privong

This history is also discussed in an essay by Garrett[0]. And there's been a few previous HN posts about it[1]. (I'm not suggesting the parent post is a dupe, but people might be interested in the essay and related contents).

[0] https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> I'm 21 now but I wish I had known about this when I was younger and getting into programming, I would have been all over this.

Unfortunately Heathkit didn't really make kits from 1992 until recently (I think the past year or two, though the Wikipedia article[0] is vague on when it resumed), aside from a brief, failed attempt in 2012.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit

I think they mean that they turned off the motors to let the drone drop into the net.

> Nobody is going to pick up the hobbyist VMS license and then decide to adopt VMS at work. I bet it doesn't lead to a single extra commercial sale. It's nice that they're offering it despite that.

While I think you're probably right, having the hobbyist x86 option might help with testing and identifying bugs though, due to the larger user base.

> Are there job descriptions anywhere? Not seeing them.

No, and their reasoning is given in the link FAQ.

There are screenshots for IRIX 6.5 too: http://toastytech.com/guis/irix.html

This was a nice, deeper dive into this topic. I'd recently come across the idea the the pack structure with an "alpha" wolf wasn't scientifically accurate while reading "Inside of a Dog"[0]. The book obviously focuses more on things from the dog side, contrasting them with wolves, but did include a brief discussion on the common incorrect thinking of wolf families as being "alpha-dominated packs". It did mention the Mech and Schenkel work, including nothing that Mech was up front and outspoken about the fact that his original published findings on the topic was found to be incorrect.

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Inside-of-a-Dog/Alexa...

> Don't plant things too close to each other or to fences.

This issue was drilled into my head with the tracts of new homes in Boise; that 5-10 years later had plant beds were overgrown and too crowded.

> When you put a pile of something somewhere, temporarily, make sure it's not a problem if it is actually there for the next five years.

Haha, good advice! I can absolutely see where this will happen.

That makes sense. I guess it's all about time spent exposed to it. I do okay with geologic features (from being a backpacker and climber) except, oddly, types of rocks. But I have never been great at tree/plant identification. We did just move to a house with a decent yard/garden, so I am learning at least some of the names for things that are in the yard (and that we've started planting ourselves).

A wonderful book about such things (and other "place words") is "Landmarks" by Robert Macfarlane.

There does seem to be a richness that we're losing, in terms of our ability to describe nature. I often find myself struggling to describe places or to differentiate no-so-subtle (but also not trivially different) features (e.g., ravines cut by water flows of different rates and temporal consistencies). I love the collections people are making, but I find it hard to gain "fluency" in this way of describing nature. I guess that's an artifact of mostly being a "weekend warrior" when it comes to nature and most of my daily work revolving around science and computers.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536563/landmarks-by...

Just to add that that only works for specific types of stars that have regular pulsations. It can be used to infer distances to other types of stars if you have good cause to think that the pulsating star is in the same place as the other stars. This works for clusters and stellar associations, but not for the "field" stars in the galaxy.

This is a duplicated discussion of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34813141

> As a pragmatist (?), I suspect answering from 3) on down is near impossible* unless you actually release it into the world. People are clever in a way I don't think any of us can anticipate and put to use things in novel ways that often surprise their creators.

That is likely true in many cases, but, even if definitive answers cannot be provided, the questions should still be asked in advance and the answers pondered. Many people take that difficulty or impossibility of conclusive answers as justification for not asking those later questions.

> recalling the night Trump won in 2015

This doesn't really impact the point you're trying to make, but the election was in 2016, not 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

I am reading a student's outline of their approach to computing the diffuse neutrino flux expected from a class of galaxies over the lifetime of the Universe. It's part of a study we are doing to see if we can determine the origin of the astrophysical neutrino background seen by IceCube[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

The documentation for Racket[0] is great. Detailed, comprehensive, readable, and a local copy comes with the installation.

[0] https://docs.racket-lang.org/

> I am using a Stream Deck for that.

Something like the DuckyPad[0,1] might work for that as well. I haven't tried using mine for APL or anything like that, but it's been great for use as a "Zoom meeting control", numpad, and MacOS shortcut pad.

[0] https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad/

[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/dekuNukem/duckypad-do-it-all...

The page linked by the HN post title (https://docs.stepci.com/guides/co2-testing.html) says:

> The calculation algorithm is provided by Sustainable Web Design

And links to: https://sustainablewebdesign.org/calculating-digital-emissio...

Perhaps you're thinking of the Mendeley reference organization software? Elsevier purchased it in 2013.

https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley

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

> Each year some of the most brilliant people in the world sacrifice on the altar of latex, that could instead be spent on more productive research.

Perhaps. But I'd wager that more time is lost to the bureaucracy of universities and grant administration than to fighting LaTeX quirks. I'm not sure that "fixing" (La)TeX would result in a noticeable improvement in research that could be done.

> Has anyone been able to get their hands on a decomissioned Google server?

Depending on what specifically you're after, there's a number of them on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+search+appliance

> JWST is just making all their data immediately available to all researchers who want to dig into it

This is not generally true; it only applies to a narrow, specific class of programs. The "Early Release Observation" (observations chosen by the Space Telescope Science Institute) and "Early Release Science" observations (director's discretionary time awarded via a competitive proposal process a few years ago) do not have a proprietary period. However, the majority of the "General Observer" programs (these make up the majority of the time allocated on the telescope) have proprietary periods of up to 1 year. The proposers can request from a range of proprietary periods when they apply[0]. "Guaranteed Time Observations" (time awarded to the instrument teams) also have a proprietary period.

[0] https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jppom/jwst-proposal-level-inform...

> There's debate though if far-infrared was worth it though.

I don't think there's debate about whether the far-infrared is valuable. The far-infrared has unique diagnostic power for some astrophysical phenomena, and the 2020 Decadal Survey for Astronomy specifically called for the far-infrared to be considered for a $1B "probe-class" mission. What was debated was the specific role and cost of SOFIA.

> Not sure what you call near IR but JWST has a range from 600nm to 28micrometers. Typicaly people start talking about mid-air from 2 micrometers. So I would say JWST definitely covers beyond near IR.

JWST covers the mid-infrared too, as you implied. But @exabrial's point still stands, that SOFIA's coverage included much longer wavelengths than JWST does. SOFIA had instruments that could observe wavelengths as long as 1600 microns[0].

[0] https://www.sofia.usra.edu/about-sofia/sofia-overview

Thanks for digging up and pasting the quote. I think that's consistent with what my impression is, though. "we have the same viewpoint of the world and where it's going, different approach to it." and "y'know I'll do what I can, and, so be it." Chouinard is "doing what he can" and has been for a while. This is just the latest evolution of it. Patagonia has been contributing since to environmental causes since the 1980's and explicitly considering their environmental impact since at least the 1990's[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvon_Chouinard#Patagonia_and_e...

> This act seems like a change of attitude for Yvon in some sense, based on what I recall from that film.

From everything I've read, Chouinard has been passionate about activism for a long time. I haven't seen "180deg South", but my understanding of the difference between Chouinard and Tompkins is that Chouinard tried to use Patagonia as a way to effect change, while Tompkins sold his company (North Face) and used the money to effect change. Their approaches differed, but they were both motivated towards activism for the environment.

As @greenthrow notes, Modified Newtonian Dynamics has been around since the early 80s, first proposed by Milgrom.

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

> Nobody knew at the time that Hubble was literally a KH-11 class telescope, but one pointed the other way. The mirror size and the ability to be carried in the shuttle was probably to get some synergies out of those two projects.

Along these lines, there's a lot of hearsay that the technology that enabled JWST's mirrors, sun shade, etc. to be folded up for launch and deployed once in space had already been developed for military satellites.

It's an impressive technique. Direct imaging finds planets that would be unlikely to be identified via other detection techniques (such as measuring the wobble in the parent star's radial velocity or measuring photometric eclipses as the planet passes between us and the parent star).

> Exoplanets are too far away and too small to image directly.

If you mean resolving details of the exoplanet, then yes that is currently true. But we have imaged exoplanets directly, meaning taken an image of a star where one can also see the planet directly in the image. [0] has a list of directly imaged exoplanets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...