[tgsovlerkhgsel]

For people who don't want to slog through the long-form article for the few tidbits of actual information:

"Nuclear device" does not refer to a nuclear weapon in this case, it was a radio signal capturing device powered by a RTG.

They had to abandon the first one when trying to install it due to bad weather and couldn't find it again. Maybe it was stolen, maybe it just melted its way under many meters of ice and snow.

They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.

[getlawgdon]

Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Yes, my angry summaries usually do go to the other extreme and gloss over details.

I usually write them when I feel like an article is grossly disrespecting my time, either by being clickbait, obfuscating the topic at hand, or including ridiculous amounts of useless filler (particularly popular: describing faces, living rooms of interviewees, weather when it isn't relevant to the story, etc.)

In this case, the title is clickbait because "Nuclear device" is usually used to refer to nuclear weapons, to the point where Wikipedia has a redirect from "Nuclear device" to "Nuclear weapon". It implies a Broken Arrow/Empty Quiver incident, not a "yet another lost RTG".

Then the article refuses to reveal what it is about for a long time: The first mention of the actual topic is in the fifth paragraph. Until then, I've been fed background information without having any idea which of it is relevant and how, finding it hard to concentrate because I'm trying to figure out WTF the article is even about in the first place.

Long form articles can be good. One of my favorite articles is https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...

It starts by getting to the point: Ship, hurricane, sank, 32 dead. Within the first five sentences, you know the gist of the story. That not only gives you the information you need to decide whether this is worth your time, it is also a promise: It shows that the author is trying to provide information instead of writing as much prose with as little content as possible. Then it dives deep into the topic. At every moment, you know why the stuff you're reading is there.

The Internet too full of garbage to read several pages just to determine whether something is good or garbage.

[gumby]

I agree with your sentiment but the GP’s comment has a long lineage: readers’ digest condensed books, “bluffer’s guides” and the like, stretching back into antiquity.

[Qub3d]

I see it less of complaining about long form writing and more assuaging concerned readers about a somewhat clickbait-y title.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

It's both about the clickbait title and bad long-form writing.

I've elaborated a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556812

[bzb6]

If you find great value in longer writing that’s fine. Some of us don’t want to spend minutes reading an article about something we don’t care much about and we would rather read a short summary with a few key points and be done with it.

[mannykannot]

> Maybe it was stolen.

The story mentions this as being a concern at the time, but if we take the story to be substantially correct, the idea that a foreign government would learn about the device, and then mount a secret expedition to find and recover it during the season climbing is regarded as infeasible, just seems to be paranoid nonsense.

[willvarfar]

Except that there have now come to light some staggering espionage recovery missions eg Project Coldfeet which ransacked a soviet ice station, Project Ivy Bells to recover the missiles and stuff from soviet missile tests, and Project Azorian to raise a sunk soviet submarine. There was even a Project Barmaid (are all British code names better?) that had a claw fitted to HMS Conquerer to sever and capture the towed sonar array from a soviet submarine while it was underway!

I’m not pretending any of this is likely in this case; I’m just giving us fun things to google and start reading about :)

[Someone]

“are all British code names better?”

Don’t know, but they had the brilliantly named “Operation Hope Not”, preparations for the funeral of Winston Churchill. It started in 1953; he died in 1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hope_Not)

There also is “Operation London Bridge”, a plan that has been updated for over half a century, for when queen Elizabeth II dies (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...). That will be a momentous event because because she’s the queen of a very large part of the world (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom and various smaller islands), and because most of the population of Britain wasn’t born when her predecessor died (making it a rare event)

[Beldin]

Now I'm wondering how many of get subjects are older than her. Gladly will accept percentages!

[Someone]

About 85% of the population of the UK wasn’t born yet when she became queen. 0.9% of the population of the UK is over 90 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...). If I interprete the data in https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... correctly, about ⅔ of those are over 94 (seems a bit high to me)

[at_a_remove]

We have a long and rich history of people who have no idea about radiation finding something radioactive, taking it home, and showing everyone.

I can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.

[mannykannot]

You will not find people wandering around near the summit (or in the avalanche chutes, where the device probably ended up, buried in snow and ice) of Nanda Devi in the season when even the accomplished mountaineers who left the device there considered it too dangerous to climb - this is one of the tallest and more lethal of the Himalayan peaks.

[baybal2]

I don't think so, even Indians wouldn't have gotten anything from it, they were already years away from getting own plutonium, and they should've been at least smart enough to know that a single bomb wouldn't matter much in war.

Moreover, I believe they were well instructed on the nature of the device, and knew by that time that dirty plutonium from few years old civilian fuel is useless for nuclear weapons. For weapons, you need as pure 239 as possible.

[closeparen]

"We could use a power orb."

https://xkcd.com/2115/

[ngcc_hk]

It is military grade and hence the material itself is weapon? plutonium is weapon?