tizzdogg

Well it sounds like a massive ripple in the fabric of reality which passes by us in a fraction of a second, never to be seen again. So from my non-physicist point of view, no it doesnt seem like a very long lasting effect, relative to us at least. Thanks for the snark though.

The intent was understood, and it's a pretty minor quibble. But I agree that line threw me for a second as well, and I had to read it twice. I was expecting the next line to be "and then today our version control totally saved our butts!"

Thanks, that's helpful. It's hard to get my head around the idea that an event so massive can be over so "quickly", without any residual longer-lasting effects.

Sorry, "echo" wasnt the right term (hence my quotes).

What I am trying to ask is if these behave like concentric water ripples, where from a single event you get first one peak of a wave, followed by many more repeated concentric peaks gradually getting smaller in amplitude? It sounds like there is just a single momentary wavefront without any residual secondary waves? Why is that?

I am not a physicist, and dont have a good mental model of gravitational waves (or general relativity at all), so maybe someone can answer my laymans question: do these waves behave like ripples in water, so a single event generates multiple repetitive, concentric waves permeating through space? That would make me think that a single massive event would be easier to detect because it would leave many repeated "echoes", ringing space for a long time after the actual event.

The article makes it sound like the detection of these waves is just a quick one-time blip though. I'd expect something as big as black holes merging to generate more longer lasting waves than just a quick blip. What is the period of these waves?

"There are few middle-aged and effectively no old people there".

Well that's just total bullshit. There are tons of middle aged and elderly people in SF, most of whom moved to the city in the 60s or 70s and bought property before it became ridiculously expensive. There is a huge population of aging hippies still in SF. Now if you mean "there are few middle aged people working in the startup world", you might be correct, but I'd guess that's the same for startups anywhere.

Not everything in San Francisco is the tech world, and the city does not just consist of the Mission and SOMA. Most of the city is non-tech families and less exciting residential neighborhoods. People who dont live in SF usually dont see that side of it.

"they can sell high their place" It must be nice to live in a world where even the service workers own property.

The astronaut who tipped Kutyna off was Sally Ride. He kept that secret until after she died. He talks about it in this oral history of the disaster from popular mechanics: http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a18616/an-oral-history...

"Kutyna: On STS-51C, which flew a year before, it was 53 degrees [at launch, then the coldest temperature recorded during a shuttle launch] and they completely burned through the first O-ring and charred the second one. One day [early in the investigation] Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn't say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It's a NASA document. It's got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired."

What was the book?

The parent commenter is saying that there is a type of person who believes that everyone should just abstain from sex until marriage, and there should be no out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Those people are as ridiculous as someone who believes that everyone should just write perfectly secure, bug-free C code.

I would argue that physically-based raytracers actually make things more difficult for artists, because they tend to be less flexible. Being physically correct is great if what you get out of the renderer is exactly what you want, but as soon as you need to cheat anything to achieve a particular look, it's much easier to not be bound by physical correctness.

Every time I've taken an Uber in San Francisco I've ended up having to tell the driver how to get where I was going. Their GPS consistently tells them to take routes that technically work but are not the most efficient. For example, they always want to take California Street or Geary (stoplights at every intersection) instead of Bush/Pine (one way and with timed lights). As a native San Franciscan driving in the city for 20 years I know these are better routes. Most of the drivers I've had seem to not live in the city. I even had one driver who was in town for the week from LA and had never been to SF before.

Of course it's just a problem with the GPS algorithms, but that sort of hyper-local knowledge seems to be really hard to encode in algorithms. I wonder how many GPS systems could pass "the knowledge" in london for example? I think we on HN tend to have too much faith in the superiority of software.

Also how close is particle physics to generating anything in the eighth or higher periods? Is the leap from 118 to 119 greater than 117 to 118?

Doing stuff because that's the way elisp does it is a surefire route to unintentional autoemacsulation.

I submitted this, mostly because I was wondering what more recent algorithms would be added to the list if you were to do a new "best algorithms up until 2015". The most recent algorithm here is from 1987. What new things from the past 30 years might qualify for future best-of lists, assuming they have enough time to gain widespread adoption?

Perhaps exact figures were not the point of the comment.

I think the bigger issue is all the hills. They are bedrock, so arnt an issue for liquifaction, but make any underground line much more difficult to construct. For rail to get most places in san francisco its not enough to just rip up the street and put tracks underneath, like was done along market street. You need serious tunneling. Thats why historically transit in SF was mostly cable cars, which were replaced over time by buses. Its much easier to go over the hills.

The point is also that in fact the 'fibonacci spirals' which do show up in nature are crude approximations. There are no real perfect fibonacci spirals in nature, just a continuum of different spirals. People like to see fibonacci patterns where they dont exist.

He then spends the next few paragraphs going into detail about why seedheads actually DONT typically display Fibonacci patterns. The cases where they happen to look like Fibonacci spirals are coincidences. Those random coincidences then get cherry-picked by people who want to say that fibonacci patterns are found all the time in plants and other places and are some sort of mystical law of nature.

> The pattern of seeds seldom comes out perfectly matched to the golden ratio in the sunflower, but when it is very close, those are the seed heads that get photographed for "gee-whiz" articles about Fibonacci numbers.

In this setup it looks like you can't obscure the center of the cylinder defined by the lenses. That's where the background light goes. So the cloaked region is actually a long tube with a hole through the middle, and probably wouldn't work for street corners. It's a neat demonstration though. It seems like the point is to show cloaking with the simplest materials and optics possible.

Right, but still only twleve of us have been to the moon.

I think the parent commenter's point was that it's pretty naive to think that there will be no more human-driven vehicles at all. Change will happen quickly in some parts of the world, and other parts will take a long, long time to catch up.

>> It's much faster to reply with a "This is not your Smith"-mail

Right, and I've sent literally hundreds of those emails. They almost never do any good, because while one person may fix your address in their contacts list, the original person who gave out the faulty address is still out there, unaware that they're giving out bad info. I always ask if the email sender can tell the intended recipient about this when they figure out the right address, but that rarely works. Anyway, I know this is a very specific problem that only affects a small fraction of people, but it's extremely annoying.

I dont really see how allowing other domains would help.. that just shifts the issue to the domain string instead of the user string. I guess it gives people more options. But one of the main benefits of gmail addresses is that it's so common. Everybody knows it, so nobody ever misspells the 'gmail' part at least.

I dont believe I said anything about vanity domains, so I dont know what you mean by that.

I meant that email is broken in the sense that when some stranger mistakenly thinks that your email belongs to them, and continues to give it out or sign it up for mailing lists, you have absolutely no recourse. If you have an email address that like mine is easily mistaken for other ones you get incorrectly-addressed personal emails many times a day. There is no way to find the actual intended recipient or get in contact with that person to say "hey you seem to be confusd, stop using my email address". And there is no really good way to filter those emails, since after all they are coming to your correct address. I think this is the kind of problem that's difficult to appreciate unless it happens to you frequently.

The problem with email is that anyone can email you if they have your address.. thats why we have so much spam. I dont know what the solution is, but it would be much better if the recipient had to opt-in to the conversation somehow as well.

This happens to me all the time as well. I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and apparently a lot of other people seem to think they do as well. Or at least, they have firstname.lastname1@gmail.com and people easily forget to add the number.

I wish there was a better way to deal with this type of situation other than constantly sending "please fix your address book" emails. Email is a broken system.

Even if it was today's hardware, we'd still be getting grainy images from this distance. It might be slightly better, but not the amazing hi-res images people on this thread seem to be expecting. Pluto is really small and far away. It's just a tiny spot even to Hubble. Well get the hi-res images once new horizons actually does its flyby and once the data is downloaded.

One story I've heard is that the original Tron was responsible for a lot of this. They originally tried to use computer graphics for many of the movie's effects, but it proved to be way too expensive and time-consuming using the technology of the time. So they ended up hand-animating and rotoscoping most of it. The hollywood studios deemed the CG a failure and were scared off of it for a number of years following. So computer graphics didnt get as much adoption as it would have otherwise throughout the 80s.

Also many, many movies still use practical models in addition to CG. It's just that now movies can blend both techniques to use whatever is most appropriate for a given shot. What is rare now are movies that use no CG at all.. even things like Mad Max which are touted for their practical effects utilize a TON of CG work.

I don't think it's possible for a thread to exist on hacker news without somebody complaining about how the web page renders.

The article specifically mentions that earlier curvy cars had gone out of fashion and sold more poorly than bigger, boxier ones. Hence the trend towards boxy designs. Theres even a picture of a 1930s streamliner.

I would change "not punishable" to "not punished". Sure you could be punished for all those things, but there just isnt enough political will to do so. Ulbricht's error was being a criminal whose punishment affects nobody in power.

Yeah, if you're looking for it, you can see the phoenix motif all around San Francisco, not just on flags. It's the symbol of the city.. a city risen from its ashes. I quite like it actually, though I agree the actual flag is not the greatest design. He didnt mention it but the gold border is a reference to the gold rush roots of the city, if that wasnt apparent.

I dont think the flag is that hard to find.. it's flying over most government buildings at least. Though I may be inclined to notice these things since I could name the cities for a few of flags on his "bad flag" slide by sight.