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opcon

20 karma · joined June 20, 2011

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opcon··on Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here’s what our telescopes capture
The jets shown in the article come from the accretion disk [1], a disk of matter orbiting the black hole, formed as matter 'spirals' in.

For reasons we aren't 100% sure about yet (though we suspect it is due to angular momentum and energy transfer through some process [3]), matter (in the form of hot plasma) from this accretion disk can be launched out along the axis of rotation at relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light) in the form of astrophysical jets [2], which we can observe to due the radiation they emit. These jets play a large part in galaxy evolution, and as shown in the article can be huge, extending far beyond the galaxy itself.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet 3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10509-009-9984-y

opcon··on Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14591097 (from 12 hours ago)
opcon··on Show HN: Miki: Makefile Wiki, Minimal makefile-based personal wiki
I mainly use Vim, and have tried using both Vimwiki and Org-mode as personal wikis in the past, but they were never quite what I was looking for.

I like writing the wiki content in Vim, but for viewing it I think I prefer it as a webpage.

Following file links in Vim is really useful though, I should use it more often!

opcon··on Show HN: Miki: Makefile Wiki, Minimal makefile-based personal wiki
I've been half-heartedly looking for something exactly like this for a while, thank you for posting it!

Instead of using Uppity, which appears to be abandoned (?), I found Navigate Up WE (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/navigate-up-w...), which performs essentially the same functionality and appears to be maintained.

Thanks again, this will be very useful!

opcon··on Stealing passwords from McDonald's users
Archive/mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115144533/https://finnwea.c...
opcon··on Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code, just for fun
If you were looking to do this and wanted a text library that is more flexible than MonoGame's bitmap fonts, I maintain the QuickFont library for text rendering with OpenTK: https://github.com/opcon/quickfont. It doesn't have very good unicode support though.
opcon··on $10 Of Free Bitcoin For College Students
Does not work with utas.edu.au either.
opcon··on Amazon Prime Air
I have a feeling they are doing it to garner support for drones in general, which will help them with the FDA when it comes to getting approval.
opcon··on What's the worst part about working at Google?
http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-par...

Bypass the sign-up gate.

opcon··on Show HN: Showing HN
It seems good, as others have stated it is a bit low contrast.

I just have one small problem with the header/title. Right now it's click able on the whitespace surrounding the title. I've outlined this http://i.imgur.com/isRbJ.png

The red box is where it's click able now, and the green box is where I think it should be click able.

opcon··on Google just launched prizes.org
Yes, google will automatically pick a winner, as explained here in the faq (http://prizes.org/faq)

How does Voting work? You may vote on as many contests as you wish. However, you can only vote for one entry in a given contest each day, and you may not vote for yourself. You do have the option to vote for more entries in the same contest tomorrow! If buyers don't pick a winner when the contest ends, winners will be chosen by popular vote.