Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | stcredzero's comments login

Someone made a pi version of the OQO!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO


How was he caught?


If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.

I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the 21st.

The XKCD counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/915/

(I think this shows how arrogant Randall Munroe can be sometimes. He does a lot of great stuff, but when he's wrong, he's egregiously so!)


If you extend your journalism one back a quarter, you lose that trend, instead, we start and end with the fine art of creating click bait. Yellow journalists followed by Buzzfeed bloggers


The sphere for all liquid water seems to be close in size to the asteroid Ceres.

https://lightsinthedark.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ceres...


But would this sphere of water have enough mass to hold itself together as a sphere in space? Put aside it freezing into a ball of ice as a thought exercise.


The freezing-into-a-ball-of-ice is relevant here. A body that small can't hold on to water vapor at anything a human would consider a reasonable temperature; the average velocity of light gases at human-sane temperatures is high enough to overcome their escape velocity. See [1] for a log-log plot of what gases a body can hold onto - even Mars, which is much larger and denser than a Ceres-sized ball of water, has lost most of its water (although other factors like the solar wind are contributors there).

A cold enough body, though, has a low enough vapor pressure that this isn't relevant even over cosmological timescales. That's why Europa can can have a stable icy surface. It's far enough from the Sun (and has a low enough albedo) that it's very very cold (about 100K), and at that temperature ice doesn't sublimate very much.

TLDR: a Ceres-sized ball of water could hold itself together, but only as long as it stayed water. But it wouldn't be able to. Either it'd be cold enough to freeze over at the surface, or hot enough to evaporate into vapor that would escape.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere#/media/File:Solar_s...


Given that water gets lighter when cooling down right above its fusion temperature, and that ice is a pretty good insulator. You'd have liquid water below an ice crust for a lot of time. It would eventually freeze entirely and be slowly eaten by the Sun's radiations. But that would take a pretty long time (well on a human scale).


Yeah, that's why I specified freeze over and not freeze through, although without doing the math I'm pretty sure it'd still freeze through on solar system timescales without radioactive (as in Earth's own mantle's case) or tidal (Enceladus, Europa, possibly Triton and Ganymede) heating.


Indeed, it will slowly freeze though and evaporate at the same time.


Freezing? Wouldn't it boil instead due to the low pressure?


Depends on the temperature. At Earth-like temperatures, yes, it would. The transition between the two is around 175 K, give or take; below about 150 K ice is quite stable in a vacuum even over astronomical timescales; above 200 K it sublimates rapidly. (Surface liquid water is never stable in a vacuum or thin atmosphere regardless.)

The rate of evaporation ramps up exponentially, from ~irrelevant at the bottom of that range to fast at the top. (For a body of this size, any resulting vapor would be quickly lost at these temperatures, so the rate of evaporation is effectively the rate of water loss as well.)

This is why Jupiter can have icy moons (temperature ~100 K), but ice sublimates quickly on Mars (~200 K).


Going from a liquid to a gas takes energy, which rapidly lowers the temperature of what remains. Net result most of the water freezes without some external energy source. Sublimation then lowers the temperature of the ice until near absolute zero, again unless there’s some external energy source.


i knew there would be someone to just try to get out of the answer by failing to just go with the spirit of the question by being pedantic. even my own attempt at dispel pedantry just allowed for even more pedantry.


I don't know what you wanted.

If you wanted to ask whether that amount can hold together and become spherical, then just by comparing to Ceres doesn't that make it plenty?

It's not crazy to interpret "hold itself together" as more complex and including vapor escape.


The sphere of water would have a surface gravity of 0.016 g, 1.6% of Earth's gravity, 1/10th of the Moon's gravity. So yes, it would gravitate into a ball shape, aside from slowly boiling off if it's inside the orbit of Mars (our 32°F Goldilocks Zone) or freezing if it's farther out.


I'm very disappointed that (Number four will shock you) wasn't some kind of break statement or event handling.


Bret Victor might argue visualizing a program is still "drawing dead fish".

The power of visual programming is diminished if the programmer aims to produce source-code as the final medium and only use visualization on top of language.

I disagree. We frequently break up large systems into chunks like modules, or micro-services, or subsystems. Often, these chunks' relationships are described using diagrams, like flowcharts or state transition diagrams, etc.

Furthermore, quite often there are zero direct code references between these chunks. Effectively, we are already organizing large systems in exactly the fashion the op is proposing. Inside each chunk, we just have code. But at a higher level viewpoint, we often have the abstraction described by a diagram. (Which is often maintained manually, separate from the repo.)

What exactly are the disadvantages here?


> We frequently break up large systems into chunks like modules, or micro-services, or subsystems. Often, these chunks' relationships are described using diagrams, like flowcharts or state transition diagrams, etc.

We frequently break up large systems into chunks like modules, or micro-services, or subsystems. Often, these chunks' relationships are documented using diagrams on a high level (like flowcharts or state transition diagrams etc.), but are not executable.

Fixed it for you.


> but are not executable.

Fixed it for you.

Dude, if you say the flow in the diagram is not executable, blanket in any fashion, then are you saying all of the programming projects you've been in are either monolithic systems, or have all failed?


> (Which is often maintained manually, separate from the repo.)

To me, this is the interesting avenue for investigation.

Rather than go from visualization -> code, how can we take an existing visualization that represents some underlying system (a code base, module dependencies, service architecture, a network topology, etc) and easily update the representation as the underlying system changes...


Sounds like the consumer tech version of "$70k EVs aren't selling anymore!"

Misinformation. The good EVs are selling quite well. It's just that their price has effectively dropped quite a lot. My wife's Model Y which cost us nearly $80k (we bought at peak price: the prior Corolla got totalled) now has the equivalent 2024 model selling for $42k!

The crappy EVs (ie most everyone else's) aren't selling, because they are inferior in efficiency and software implementation. Rivian and Lucid vehicles are pretty good, but those companies are still at risk of never showing a profit. I've been in a Hyundai Ionic 5, and that seemed decent too.


Instead of just downvoting me, how about doing some actual research:

Proof that Tesla demand is up in July 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHiAIZsXT1Q


Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.

Long term, here's what I suspect may happen. Robotics+AI is going to eat the lunch of VR. VR is only used when it's not economical to have the actual stuff, but the realm of nifty real world stuff is going to expand tremendously.

This may well result in a societal bifurcation, where the rich have a bunch of robots, and the poor have to settle for VR.


An enormous percentage (like 90%+) of requests to Hubble, JWTC, etc get denied, so the market is seemingly there.

What is the TAM? Would it be worth it?

However, considering that the Hubble was developed from spy satellite tech, could this also happen in reverse? What uses would a 9m mirror telescope have in terms of ground observation? Would the US government allow such a thing to go up and be available for hire?


What would be the effect on the "Grabby Aliens" model?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: