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smingo

27 karma · joined November 27, 2017

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smingo··on Show HN: Keyboard Drill – Minimalist Typing Drill to fix common mistakes
It's good stuff. It might be good to have an option to have a time threshold based on when the typing starts, not when the word appears. In that way, the time taken to recognise the word becomes irrelevant.
smingo··on NASA returns Hubble to full science operations
Well that actually makes it almost plausible for Hubble to capture an image of JWST

According to Wikipedia, the order is: Sun, L1, Earth, L2. So L2 is always in the night sky.

I don't see issues with focus. 1.5M km is effectively infinity. Indeed for my camera on earth, 10m resolves as pretty much as well as infinity, f stops notwithstanding.

JWST is about 20m by 14m in size. And it's out of the earth + moon shadow because of the nature of its orbit. It has a sun shield, and radio dish in the shield.

The resolving power of 0.05 arcseconds at 1,500,000 km apogee is indeed 350 m (ish), which is much bigger than the JWST. The situation is worse at perigee. An image of JWST would take up less than 1% of Hubble 'pixel'. So there may be a faint blob, depending on the albedo of the JWST. (I don't know how Hubble's the photodetector arrays' resolution compares to the maximum resolving power of the lens.)

However, Hubble's guidance systems have permitted astronomy at 0.0003 arcseconds, which comes out at a little over 2 m at JWST's range. So after a lot of computation, stacked images and fine-guidance shifting, presumably there could be an image of around 10 x 7 pixels (or whatever they are after the computation).

And that's a result!

smingo··on NASA returns Hubble to full science operations
Would Hubble be able to resolve Webb? Or vice versa?
smingo··on Concerning amount of errors on BBC comp. sci. revision page
So much is wrong on this page - poor choices on the diagrams, erroneous text. And no obvious ways to suggest corrections.
smingo··on Uno – the “unit” for dimensionless quantities
There is this Erlang unit, for the number of simultaneous calls a telecommunication system can handle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit) It's dimensionless, because it multiplies the rate that calls are initiated by the average length of a call: 'calls / second' by 'seconds / call'. Dimensionless.

But that makes little sense - we're measuring the number of simultaneous calls. It gets reflected in buffers, circuits, sockets, channels allocated, etc.

It would be better to consider 'call starts / second' as the rate at which calls are initiated, and the average 'call.seconds / call start', which when multiplies gives the more sensible unit 'call'.

Or simpler: just measure the average length in seconds. So we have so many 'calls / second' initiated, and the average length is so many 'seconds', which when multiplied again gives a unit of 'call'.

smingo··on Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
Did you manage to configure SPF correctly in your DNS records?
smingo··on The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges
We could call the resultant algorithms "simulated ant kneeling".
smingo··on Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
There is https://www.wikitribune.com/ which is supported both through subscriptions and donations. It's early days for Jimbo Wales's latest venture.
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