martinclayton

I use Catalyst quite a lot - have been working on a new thing this morning.

Thanks, Matt, the ripples will go on for a good while.

In a thread elsewhere I saw "Interstellar Objects in the Solar System: 1. Isotropic Kinematics from the Gaia Early Data Release 3" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.03289) mentioned.

In there, one estimate of the number of these objects is

   Nisc <~ 7.2 × 10−5 AU−3

Which (my, probably wrong, calc) implies roughly one inside the orbital volume at the radius of Saturn's orbit at any time.

What happens if Charlie Stross meets the Pope?

Information-rich but is sadly very click-baity.

The head/title of the page is: "Asteroid to Hit Earth 2025 | Most Dangerous Asteroid 2025".

Heading is "Next Asteroid Predicted to Hit Earth: All About 2024 YR4 and Other Dangerous Asteroids". Then big picture of bad things happening: "Are We Doomed?"

Body text kicks off with: "Every now and then, the media produces dozens of scary headlines about rocks from space headed toward our planet." ...like this one, you mean?

There's a section headed "Famous asteroids predicted to hit Earth". Why use this misleading style? The body text below this heading can be summarised as: "there are no famous asteroids predicted to hit Earth".

At least it says "At this time, there is no evidence that any of these asteroids will collide with Earth". Sounds like "so you're saying there is a chance!"

When a magician does this, you know it's likely a distraction, and somewhere else there is trickery going on.

As a cryptography layman this would make me more suspicious...

I think this must be it, or at least this is one story that fits.

Seems a shame that people report Objective-C experience as Swift experience to such a great extent. These surveys are not resumes...

Perhaps it just "proves" that all data in these charts is questionable.

In case anyone is interested...

The SO Developer Surveys give some info on the job market for COBOL as it appears on the average salary versus years-of-experience graphs, which I like as there's as many stories or reasons as you can think of to explain them.

In 2023 there were 222 respondents who averaged 19 years of experience, and an average salary of $75,500. In 2024 the exact number of respondents is not shown, but likely similar based on the color code of the point, but the average experience had dropped to 17 years.

Elsewhere in the graph my favourite open question is: how come the over 2000 respondents mentioning Swift average over 11 years experience in a language that's only been public for 10 years?

2024 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary-comp-total-...

2023 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/?utm_source=so-owned&ut...

There was an interesting Fraser Cain YT vid a couple of weeks back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcR6gs0Up6k

Interview with Gerard van Belle, director or the Lowell Observatory.

The topic was space/lunar optical interferometers. It's easier to do this on the Moon than in space, as there's no formation flying. He's got a "menu" of projects from a few/small unit telescopes right up to lunar manufacturing like this.

Given that the customer ticked an agree to terms box for the park tickets that likely will be enough for the company to keep the case out of court, why would they feel the need to go with the "stretch" to the streaming agreement terms too?

Could there be some difference in the terms, where the streaming terms have some advantage over the park ticket terms for the company, perhaps?

My experience is different to that.

I'd say people and businesses that best understand and balance risks against potential rewards are the most successful. I know a couple of skydiving accountants...

Use of innovative tech in finance is one way for companies to gain an "edge" which can make them a lot of money. I wouldn't characterise people working in those particular areas as more risk averse.

OTOH finance businesses (esp. those that manage other peoples money) are regulated and can't put new tech into Production without careful change control. But this evolves over time, and controls were looser in the past.

There's a steady creep of regulation and control into tech used in finance outside and around IT: so called EUC (End-User Computing). This can be a source of "wrong tool for the job" syndrome. I've seen some hellish SQL written by non-IT people, but it got the job done. It's also an area where source code control, testing, and release processes are inevitably more human and error-prone.

There is a culture clash internal to large finance between "move fast and break things!" and "nothing can change, ever - too risky!" This leads to a mixture of the very old and very new, and inevitably, more complexity. Achieving homogeneity once the heterogeneous is out of the bottle is very hard - attempts to do so often (always?) lead to a variation on the xkcd "Standards" situation https://xkcd.com/927/

Y-chromosomal Adam, aka Y-MRCA, must be due a spoof Village People number ...

It's in section 3.3.

- Natural Al estimated at 141.1 metric tons / year not varying.

- Human-made: 2016: 5.36 tons, 2022: 41.7 tons, "future" could be 912 tons, i.e. more than 6x natural.

I think the last figure is based on many planned large satellite constellations being deployed.

An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1].

Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

Title should mention that the article is from 2011.

I was going to write a "Previously on Hacker News" comment, but no one commented the one time this was posted before ...

I'd forgotten about the Aggregation Theory piece.

"By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle."

Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification.

"...from music to video to books to art; the extent to which being “special” meant being scarce is the extent to which the existence of “special” meant a constriction of opportunity"

I don't get this. Rarity or inaccessibility has been used as marketing tool, sure. But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. Feels like a "never mind the quality, feel the width" view of culture.

"LLMs are breaking down all written text ever into massive models that don’t even bother with pages: they simply give you the answer."

When will people stop saying that? The give an answer, yes, but is it the answer: caveat emptor.

Previews only use the HMTL head - to get OG metadata - and usually an image.

Never thought about this before. One of my sites is (a single-page application) 45k HTML and 40k image. Hence about 50% of what is served for previews is wasted.

It would be nice if there was a way to recognise an "only html head needed" type of request. Don't think there is?

(Roughly) where in the world are you?

I think I agree; my take:

The point that the leading group in a field could and indeed did know each other to some extent is somewhat conflated in the piece with that particular group, who represent a very particular set of one-off extreme high achievers.

Self evidently "most physicists" are not going to measure up against a group including 17 Nobel Prize winners.

PhDs serve a different purpose now in society, but are still of value.

I don't disagree with the article - enjoyed it. The 5th Solvay is somewhat of an outlier: majority of the folks in the famous photo were Nobel laureates or laureates to be, which must be some sort of record.

Unfortunately, everything is held back by the en(bull)shitification cycle we're in, not just academe. This seems to be an area where LLMs will make a big difference: what we think now is a flood will turn out to be the receding tide before the tsunami.

Is a "right imbalance", which seems to be the central idea expressed here, somehow being illustrated by a counter example: the content of the article itself?

Richard Littler's poster for the "real" Festival of Brexit Britain:

https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/03/richard-littler-satirical-...

And the outcome was ... ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)[1][2]

    [1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf
    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms

Doh! Indeed - edited. Nice of the 'arrows to not move far when they left Scampton.

We used to live under the flightpath for the departures from Heathrow to the US, not far from Reading. The evening flights would go over, which you could feel in your body, then moments later catch the light of the setting sun as they headed west. It was quite inspiring.

The Vulcan is (or was!) my favourite plane sound, beating out the Merlin-engined stuff and even Concorde. Four Olympus engines, plus the howl. Can't be bettered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ

The piece seemed a bit wooly to me. This bit caused a little twinge of pain:

Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet spinning around a foreign star would drift in time when observed from Earth, "the same as when an ambulance goes past you, the sound of it shifts from very high to very low"

What's wrong with saying Doppler, frequency, or pitch maybe?

Front and rear lights seem to have diverged in design recently. They don’t look similar at all when illuminated. It gives some sort of character to the otherwise sameness. To me, half of them look like Angry Birds. Presumably replacing them costs a limb.

Indeed! Carry burn about 4% per hour a pilot friend mentioned last week. Flying is more like space flight than driving in this respect.