Ask HN: What was your last “ah-ha!” moment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33152008

by sunday_serif • 4 years ago

23 19 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What was the last moment in which something technical (or otherwise) just clicked? What exactly did you learn?

I was taking flight lessons and dropped my pen under the rudder pedals. I had a pencil in my pocket and my flight instructor said he was impressed that I had a backup.

This kind of drove home that you need to be prepared for a lot of different outcomes because I would have been screwed if I was flying by myself and was unable to take notes.

altdataseller• 4 years ago

Screwed in what sense? Was it a life or death situation?

I_dev_outdoors2• 4 years ago

unable to copy ATC instructions, unable to cross stuff off my in flight check list. I guess not screwed, but when task saturated, it wouldn't be good.

przeor3• 4 years ago

Cryptocurrencies is a more social revolution than technical one. It helps to spread innovative ideas more evenly across the globe.

Cryptocurrencies provide coordination mechanisms and is the "fuel".

I'm from Poland, so good example will be gaming as we have CD Projekt (they made Cyberpunk 2077 / Witcher and other titles) here. Their advertising budget is huge and most of it goes to Facebook ads, Twitter ads and other Silicon Valley funded companies. So in order to make a successful title, you need to spend a lot of money on ads.

On other side, Axie Infinity in 90%+ spreaded around the globe because a lot of people coordinated to do so because of this cryptocurrencies social phenomena.

I'm sure this mechanism will be used, improved over the next years and more "money" will go to "token holders" instead of to social platforms like FB.

It's win-win situation for the game/software producer and to the user etc.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game which you have to buy. People buy it because they hope that the entertainment value they'd get out of it is greater than the price they paid.

Axie Infinity is a ponzi scheme with game elements on top. The vast majority of people don't play it for the gaming aspect of it, they play it for the monetary returns.

przeor3• 4 years ago

I'm talking about mechanism -> "I'm sure this mechanism will be used, improved over the next years and more "money" will go to "token holders" instead of to social platforms like FB."

I'm not talking about specific game.

Any game studio has to have a big budget to get out of the door in the web2.

It will improve over time, and we will get different favours over time.

nicbou• 4 years ago

You're describing affiliate programmes. They achieve the same goals with regular money.

przeor3• 4 years ago

Not really, with affiliate programmes you need to share ref links. Ref links are spam in various places + you won't be able to share a ref link in a spoken language etc. with people who you don't have direct line like phone number etc.

... and ref programs were super popular 10-20 years ago, now they rather have a bad rap

mikewarot3• 4 years ago

Technical:

When I learned exactly how an HP 5061 atomic clock works, in the process of repairing them.

The tube is a marvel of modern engineering, a physics lab in a package small enough to hold in your hand. In the end, it takes quantum mechanics, and turns it into a razor thin filter/rf detector. If you put in 9,192,631,770 Hz, you get a strong DC signal output, a few hundred Hz higher or lower and the output drops off rapidly.

HP engineers did some VERY clever work. They start with a high quality crystal oscillator, in an oven to help stabilize it's output. They multiply it's output frequency up to 9.2 GHz using a PLL to get the odd bits, and straight harmonic generators for most of it.

A small phase modulation is added to the signal, which in effect spreads out the probe frequency enough to allow finding the peak output. As the equipment starts up, it's precise enough to drift into detection range once it gets up to temperature.

The gentle rocking back and forth of the clock frequency to probe the sides of what is effectively a razor thin, quantum stabilized, RF filter/detector with microamp output. was genius. Doubly so when they used the phase of the output variation to tell which side of the peak they were on, and to then lock to the center of the range.

If you're on the low side, the signal goes up with frequency

If you're centered in the middle, the signal goes up with both sides, and you get double the swing frequency out

If you're on the high side, the signal goes down with frequency

They use this signal to then add a very small, and very slowly changing steering signal to the 5,000,000 Hz crystal oscillator... which then locks it into frequency with an accuracy of about one cycle/day. In effect they take it's error bars from +/- 10 Hz to about 0.001 Hz.

We connected two of them to the X and Y channels of an oscilloscope, and observed a diagonal oval that didn't drift, even after we came back from lunch, nothing had changed.

There are even more bits of clever in the device, but that gets into Zeeman splitting, etc.

Other atomic clocks, such as the Rubidium Clocks that are available surplus in E-Bay work in a similar manner, but instead of a stream of Cesium atoms, they have a cell of Rubidium gas that becomes 1% more opaque to a specific wavelength of light when excited with RF at 6,834,682,608 Hz

mikewarot3• 4 years ago

Non-Technical:

We thought that "The Algorithm" was a NERFed version of AI, and thus completely safe to use. We've allowed it to mediate all human thought on society wide scales. It may be the extra push that kicks off WWIII.

mikewarot3• 4 years ago

Beating a dead horse, but here's Bowen Yang's character should have been named "The Algorithm" on a Saturday Night Live sketch that makes my point

https://youtu.be/_U7UCyAcSzY

sandreas• 4 years ago

I was trying to create PDF files from photos taken with a phone camera (aka docscanner) and tried to compress as good as possible, when I realized that PNG supports 1 bit mode, with a palette of only 2 entries...

Combined with adaptive thresholding (e.g. Sauvola) this resulted in extremely compressed but still readable images.

I wrote a little C# tool called shrivel for my requirements: https://github.com/sandreas/shrivel/blob/main/shrivel/Comman...

No release but it works like this:

  shrivel process ./images/input/ --filter=resize[1750,1750] --filter=adaptivethreshold --output-template="{inputDirectory}/processed/{name}.pdf" --merge-pdf="./small_merged.pdf"

joshxyz• 4 years ago

this past fee days i understood jwt is for microservices scaling, mind blown moment

altilunium• 4 years ago

1. Investment, no matter what is its form, is not a golden bullet to prosperity. In fact, it's a glorified risky gamble : sevenfold (more or less) win or lose it all.

2. Each of the world's current top crypto coin has their own unique value proposition (for example : bitcoin "the original cryptocoin", ethereum "the programmable cryptocoin", stablecoin, etc).

3. There's a new trend that current new cryptocoin should have their own specific use case (for example : BAT for digital ads, TEKKON for openstreetmap-styled contribution, Golden for wikidata-styled contribution)

4. The very essence on "why double entry accounting" matters is : you are always being forced to re-check all the transaction twice, make it more safer, especially from high risk transaction bookeeping.

muzani3• 4 years ago

My favorite perspective on investment is you should only invest in things that are low risk, high reward. The good investments are invisible to the masses. A great investor has an unfair knowledge advantage. Anyone who views themselves as great investors think they have that knowledge advantage; same goes for gambling.

2rsf• 4 years ago

low risk, high reward

I know about a few somewhat lower risk and somewhat higher reward options, but nothing which is significantly more or am I missing it?

meiraleal• 4 years ago

Blockchains will inevitable become the world's ledgers

muzani3• 4 years ago

The idea that wealth is performed, not possessed.

Wealth is compensation. One must prove that the wealth they gained is less than the effort they put in. A billionaire sacrifices his life, his marriages. An actor or rock star becomes a drug addict and goes through hell and depression. People assume higher salaries come with poor work-life balance, even when it's more efficient to have healthy, rested, happy employees.

Wealth also has to be consumed. Often via taxes, but also sponsorships, charity etc. How many rich people oppose tax on the rich? Amazon famously has minimum profits.

If not properly performed, then society finds a way to deprive people of their undeserved wealth. Then you get minimum wage laws, more tax, revolutions, etc.

Theives also frequently view themselves as taking from the undeserving rich, and compensating the inadequately compensated poor. You see this not just in robberies, but those justifying piracy and running red lights.

Ask HN: What was your last “ah-ha!” moment?

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