I'm reminded of the quote: “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
Slow
41–50 of 238 posts
Re: Slow
#42How to game HN: always write rebuttals
Re: Slow
#43In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture. People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generatio…
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author. The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So…
> A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
Re: Slow
#44A few other proposed entries:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program (the twin spacecraft that have since left the heliopause)
Re: Slow
#45Cool list, but to be a party pooper: > Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure. UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google. I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to b…
> TCP/IP has already been replaced
Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
Re: Slow
#46I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something. (…
When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.
As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when the construction started. He kept working at it until his death.
Re: Slow
#47I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
We should all strive to make it so.
Re: Slow
#48This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
I'd forecast that most of the remaining ones would end up making their way to Southern Florida but they're already there.
Re: Slow
#49I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
What is a "growth tree"?
Re: Slow
#50A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later. It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably ha…
I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.