Torus-Earth (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Torus-Earth (2014)

aleph.se

73 points10000truths33 comments

> while strongest slightly hubward from the "poles". This can be a fairly major difference.

Spotted the discworld fan.

Is discworld worth reading? I've heard mixed reviews on it

I like it. The humor is a bit peculiar. If you like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you'll probably like Discworld.

Some are real head scratchers too.

My favorite, from the first book:

"Reflected sound of underground spirits" -> echo gnomes -> economics.

An easier one: "Inn sewer ants" -> insurance

Yes, absolutely. But don't make the mistake of reading it in order - the first couple of books are not representative of what people love about it, as Pratchett hadn't really settled into his style at that point. Early Discworld was a straightforward piss-take of fantasy tropes, but it became wonderful when it expanded into more general social satire.

Where to start, then? It's not a series so much as a diaspora of stories set in a shared universe with occasional shared characters. Certain collections of books form little mini-series within themselves. There's a solid overview here: https://www.discworldemporium.com/content/6-discworld-readin...

I'm still surprised "widdershins" is a real word for counter-clockwise.

Torus Earth (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15578594 - Oct 2017 (17 comments)

Torus-Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182822 - Feb 2014 (62 comments)

What might be the practicality of an aquatic flotilla city for the purposes of following the sunlight more to manipulate placement to experience longer days? For given different volumes maybe it could be practical at a reachable speed... If the donut were extremely thin, for example it's not too far to get to or stay in the sunny side....

Couldn't get from the article -- is angular velocity is the same for each point on the torus? If not (essentially liquid regardless of composition), a ton of rotational energy would convert to heat pretty fast

They're talking about a stable arrangement, so presumably not one prone to converting rotational energy to heat.

Stand-up Maths on youtube recently asserted that, at least to topologists, a torus is a hollow rather than a solid donut. Is that something particular to topological domains or is the title on this incorrect?

You can say exactly the same thing for a sphere. Really a sphere is just the skin, but in practice people will use phrases like "within the sphere" etc.. So it really doesn't matter, when it does people refer to the "boundary" of it or will just write some equations.

Topologically the hollow torus is more interesting, the solid one is effectively a slightly thicker circle.

I was very confused until I realized you meant the boundary of a circle, not a filled circle.

A filled circle is called a disk (or 2-ball) in math.

So is there a stable torus planet dimension where the hole contains captured atmosphere through which you could fly using a conventional (non spacecraft) aeroplane?

You know, it’s for kids!

You let me down. You let Mrs Eisenhower down. You let the American people down… by sticking that “it's” in there.

> 'it is' for kids

Sounds right.

You missed the joke, but missing the context is kind of the point of this joke.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who downvoted the comment, and those who have seen The Hudsucker Proxy (1994).

GP didn’t open the blue letter.

Maybe he's wise?

Why do people insist on specifying a tiny font size that I can't read? (Or for that matter, specifying a font size at all, instead of just leaving it to the default, which I, the reader, can adjust appropriately for my preferences and eye capabilities?)

Can you not re-adjust the font after it's specified? I'm confused. I was able to Ctrl+Plus it

Of course I can zoom. I had to zoom to 150% to make the page readable. But I shouldn't have to. This kind of content has no reason to force any particular font size.

Many browsers don't zoom, or zoom in useless ways --- full page rather than fonts, as an example.

Firefox/Android hides zoom under three clicks: Kebab -> Settings -> Accessiblity -> Font Size

It applies the same zoom to all websites, and does not remember per-website zoom settings.

I'm increasingly going to my newest favourite browser (at least on Android & e-ink), EinkBro, which has font zoom directly on the toolbar, immediately available.

It's easier to access / change credit card settings than font size on Firefox / Android.

I've used the browser family since Netscape days. I'm wondering who the hell is running the show there.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That page has almost no formatting. It is nearly all raw html. You can certainly zoom the page in your browser or apply client-side styling to change the font.

While there are sites that make it difficult to read due to aggressive styling, this is most definitely not one of them.

The stylesheet forces small font sizes for the body text. I don't see why I should have to spend my time doing client-side styling to override the braindead choices of a site designer.

Why do people insist on using a web browser that prioritises websites' specifications over their own?

If your browser ignores CSS stylesheets, it's going to have a hard time getting much traction.

I suppose I could spend time crafting site-specific stylesheets for all the sites that insist, for no good reason, on having CSS that makes them unreadable, and then tell my browser to use my custom stylesheet to override the one the site specified. But why would a site designer force me to do this? For content that shouldn't care about things like font sizes anyway?

Increased use of Reader Mode makes me think that the tide may well be changing.

Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem.

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