shagie

I'm moderately disappointed that Fort Point in San Francisco isn't listed.

Things like Fort Dearborn in Chicago are listed, but all that remains is markers of the perimeter... while Fort Point is a structure that you can visit and walk around.

The suggestions that I've seen for astronomy on the far side of the Moon have largely been about radio astronomy rather than optical. The lack of the ionosphere which otherwise blocks and distorts 10 meter and longer radio and using the Moon itself as a shield from the radio noise of Earth makes it more interesting.

Radio telescopes only need a wire mesh to deploy (rather than polished optical mirrors). https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/arecibo-tel... has a view under Arecibo.

https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...

---

The liquid metal mirror telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-mirror_telescope are interesting in part because you can get liquid mercury temperatures near room temperature on Earth.

It's theoretically possible for the moon - https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007Natur.447..979B/abstra...

    A previously proposed liquid mirror telescope, based upon a spinning liquid metallic alloy, is not appropriate for infrared applications, which will require a liquid below 130K. Here we report the successful coating of an ionic liquid with silver. The surface is smooth and the silver coating is stable on a timescale of months. The underlying ionic liquid does not evaporate in a vacuum and remains liquid down to a temperature of 175K Given that there are ~10^6 simple and ~10^18 ternary ionic liquids, it should be possible to synthesize liquids with even lower melting temperatures.

The far side of the moon would be useful for a radio observatory where one can block the noisy Earth while taking advantage of the ability to construct large collection area dishes (think Arecibo in a crater - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Crater_Radio_Telescope )

As to the dark side of the moon, I would suggest a read of the story "A Walk in the Sun" - https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm (the dusk terminator moves at about 10 mph (15 kph) at the equator).

https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/

Jeff had stepped away in 2012.

While there was some lingering activity in 2013 and 2014, it was way down from when he was part of the company. https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood?tab=answe...

I would suggest this marked a change from an "Atwoodian" philosophy of curation to a "Sploskian" philosophy.

From https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

    It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of *good* programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

to

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

    What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/ was the start of it - a year after Jeff left.

I believe that Joel was responsible for the direction of Stack Overflow from 2012 to 2019... including the "direction" of those policies of 2013 and 2014. The "every question can be fixed" and "every answer should remain if it was an attempt to answer the question" stem from his philosophy.

However, (again, I believe) that is what ultimately contaminated Google's search and you were more likely to hit a duplicate ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) than the correct answer because of the lack of culling of duplicates and the golden dup hammer making that the path of least resistance for closing a question if it was slightly related.

Often the people curating the questions are also the ones who are answering them.

Their goal (loosely described) was so that if you pulled up the front page of the site, you'd find questions that are interesting to read and answer.

If you, as a professional visiting the site went to it and found the front page with things that were trivially answered by reading the documentation or "how do I draw a triangle with stars?" ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/10932962/ type things) you, as a professional, are less likely to stick around.

In the period, Stack Overflow was reducing the ability for people to curate content and trying to boost "welcoming". https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

Part of this is that much of the early writing style was intended to mirror technical writing. In reading https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel... one doesn't find "Hope that helps" at the end of the page.

It takes a while for a person to understand the norms of writing for a given audience. In the early days, people either came to it with that mindset or were able to be given more attention and guidance as to what the expectations for the site were. When Stack Overflow become extremely popular with college students and people outsourcing their work ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960245 ) the ability for the... for lack of a better term "elders" of the site to try to get people to understand how the site worked and its expectations.

Many of the new users expected Stack Overflow to work much like forums - with a back and forth between people and a chat like environment... that wasn't so. The use of the curation tools to try to help onboard a person were deemed as unfriendly and "toxic" started getting tossed around.

Stack Overflow corporate, trying to be sensitive to the broader cultural movements at the time and the "we need to make this a more inclusive space" made it harder to curate and began a campaign of removing or limiting curation tools as part of "welcoming".

During this time, there was one tool that was enhanced in its effectiveness. If you had a gold badge on a tag you could close it as a dup of another question categorically. Rather than "this question is poorly written and it is unclear what you are asking" (requiring 5 close votes from different people - that would never happen if it didn't happen in the first few minutes because few went to the review queues) they could close the question as a duplicate of what it might be.

That didn't help things when it came to the perception of the site. It was a last ditch effort to try to make it so that the front page was the well asked questions.

Combining the reduction of curation tools, labeling their use as gatekeeping, the growing ratio of new users to elders, and corporate quite literally saying that those people who were doing the curation were the bad guys... well, a lot of them left or reduced their activity.

That in turn made it so that it was harder to find the well asked questions and fewer people were around to answer questions. Note I write "well asked" not "valid" - a lot of people claim to have a valid question but don't ask it in a way that is well suited to the Q&A format.

Combine that again with reductions in staff, various awful "experiments" in the name of improving engagement. That was akin to firing half of a construction team at a house while having them add a new patio... all the while the basement is flooded.

And so you've got what is there today. Very few curators left compared to 2016. Few caring answer new difficult questions. The easy college homework questions (how do you draw a triangle) and the outsourcing of work to free labor is now done with an LLM... and there's no coming back from that. ... And few people believe in the mission goal of Stack Overflow - and those who do, don't believe Stack Overflow corporate believes in that mission goal.

My most recent read of Dune was after Foundation in order (side bit: bailed at Foundation's Edge because it got too "preachy").

One of the things that I had stumbled across was that Dune was an argument against the utopian view of Asimov and Foundation where individuals don't matter in the Seldon Plan and its played out in a galactic scale. Dune in that read is a dystopian view of the future where everything (at the galactic level) hinges upon individuals and the plot is played out on a planetary scale.

Asimov was asking "can reason organize civilization?" and Herbert came back and asked "what are the dangers if you think it can?"

...

So, when I revisit the large scale science fiction from the era... to me, now, it's more of a philosophy paper with a plot founded in future speculative fiction - more akin to reading Plato than Tolkien. Philosophical arguments rather than myth making and story telling that the authors were dueling in serialized pulp magazines rather than letters and treatises.

Playing with the trajectory browser at NASA is kind of neat.

https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE...

The "view" at the bottom has an animation of the various routes. They're all EM-ME though...

If you pick some other interesting targets you can get EVJS or something like that (launch from Earth, Gravity assist at Venus, Gravity assist at Jupiter, rendezvous with Saturn)... and then the trajectory animations are much more interesting.

From the archives ... How much bigger could Earth be before rockets wouldn't work? https://space.stackexchange.com/q/14383 Feb 3, 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243303

And related...

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/178131/wha...

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/117347/when-a-pl...

It's not NASDAQ as a whole... it's NASDAQ 100.

https://etfdb.com/index/nasdaq-100-index/ are the ETFs that track that index.

Also in the 90s...

I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.

One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.

    find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;

So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.

... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?

Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.

Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.

(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)

https://web.archive.org/web/20021014120633/http://www.ping-t...

They had 20 game machines (for the day)...

Each gaming computer has a 1-Gigahertz Athlon, 21-inch Monitor, GeForce 2 GTS, Sound Blaster Live, 256Mb of 133Mhz RAM, 10/100 Ethernet card, and an optical logitech mouse.

that were in two rooms in the basement. You could get 10 people in one room, and 10 in another and then have team games against each other where you could talk freely without worrying about the other side hearing you (unless you were shouting).

Each computer is on its own 100 Mbit Full Duplex switch port. The network as a whole is linked to the internet via a T1.

It was $2.50 / hour (and if you played for 3 hours, you would get another 2 hours free). On the weekends, high schoolers and college students would sometimes play for a good 10 hours for $15 (way cheaper than the classic quarter per play arcade).

The vending machine was stocked at $0.50 for each thing in it... so you could get a candy bar and soda for $1.00.

A nostalgia point for Tribes...

There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.

Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.

MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.

That becomes a question of discoverability and the "what about bumping ancient threads".

Consider trn and rn of old. I recall the first news reader that I used wasn't threaded and it was neigh incomprehensible unless you were following all the posts and what was going on. For smaller newsgroups, that was something that was possible. For larger ones, a flat structure was very difficult.

Threaded news readers (while I can't find any for trn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_%28newsreader%29#/media/Fi... is old enough and shows the interface) was useful and captured the structure... and bumping old threads was something that provided discoverability for new comments on old.

However, news readers had a lot of other features that Reddit and HN style comments don't have. I could plonk an entire post, or all the followups to a specific comment, or a specific person.

Without the ability to provide personal moderation (arguably something lacking on HN and Reddit), the weighted to current activity to try to discourage comments on old posts is useful. They're ok with collapse and hide... but NNTP clients had much more that allowed it to support different types of discussions and never-ending comment trees. ... This also made them very difficult to search for content.

I'd absolutely love a NNTP interface to HN. Without it, the interface that HN has (allowing collapsing of comment trees) and downranking old posts is useful. If you want to still find things that are active (rather than downranked), https://news.ycombinator.com/active or https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments are useful for surfacing where people are commenting - even if it's days old.

I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.

My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.

One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.

It's a matter of spending 200 to 300 hours of practice on it.

Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.

While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.

And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.

Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.

You can get a manual typewriter (hammer rather than ball) on Amazon for about $200. Brand name ones run in the $300 - $400 range.

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

That is the interesting reason.

While the retraction brings into question the anecdotal evidence for the windscreen phenomenon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon ), there are other studies with other sampling approaches that support the global insect population collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations ).

However, he has been adamant that vaccines are incredibly important for the military ...

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolu...

During the 1700s, smallpox raged through the American colonies and the Continental Army. Smallpox impacted the Continental Army severely during the Revolutionary War, so much so that George Washington mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers in 1777. Just fifty-six years earlier, in 1721, Bostonian doctors and clergy introduced the procedure to the American colonies. Without the vision and determination of these early Bostonians in normalizing inoculation, Washington may not have made the decision to mandate inoculation for the Continental Army. Though it was a controversial action, many historians credit the medical mandate with the colonists’ victory in the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States of America.

https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect...

HEAD QUARTERS MORRIS TOWN 12TH MARCH 1777

Sir

You are hereby required immediately to send me an exact return of your regiment, and to send all your recruits, who have had the small pox to join the Army. Those, who have not, are to be sent to Philadelphia, and put under the direction of the commanding officer there, who will have them inoculated.

Possibly. I was trying to find one with capture in the summer or early fall when it was a lot warmer out.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708150410/https://www.nrel....

The thermosyphon took it from 90.2°F to 70.8°F ... and then it went to the counterflow cooling towers which took it from 69.8°F to 64.8°F. If that thermosyphon did the majority of the work and there's not too much more in the cooling towers... and that was only rejecting 375kW of heat through evaporation.

Note one of the parameters with it in the dashboard: dry bulb temperature.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251207023030/https://docs.nrel... for more info on the thermosyphon.

I'm disappointed that the dashboard isn't available anymore. It was rather neat to look at.

Some older articles about it:

https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/program/2023/a-decade-of-gre...

https://www.nlr.gov/computational-science/data-center-coolin... (click through these)

    When possible, heat energy from the energy recovery loop is transferred to the building process hot water loop, which provides heat for the office and laboratory spaces within the building. The energy recovery heat exchanger (6) transfers heat from the ERW loop to the process hot water loop.

    After re-use potential is exhausted, warm ERW water flows to the fourth floor mechanical room. When temperatures permit, heat is dissipated through a thermosyphon (7), which is an advanced dry cooler that uses refrigerant in a passive cycle to dissipate heat.

    Remaining heat is transferred from the ERW loop to a tower water open loop via the cooling tower heat exchanger (8). Cooling towers (9) cool the tower water loop by cascading that water across fill material while drawing ambient air across the fill material. This provides a very energy-efficient way to cool water with sensible (heat dissipated to air without evaporation) and latent (heat dissipated with evaporation) heat transfer. However, this evaporative cooling process requires a continuous source of water.

https://www.nlr.gov/computational-science/reducing-water-usa...

    In August 2016, a prototype thermosyphon cooler—an advanced dry cooler that uses refrigerant in a passive cycle to dissipate heat—was installed. The thermosyphon was placed upstream of the HPC Data Center cooling towers at the ESIF to create a hybrid cooling system. The system coordinates the operation for optimum water and operating cost efficiency—using wet cooling when it's hot and dry cooling when it's not.

Of old... https://web.archive.org/web/20210115152829/https://www.nrel....

It's got a "heat energy to/from campus" exchange in there.

That's a link in March and the air temperature was 31°F.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708150410/https://www.nrel.... is later with air temperature of 68°F.

He was a proponent of a style of programming that was reasonable... you could reason about it and prove / demonstrate that it is doing what it should within that block of code as being correct.

Imagine teaching someone BASIC or FORTRAN...

      IF (IA .GT. 0 .AND. IB .GT. 0 .AND. IC .GT. 0) GOTO 10
        WRITE (6, 602)
  602   FORMAT (42H IA, IB, AND IC MUST BE GREATER THAN ZERO.)
        STOP 1
   10 CONTINUE

Dijkstra's approach to programming help take software development from a craft where each woodworker did things their own way and going from one shop to another meant relearning everything to something were one could more easily reason about how an application worked by removing some of the ability to write unstructured code. You can still write it... and I'm sure you can find some code that is convoluted ("... the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/real-programmers.html ).

Structured programming is also easier to teach. Yes, you can teach people how to write line numbered BASIC but the challenge is also teaching them discipline to not cut off their fingers when doing it. The structured programming approach it becomes easier to enforce that discipline as part of teaching ... and if they go and do dangerous things after they graduate from college, that's up to them.

https://youtu.be/mqicZN7wHtU is the final bit from the Big Short where Mark Baum is to speak before the "legendary, former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan" at a financial conference in 2008.

https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx is a useful site. I'm personally a fan of the killer variety.

Its solver is interesting in showing the individual steps.

For the same puzzle, https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx?bd=06039000804900150...

The new IT manager walks into his office. He sits down and goes through his desk and finds three envelopes with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them with the attached letter:

    Congratulations on your new job.  To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem.  Open them in order.

The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.

Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."

With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.

For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."

I got a new job! from seank

Ringworld. https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2021/06/20/ringworld-theory-...

    “When we call, they are out. When we call back, the phone computer gives us a bad connection. When we ask for any member of the Brandt family, every phone in South America rings.”

The cost of land and labor to build a house is relatively the same no matter what house you build. This also applies to apartment buildings.

Fancy it up a bit (mostly nicer appliances) beyond that and you take a $300k house to a $1M house.

Developers make about 20% on the total ( https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/press-releases/2025/... ). They'd rather make 20% of $1M than 20% of $300k. Same work crew either way.

Next question then becomes "is it better to sell 3 houses at $1M each ($600k for the developer) out of 10, or all 10 houses at $300k ($600k for the developer)?"

This also applies to apartments. Do you build 200 "luxury" units? or 200 affordable ones?

There's a board game from a few years ago that I'd recommend for such a situation: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/252997/mapmaker-the-gerr... - it was a kickstarter and available beyond that for a few years: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...

The designer diary: https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/111646/designer-di...

    We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82 copies of Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.

Available for borrowing at https://archive.org/details/garfieldhis9live00davi

7th life is dark. 5th life is a close second.