HCIdivision17

It's the theological equivalent of "eat your vegetables". The link to Penn's commentary explains it reasonably well: no one wants to tackle another person, but you'd do it to stop someone from getting hit by a truck. Likewise, if you're sincere in thinking educating others of the theological risks can save their life - like you're not just going through the church-on-sunday motions, personal feelings take a back seat. To them it's too important to let petty things get in the way.

Naturally, this can backfire pretty hard. But that's the cost of taking the faith seriously.

My two cents on this off-topic discussion...

I've never been a part of the goin't'hell group, but in my fairly extensive experience as a young adult in an evangelical religious group, I certainly got the impression that the high touch personal approach was taken as more effective. Most people don't really like doing the door-to-door salesperson routine[0]. But they do it because it seems to work - assuming anyone actually answers the door (which is the real rarity). Or at least is effective enough; conversion rates are, shall we say, low. It doesn't need to be high, though, since the risk and reward is so high (failure means more lost, success is a life).

[0] For introverts it can be extremely stressful - practice is the only thing that seems to make the terror go away for them. If the person at the door preachin' the word looks awkward and is stammering, be kind - they're more afraid of you than you are of them :)

EDIT: slight grammar/clarification. EDIT EDIT: This is off-topic enough I'm going to just truncate part of my comment to gist: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/dead25324e4f74ccc183

That is one of the coolest articles on field engineering I've seen in a while. Thanks a lot for sharing it - it really brings out how something like the hyperloop can be tackled. So far, thermal effects have been my main point of curiosity, but the idea of calibrating the steel to take care of it will likely be the ... easiest? way around the problem.

At their desired vacuum pressures, the steel doesn't need to be anything special, so I would love to see the mechanical engineering that goes into designing the 5 mile track's materials.

To be charitable, I think the actual amount of the bump and spacing is very carefully calibrated to make sure that doesn't happen.

Really, it's almost like replacing the cage with a subtle bumpy bit in the race. And that seems less-crazy.

But without the grease, wouldn't it suffer the same as greaseless caged bearings? Albeit slower wear? Perhaps the wear is reduced enough that you'd be willing to replace them more often in exchange for the lower losses through friction. I dunno; I really think this just needs a (perhaps literal) ton of testing.

I was thinking something similar. I immediately thought, "wait, doesn't a speed change imply a force on the bearing, and wouldn't that necessarily imply friction between the bearing and track?" Under load (and I've no idea how much), I just imagine this applying a subtle little ba-dump-ba-dump-ba-dump to the bearings as they spin around.

Their innovation seems to suggest that this is such a small change that it has less of a bump and more of a very slight shape change effect. So there may actually be something there - I've certainly seen stranger topological results. But until I see one after a few thousand hours in a high speed motor, I'll be on the fence.

I think you're right on each count. But I also think that there's a lot of benefit from having a vocabulary - even a goofy one - that allows these things to be broken down and understood. On some level it certainly does remove that je ne sais quoi from the topic, but on the other hand it illuminates it somewhat (so long as the terminology isn't too slanted). Even a mild bias isn't bad, since we naturally adjust for rhetorical tone, and it can add a bit of levity to an otherwise tedious discussion (see Phabricator for a nice case study in that).

At any rate, I really like the idea that there really isn't bad people conspiring but just a badly formed/tuned system. (I'm a process engineer, so I suppose that gives me hope where others wouldn't see any.)

Absolutely. TVTropes has a real danger of adding its crazy vocabulary to your everyday life, especially on things unrelated to entertainment. (See also Idiot Ball, Fridge Logic, and Forensic Phlebotinum, which may be on topic.)

Really, someone should write up some of these political stories in terms of TVTropes so I can know how I feel about how the plot's progressing. So far it seems like we're in a poorly written mockumentary.

This sort of thing was lampshaded to hell and back in the Portal games.

On the surface it's a hilarious first person shooter with a gun that harmlessly puts holes in things in almost exactly the way normal guns don't. Yet it's actually a place where human life and safety is meaningless, where unconciable acts of terror and horror happen everyday (or at least did). And their PowerPoint slides are just awful. It's clear there's a systemic problem in the facility with sustainable testing. Aperature Science may be the most evil corporation ever, and it ends up being funny simply because they're so incompetently banal about it.

It's helpful to remember that giant machines chewing through our world and wreaking havoc on our lives are just side effects of lots of like-minded people working together for a common cause. Teamwork can bring you Star Trek or it can bring you Aperature Science.

There's a moral to be had there, but I'll be damned if I know what it is...

I came across a neat implementation at UTA's ARRI. There was a gizmo there called the Texas Microfactory, and it actually could assemble things on the microscale this way. I'm not sure how hard it is to get a tour of the cleanroom, and I wasn't able to find many good pictures of it easily.

Really, it was enormously impressive. That it worked, that is: turns out the magic of the system was the controls engineering. Placing manipulators on manipulators makes for a heckuva unstable system (every minor error upstream compounds, and timing starts to be everything). And if you go for stability, it becomes too slow to be useful.

But it could stack blocks in a clever way, and any microrobots that do anything at all is pretty dang impressive.

This is really cool looking, and I have no idea what you'd use it for.

And this is just the neatest thing to play with: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/hammer-retroazimuthal/

I think it would actually be really hard. In game lore, capsuleers can't meet in stations because decontamination is insufficient. Capsuleers already have compromised immune systems as a result.

Not to say it couldn't be made to work, but I highly suspect it'd just result in a pandemic that perma-deaths the player base. Could be handy if you could dope a capsuleer with a debuff though, like a stim with no upside. (Maybe pay off an NPC corp for the subterfuge?)

I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)

Your link follows to a pretty good set of animations on the topic (linked by the OP of that thread):

http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au//jw/rolling.htm

Good stuff, and even has an interesting note about how train wheel rims acually go backwards as the wheel turns!

I think the idea is that the top of the wheel is basically super sonic compared to the ground. This has to be the case: the train is connected to the middle of the wheel at speed, the bottom of the wheel is going 0 so long as it's not slipping, so the top of the wheel is screaming along at near-sonic speeds.

It's an odd diagram to draw out, as that result is pretty counter-intuitive.

And the obligatory HN discussion I was trying to find but couldn't remember the name of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6292750

The ratio is actually a function of the radius:

v = (4/3) * pi * r^3

s = 4 * pi * r^2

s / v => 3/r

This makes a kind of sense in terms of heat transfer: the sun's got a whole lot more insides for radiation to get through before it can even reach the surface to escape.

EDIT: line breaks unbreak formulas.

I think this is a funny comment in context of the opposite comment made elsewhere here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297279

Let's merge these two threads together and see which wins!

It's pretty annoying to strap on a motorcycle.

You're of course correct; the term shocking here is pure rhetoric. It would be shocking only if probing for a solution actually caused the device to electrically feedback, which would then be both literally and figuratively shocking :P (I've ruled this out so far, I hope.)

Specifically, I meant that usually there's a reasonable work-around. Something you can probe, inspect, and otherwise work with. In this case there really just isn't anything useful at a high level.

A better term might be it seems to violate the Law of Least Astonishment, but from the hacker perspective instead: I have a device that's really just spoofing acting like a storage device. There's a lot of side trips that normally can be taken to work around this, and each are the same sort of no-op, since it's not for real. This sort of thing was common for the old 'dumb' phones, but it seemed like it was because they were too dumb to behave properly; now here's a smart phone being dumb. It's a bit unexpected, at least for what seem like obvious things like "add mp3". But there we are. The whole time there's a feeling of "gosh, surely there's a better way" and there just really isn't: install iTunes and let it do whatever it wants, or you just don't get to put that mp3 on your phone.

And wanting to avoid installing iTunes isn't pointless. I mean, you may not see it, but there are certainly reasons not to. Heck, just failing to update iTunes was useful for a few years due to some odd DRM workarounds (mostly for a WinAmp addon that read iTunes music files). Besides, it's fairly invasive - you may only use it rarely, but it installs a couple services and tries to jump in when the phone connects (all can be administered, but it's a pain cleaning up that mess). While I've finally come to just tolerate it, I don't appreciate it.

(Perhaps I should use counterintuitive? I would hope that would get the same idea across without somehow triggering offense. The problem I'm describing is of expectation and should be orthogonal to intelligence. There's a lot of subjectivity to it, but no reason to take offense. Mindsets filter, so why would a hacker find the same things intuitive as your average user?)

I had tried that in the past, and it didn't quite work well.

I'd bet that it's been updated to integrate better, though. Could be a pretty good solution if you're used to using Dropbox.

You'd think it was trivial, but it's shockingly hard to do without using iTunes. For a person who frequents HN, that's extremely unintuitive. And iTunes is terrible, so that solution is out.

It took me forever to realize that just because I can kinda-sorta interact with my iPhone as a storage device doesn't mean that it's even remotely going to actually behave as one. The whole process is infuriating if you go in expecting it to be simple (which, given it's an iPhone, one might reasonably expect). Try to find an obvious way to put an mp3 on an iPhone without some odd middleware software; some of the software looks sketchy - and/or has a cost, and a many suggestions are to just use Google Play or Amazon Music. I also like the Winamp plugin from 2010, as well. That sort of list is pretty much the opposite of trivial. I mean, if it was drag-and-drop, sure, but this that ain't.

Personally? I ended up just uploading my music to Amazon and use their app. It's less infuriating than the Music app on the stock iPhone.

You'd probably be right about the risk. But a buddy of mine has a pacemaker, and the version he has now allows wireless updates and tuning. It's possible that a firmware update still requires direct access, but it's possible it's wireless.

Of course, you'd better be darn sure the update works (firmware updates always scare me a little, never mind on a pacemaker!)

As an engineer, programmer, and human being I would be thrilled to hear these sorts of war stories. If you've a book or lecture series, I'm all ears (err, eyes, as the case goes). This is a great, fascinating look - thanks for continuing to weigh in!

(And, incidentally, cruel to just skim over this stuff; some of this is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman material :)

I can't see why - the sales clerks at brick and mortar stores do the same thing. Like, if I went to a bike shop they would make off-handed remarks about someone buying a certain style helmet recently or perhaps emphasize the DOT rating (instead of the lacking Snell). Seems natural.

If I recall fun trivia from my childhood correctly, slightly damp skin has better grip. Obviously drippy hands won't work, but it makes some sense in the context of cartoons showing the character spittin on their hands before putting their back into something (like an axe whose head inevitably flys off the handle (which was expected to have better grip now)).

I gotta say, that sim of three lanes of cars all merging into one lane to turn right really was painful to look at. Darn near had flashbacks to my morning commute. Really nice work.

I was surprised as well. This looked exactly like how banks used to resolve transactions out of order to maximize fees. (And would spot you the overdraft for a modest fee; the practice got egregious enough congress got involved.)

Hopefully this isn't a widespread practice, but I could imagine it easily be part of the shenanigans regularly played.

Mint is what I recommend to friends and aquaintences interested in this Linux thing. But #! is the distro that I enjoyed getting work done in. It hits that aesthetic sweet spot of sparse and functional perfectly for me. So I for one am thrilled to have a Jesse update (making time to hack an update together or fuss with the package update friction is a luxury I just don't have anymore...)

Huh, you know, that sounds just like how dimensional analysis affects people sometimes. I've certainly seen some take a pile of engineering inputs and whack them together until the units work (myself included); it's a shockingly powerful heuristic for linear systems, since you'll typically only be off by some logical scaling factor. Of course, there's a bajillion ways it can deceive, so it's wise to be thorough.