I'd give it a punt.
I mean I kind of agree that the microsoft thing is probably a bit of a stunt give that I think they haven't generated any net electrical output at all yet. But I think they have a reasonable chance of getting it working at some point.
Having watched a short documentary on ITER it seems like an incredible waste. A bunch of mismanagement and bureaucratic nonsense. As an American, it seemed like exactly what we would expect from a Euro-based project.
By the time any actual work can be done at ITER, won't the technology have progressed beyond they design they are trying to test?
This is one of those all too common misunderstandings of how engineering works. There's some idea that once designs and theory are done, that engineering is some kind of straight forward act of stamp collecting and that the best thing is always to wait until the problems are worked out on paper before we start to build.
But in fact the engineering itself is exploratory. And often times, to understand something, you just have to start building.
That's what ITER is about. When the project started, we had gone about as far as theory and design could take us. You can see the same thing with other unproven fusion designs getting underway as well including the one at Lawrence Livermore.
Right... But given how quickly our understanding is evolving on how we can create fusion, did it make sense to take on a project this big and settle on a specific design type?
I don't think that was the case when ITER was conceived or started. The flood of fusion news we see is relatively recent.
And to be perfectly frank, a lot of it bursts onto the scene with sensational claims, never to be heard from again. At the end of ITER, there will be a thing. And probably, it will do most of what it was projected to do. We can't say the same for almost any of these other advances, compelling as they may sound.
Lastly, I'll point out this. "Breakthroughs" are rarely made in isolation. Are you so sure that without the billions that have gone into Lawrence Livermore, ITER and such that these other "breakthroughs" would even be happening? If there is no market for nuclear engineers, there will be fewer nuclear engineers. There's fewer people to bounce ideas off of and peer review your work. There's fewer people to come up with the small innovations that add up to a big result. There's fewer colleagues to get you that next gig where your team might beat a hard problem.
While you’re probably right about GP’s cynical tone, this announcement does seem fairly meaningless. Does Helion have a working prototype that can be reasonably moved into production? Or is that still years away?
> Their sixth reactor achieved 100M degree temps, ran for 16 months under vacuum, did thousands of fusion shots, and demonstrated D-He3 fusion.
I don't have anything near the expertise to evaluate Helions approach, but I know enough about fusion to say that just because you have a design that can achieve fusion conditions does not mean the approach could even theoretically lead to a power plant. e.g. electrostatic fusors
Lasers are really inefficient (poor at transforming electrical energy into light energy). They got more energy out than they put into the pellet, but nowhere near as much energy as they put into the lasers. Which means that turning that experiment into commercial fusion is... "not straightforward".
NIF's lasers are only 1% efficient but they date back to the 1990s. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient. If they had modern lasers they'd have produced fusion power of about 20% of the input power.
They seem to scale well, too. In their big shot they increased the laser power by 8% and output went up 230%.
That said, compared to Helion it'd still be a lot harder to make a practical reactor with NIF's approach.
In a world drowning in self-interested promotional 'puffing," calling this cynicism is in itself cynical.
I prefer to see what your referring to as HN's community hype-filter.
Maybe people are getting desperate enough for meaningful progress on environmental stuff they've decided to throw money at the problem on the theory that if we don't find real solutions soon, we're all dead anyway.
(A la the scene in The Titanic: "You're money won't do me any good at the bottom of the ocean.")
So, Microsoft is buying power generated from a Fusion plant that 1. doesnt exist today, and 2. is not even proven to be possible in practical terms(I mean net gain of power from a fusion plant). This kind of PR notice only serves to confuse people who care and fuel the idea that fusion could very well be vapourware.
Why not just say "Microsoft commits some money for us to research if Fusion will be possible in ways we can think of"?
Because it doesn't cost MS a bean until Helion have something working, but to Helion it means they can raise money for the actual construction of the first-production machine with the investors knowing someone will pay them for it if it works.
You're making the mistake of thinking the person you were replying to was actually wondering why they would do this - and not just jumping to their own cynical conclusions (which they did before "asking" their question) and cathartically posting them here.
No, engaging with good faith isn't a mistake, but the person you were replying to admitted in the sentence before their question that they already had decided what the answer was. This is a common communication pattern I try avoiding engagement with since it's set up to sound like a person is asking a question when they're actually making a statement. (Though agreed that it's not always a fruitless effort.)
I agree with almost everything in your post, but the way you posted this also makes me recognize a feeling I had for too long, maybe it’s time to take a break and get a few deep breaths?
It’s always a bummer to open a thread like this and realize all I can do is open, skim, and promptly exit. I have zero expertise on fusion power so I don’t have much to add in a top level comment - but all the top level comments are not communicating from a perspective of expertise, just broadcasting cynicism. I have this queasy feeling sometimes that HN is really not a healthy social media community any more than the others I have quit.
I’ve learned a lot about fusion power in previous threads on the subject - all you can learn here is how bitter and cynical some people are about this particular company’s efforts.
One thing I'm trying to live lately is it's okay to have reactions and share them.
There's this weird thing with the richer society I've moved into from being in tech, where people think being anesthetized is the same as being happy.
No psychologist I've met advises what I see people assume: you must always hold back negative thoughts.
They then apply techniques for reducing stress from overwhelming thoughts to advise eliminating all negative thought.
Yes, I was cynical and frustrated from so much of PR fluff pieces that imply one thing only end up being smoke & mirrors. I did however genuinely ask “why not say it like it is?!”
Sorry, I do not subscribe to the idea that everybody should just ignore and move on when they see nonsense.. If nobody cares, then what is the point of our collective existence as a society? As an exaggerated example, if we all stopped caring whether a business claiming to do something can actually do it or not, doesn’t it incentivise every business to just lie and deceive as their way of business? Is that the world we should be looking forward to?
I'm referring to scenarios where the nonsense is affecting your psychological well being. If you're in a situation where you see nonsense, see a way to refute or diffuse it, and without it causing an emotional response in that moment, then obviously "block and move on" has different consequential implications and isn't a good formula. But the duty to tell the truth only is actionable if you're not plunged into irrationality or weak arguments because of the stress or emotional frustration overwhelming you.
while not every comment deserves a reply, or your attention, silencing every opposing viewpoint is a great way to end up isolated and without contextual diversity.
I read the comment as being about silencing low value noise from the knee jerk “this news doesn’t mean anything because companies bad news fake nothing to see here” crowd.
If an opposing viewpoint doesn’t have any thoughtful, well reasoned proponents, maybe it’s not that interesting of a viewpoint?
I only recommend people blocking things that they can't handle. If you can't handle opposing viewpoints, that's a big problem, but telling you that you can solve that problem by forcing yourself to be exposed to them is mistaking the symptom for the disease. The cure for that isn't to read opposing opinions but to read arguments as to why emotional reactions to such things is not the path to a well examined life.
> Because it doesn't cost MS a bean until Helion have something working
I doubt that (unless you have some source for it which I missed, in which case sorry). It seems really unlikely that Helion would commit to a contract with penalty clauses if they didn't get money before they got fusion working.
Once (if) they have commercial fusion working they're golden, it will be trivial to raise money on excellent terms, and as such they won't need income from this contract. If this contract only gave them money at that point it wouldn't be worth very much to them.
If the contract gave them money now though... well right now it's hard to raise money. Taking a loan out could make sense. Getting the option to repay that loan by providing services could make sense. And what is a contract where you get paid now on the condition that you pay back more at the end (either in dollars in energy) if not a loan?
Besides, it's a loan which serves as great PR for both companies.
Fair; but I think their problem is that they'd like to get money to start to build the production reactor before they've demoed they have it working - of course that's risky as hell. But if they're right, and can start going the basic building and construction on the next phase while finishing the current phase it chops a couple of years off. But being risky as hell anyone sane would be more worried about making a loan or investment - so some encouragement in the opposite direction from a customer would help them get that loan.
I would assume they can't make it work at a competitive price (yet?), but it is technology Microsoft wants to see come to fruition. So if they make it work Microsoft will pay them 2-3x the market value for electricity.
There seem to have been very few details released so far as to the exact nature of the agreement between Helion and Microsoft, but I think it's almost guaranteed to include an investment in Helion by Microsoft (maybe a series of investments based on meeting development milestones?), in addition to eventual power purchase agreement.
Helion gets continued funding from Microsoft (maybe increasingly expensive at this stage as they scale the tech up and operationalize it). Microsoft gets good PR, a likely profitable investment, and eventually cheap electricity as a bonus.
I believe Sam Altman has most of his personal net worth (to tune of few hundred million) invested in Helion, and no doubt brokered this deal, so it can also be seen as a doubling-down by Microsoft of their relationship with and commitment to OpenAI/Altman.
You don't "just hook it up to the grid". You have to work with the local utility company or companies to negotiate pricing, SLAs, and safety concerns (eg: shutting off power when linemen are working). Helion's fusion reactors are small enough to fit in a couple shipping containers. The idea is that the units can be mass produced in a factory, then transported to data centers and replace the grid hookup as the primary power source. Another potential market is stuff like remote mining operations which currently use diesel generators. The cost of transporting fuel to such sites can be quite high. A fusion reactor, while more expensive up-front, could be cheaper in the long run. And unlike solar cells, the reactor can be easily moved offsite when the operation is complete.
But you do have to compete with grid hookups for pricing in data centers.
I definitely buy that there's a market for small power plants that cost too much to be competitive on the grid (in some sense that's literally what generators already are), but I don't see how datacenters are in that market.
> but I don't see how datacenters are in that market
Are you kidding? If datacenters aren't the majority of that market, they will be soon, and their share will keep growing on the short term. Only factories match their consumption, every other wholesale energy buyer is relatively tiny.
But that market will pay at most a 3x to 5x markup on the grid price. There exists a smaller one formed by far from the grid activities that will pay a much higher price.
Wholesale buyers are willing to pay 3x to 5x (depends on the location) more than electricity distributors.
Electricity distributors may add a markup of over 10x on resale. For many reasons, it's easier to get energy out of them so you just won't pay the full ~10x markup on the wholesale market.
> But you do have to compete with grid hookups for pricing in data centers.
You do, unless you sign a contract with a large datacenter operator that's willing to pay above market price for the PR benefit/green energy credits of a working fusion reactor. Which presumably is the point of this.
And realize this also depends on how much the competition costs. If renewables and storage continue to get cheaper, fusion that "works" in an economic sense could transition back to "doesn't work".
It's the fate of most technologies to fail this way, so it shouldn't be surprising (or a source of dishonor) if the same thing happens to fusion. That doesn't mean money spent developing fusion is necessarily wasted; the size of the energy market -- a quadrillion dollars or so over the 21st century -- justifies longshot investments.
Bear in mind that Helion's reactor is 50MW, about the size of three large wind turbines. If it works they'll be mass-producing them in factories and shipping them by rail, and they'll have a declining cost curve just like anything else.
> > fuel the idea that fusion could very well be vapourware
But it's exactly the real scenario at play. However Microsoft is calling dibs on the energy that will be generated if fusion turns out to be not vaporware
A company that relies on massive amounts of increasingly expensive electricity to make enormous profits. Agrees to pay another company likely over the odds for early - and no details, but quite likely exclusive access and with Azure compute as part of deal (a la OpenAI)) - for the small amount of electricity that may or may not be initially generated by the other company's technology. Then when/if technology is successful, as it scales up they get to fill their boots with effectively limitless Carbon-free electricity at progressively orders of magnitude lower cost than their competitors have access to.
Worst case - a nice bit of PR for Fusion, Helion and MS.
Best case - in a few years provides funds to help Helion rapidly scale up, MS - assuming exclusivity - with increasingly low-cost climate-friendly electricity for their data centres that their competitors cannot access. Carbon capture becomes something other than an oil industry excuse, and the human race's bacon is saved.
This critique seems very reasonable and accessible. So I'm puzzled how the caliber of people like mentioned in the article, who are technologists and familiar with physics, can get on board with the kind of investments they are getting. What do they know that we don't? At least in the case of Theranos the investors were not technical.
The guy did a much longer Q&A livestream afterwards and he did slightly roll back his critique. He admitted there were some advantages of Helion's approach even if he still doesn't think it is overrall the best way forwards.
Thanks for the link! The rebuttal sounds very reasonable. I doubt the Real Engineering guy has much expertise in that area and just mostly went for the views and fusion hype.
Reminds me of a similarly vague "statement" made by BOOM supersonic, another YC company. [0] Here's an excerpt:
United will purchase 15 of Boom’s ‘Overture’ airliners, once Overture meets United’s demanding safety, operating and sustainability requirements, with an option for 35 more aircraft. Slated to carry passengers in 2029, the net-zero carbon aircraft will fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Let me tell you where the problem is.
If there is no PENALTY for United or Microsoft to get out of the deal, and/or no upfront payment, it's simply a completely empty statement.
Let me give you an example.
Here, on HN, today, I solemnly declare that I am available to sign a deal with Helion to purchase 50 MW of power generation, for 10 years, generated by their 1st power plant, starting in 2028.
We can pre agree on the price, yes. Let's say $40 per MWh [1]. This is 50 MW * 24 * 365 = 438,000 MWh / year, or ~$16M/year. (correct me if this math is completely wrong). Fantastic!
Oh, by the way: nothing will happen to me if I walk away from this deal. I am not giving any upfront payment. Nothing. Just my word.
See you in 2028. Or not.
p.s. happy to be proven wrong, if Microsoft of Helion (or Boom) are kind enough to provide more details about this "agreement".
Besides this, I wish them all the best. Just don't try to sell me this PR BS, please.
"While the agreement carries a risk to Helion, it also unlocks essential benefits, Kirtley said."
It probably has something to do with co-location at a Microsoft Azure data center, several of which or being permitted or under construction in Washington State.
Does anyone have some thoughts on whether fusion will actually help fight climate change?
Of course, fusion is far more clean than coal or gas and less environmentally destructive, aside from the mining of materials required, than say hydro power plants. But from what I can tell, the primary contributor to damaging the climate and environment is consumption, as a process. I currently see no end result where fusion does not drastically increase consumption, which means more use of non-clean materials and processes.
So I guess the question is: will the benefits of fusion offset the increase in consumption?
Good question. I think people are betting that even with dramatically increased consumption (for example all developing countries reaching developed country levels standard of living) we will eventually reach something resembling a steady-state of population and consumption. I think it's a big bet indeed but I think it needs to be made if nothing else than just to reduce the amount of suffering around the world caused by our current system. At worst, assuming fusion succeeds, we stave off the inevitable for a while longer in the hopes something else comes along to balance the equation.
I don't understand your argument at all. In a world where people can produce power through fusion cheaper than they can through coal or oil, why would use of non-clean materials increase?
Because it isn't just about power production. People use that power to then go off and do things. The question I'm asking is what does that look like? Because how we do things still requires oil and other destructive acts, for example.
An analogous situation is electric cars. Electric cars, eventually over the lifetime of use (not immediately), save emissions over combustion engine cars. However, building a single mile of road is something like 10x or 100x (I forget the exact multiplier, but it's at least an order of magnitude and maybe greater) the emissions of a car (electric or combustion). So given the idea that electric cars actually bolster if not increase the love and use of cars, then that has a downstream effect of more roads being built and maintained, which is far more polluting than the cars themselves.
So you need to look at things as a system. I'm not arguing for anything but looking to understand things. I think fusion is obviously something we should do. What I'm wondering is how do we get people to realize it isn't a one-stop shop for staving off even more environmental change.
>then that has a downstream effect of more roads being built and maintained, which is far more polluting than the cars themselves.
Surely this is negligable compared to the carbon currently being emitted by ICE cars? The first source I can find says that building and maintaining one lane mile of highway emits 3,500 tons of CO2, whereas the vehicles driving on it will emit 90,000 tons of CO2.
I shouldn't have included maintained in there because I just meant the emissions for manufacture. The emissions for building an electric car is more than that of a combustion engine car, and building a mile of single lane road dwarfs both of those. So switching to electric cars keeps us building roads and increases emissions at the time manufacture. To get the real story, one needs to consider the use of and maintenance of these things. At some point, there is a crossover point where electric cars have less total emissions than combustion cars. But the use of electric cars will not slow the building, use, and maintenance. If anything, they will increase it because they make buying and owning a car sexy again. Plus, electric cars are far heavier than combustion cars, which will increase road wear. And most analyses don't include battery recycling and disposal as part of an electric cars emissions. So electric cars are probably or even maybe a win in the long term, but the simple act of having electric cars isn't enough.
My point is that one can't simply look at the power production of a car as the sole comparison, and I think that also holds true for power plants. I just haven't seen this analysis for fusion plants. They will be a good thing for sure, but I worry many think it's a silver bullet, and I'd like to understand their affects once they're on the scene.
Why do you keep talking about building a mile of road? There are many more cars in the US than there are miles of road, and the replacement time of roads is at least decades.
There's more to environmental destruction than just emissions. If we're net zero emissions with something like nuclear energy, and clean energy is ubiquitous and cheap, people are still going to want to do things with the energy and that will potentially dramatically increase consumption of finite resources in general. For example, clean-fueled fishing boats don't matter much if we still fish the oceans to extinction.
Well sure, but that's a bit of a dead end conclusion.
I think it's still better than belching out coal soot, and with abundant energy we can power other processes to help clean things up. Well - we could, but we'll probably just mine bitcoin with it and zip around in our flying cars :( But unbounded consumption and our awful societal structure is a bit of a different problem compared to how we fuel it.
See Jevons paradox - increased efficiency often leads to increased demand and usage.
If the logic works in this direction, it works in the other direction too - are you saying we should shut down renewable energy so that the price of energy goes up and consumption of it goes down accordingly?
>are you saying we should shut down renewable energy so that the price of energy goes up and consumption of it goes down accordingly?
No. I’m suggesting that once a cost competitive alternative exists at scale for hydrocarbons, we institute Pigouvian taxes (e.g. carbon taxes). This ensures that at the margin, people are incentivized to choose low/zero carbon energy sources.
There will need to be policy, hopefully in the form of Pigouvian taxes. But before you can get the policy in place you will need a viable source of energy that’s cost competitive with hydrocarbons.
Once we have a viable alternative to hydrocarbons at scale, carbon/methane/ high GWP gases will need to be priced appropriately (e.g. taxed in a way to incentivize reduced consumption).
I think it's a long term great option that will have to prove itself based on a cost/performance basis in an extremely competitive market.
Therefore, short term the impact is going to be minimal/negligible. There are no plants yet, no approved plans to build any, no validated designs for any, etc. The first few plants are going to be very research/prototype focused and won't produce any impressive amounts of energy relative to what is needed and what is coming online every year in other forms. Best case, we'll see some early adoption in the late 2030's early 2040s with some proof of concept reactors coming online maybe in the next five to ten years already. Several companies are claiming that they are doing that; including Helion. That would be optimistic but it could happen. But I'd be surprised if it hits more than a few percent of global supply before middle of the century. And even that would be a lot.
Getting most coal, gas, and other fossil fuels offline by the 2050s would be the main challenge and a bit of a stretch goal according to some. I think fusion will be too late for to play a major role for that either way. If fusion starts working as advertised, it will likely be the second half of this century. It's main role will be to drive cost down and replace more expensive nuclear reactors.
I'm actually optimistic about the 2050 timeline here mainly because I think the fossil fuel industry is heading for an investment and cost cliff much faster than they are hoping and mainly because that is driven by the pricing of and investment in renewables. They are being to optimistic how long they can remain profitable and too pessimistic about how much further renewables are going to come down in cost. Once they hit that cliff, a lot of remaining supply will be deprecated and taken offline as fast as they can replace it with something vastly cheaper. They'll be bleeding cash all the way. Also, investment is ramping up and shifting from one to the other faster than they hope. So, I take most current projections that seem overly pessimistic and conservative with a grain of salt.
Either way fusion won't be that important for getting rid of fossil fuels. But if it works and is cheap enough there will be a role for it beyond the 2050 timeline.
By then, we should be pretty far done tackling climate change. Mostly via renewables and maybe a bit of nuclear here and there and lots of cheap and scalable storage. There are so many proven battery chemistries and other solutions for this now that I consider that as pretty much guaranteed to happen. A mix of short term, mid term, and long term storage coming online by the tens of twh per year in a few decades. The grid will be very different than it is today with lots of private and de-centralized generation (almost exclusively renewables) and storage, micro grids, etc.
If Helion actually works, their plan is to build a factory making twenty 50MW reactors each day, shippable by rail. That could replace the world's fossil-based electricity production in six years, and that's just one factory.
I love money flowing into these projects. More = better. Nothing is lost. WORST case scenario: some intelligent people will learn new stuff and get to know like minded people.
I think Helion has a 50% chance of achieving net electricity next year. When hearing about fusion research, the vast majority of people immediately react with something like "fusion is always 30 years away lol". There's a good chance they will be very surprised.
It's probably a net benefit to be pessimistic about world-changing technologies you hear about in the press until they're proven and operating. Being endlessly disappointed is draining. Not to mention getting scammed sucks.
I hope so. There is so much money spent on technology that is meaningless, so much pessimism over technology that could actually help us. I hope to see people as shocked by fusion as they are by LLMs.
So, assuming this pans out, would this require Helion to deliver the power to Microsoft off grid? I guess my question is 'what regulatory oversight is typically required in these sorts of situations?'
I believe agreements like this typically have the power go to the grid. The electricity they consume still comes from the grid wherever their needs are, and the electricity being produced by Helion would go to wherever the grid needs it. They would be paying extra for the production of the energy, and then count it as offsetting their consumption.
I am not totally fond of how that seems to work out, as they are offsetting production elsewhere, and the grid there could already be cleaner than where they are consuming. But perhaps somewhere along the way things like that are accounted for?
In the USA, it's likely the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Their site says "The Commission as a collegial body formulates policies, develops regulations governing nuclear reactor and nuclear material safety, issues orders to licensees, and adjudicates legal matters."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/20/nuclear-fusion-will-not-be-r...
Depending on how early in development it is, it would likely be grid tied at some point because of the huge power needs to drive the power generating reactor before it gets going and the fuel generation reactor which is not energy producing.
p-11B fusion is really hard. Fortunately, the folks at Helion have found ways to greatly reduce the DT neutron production in their reactors. They still will have neutrons from DD reactions, but those neutrons are much less damaging due to their lower energy.
Not a take over, but likely an investment (or planned series of investments) in Helion by Microsoft that'll give them an ownership stake and help fund Helion's continued development up to and including the pilot plant whose output Microsoft will be buying. Quite similar to Microsoft's investment in OpenAI... investor + customer + good P-R.
What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool.
>oh no this might not work!
Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?