To do this you would need a way to create a good vacuum and a way to generate some seriously high voltages. For confirmations, you would also need a neutron detector. Totally achievable stuff, many people have done it with home setups, there is even an Instructable here https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/
Impressive build by the kid!
The kind of nuclear fusion that governments spend billions of dollars of research on though is the kind where you actually get some net energy out of the reaction.
Amusingly, the vacuum pump in the picture (above this text, his right hand resting on it):
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Within his home, Jackson’s lab is quite extensive and he describes it as having too many parts to even write down!
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Looks precisely like the model I bought from Amazon, to pull a vacuum for my self-install of my heat pump at home! These sorts of heat pumps come pre-charged with coolant, so after you connect the copper piping between the head (indoor) unit and the external compressor, you then need to pull a vacuum, validate the system is stable, then finally let the coolant into the entire system.
To me, this only highlights how some things are easily done with low cost, off the shelf parts.
When I was a kid, there was no way to easily, or effectively find such things anywhere my small rural town. Nor was there any easy way to even find magazines, which might have ads for companies selling such things!
I read an article once on how to create a low-tech nuke in a house. The TL;DR is that you mainly need shaped plutonium or a spicy flavor of uranium (a half ball and socket), a pipe, and some explosives. Shoot the ball at the socket using explosives, ?????, city leveled.
Getting the plutonium is the hard part though. And I'm probably trivializing it / missing some steps.
You either need enough of it so it goes prompt critical on it's own (which is very different from being critical, which means your largely running on natural fission, prompt means that your fission rates become exponential), without refining that probably requires half a ton of U or P material.
Nuclear non-proliferation is about controlling access to highly enriched materials, not the knowledge. If you have enough refined material for critical mass, getting it to blow up is trivial. Maximizing yield, not so much.
And no matter how much privilege may have indeed played a part, it seems very gross to me that people seek to debase their achievements by focusing on aspects that these kids can't even control. It's rude (to a point) to point out how much raw luck may have had in one's achievements, but why is privilege (which is arguably very similar in many ways) fair game?
The focus should be on all of the effort that the kid put forth which many other equally privileged or lucky kids would have squandered.
I think the point is that the effort is maybe not as much as the lauding implies ("Guy makes WSYWIG editor in 10 seconds" is less impressive if I just use contenteditable)
I don't really agree on this reading for this case, but this _definitely_ applies for basically every 30 under 30 list and lots of stuff in VC-land (Theranos etc). Some people get a silver spoon of a situation and get lauded for basically showing up.
What is irking people is not the achievement, but the meticulous documentation and flagrant promotion of the achievement. Guinness Book of Records didn't invite themselves you know. They also don't come for free. Typically you need to pay a hefty fee to come and document your record AFAIK (another sign of privilege).
More kids may have similar achievements but their parents never sought publicity photo shoots for them. Exposing kids to this kind of publicity may be bad for them down the line. May make them feel like a failure if they aren't able to pull another newsworthy stunt in the future.
Meh, I'm literally a Communist and I find the tone unnecessarily negative at times. Yes, obviously the kid is privileged, but there are a shit load of privileged kids and how many of them are doing cool experiments like this?
This is why meritocracy as it is now is flawed[0]. Smart people who work crazy hours, achieve a lot and obtain the appropriate status and wealth are also smart enough to know to invest tons and tons of money into their kids’ education and incentivise them to work as hard. Eventually it approaches a “pyramid scheme” where again only rich can win and everyone is unhappy.
If you lool at it from a perspective of winning/loosing/fair/unfair you are probably right. If you look on the total effect of society then probably not. I mean to have competetive companies you need people who have worked(or played) their ass off and achieved skills and knowledge which only the mixture of privilege, work and skills can achieve. You actually want to give the smart kids extra tuition, because mostly these people will innovate later.
(I dont mean to speak in absolutes here, but on average)
Society is not only about distribution but to distribute something you have to create it first.
So I would say, yes it is a flaw of meritocracy, but meritocracy is not flawed.
In a meritocracy, a person should become powerful/rich according to their merit—education, skill, diligence, etc. However, what then happens is elites start religiously investing all they can (and they can invest a lot) into ensuring their own offspring has even more of that merit than others.
As an exaggerated example, you can’t buy your kid a Pfeiffer turbopump to experiment with if you are choosing between bread and soap when you’re going to the store.
What we get as a result is the same ever-growing gap between the already-rich and the rest. Meritocracy turns into plutocracy as merit becomes more or less a proxy for wealth.
Breaking that trend would involve actions that go beyond meritocracy, and arguably are un-meritocratic: instead of just rewarding by merit, it’s about helping more people have that merit regardless of their or their parents’ wealth.
That’s not a confusion of merit and wealth. If I use wealth to teach you how to drive a truck or learn to program, that’s growing value inside a person. That person became stronger, and in the eyes of society, more meritorious for some tasks.
Merit is due to many things, and mentorship, experimentation, and preparation are all parts of it. Medical training is also very expensive and part of medical merit, but also clearly entangled in discussions of money, opportunity, and growing inequity.
If you have hidden biological talent but never trained as a doctor due to wealth, should we trust you now to perform medicine? Not before that expensive prep; it’s part of merit.
> Merit is due to many things, and mentorship, experimentation, and preparation are all parts of it. Medical training is also very expensive and part of medical merit, but also clearly entangled in discussions of money and opportunity.
Exactly, and if one has a lot of hard-earned wealth thanks to their own smarts and merit and drive to work hard they’ll of course happily spend it on all the right things to make sure their kids have even more of that than their parents. With private education and all that blocks opportunities for kids in lower income families and increase inequality; merit becomes a proxy for wealth and as meritocracy matures it becomes more and more a rule of the rich. (Being “a proxy for” is not the same as “being confused with”, it’s just that one would more or less follow the other.)
Yes. And I believe this is sort of the best of all worlds. I find it better that like high paying jobs like a surgeon are given on merit (beeing a proxy for parents beeing rich, but still on merit) instead of given on e.g. power, like oh he is the son of ... he doesnt need to study to become a surgeon. Or whatever example you like.
The question is, how possible is it to level up. At least in Europe not so difficult, and in the US the Asian immigrants also show it is possible (if you think in terms of 2 generations).
Money helps. It would be hard for me to become competent in something I wanted to educate my hypothetical kids about if I were struggling to make ends meet. On the other hand, if I were among the really rich, I would furnish my kids a well-equipped lab and ensure they get a chance to hang out around top experts in the field.
Except not only the rich can win. My longtime barber is a Vietnamese guy who speaks very broken English. When I go and get a haircut his son was often in the store studying. My barber would tell him a math problem, like 257 times 191 or whatever, then the kid would produce the answer, then my barber would interrupt my haircut to whip out a calculator and check.
Kid got a full scholarship to Duke University. And I’ve seen this in other Asian immigrants as well, a cab driver in NYC whose daughter was at Cornell Medical School.
Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too.
Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k.
Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year.
10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day.
20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day.
Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.
> once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.
I’m curious whether it’s really specific to male population, and if so why…
That aside, and I can’t believe that this is where the thread took us, I empathise so much with this. Even in countries where I can converse easily with anybody it’s a struggle for me to trust someone with my hair, despite me presumably not really caring about it. Now living in countries where I don’t speak local languages and locals predominantly don’t speak any of mine (or do so with much difficulty) I haven’t gone to a barber in years—I pretty much gave up and just live with terrible hair. I guess if I ever find “my barber” I may be willing to travel far to get my haircut.
Assuming you can keep your customer queue sufficient at all times, and that your clients can come when you are open.
Most likely this means a location that already has a high throughput of potential customers and that also most likely means a place that has high rents.
Sure, if you already have a place, like an extra room in your house, and you manage to establish yourself on the area. But even then you might find out that your first client wants to come in at 7 or 8 am, to get ready for whatever work thing they have that day, and the last client wants to come in at 8 pm, because they can’t earlier.
By the sound of it barbering resembles consulting a lot. Being in a lively area could help find some customers at first, but once you have established relationships with customers that value you specifically you can probably set up anywhere.
(And if someone wants to come in at strange hours for important work appearances, I’m sure they won’t mind being charged double the price either!)
> Should smart people deliberately not be good parents so that social justice can prevail in a world full of not-so-smart people?
> Should not-so-smart people just not have children so society can be smarter as a whole?
Perhaps smart people could spend some of their hard-earned money and prestige to ensure the whole society, not just their offspring, has more opportunities and access to good education? However, as you can see, that does not align with meritocratic ideals as they are currently being applied.
I believe the article suggests things such as (but not only) changing education to be more accessible and inclusive, and making work done by employees without expensive education more valuable across industries.
> are blamed for overworking so much they win the race.
The point here is also that, while “winning the race” thanks to their hard work and abilities, under meritocracy as it is elites also produce more and more inequality in longer term, raising the bar and blocking middle and lower classes from opportunities.
(I would tentatively posit that the existence of a race to be won is the problem here.)
Honestly it would be nice to stop beating around the bush and declare your end goal: communism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
"Meritocratic equality" is an oxymoron. You can only attain it if what you are measuring applies to everybody, like, say, having a pulse.
The world is hyper-competitive. I don't believe the US will fare well with this excellent strategy.
> Honestly it would be nice to stop beating around the bush and declare your end goal: communism.
First, let’s agree on whether we both believe the problem with meritocracy, as it works currently, is real. If you don’t believe so, then there’s no sense in continuing.
Second, if the only solution you see is communism, don’t attribute the same outlook to me.
As far as I’m aware, if communist regimes so far are any indication, communism could only make the situation worse with blatant nepotism if nothing else.
What if, if a solution you can think of off the top of your head is horrible, all it means is that the problem is just not that easy to solve?
If you want to promote the idea that there's more to life than work and that one could focus more on family, nature and the arts by all means.
But saying that capable people must bend the knee so somebody less capable also gets a turn at 1st prize makes we wonder want kind of morality asks that, accepts that and takes pride in finally winning that way.
Indeed. When I was 16 I wasn't able to "get funding" for a lab bench power supply.
I resorted to building one off an used ATX computer power supply, but voltages fluctuated a lot and also it was pretty high and non-regulable in current output. That was a recipe for troubles. Indeed, when one of the first boards I was learning on caught fire (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff.
So yeah, extremely impressive achievement for a 13 years old student, not downplaying his achievement, but it's wrong to understate the role that his parents and their funding had.
You had a used ATX power supply?! You were LUCKY!. When I were a lad, all we had was a bike dynamo. And you had to crank it by hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
Yes, this is a perfect example for the nature vs. nurture debate.
While the kid building his reactor is almost certainly intelligent and driven, he was also lucky enough to be born into a family in the upper 1% income bracket, because most people would have neither the space nor the funds to set up such a laboratory.
It's kind of the same with child prodigy musicians. Unless the parents have a piano at home, they'll most likely not notice their kids talent early enough. And most middle-income families these days don't own a house and won't have a piano around for decorative purposes.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
To be fair on the kid, in a video on YouTube [1] he ends by saying he's trying to create an organisation to help kids do experiments who don't have the financial support that he does. I don't know what that means exactly, but it at least demonstrates some awareness to be saying that (even if it's just on behalf of his mom/dad who might have told him to say it).
Is there a reason to doubt that a guy who is capable of designing and building a home fusion reactor is also capable of noticing that being able to buy all the gear is a privilege others don't have?
I try to maintain a healthy level of skepticism where possible. I don't disbelieve this kid and that wasn't my point - I was defending him- there's just a bit of a gap between "noticing you have privilege" and helping to found an organisation to help other kids do experiments. The latter claim might start to set off "too good to be true" detectors, so I'm merely saying that even if that's not 100% true the fact he's talking about it is a positive thing since some young talented people do seem utterly oblivious to their own privilege.
Plenty of kids with pianos and parents musicians grow up not being child prodigies. But, pretty much no child prodigies grew up in environment where people don't listen music much, without access to piano, teacher (official or unofficial) and so on.
Unless the parents lie and literally manufactured it all, both components needs to be present. For most 13-15 years old, just focusing on one big project and keep interest is quite unusual. So is willingness to build one thing for so long.
The parents are interviewed, and from my experience there might not be quite as much more to the story than it may seem.
Children are capable of absolutely amazing things when they are told "yes" and given respect and minimum guidance. Of course my example is not as mind-blowing as this, but my son built his own forge and has made beautiful knives and swords from found metal. Tons of research and sweat and persistence on his part, and not ours. And if we were interviewed about it, the soundbites would come out about the same: "Yup, he did it, we were a bit worried, but he was managing the risks and knew and followed the necessary rules, so ultimately we trusted him."
Sure, but the question I'd have for you as parents would be - ok, but how come you you have a forge in your house? Is that your profession? Hobby? Did you build it specifically for your son? What did that involve? How does your son know how to operate a forge in the first place?
Like, that's just few questions that come to my mind in like 2 seconds, I'm sure a competent interviewer could think of more.
1. I didn't have a forge in my house. As I said, he made one, using found materials and a few cheap tools he bought with his own limited money, outside.
2. I am a software developer, I have done a bit of small vegetable farming, and my metalworking experience is limited to watching the blacksmith at the historical museum.
3. My son built it specifically for my son.
4. Building it involved his working his butt off hauling discarded materials like cinder blocks from the neighborhood.
5. He studied very hard on many aspects of the craft, for months, online.
My input into this was computer access, permission to proceed, "no you can't put it there", (then after he set it up in an approved spot) "neighbor says you have to move it further away from his yard", and buying the fuel since he's not old enough. Then one day dropping my jaw when he walks in the house with a beautiful knife.
There's lots of interesting threads about how hard this is and how much help he received but no one is asking the important question - why is he wearing a hard hat?
I once wore a baseball hat for a month, day in, day out, sleep, etc. However first, I ripped out the liner, and placed tinfoil inside, replacing the liner afterwards.
I wanted to empirically test -- to see, would I behave differently? Think differently? So I also kept a journal.
Problem was, did I EVER SWEAT! And this was in the winter too.
The solution? A hat which is not directly in contact with the head! And has space under it to breath. Like this hard-hat!
Clearly, this kid knows the truth, knows the forces aligned against us all, and this hardhat, in this pic, is his message to us all.
Beware. Beware of them, of those, placing thoughts in our minds!
>>This ultimately inspired him to attempt to build a reactor himself, but Jackson clarified that he was the only person to have any involvement in its design or production.
What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else.
> What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far.
You are missing his age. He is not a grown up who could graps the whole complexity of the task. He can see what he have done, but he is unable to grasp what others did to make his achievement possible. Such an inability would be worrying for me, if he was older -- 20 years old, or even 16-18 years old. But for 13 yo kid it is absolutely normal. Cognitive limitations he shows are only to be expected. There is no reason to grumble about society degrading to a hell.
When someone accomplish something like this, a Guiness Record after all, it's only natural to feel a bit proud. Of course the idea wasn't original and he had help. But taken in context, the boy says he did it himself in that room. It'd be something else if he had onsite assistance. This is probably part of the Record as well.
On top of that, he's largely (only?) able to do this because his parents have the resources and disposable income to drop $10,000[1] on their son's project and awareness/ability to consult with experts[2]. That's not to say that his interest in hacking on nuclear fusion wasn't also a factor here -- obviously it was, but if that's all he had he wouldn't have gotten very far.
One wonders how many kids swallowed up by poor, resource-starved neighborhoods would have been able to achieve similar feats given more access and resources. Kids generally have nothing but time -- so yeah, if you finance their projects and give them your support and an environment conducive to focusing on hacking on fusion reactors, or becoming chess or math or music prodigies, or whatever, they'll tend to do that. And likewise if you give them an environment conducive to trauma, financial stress, and poverty, well, that's what they'll tend towards.
There are exceptions in both cases -- I'm sure many of us can think of people who came from wealth and ultimately didn't amount to much, and some of the most brilliant and accomplished people I know came from abject poverty. My point is that wealth and resources makes stuff easier -- or even possible in the first place.
[1]
> Building the nuclear fusion reactor was no game for Jackson. He converted an old playroom in his Memphis home into a functioning lab. With the financial support of his parents – he spent between $8,000 and $10,000 over the course of a year collecting the parts he needed to build his nuclear fusion reactor – that was apparently the easy part.
[2]
> Jackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.
I would also point out that even with access to the parts, getting into the guiness world records book is expensive (one of the main reason speedruns rarely make it there). So it's likely 10k$ for parts and labor plus 10k$ to get their judges to come and verify the record.
> One wonders how many kids swallowed up by poor, resource-starved neighborhoods would have been able to achieve similar feats given more access and resources
I live in Austria. In the 70, 80ies it is save to say it was a socialist country. Universities were free, school education was free. There were no private universities and practically no private schools. The idea was that everyone should have equal possibilities for a start.
It was a time of great social cohesion and peace. Maybe we went to far with Theatherism and privatizations.
What a weird and frankly pissy response. I think all that means is that he didn't get a near-complete design from some other source and stick it in a shiny box and put a sticker on it calling it the Jacksotron so something and declare that he "built it".
It's quite the Festival of Debunking a 12 Year Old Kid going here on Hacker News, and it's embarrassingly transparent. Yes, you're all very smart too.
I took it in the context that it is a necessary condition for the Guinness Book of World Records that he did it by himself, since the next sentence is about Guinness. If he says he got helped from other people that would invalidate the Guinness record.
It's really strange they insist on calling it a playroom. Sure, he is a child (young man / young teen) but it seems weirdly demeaning and distracting. It's a laboratory, which they correctly name it later on, but why not in the title is beyond me.
> What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else.
> Youngest? Maybe, but the slickness of those pictures tells me that the real achievement comes from the parents who...nurtured...his inclinations.
IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly...
1. hacker (definition): Someone who is brilliantly persistent in solving technical problems, whether these involve golfing, fighting orcs, or programming. Hacker is a neutral term, morally speaking.
The unfortunate thing is the way it is presented, it looks like his parents are showing of their smart kid. Almost like a form of objectification.
Look at him, dressed like a dandy, with his accomplishments framed and a much too clean workspace and Hollywood scientist accessories.
That's not how I portrait a hacker, especially not a kid hacker. I want to see him on a workbench with tools all over the place, I want to know how he solved the hundred of problems that arose. I want to see him yelled at by his parents because he didn't follow safety rules. Everything looks too clean to be true. I don't mean that kid is a fraud, but the article doesn't really show his "hacker" side, besides a few pictures taken when he was younger.
Impressive build by the kid!
The kind of nuclear fusion that governments spend billions of dollars of research on though is the kind where you actually get some net energy out of the reaction.