djaque

Ummmm... Ashli Babbit was a QAnon conspiracy theorist who broke into the capital during the Jan. 6 insurrection. She was at the front of a mob trying to get into the Speaker's Lobby containing representatives sheltering in place. The mob was commanding the police to let them in and started chanting to break down the door. Police warned them multiple times. Instead, Babbit climbs through a window in front of a police officer with a gun pointed at her after being commanded to not enter. She got within feet of representatives (who... mind you the mob was screaming death threats about). There was no way to know if she had hidden weapons on her body, especially with others at the insurrection carrying assault rifles. Any reasonable person would say the shooting was justified doubly so with a mob of conspiracy theorists behind her ready to brutalize some politicians.

Don't gaslight people by just calling her "unarmed" especially when QAnon is turning her into a martyr for their movement. It's fundamentally dishonest.

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Rush Limbaugh hosted a regular segment on his show where he would read off the names of gay men that died of AIDS and celebrate it with bells and horns in the background.

I'm not one to celebrate people's death, but I will sleep a little easier tonight knowing that he now belongs in the past.

I too dream of a day that even a group as oppressed as Christians are in the US will be able to hold the presidency, the highest office in the land. Who knows, maybe one of these days they'll even manage it 46 times in a row. /s

...

Cut it out with the regurgitated Fox News talking points. My college has a university funded Bible studies club, an entire religion studies department, and a rather large college conservatives political club. My advisor is literally a Deacon in the Orthodox Catholic Church and another professor in the same department used to be a protestant pastor. Nobody is coming to brainwash your children.

Anyone else think this is a pretty bad time all things considered?

Hot take: the fact that HN comments have an academic/professional tone doesn't make the noise go away. It just makes it easier to pass for useful comments.

On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".

I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.

Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.

I remember watching some sort of British documentary on Alan Turing on youtube when I was in high school. It had interviews from all of the people that knew him during his lifetime. This was long before his story was popularized by "The Imitation Game" and so I can't find it now that there is so much other content.

Does anybody else remember it? It was one of the good ones. From what I remember, the "asshole genius" trope was greatly played up for the film and he was much more human than that even with the treatment he endured.

Having taught undergraduate physics (at one of the ivy leagues), that echos my experience. The math and memorization are quite simple. But, it is the exposure to the concepts that takes time and seeing them a year or two prior makes a big difference.

I ended up socializing a bit with the students during optional study sessions and it was usually the people that came from more disadvantaged schools that needed to be there in order to keep up with the class. Some of them also had to take a job (or two) to manage their bills during college which meant that they didn't always have the time to be at the study sessions.

I will also recommend reading "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler (Feynman's PhD advisor). Excellent discussion in a kind of old school style (which is how I like it).

Off the top of my head, that sounds like you're off in the pressure requirement by multiple orders of magnitude. The pressure used for the superconductor is enough to shatter diamond. Creating strain in a lattice like that would just shear the materials apart.

Does HN auto-captilize GaN to GAN? I was super confused for a second about that title.

Handwavey explaination: the particles pair up because of vibrations in the crystal. It's modeled like a bunch of metal balls on with springs between them and you can imagine tapping one end and sending a wave of vibrations through. However, these springs are a bit non-linear and so I imagine that if you pack the atoms closer together then you will change the spring constant.

The other knob you can use to change the vibrations is the mass of the balls. This can be done by using different isotopes of the same element and the critical temperature goes down with mass.