Hacker News Meetups?
Are there any active HN meetups? Where are they announced? Also: Anyone in germany interested in a meetup? :)
@lainon HN meetups in Germany:
If the group owner is reading, can we have a non-FB meetup group please?
There are plenty of /r/philadelphia reddit meetups, and there's a decent number of tech people there (the ratio was higher when reddit was young and mostly tech articles, but the meetups weren't very good). There's also the Philly Linux User Group, which has meetings in multiple parts of the city: phillylinux.org
I'd be up for an occasional HN Philly Meetup though! And if HN folks wanted to invade a reddit meetup I'd be down for it.
I've been a longtime lurker on the /r/philadelphia sub and have thought many times about going to one of the meetups. I think I may need to stop by one of them.
As far as organizing, there's an /r/philadelphia discord, and we could probably persuade them to make a channel about HN meetups. Or Discord servers are easy enough to make yourself.
EDIT: I've just made a HN Philly Discord. Feel free to jump on to talk meetups. https://discord.gg/jFeJUsJ
I'll check out the Discord server today.
Thanks!
Noting your interests: I had a fusion researcher in my family, Ray Dandl. According to his brother, Ray got the first "stable" plasma going. That was probably prior to 1985, in San Diego. He had also been a minor (?) participant in the Manhattan project. Another relative did calibration/testing/burn-in for gyrotrons that the Japanese used for heating plasma for fusion.
I just do low-level software.
I didn't recognize the name of Ray Dandl, so I did a little research. Apparently he was the mind behind the Elmo Bumpy Torus, a device half-way between mirror designs and a tokamak. I recall reading about it many years ago. He also seems to have had a hand in early microwave plasma heating (not sure if that is in conjunction with your other relative).
While looking around, I ran across an interesting book, "Fun in Fusion Research", by John Sheffield. It contains a bunch of interesting anecdotes, including ones about Mr. Dandl. I thought I might mention it to you in case you enjoy it.
I wonder why nobody seems to have tried electronically cycling the field direction (alternating perpendicular fields) faster than the particles can get out the end of the magnetic mirror.
That other relative, Pat Cahalan, did work for Varian, now called CPI. That was the supplier of the gyrotrons. He also was held back by limited education. The gyrotrons are pretty insane, with diamond windows about 2" in diameter that cost a $million. Megawatts of RF shoot out in one direction, while a powerful beam of X-rays shoots out in another direction. I've heard of them reaching 60 MW, and evidently they go over half a THz.
I'm told that it's a bad day when you shatter the gyrotron window, causing air to be sucked into the hot vacuum tube. It's also a bad day when you are inside the walk-in power supply and a capacitor blows.
Interested even to help coordinate one.