Tardigrades survive impacts of up to 825 meters per second
phys.org
phys.org
Which made me ask - are they intelligent "Does a Tardigrade have a brain? Tardigrades have a dorsal brain atop a paired ventral nervous system. (Humans have a dorsal brain and a single dorsal nervous system.) The body cavity of tardigrades is an open hemocoel that touches every cell, allowing efficient nutrition and gas exchange with no need for circulatory or respiratory systems." from https://www.americanscientist.org/article/tardigrades
Which is all interesting as AFAIK we still don't know for sure if they feel pain. Not that I'm siding with any side of the ethics in this respect - just fascinating how that line is defined and changed over time. Makes you wonder how we would view such science in a few hundred years.
That all said, one question I do have - did they have some expected modelled result and this was science to see how their calculations compared to refine a model, or was it just science to measure results without any expectations or idea upon the results!
HN doesn’t want you to talk about failed HN systems.
One of Amazon’s leadership principles used to be “vocally self critical” but now it has been removed.
I don’t know why this trend exists but it’s disturbing. “Please don’t talk about the bad stuff here” is the mantra of modern times.
Heck, HN doesn’t even let you downvote or comment on YC job posts no matter how bad the company may be to work for.
Then we come on here and talk about fake reviews and inflated ratings as if we aren’t part of the problem.
Many conversations worth having aren't had and many conversations had aren't worth having. The environment has been very polarized along certain lines and unfortunately I think trends towards reinforcing very myopic worldviews held by people with very skewed perspectives of the world at large.
Just for some examples, crybullying runs rampant on this platform lately and I increasingly do not want to associate with a community that is used to coordinate and amplify personal attacks. Then there's the frequent contempt for the poor that tends to come up any time someone mentions rent regulations and/or zoning.
We do though. I'm pretty sure the saga of Gab played out on this website in plaintext. Maybe that's not your definition of "failed" though?
> HN doesn’t want you to talk about failed HN systems.
Like that infamous no politics policy of 2016? That seems to get brought up every few months. It's worth mentioning changes to HN are very slow, and by design. Some changes are too fundamental to HN, which dang refers to as, "fucking with the firmware".
> One of Amazon’s leadership principles used to be “vocally self critical” but now it has been removed.
I'm honestly not sure how this is related.
Anyway, I do think a lot of HN and ycombinator discussions happen but you end up having to be at the right place at the right time. By browsing other users comments I've discovered there's a lot of interesting threads I miss, which I was previously unaware of. Sometimes they don't spend that much time on the front page, or live on for days in /active.
The Gab website is still active and the company is alive...that does not count as failed in my book. I did a search for over 170 failed startups from YC (this is still a small sampling) and without exception, any post that talks about their failure (there's maybe 3...) invariably gets buried immediately and ends up dying with no comments. [0][1][2] Ever heard the saying twice is a coincidence and thrice is a pattern? Would love to see a counterexample with an actual shuttered startup.
> Anyway, I do think a lot of HN and ycombinator discussions happen but you end up having to be at the right place at the right time. By browsing other users comments I've discovered there's a lot of interesting threads I miss, which I was previously unaware of. Sometimes they don't spend that much time on the front page, or live on for days in /active.
That's a fair point. I can see how HN-specific threads would be more susceptible to getting caught in the anti-flamewar filter and dropping down in the rankings. However, I'm not optimistic any change will be made here.
> I'm honestly not sure how this is related.
It's related in the sense that there appears to be a trend against the idea of sincere self-assessment, and more disturbingly, a trend towards actively suppressing dissenting voices by any means necessary.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15959095 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15316698 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030823
Being able to email dang is a feature. If you want humility on display, search his comments or email him. The man, from my perspective, has no problem with metaphorically standing naked in a room. That doesn't mean he won't debate you, but he's fair and admits when there's an issue. Rephrased as, "HN doesn't take action on an issue as soon as I'd like" I would agree with, and that is by design. Their philosophy is contrary to move fast and break things. When dang does extend something, it is usually very thoughtful and intended.
> The Gab website is still active and the company is alive...that does not count as failed in my book
I would suspect that based on the crowd, failed startups aren't very interesting or curious. Most of us come from startups or FOSS. It's fairly well known why startups and projects typically fail, but I've seen some post mortems take off that subvert our usual expectations. Gab I would consider failed since they were kicked out of YC, it was very public, and much of the reasoning came from interactions on this board. Your implicit argument is that YC and by proxy HN are covering up their failures through automation, but that thread could've easily disappeared. I think there's a lot more reasonable explanations that precipitate your extraordinary claim.
I note the conspicuous lack of actual counterexamples in your post (notably Gab itself was never YC funded)...but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is some kind of emergent phenomena and not deliberate manipulation. I agree that it doesn't make too much sense for it to be deliberate manipulation, and YC still appears to be more transparent than most VC groups.
What I will say from reviewing your comments is that you're obviously discontented with software. In many ways I don't blame you, this industry is a young person's game, and even in my thirties I am dying. I can feel it when I'm annoyed that someone reprioritized parts of my project to fit their demands and concerns, even when they'd be solved by how the team had decided to tackle them. I sense it when I get frustrated with people in my life and my only reaction, in order to avoid lashing out at them, is to act like I am devoid of feeling. I have this mode where my eyes glaze over, my voice softens, and I relax - it's totally unnatural, I'm a former Marine, passion and energy are part and parcel to who I am, yet I show those to people in software and they get butthurt with the quickness of reverse time dilation. If these comments and skepticism are the result of that, then you're falling into the sink hole I was in where I had a beef and reflected that on the wider industry. I still have beefs but they're pretty specific and I don't translate them to the wider world anymore. Maybe all that's unrelated though, but in the case it's not I hope these words help.
I think software, like science, isn't anything like what it was supposed to be. Not in the sense that the world has changed, but more in the personal sense. Playing around with pipettes in your kitchen is a vastly different (and oh so apolitical...) world than the ivory towers of academia.
Even so, what I'm actually unhappy with is the idea of being a cog in a machine, however large and impressive the machine may be. It's not about the insignificance of the cog - it's about the unimaginative and inextensible role the cog plays. As someone who has many talents beyond software, I think I'd be able to employ myself more efficiently than any third party could.
I think the complaint that people are often trying to raise is that, while downvotes for comments that are actually hostile seem like a reasonable mechanism for keeping up the quality of conversation, the semi-official sanctioning of using the downvote button to register your displeasure with an opinion you don't agree with, without having to actually share your own opinion, encourages at least some thoughtful discussion to be replaced with knee-jerk reactions. Some folks who've been on HN since early on see it as the driver of a sort of "endless summer" effect, and are perhaps nostalgic for a time when the social conventions around this button were a bit different, and served to foster more civil, thoughtful discussion.
Downvotes should just be gone, it rewards laziness and I suppose keeps lazier people who just enjoy/need a quick hit of dopamine to feel like they've contributed somehow - so probably keeps more people addicted and coming back, people who otherwise would get bored and not come back as much; it makes me wonder what quality of comments people who downvote also make, I wonder if the less downvotes people do the higher quality comments (need to define what attributes would be part of quality)?
Dang/HN doesn't seem to be open to experimenting either.
I'd be interested if sorting could be done better, too. The way that posts accumulate votes according to zipf's law together with a feedback effect where people mostly only read (and vote on) the top few comments means that there's a strong bias toward the discussion being dominated by the earliest posts. Ones that have had a chance to benefit from and be informed by points raised in earlier comments are at a bit of a disadvantage in the karmic rat race.
* comment scores clamped between +5 and -1
* anonymous user comments started at 0
* comments at -1 were hidden by default (although you could set the threshold to whatever you wanted)
* required a reason for moderation (Insightful/Interesting/Funny or Flamebait/Troll IIRC)
* only gave out 5 "moderation points" at a time to users on a random basis
* mod points expired after a few days, and IIRC not using them lowered your chance of receiving them in future
* the pool of users who could receive mod points excluded the 10% most active posters on the site
* you couldn't moderate in an article you'd commented in
* if you commented in an article you'd moderated in, all those moderations were undone
* there was a meta-moderation system where you could rate anonymous moderations as "fair" or "unfair", which would influence the chance of the moderating user receiving future mod points
It was a complex system overall, but not really from the user's POV. The big difference was the idea of requiring moderation points in order to up- or down-vote comments, but I think clamping the lower-bound of comment scores would be an improvement even in systems where anyone can vote.
They originally showed your total karma but changed it to a descriptive term to address karma whoring, anything over 50 was just "Excellent".
That said, I would like to see such things as preventing you from downvoting more than you upvote and/or comment. I'd love to see more experimentation.
Asking whether tardigrades feel pain is interesting, implying that there would be ethical concerns with experimenting on them seems a bit disingenuous.
Thank you, I was just pondering the aspect, and was mindful just raising some aspects can be deemed as siding one way or another - an aspect I felt I clarified. I was basing from the perspective of what we did in the name of science in the past and how perspectives change.
However it was a sincere avenue of debate/question and certainly not aware of giving the impression I knew more about the subject than came across. Sorry if it seemed that way.
It may well be that in a few hundred years time, people may freely label such ethics of our time as disingenuous and that was the area of debate I find fascinating and the crux point I was raising. Hence was wondering if they had expected results or had some idea from data modelling from what they already knew.
Though let's be clear - I'm not ethically labelling this as good science or bad science, more that whole avenue of debate around this and how we define such ethics and how they change over time, so I'm sorry that was not as well communicated as it clearly could of been.
* to have
Plenty of meteors break up in the atmosphere, with only small fragments reaching the ground at much slower speeds (significantly less than 825 meters/second by the time air resistance has decelerated them), and so the question then becomes what forces would they experience as the meteor entered the atmosphere and broke up, and could they survive those?
Sure, if you're talking about a large asteroid impact that reaches the ground, it may not be possible for them to survive, but most of the objects that hit earth's atmosphere are not large asteroids (e.g., bolides, potentially comets, etc.). Presumably, at least in theory, they could also carry frozen/sleeping tardigrades?
How fast can are tartigrade travel when encased in ice (an instance already shown that it can survive).
> The researchers found that the tardigrades shot from the gun at speeds up to 825 meters per second could be resuscitated after removal from the cylinder. Those experiencing higher-speed impacts were torn apart and did not survive.
What's of interest is the acceleration that can be tolerated m/s^2. Accelerating a cylinder (presumably with a mass much greater than the tardigrades) could be considered to be similar to having the tardigrades accelerated to 825 m/s then having it hit a hard metal surface, if for example the cylinder was made of such a metal and it was decelerated from 825 m/s to zero with the tartigrades then hitting the wall of the cylinder end.
So it comes down to the surfaces around the tartigrade upon impact, it could be much softer than metal, glass, etc.
Planets have atmospheres. The terminal velocity for an asteroid on earth will be 100-200 meters per second which is well below that threshold, not sure how they arrived at this conclusion.
It seems like one could rather trivially dismiss the idea that earth was seeded with tardigrade-like organisms based on the fact that they're too evolutionarily advanced to account for six of the seven kingdoms of life we have on this planet.
You mean a millimeter? Even "a tenth of a centimeter" is better.
They also could say "1800 miles per hour" in the title if they want people to be able to take it in quickly. (or 2900 kph) Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but it seems like they are trying to make it harder to take in.
Anyway, to get this delicate circuit to survive the firing, it was encased in a solid. So perhaps the tardigrades could survive the impact if they were frozen in ice instead of suspended in liquid? I read that they can survive ice...
That's faster than the muzzle velocity of 7.62 nato rounds (1772 mph).
I haven't watched any Anime in a long time, would anyone be open to providing some suggestions?
Anime I liked: Planetes (which I've seen mentioned in several HN comments in the past as it's hard sci-fi!), Full Metal Panic, Full Metal Alchemist, Last Exile, Geneshaft, Space Cowboy, Read or Die.
Some ones I have but not watched: R.O.D. the TV, The Third, Black Lagoon, Steins;Gate, Trinity Blood.
Akira (just in case you haven't seen it).
Legend of Galactic Heroes (it's on crunchyroll, the new one, hardcore anime space opera stuff)
Jujutsu Kaisen was absolutely killer the last two seasons. (typical shonen but done really well)
Code Geass (mecha plus nation state subterfuge)
One Punch Man (really really funny).