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jbperry | 2 years ago | on: NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes

I don't see a way to slow down. So they would be travelling thru that solar system at .2c. At that speed, they wouldn't be in that solar system for long.

Imagine this was Proxima Centauri doing the same mission on our solar system. Assuming that some of the swarm was on target enough to go thru the inner solar system:

Mars is ~13 light minutes from the sun. So double that for the whole diameter of the orbit, 26 light minutes. At .2c that's 130 minutes total transit time (less really unless it passes really close to the sun). So probably less than 2 hours total in the inner solar system. And that's assuming you can hit that small of a target from 4.25 light years away.

Light distance Sun-Saturn is 1.3 hours. 2.6 diameter. 13 hour transit time for most of the solar system.

You don't know where the planets actually are going to be, or were to point a camera or any other instrument, except the sun. And you have probes that weigh grams.

That's a tough problem, without considering the laser.

But I like thinking about it.

jbperry | 2 years ago | on: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

I honestly thought that the scrollbar didn't work at all until I read this comment. If I put the site on my right monitor, I can grab the scrollbar by just going to the edge. But on my left monitor, where I typically have the browser, it's almost impossible.

I too find it very annoying, especially for such a long article.

jbperry | 3 years ago | on: Greg Bear has died

He's the one that really got me obsessed with hard sci-fi in my teens, with Eon.

Followed by The Forge of God and Blood Music. I don't won't to ruin the endings of these two, but who knew you could end books like that?!

Queen of Angels was the weirdest detective book I'd ever encountered, with futuristic CSI way ahead of its time.

The power levels of the conflicts in Moving Mars and Anvil of Stars seemed unimaginable.

Slant, one of my favorites, felt like something like cyberpunk, but something else as well.

I've always thought him as my favorite of the Killer B's (Bear, Brin, Benford). And one of the authors that really changed how I thought about things

jbperry | 3 years ago | on: Obese People Burn Calories Less Efficiently, Even After Weight Loss Surgery

I would like to see the same study done with a drastic change in exercise and muscle mass.

I have always struggled with my weight. I find that the solution is always diet. Exercise does make me feel better, but doesn't seem to have much effect on my weight loss, if at all. At least in the short term.

I assume more muscle mass, would mean a higher resting metabolic rate. But how much. Is the effect large or small? Is it like this study, where sure it changes, but not enough to ever be able to eat like a "normal" person?

jbperry | 4 years ago | on: Commodore 64 Guides

Wow, nice job. I spent so much time inside the Programmer's Reference Guide as a teenager. My copy was completely wore out with pages falling out.

Writing machine language by hand on the C-64 is the closest I've ever felt to the hardware as a programmer. 3 registers, some flags and interrupts.

jbperry | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your favorite programming language and why?

I enjoy learning new programming languages. My favorite that I've played around with is Elixir. But I don't see that ever being used at my current job.

The language I reach for the most is C#. LINQ is great and the base libraries are solid. Plus, the industry I'm in (building controls) is largely Windows based, so that obviously influences that choice.

I really enjoy the concepts and syntax of OCaml, but I've repeatedly lost of the battle of making it work on Windows.

The JVM has become much more popular in the building controls industry in the last decade. So I've been thinking of picking up a JVM language this year. Trying to decide between Clojure and Kotlin.

jbperry | 5 years ago | on: How far does sound travel in the ocean?

I spent 6 years in the Navy, 4 of those on a fast attack. I would say that it was an exercise in the extremes. There were times of extreme boredom and extreme stress. I leaned a ton of interesting things. The crash course in real world systems and how they work together is something that I'm not sure I could have gotten in any other environment. But on the other hand, I easily cleaned more than I have in the rest of my life.

Another interesting thing, is to see how people react in these situations. Some people can't take the high stress, some the long hours, some the long stretches of boredom. And they deal with it in different ways. And it can bring out the best and worst in people. And everyone comes out of the experience changed.

jbperry | 5 years ago | on: Learn from Anyone

I had more than one refer to diagrams, but it didn't show the diagrams. Example:

Me: Explain Feynman diagrams Richard Feynman: Ok. Let’s start with the basics. If we have a simple electron traveling from x=0 to x=3 then we could use this diagram: The node circled in blue means that the electron isn’t interacting with anything and is just moving, the node circled in orange means that the electron is interacting with the photon and has an “integrated” or a sum of all possible solutions with differing amounts of spin.

jbperry | 5 years ago | on: Birth of BASIC (2014) [video]

Agreed. The limitations of the C-64 lead me to learn a whole lot more about the internal workings of computers than I think I ever would have learned using something more advanced. Unfortunately(?) that has been the only assembly that I really ever used extensively. Still, it was a great initial foundation.
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