HN user
sama: While you have our attention, you might as well explain the details about the $120k/7% happening in two chunks.
[Edit 1:] Thanks; OK. I had read it as potentially indicating the money came at two different times rather than just from two different sources. All clear now.
The article's discussion of golf balls reads completely opposite to standard well-accepted theory. The author writes:
[The "drag catastrophe"] is when an object is falling so fast that the boundary layer of gas separates off the object and the drag force suddenly drops by a factor of almost 10. The reason why golf balls have dimples is to cause this drag catastrophe to happen at slightly slower speeds, so the ball will travel a lot farther.
This is very confused. Golf balls have dimples to prevent flow separation. The dimples are turbulators meant to induce turbulent flow around the golf ball before the laminar flow would otherwise give way to flow separation. Far from decreasing the drag force, flow separation increases it substantially.
[Also, the term "drag catastrophe" appears to have no relevant hits on Google other than this one article.]
[Edit 1]: The author is well qualified and unlikely to be confused himself; so I don't doubt his conclusion. Reading charitably, turbulent flow might be called a form of separated flow, and this must be what the author means. His coefficient of drag graph supports this interpretation as his "drag catastrophe" would be happening when you would expect a transition flow (from separated laminar to turbulent). Pedagogically he should have more clearly distinguished it from the typical laminar separated flow.
More discussion from the early HN:
Believe it or not, there is actual IETF precedence for this:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6189#section-11
(which they really should have cited in RFC 7169)
When the IETF was deciding whether to standards-track ZRTP or DTLS-SRTP, one of the decision points was Phil's refusal to remove the disclosure flag from ZRTP. The committee wouldn't consider adopting ZRTP unless the disclosure flag was dropped.
Incidentally, this is also a case of creative patent use. Phil received a patent for some core design elements of ZRTP, then freely licensed the patent as long as you correctly implement the disclosure flag.