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CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

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Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#181

Post by talmand »

clay_to_n wrote: post #171
kagamine wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now there's an interesting UX paper if it hasn't been done already. In UX we hear that a milliseconds long delay directly affects user retention rates. I wonder how users feel about search reliability, or data integrity when results are faster than expected.

I don't know about papers, but I've read writeups from companies adding a "delay", usually with a progress bar, for things that are actually near-instant to perform. For "large" seeming operations, sometimes users assume an instant response actually means a failure. DigitalOcean's Create Droplet flow comes to mind. You get a progress bar indicating your droplet is being created, but in just a few seconds you can clic…

I stated elsewhere that I introduced a delay for those very reasons. In that case the search functionality was reported as broken for the second search. Because the first and second test searches happened to have the same results in that particular case, but the fast response prevented an understanding that something was in fact done.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#182

Post by stephenhuey »

VLM wrote: post #177
Houshalter wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just anthropic bias/survivor bias. There have probably been a lot of Earth like planets that have been annihilated. Perhaps the only reason we exist is because we are lucky enough to have friendly neighbors, or perhaps no neighbors. Well I do wonder how friendly they are, given that they haven't intervened at all in Earth's history. I find that very unlikely. Moral aliens would probably want to help us, amoral…

Given a pride of lions in Africa having severe domestic turmoil over leadership selection issues, what are the odds anyone in, for example, Wisconsin, either knows, cares, and is capable of sending an effective peacekeeping force? You can even abstract out distance. I'm pretty sure there's some hierarchical struggle going on with the squirrels in my front yard, but I'm also pretty sure I don't care. And we're fellow…

While I agree with some of your points, I must take issue with your implication that white people ran Africa better.

http://diglib1.amnh.org/articles/kls/

Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain did a good job illuminating how people tended to think this way, all the while forgetting that the people under a heavy thumb might not agree! Some things may have been better organized when white people were in power, but the German concentration camps of World War II were also "better run" by some definitions than a bickering gaggle of democratically elected disagreeing men in nearby European countries, and I don't think we'd really use them as an example of better run. I grew up partially in Nigeria, the target of many jokes, and no matter what issues they have there I know that many Nigerians who would never wish for a return to British rule.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#183

Post by hodwik »

talmand wrote: post #180
sanoli wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same thing but similar, a programmer wrote once how he made his software delay the answer to some user action to make it look like the program was hard at work. The process was actually very fast, almost instantaneous, so he added some message like " working - x seconds left ". Maybe it was on HN some years ago...

I did this myself just a few weeks ago. The complaints was that search results would often come back fast enough that the user may not understand anything was done if the results happen to be the same.

Saw a form recently with search-as-you-type that included a fake button that when pressed would write "Search Complete" to the screen, but had no other function, for users who didn't comprehend search as you type.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#184

Post by CWuestefeld »

meagain20000 wrote: post #83
hyperpallium wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like carrots. The British promulgated the belief that carrots improve eyesight to explain the effective of their aircraft spotters, instead of radar.

You mean to tell me they are not?!! I remember reading that carrots have some nutrient necessary for good eye sight, beta-catorene I believe. I don't think it improves your current eye sight so much as it keeps it from going bad from a lack of it.

So getting sufficient vitamin A from carrots or other sources is instrumental in keeping your eyes healthy. That's not the same thing as saying that eating additional carrots will give you super-vision.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#185

Post by ild »

forgetsusername wrote: post #155
antidamage wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the CIA were gaming Google in the 60s. It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way. The fake aircraft seems more reasonable though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50#Development > The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them.[19] The "windows" evidently worked, as the first western reports of the…

> It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way. Communist Russia was coming apart at the seams, and it took the US many years to realize it. There's a lot of complexity.

USSR. Russia has never been falling apart. Calling USSR Russia is HLN/Fox level discussion.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#186

Post by LordKano »

jimrandomh wrote: post #22

I'm surprised they're continuing the misdirection so many years later. "Unidentified flying object" means an aircraft, usually a military one (because civilian aircraft are easier to identify). A UFO over US soil would usually be a USAF plane, but the CIA ran (runs?) a reporting hotline because they might occasionally be foreign spy planes instead. But of course, the Soviets were very interested (or the US believed t…

An apparently metallic or luminous object in the sky at any time after the 1940s could possibly be explained away as experimental terrestrial craft but we have reports of such things going back much further in history.

It's funny how today many people call them "flying saucers" due to a misunderstanding of Kenneth Arnold's description of the objects that he claims to have seen in 1947 because more than 800 years ago, someone reported seeing what he described as a "flying earthenware vessel" in the sky over Edo(Tokyo) Japan.

People have been seeing things in the sky for a very long time. We simply don't know all of them are. Anyone who claims to know with absolute certainty what they are is just speculating. Chances are, that person just wants to sell you their book.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#187

Post by lawpoop »

speeder wrote: post #176
JonCox wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft are at it too with Windows 10. Sneaky beaky ;)

This one is to workaround coders stupidity, despite winapi having functions to give windows version numerically, lots of coders just used regex on windows name... and the regex for "windows 9*" is extremely common

Well couldn't we further push that blame to MS' cockamamie versioning?

I originally wrote "versioning convention" but realized I had to drop convention.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#188

Post by ild »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #71
antidamage wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the CIA were gaming Google in the 60s. It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way. The fake aircraft seems more reasonable though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50#Development > The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them.[19] The "windows" evidently worked, as the first western reports of the…

don't overestimate Soviet competence. Soviet system was completely submersed in the sea of utter incompetence, with occasional pockets of competence here and there

Don't underestimate either. Soviet/Russian rocket engines are still better than American.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#189

Post by vkou »

sgt101 wrote: post #167
varjag wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in physics, you can't get away with politicking and reading the Party plenary speeches alone. That nuke better has to work and is easily verifiable: Beria, the head of Soviet secret police, personally compared the mushroom cloud photo of the U.S. test to the Soviet one, to ensure the bomb was copied correctly.

I wonder what he'd have concluded if it had looked different?!

That the discrepancies were the work of wreckers and saboteurs.

Probably followed by liquidation of the parties responsible.

Re: CIA declassifies hundreds of UFO documents

#190

Post by epimetheus »

incepted wrote: post #47
hyperpallium wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like carrots. The British promulgated the belief that carrots improve eyesight to explain the effective of their aircraft spotters, instead of radar.

As a matter of fact, I've never seen rabbits wearing glasses.

Well, naturally, rabbits don't even eat carrots[0]

[0]-http://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/rabbits/diet/m...

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