Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
There is incredible complexity involved in performing these processes on an industrial scale in the modern day. This means that many important control decisions are made using approximate heuristics. And this leads to huge inefficiencies.
For example, a typical steel plant spends many $10s million/year on energy, but the theoretical minimum needed is far less. We are working on solving this problem by achieving totally optimal control. We create data-driven predictive process models that can simulate the physics and chemistry of the very quickly. This allows us to simulate different control tactics in real time - continuously evaluating different options in response to live observations.
[1] https://www.foresightdatamachines.com/jobs or email me: info [at] foresightdatamachines [dot] com
Another excellent resource on the magic of iron is the hypertext "Iron, Steel and Swords" by Helmut Föll [1] -- which is also an interesting experience just for the form of presentation.
Part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792
He's got a lot of good content on his site besides the iron/steel sequence, I thought his contrast between Sauron's well executed attack on Minas Tirath versus Saruman's amateurish attack on Helm's Deep was quite well done as well.
That changed the world. For millennia, steel was a high-cost, low-volume item, like titanium today. Then, in the 1850s, Bessemer and others finally figured out how to scale up steel making. Suddenly production went from blacksmith-scale to tens of tons per hour.
"I will do my best to capture changes in metal-working techniques in the medieval period. What I am not going to cover in detail is modern steel and iron-working (that is, post-industrial-revolution), though I will occasionally note how it is different"
The old posts on the blog can be pretty interesting, though the author seems to have viewed it more as a stepping stone to becoming a political activist than as a project in its own right.
When I look at my stuff from the heyday of blogs, half of it is, “wow, did I really write that?” And the other half I have no idea what I was trying to say.
Sometimes it’s better to just stop and publish.
After doing it for a year, I got pretty good at it (I'd like to think). I'm able to pretty quickly throw together an email or press release that's clear (avoids BS corporate speak), concise (summarize a paragraph in one sentence) and sets the right tone (why should the reader care).
Now I read others people's work (not talking about this blog post at all, I haven't read it) and subconsciously edit it my head.
My takeaway? Anyone can be a good writer with enough practice.
None of it has attribution, all are selling ads.
Some are copying comments from the threads here and putting them down the bottom of their fake blogs also to give it some legitimacy.
It's a shame when people who write high quality stuff like this for free end up treated this way by digital parasites. It's not an easy problem to solve, either you lock it up and get no exposure or you get robbed.
His work will still be there years from now, the poorly proofread copies likely will be too.
I made that original comment in the last thread, it was only speculation but it's an easy, low cost strategy to deal with this.
Let it get popular on HN with no proofreading, it gets copied, then fix it in a week or two and keep the version more likely to stand the test of time.
> None of it has attribution, all are selling ads.
Unsurprising, yet sad.
Some even go to the trouble of changing a couple of words, presumably trying to cover their tracks or justify some kind of claim of "authorship":
"This week, we continue our ... stare upon pre-standard iron and steel manufacturing"
No normal English speaker would write that. Sure enough, the original had "look at", and the thief has just substituted "stare upon" without considering whether it actually reads well in the context.
If someone cared to DoS or otherwise take down that parasitical site, I'd consider it a service to humanity....
As soon as his content started getting posted here it was bound to happen.
If you had to pick a user base most likely to have a side gig where they run some scripts to rip off websites HN would probably be about the best fit.
It happens enough on HN that bad re-blogs of OC get ads thrown around them. This shouldn't be.