M4.5 Earthquake, Berkeley, CA | Hacker News Reader

M4.5 Earthquake, Berkeley, CA

earthquake.usgs.gov

35 pointsfrisco17 comments

There are dozens of earthquakes of this strength every year. I understand that this one is in the backyard of many of you but it's ridiculously CA-centric to be upvoting this.

Nice to see I'm not the only one, I was getting worried.

worth revisiting the article from 2015 in the New Yorker. Probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever read.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

N.N. Taleb is right.

Seven minutes after that one, a 4.9 magnitude happened here, 10000km away from CA: https://earthquaketrack.com/quakes/2018-01-04-10-46-12-utc-4... Coincidence?

Yeah this is freaky. 3:30 AM and my girlfriend and I just felt earth tremors near SFO. Turns out that there have been over 200 two hundred micro quakes in the last two weeks, and San Jose had a 3.9 a week ago.

Hopefully not a precursor to something more devastating. If there's another one >=3.5 in the next few days, I would recommend getting away for a bit. We certainly will be

Small earthquakes are not generally a precursor to larger ones, although sometimes they can be. Here's a decent quora answer to the question from a geologist: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-little-earthquakes-are...

Summary: small earthquakes incease the risk of larger ones by 1-5%, but large earthquakes are fairly rare so an increased likelihood of 1-5% isn't something sensible to take action on.

Although the submission is a bit tangential to HN content, I've found this article which describes it more:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-earthquake-bay-a...

Stronger than the miniquakes I felt over the last few hours in San Jose, CA.

An earthquake? I thought HN was tech and business and more broadly intellectually stimulating stuff. Is it becoming a generic news aggregator?

Hacker news is whatever is interesting to hackers. A lot of them happen to live in the Bay Area.

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for this. I had never noticed that "flag" button. And more generally, it's not something I'd expect existed or felt the need for ever on HN.

An earthquake near where many people on HN and the SV scene live.

An "are you all OK" is more in order than "where has HN come to".

How many users of HN live in the Bay Area do you think?

> How many users of HN do you think live in the Bay Area?

FTFY.

I don't know, but something tells me you're over-estimating the fraction. What's your guess?

Not sure it needed fixed, but thank you. My initial message was meant to be a conversational format. It's how I would have asked the question in person.

Well, I'm estimating a percentage in my head and then considering the amount of karma that percentage may have. I'd say 20%, maybe? Of which I personally know a few who have some sizeable karma.

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