Ask HN: What was your last “ah-ha!” moment?
What was the last moment in which something technical (or otherwise) just clicked? What exactly did you learn?
Wealth is compensation. One must prove that the wealth they gained is less than the effort they put in. A billionaire sacrifices his life, his marriages. An actor or rock star becomes a drug addict and goes through hell and depression. People assume higher salaries come with poor work-life balance, even when it's more efficient to have healthy, rested, happy employees.
Wealth also has to be consumed. Often via taxes, but also sponsorships, charity etc. How many rich people oppose tax on the rich? Amazon famously has minimum profits.
If not properly performed, then society finds a way to deprive people of their undeserved wealth. Then you get minimum wage laws, more tax, revolutions, etc.
Theives also frequently view themselves as taking from the undeserving rich, and compensating the inadequately compensated poor. You see this not just in robberies, but those justifying piracy and running red lights.
This kind of drove home that you need to be prepared for a lot of different outcomes because I would have been screwed if I was flying by myself and was unable to take notes.
When I learned exactly how an HP 5061 atomic clock works, in the process of repairing them.
The tube is a marvel of modern engineering, a physics lab in a package small enough to hold in your hand. In the end, it takes quantum mechanics, and turns it into a razor thin filter/rf detector. If you put in 9,192,631,770 Hz, you get a strong DC signal output, a few hundred Hz higher or lower and the output drops off rapidly.
HP engineers did some VERY clever work. They start with a high quality crystal oscillator, in an oven to help stabilize it's output. They multiply it's output frequency up to 9.2 GHz using a PLL to get the odd bits, and straight harmonic generators for most of it.
A small phase modulation is added to the signal, which in effect spreads out the probe frequency enough to allow finding the peak output. As the equipment starts up, it's precise enough to drift into detection range once it gets up to temperature.
The gentle rocking back and forth of the clock frequency to probe the sides of what is effectively a razor thin, quantum stabilized, RF filter/detector with microamp output. was genius. Doubly so when they used the phase of the output variation to tell which side of the peak they were on, and to then lock to the center of the range.
If you're on the low side, the signal goes up with frequency
If you're centered in the middle, the signal goes up with both sides, and you get double the swing frequency out
If you're on the high side, the signal goes down with frequency
They use this signal to then add a very small, and very slowly changing steering signal to the 5,000,000 Hz crystal oscillator... which then locks it into frequency with an accuracy of about one cycle/day. In effect they take it's error bars from +/- 10 Hz to about 0.001 Hz.
We connected two of them to the X and Y channels of an oscilloscope, and observed a diagonal oval that didn't drift, even after we came back from lunch, nothing had changed.
There are even more bits of clever in the device, but that gets into Zeeman splitting, etc.
Other atomic clocks, such as the Rubidium Clocks that are available surplus in E-Bay work in a similar manner, but instead of a stream of Cesium atoms, they have a cell of Rubidium gas that becomes 1% more opaque to a specific wavelength of light when excited with RF at 6,834,682,608 Hz
Cryptocurrencies provide coordination mechanisms and is the "fuel".
I'm from Poland, so good example will be gaming as we have CD Projekt (they made Cyberpunk 2077 / Witcher and other titles) here. Their advertising budget is huge and most of it goes to Facebook ads, Twitter ads and other Silicon Valley funded companies. So in order to make a successful title, you need to spend a lot of money on ads.
On other side, Axie Infinity in 90%+ spreaded around the globe because a lot of people coordinated to do so because of this cryptocurrencies social phenomena.
I'm sure this mechanism will be used, improved over the next years and more "money" will go to "token holders" instead of to social platforms like FB.
It's win-win situation for the game/software producer and to the user etc.
Axie Infinity is a ponzi scheme with game elements on top. The vast majority of people don't play it for the gaming aspect of it, they play it for the monetary returns.
I'm not talking about specific game.
Any game studio has to have a big budget to get out of the door in the web2.
It will improve over time, and we will get different favours over time.
... and ref programs were super popular 10-20 years ago, now they rather have a bad rap
Combined with adaptive thresholding (e.g. Sauvola) this resulted in extremely compressed but still readable images.
I wrote a little C# tool called shrivel for my requirements: https://github.com/sandreas/shrivel/blob/main/shrivel/Comman...
No release but it works like this:
shrivel process ./images/input/ --filter=resize[1750,1750] --filter=adaptivethreshold --output-template="{inputDirectory}/processed/{name}.pdf" --merge-pdf="./small_merged.pdf"2. Each of the world's current top crypto coin has their own unique value proposition (for example : bitcoin "the original cryptocoin", ethereum "the programmable cryptocoin", stablecoin, etc).
3. There's a new trend that current new cryptocoin should have their own specific use case (for example : BAT for digital ads, TEKKON for openstreetmap-styled contribution, Golden for wikidata-styled contribution)
4. The very essence on "why double entry accounting" matters is : you are always being forced to re-check all the transaction twice, make it more safer, especially from high risk transaction bookeeping.
I know about a few somewhat lower risk and somewhat higher reward options, but nothing which is significantly more or am I missing it?
Y Combinator plays on the very high risk tables, but they get in early enough to also reap very high rewards for a relatively low investment. And they've specialized enough in it to lower the risks.
Berkshire Hathaway does the exact opposite, they specialize in finding ways to get the risks so low that the lower returns don't matter so much.
We thought that "The Algorithm" was a NERFed version of AI, and thus completely safe to use. We've allowed it to mediate all human thought on society wide scales. It may be the extra push that kicks off WWIII.