Time Travel Cheat Sheet | Hacker News Reader

Time Travel Cheat Sheet

topatoco.com

Note to poster, this is an example of rude and/or lazy linking behavior magnified:

1. joshwprinceton linked to the gizmodo story, it's actually just a cheap "via" link from buzzfeed (http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/lets-say-youve-gone-back-in-t...)

2. Buzzfeed linked to the image graphic directly, instead of the actual story providing context at Topato (http://topatoco.com/hey/?p=33)

This laziness fails to give Topato the actual traffic they deserve for this image. It's a case of giving the money to the least productive members in the information supply chain.

I have no affiliation with any of the sites or people involved.

I'm 100% in favor of linking to original sources, but it's not fair to call the middlemen sites "the least productive" members in the supply chain.

On the internet if you create the most amazing thing in the world, but sites like Gizmodo and Buzzfeed don't link to it, then you effectively did not create the most amazing thing in the world.

If a site doesn't get linked to, did it ever exist?

If a man speaks himself in a forest and no woman can hear him, is he still wrong?

Humor aside, you posed an interesting question. The answer is of course yes, the web page exists, but it's not reachable. Which means that for practical purposes, for the society as a whole, it only exists by the manner in which its owner is affected by it in his/her interaction with the world. Which is a very low kind of existence.

Possibly like the average Twitter user then? :) I guess a better line would be "If a page isn't linked to, does it have any significance?".

That makes me wonder how many orphaned pages there are on the web. I guess it's uncalculable (within realistic constraints and without attempting to brute force URIs) as they woudn't be indexed by any search engines (unless they crawl the new domain registration lists).

Well, there are many, many people in the world with the power to link to the most amazing thing in the world with the effect of making it significantly more well-known. However, there are much less people with the power of creating the most amazing thing in the world.

So I'd say the former are much less productive than the latter if we define productivity as the propensity to create things of value.

But how many Gizmodos and Buzzmachine's are there, sites that can send 1000's of early-adopter readers to your site, readers who blog, tweet and tell their friends about it? These sites are the distribution system for the internet. Google won't even send people to your site until others link to it. I'm not suggesting this item link to Gizmodo, just that it's a complicated matter.

Should say Buzzfeed, not Buzzmachine. Got Jarvis on the brain.

If you really create "the most amazing thing in the world" you'll necessarily get mentioned in places that matter if you give it some time. If the places that matter repeatedly fail to mention "the most amazing things in the world", they'll get taken over by competitors.

As I see it, the most obviously amazing your thing is, the easier the word will spread for the same amount of effort.

I wasn't intending to troll the middlemen. I think it's fairly accurate to say they are the least productive members, they didn't produce the work we're discussing at all.

Of course they produce value, and do so in various ways. Butin this case they produced very little value to Topato, and certainly less than is customary. This is constructive criticism.

Props to the original poster for updating the HN link to go to the Topato page.

Comes from Dinosaur Comics for those who liked it.

http://www.qwantz.com

Took me a while to warm up to the comics, but there's some gold in there, eg:

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001426.html http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001433.html

Also, while I'm spouting random and totally subjective opinions about Dinosaur Comic related things, I much prefer this shirt

http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

to the time travel one, but maybe I'm just a big kid.

Another one to add to List of works with the equal transit-time fallacy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_with_the_equal_tr...

Why would you go to the length of putting together a geek oriented work like this, and then get something so blatantly wrong in the first paragraph?

I guess I'm not the only one who daydreams of going back in time and (re)inventing all the good stuff.

I've been memorizing lists of Superbowl champions by year, just in case. Think how stupid you'd feel if you suddenly found yourself in 1972 and didn't know who to bet on to make your millions? You'd have to wait 10 years to buy Apple stock.

Corollary: Most early Apple investors are time travelers who aren't into football.

I'd like to learn from some good, concrete, and practical cheatsheets; this one mostly enumerates what you'd already remember with no trouble. For example, a computing one for people who don't know computers might go: It's possible and valuable to build a computing machine that can simulate any other computing machine, given a coded description of it plus enough time and working memory. Here's a simple one: <very basic one-accumulator binary stored-program computer, logical design> Build it out of logic gates and flipflops, satisfying the digital abstraction (that errors in each device's input get reduced enough in the output to allow very long chains of operations with negligible error). <sketch of slow but workable bit-serial implementation of the above, using a few dozen gates, not counting main memory (Babbage's strategic mistake was to design big fancy hardware; point this out)> <hints for devices: rod logic, electric relays? I don't know this part> Point out selling points for historical customers: cryptology and numerical tables come to mind for a start. I'd love to squeeze in some theory too (cool algorithms, uncomputability, NP-completeness, Shannon coding theorem, core Scheme self-interpreter, algorithm design principles (invariants etc.), Hindley-Milner and Curry-Howard?), but we've already used up one sheet.

This seems like a mix of the pointless and the inspired. Telling me that viruses cause disease is stating the obvious and is something I'm unlikely to forget during my temporal accident. Telling me that C20H26O2 is a good synthetic substitute for progesterone is close to entirely useless. At least give me the structure or better yet a chemical process to synthesise it.

On the plus side giving me lat/long coordinates for useful ore deposits is inspired. That wasn't obvious to me.

As one of the other posters mentioned one cheatsheet really isn't enough. This is a interesting start but could have been so much better.

Pretty bad cheat sheet, since it doesn't mention any military applications. Throw in a few tips on how to make rifles and should be good to go

Gizmodo says you already have a gun. If you go back far enough in time, 1 is enough.

A gun is fine and dandy to defend yourself, I'm more talking about local manufacturing. Something like a flintlock or hell even a matchlock. Think of how much you'll stand to gain by equipping some local warlord's army with a couple thousand worth of rifles

But should that necessarily be the best way to go about living in the past? You may well end up as endenturing yourself to said warlord as the boomstick maker. Probably better off trying to be a merchant of useful stuff to begin with.

Tying yourself to a warlord to whom you have just given a very unequal advantage is exactly the thing that can keep you alive in a circumstance such as this. Further, nothing wrong with "inventing" the assembly line. With this kind of overpowering technology, you can get the manpower needed to get the other ideas ramped up.

Not the most admirable, of course.

The big thing that is missing is that unless you have studied a language and can precisely direct where you're going, you're going to have trouble speaking with anyone. Everyone seems to forget language in these things...

I suspect this mammoth thread at MarginalRevolution last year...

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/06...

...is behind some of the recent interest in 'time traveler tips'. It even spawned a song highlighting some of the consensus recommendations:

http://www.sugarfix.net/2008/06/23/song-1000-ad/

(Though, the genre goes back at least to 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'.)

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