puzzledobserver

Just like one of the comments in the article says, the final rankings table is actually quite funny: https://www.memo-project.eu/flatCMS/index.php/News#17.

Changing lanes, overpassing, crossing trenches and lost molecules.

From what I understand, the challenge is the following: Even though we know precisely how to calculate the lift generated by a wing, all attempts to reduce those equations and their predictions to "ELI5" arguments leads to incorrect explanations.

Basically: We can explain aircraft lift to a college student, but not to a 5 year old. Or, we can explain aircraft lift using equations, but not using informal arguments.

I am not a physicist, but I suppose it is because the s-orbital has an amplitude peak at r=0?

In other words, it is not so much the antiproton falling to the nuclear surface as much as the antiproton finding itself at the nuclear surface.

EDIT: The context is that the antiproton was in an orbital with large principal and azimuthal quantum numbers. Still, there would be some non-zero probability of the antiproton finding itself close to the nucleus, no?

See for example the experiment conducted by Tom Van Baak about 15 years ago: http://leapsecond.com/great2005/.

He drove three Cesium clocks up Mount Rainier and returned after a week. He compared them to a clock he left at home for the journey. The graph that he shows on the page and his associated commentary is interesting.

Ultimately, a clock is simply an abstract device that goes tick-tick-tick at some regular rate. Once one starts measuring the phenomenon itself---mechanics of the human heart, tidal forces on the Earth, friction in a pendulum, or the uncertainty principle in atoms---it is no longer feasible to treat it as objective time.

International Atomic Time (TAI) itself consists of an ensemble of 400 atomic clocks, with the collective being more accurate (the proper word is "stable", I think?) than any of its constituents.

I'm speculating here, but I think the idea is to ascribe accuracy to processes, not to specific clocks.

So you make two clocks on the same principle, say pendulum oscillations, and measure how quickly they start to disagree. Then you make two clocks based on a new principle, say quartz oscillations, and measure their rate of disagreement. You'll notice that the two quartz clocks agree with each other better than the two pendulum clocks do. So quartz clocks keep time better than pendulum clocks.

Then you build a new type of clock, say of the atomic kind, and compare two atomic clocks to each other and to quartz clocks. As you repeat this process, I suppose the clock frequencies have to get progressively higher (Cesium clocks are measuring radiation at about 9 GHz), but this allows you to measure finer and finer discrepancies between them.

IANAL, but I don't think so. See, for example, the famous R v. Dudley and Stephens case concerning cannibalism at sea [0].

The group was shipwrecked, surviving on a turtle and drinking their own urine. The victim, Richard Parker, was apparently in a coma. Despite these mitigating circumstances, the two defendants, Dudley and Stephens, were sentenced to six months each in prison.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens

IANAL, but isn't / shouldn't the process be the following: Google's lawyers drafted the employment contract and used the word evil. Now it is up to the employees lawyers to argue for an interpretation of the word, and if that interpretation is reasonable, then it stands?

There is a Wikipedia article about something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem

(I have only briefly skimmed the article, but ...)

Material such as this serves to remind the reader of what they already know, and contextualize it in a way that is relevant to this article. The article begins by telling the reader, "We all know what scalars and vectors are---here they are---but have you wondered what if ...", and taking the reader beyond. The introduction which you seem to find objectionable is only a small part of a much longer article.

In addition, different readers have different, mildly different notation styles. These introductory blobs inform the reader of the language in the article, and are essentially a friendly statement of definitions.

A third purpose is rhetorical: readers sometimes get stuck while reading text, and these parts of the article work as anchor points where they can loop back and "synchronize" with the writer.

Shouldn't this be illegal / isn't this already illegal?

Two companies reaching an agreement to supply products at reduced price, but not making the terms of that agreement available to a third entity (uninsured customers)?

Haven't watched the video, but I recently watched Timothy Roscoe's OSDI keynote on operating systems and hardware [0], where he argues for the operating system to include all of the kernel, device drivers and blobs that manage the SOC. He points out that the system emerging from the interaction of these components is complex and essentially unarchitected.

After watching his talk, I wanted to figure out how a computer, say a Raspberry PI, _really_ works. And build an operating system for it. Maybe in Rust?

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

Maybe CAD models for 3D printers? Something like Thingiverse, at the very least.

I'd imagine you also need repositories of processes and assembly instructions.

Early in the pandemic, I learned of an app called Dialup which offered a service called Quarantine Chat. They call my telephone at some random time every day, and I am connected to some other random Dialup user, somewhere else in the world.

Most often, conversations never moved past the awkward stage. I've not accepted calls from them for many months now, but I did have a few interesting/memorable conversations on the app, from people in my own city, to people halfway around the world.

To quote Harlan Ellison: I have no mouth. And I must scream.

It's amazing how such long experiments are organized. My first thought when I read "longest-running experiment" was the Rothamstead Park Grass Experiment.

I'm accustomed to thinking of Big Science as the LHCs and the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Projects of the world, but there might be a category of experiments that are instances of Long-Term Science.

Why the condescension? Do you mean that Google has been offering this service for a while? Or do you mean that similar services have previously been offered by other organizations? In which case, perhaps you could link to them?

'Top of the sky' is often the colloquial phrase for 'on the meridian line'. Which is valuable to know in itself.

Now, of course, there are differences between the mean solar day and the actual day, and the analemma, and all that, but to a first approximation, the sun is really closest to the top of the sky at noon, local time.

My first thought was to think that the standard was ridiculous. Obsessive formalization of the mundane. But that's a hasty conclusion.

Why does this standard even exist? The Wikipedia article mentions something about maintaining consistency of blends and harvests, but can somebody elaborate? If I was managing a tea plantation, I might certainly be interested in something like this, but why would I use the ISO recipe, rather than some plantation-specific technique?

I wanted to do something similar a long time ago, and couldn't find anything useful. Is there any reason an "integrate-everything-statically" tool isn't provided with binutils?

Is the argument that this is a simple procedure which yields recognizable English text? In other words, how does one confirm that this was indeed the encryption procedure originally used?

I ask because there are similar procedures one can apply to other documents, but they have been dismissed as coincidental. Bible codes are the example which immediately come to mind.

To me, the hardest part of writing is getting the first draft done. I'm a good enough self critic to do a reasonable job of editing, but the writer's block is real and awful.

The standard advice is to silence the internal critic and write. Of course, it's easier said than done.

I'm supposed to be writing a paper. I'm commenting on HN instead.

rumpkerbels? Mind sharing a link? Google Search is curiously empty.

One of the challenges to building an entirely new kernel is the vast amount of hardware support in the form of drivers and the features the existing kernel exports to userland in the form of syscalls.

Would it be possible for a hypothetical new kernel, presumably written in Rust, to run an existing kernel such as Linux in a VM, just to tap into its drivers and emulate its syscalls? As more drivers are ported to the base kernel, the reliance on the donor kernel would shrink over time.

Edit: This was an aside. Of course I realize that the conference was about adding Rust code to the Linux kernel, and not about rewriting any large, important, and functional codebase in language-of-the-day™. Hence my speculative language: "hypothetical" new kernel, "presumably" written in Rust.

Is there evidence that doctors and lawyers are, by virtue of their oaths, codes of conduct, and background study of ethics, more ethical, moral, and upright than members of the general population?

Also, whose ethics would such a Hippocratic Oath advance? For every privacy-conscious person saying that encryption-everywhere is good, there is a law enforcement officer speaking of reduced abilities to solve crimes.

Imagine a software engineer who has been asked to place a backdoor in some software. Is there any piece of uncontroversial advice which you can give them?

And like several previous commenters have asked, could this be a way to shift responsibility from institutions and their management cadre to individual developers?

Here's a potentially random question: Is UTF-8 essentially a fancy way of representing arbitrary precision BigInts where the character-to-integer mapping is specified by Unicode, and which coincides with ASCII encodings on a certain range of numbers?

17 years in isolation.

It can serve absolutely no punitive or reformatory purpose. It is of zero value as a means to compensation. Whether it is useful as a deterrent is unclear, but also immaterial.

The only purpose I can imagine is for the public to witness the misfortune of fellow citizens. A modern day public execution.

I am not hopeful that things will get better in the foreseeable future. I can only hope that our children judge us harshly.

17 years in isolation.

What assumptions does this visualization make? That it is a lone hydrogen atom suspended in a homogenous magnetic field?

Wouldn't the probability of finding an electron be spherically symmetric, regardless of the orbital number, if no external fields were present?

> There is a trend, and the trend has been a MASSIVE reduction in memory errors.

Citation?

I don't follow this criticism. GP came across as respectful but critical. I have read Aphyr's original blogs, and felt similarly when I read this blog. I even felt that the comment was phrased more eloquently than I could have. There is also no swearing or personal attacks, which are typical of a rant.

Isn't honest, critical, constructive feedback par for the course on HN?

What is the environmental footprint of a typical fab? From what I understand, modern chips are free of conflict materials, but are there toxic byproducts which would cause trouble with the EPA?

Asking someone who took their last (undergraduate) architecture course more than a decade ago: Is it possible to design a motherboard that will shield the user against Intel ME / AMD PSP-induced shadiness? Would it be possible to do this without performance impact?