Whats the easiest way to resolve handshake names locally without a 3rd party gateway? Is there a FF extension I can use, something that doesn't require a lot of configuration?
If the COVID-19 vaccine is botched, multiple generations will lose trust in the medical community. The medical would lose their cultural authority and their rhetorical high ground against the anti-vaccine crowd and other health disinformation hucksters. The damage from a loss of trust is difficult to understate.
Modern healthcare may be expensive and advances may be slow, but it generally works and people trust their doctor.
The fact that the dashboards and alerts have a delay sounds like there might be difficult consistency stuff going on. Many nodes need to coordinate their usage and billing. It may be a difficult problem, but solving billing problems might not really motivate anyone at the company. It's not a "cool" problem for engineers and not profitable for product.
>> The fact that the dashboards and alerts have a delay sounds like there might be difficult consistency stuff going on.
I think that's true. It's easier to measure usage and aggregate that data after the fact than to meter it in real time and stop at a limit. Those are very different things. What happens if you hit the cap while running multiple processes spread across a cloud?
One improvement might be to throttle things as the cap approaches but that doesnt really change the problem at all. Do that and have provider eat any overages should solve it from the user point of view.
Theres an easy solution: You set a limit and everytime a service needs to spend some many it allocates a small portion of the budget and after some threshold it will put unused money back to the budget. The only downside is that your spending limit will be reached to optimisticly, but i prefer that to paying thousands more than i wanted to. Knowing the system works like maybe a lower and higher threshold for the budget could be set.
> Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
I've noticed this drift is already happening. It's like there are two reddits. It can be really confusing as a moderator when you are looking at a different website from your users. Eg new sidebar and the old sidebar.
For just that weight of metal...not too expensive. To get it formed into that shape, potentially very expensive.
It looks like aluminum. Someone posted 23.5" x 23.5" x ~144" as the dimensions. This comes out to be 46 cubic feet, and would weigh about 7,700 lbs. A floor of the price would be ~40 cents/lb scrap price, or ~$3,100. Ballpark 80-120 cents/lb might be a more realistic price if it were straightforward to manufacture like that (which it's certainly not).
As an industrial engineer and former employee of one of the largest aluminum plants in the world, I can safely say I doubt it is solid rolled aluminum, and bet it would be way bigger of an extrusion that is possible. And logistically, it would be far easier to transport to a remote location via helicopter if it wasn't solid. Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipment, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs.
television ratios joke. 4:3 became 16:9 for widescreen. Further from square and closer to the "golden ratio", so make something closer with different prime squares.
In reality I was joking about fashion. The new trend in monoliths is a metallic finish and slender proportions, skipping one prime square - The original is 1²:2²:3² and the new one is 1²:3²:7² (skips primes 2 and 5). The dimensions continue, of course. In Clarke's 2010 it's kind of assumed it'd mean it'd be integers, but the new one fits better with primes.
> Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipmen, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs.
It seems unlikely that there are serious tolerances to be kept here, couldn't this just be cast messily using a sand/clay mould and then cleaned up with portable power tools?
That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
Large scale castings are also tricky. You can't cast a rectangular prism and get good results. As the metal freezes (solidifies), it shrinks. You'd end up with a very poor surface finish at best, and chunks missing at worst. The shrinkage needs to be made up for with some additional molten metal.
The fix is pretty simple though. You need directional solidification, meaning the freezing starts on one end and moved towards the other. If you apply a draft angle of 1 degree or so to the parallel faces, you will have enough difference in dimensions to get directional solidification working fine.
>That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
I'd advise against mixing alloys, but you may still be alright to get something, but it will be worthless if you try to recycle it again. Mixed scrap fetches far less than sorted scrap when you try to sell it. E.g. Some alloys might allow 1-2% copper, while others require <0.01% copper. Each pound of type 1 mixed with type 2 requires lots of pig (pure aluminum, no alloying elements) to be added to get the proportions back to something you can legally call whatever alloy you're targeting.
Aluminum cans aren't a wonderful source for things like this because they contain a thin plastic film on the inside to prevent the liquid contained from having its flavor tainted. Normal recycling processes handle this fine, but cannot handle the plastic labels added on many small brewery cans. Those should be cut off prior to recycling.
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Side note - It is incredibly energy intensive to mine bauxite, refine it through an electrolysis process into alumina, and finally alloying it into your preferred type of aluminum. It recycles incredibly well though. Recycling 1 ton of aluminum saves about 95% of the energy compared to new aluminum. This 95% savings is about 14,000 kWh. The energy intensity is part of why Iceland houses 4 smelters. With nearly 100% of electricity production coming from hydroelectric, they have incredibly cheap electricity, and it's economically viable for the likes of Alcoa, Rio Tinto, and Century Aluminum to haul bauxite ore from around the world to a tiny country with almost no manufacturing base, process it, then haul it around the world to its final destination.
Iceland's electricity production mix seems to be typically about 70% Hydro and 30% Geothermal (which does not change the overall point - just interesting).
Ah, good catch! I was rusty on my numbers from a year and a half ago when I wrote a paper on this for school. Back in the 80's they were nearly 100% hydro.
Just a note about aluminum recycling. Humans tend to trash things instead of recycling. Out here in the desert where people dump things I have noticed old steel cans rusted to nothing mixed with aluminum cans which seem to not degrade over time.
Arguably if you are worried about the environment and account for human laziness steel cans are better for the environment IMO
I've read around 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today. If you machine a new surface on aluminum, it will form an aluminum oxide layer in a matter of hours. I believe (but am not certain) this effectively prevents it from degrading the way steel does over time.
Aluminum can recycling rates tend to be higher in states that offer deposit programs. Back when they were getting introduced in the 80's, $0.05/container had a lot more buying power than it does today. It's enough of an annoyance now, they'd be best off eliminating it or increasing it to ~$0.15 or so. Or since this is HackerNews, maybe we could use block chain technology to verify each can is properly recycled and reimburse with bitcoin.
A classmate of mine in college made all of his sculptures out of plywood and Bondo, reasoning that they were likely to last much longer than anything made out of metal due to having no scrap value.
> And logistically, it would be far easier to transport to a remote location via helicopter if it wasn't solid.
Cue reddit researchers combing through old helicopter flight plans/paths from the relevant time frame? Though I would have thought an off road vehicle might be more likely; looks like it's only about 2-3 miles from the nearest road.
Edit: actually there appears to be a dirt road ~1k feet or less away
The road is Lockhart Basin Road, well-known among Utah off-roaders. I've been there, and also camped on one of the fingers of Hatch Point, directly above the monolith.
As I noted in another response, you can't cast a rectangular prism and expect a good result. You'd need to add some angle to the edges to ensure it solidifies correctly, but doing so takes away from the monolith feel.
That's also a lot of polishing for the finish you would get from sand casting.
Good math... Aluminum comes in different alloys, this is likely 6061 (precipitation-hardened aluminium alloy, containing magnesium and silicon as its major alloying elements) - 6061 is about two bucks per pound [2]...
Using the weight calculator [1], and plugging in 23.5/23.5/141 (all in inches) I am getting about 7.7K lbs, or around $15K in material costs. Given it’s unusual shape, I’m assuming that normal is producing it. This would require additional costs for machining and processing Dash I’d probably say it would be several thousand dollars in additional costs. Overall this looks to me like a $25,000 piece of metal...
Aliens may not know that. Since McMaster Carr is the web site with the best UX for materials supply, and has been so for 20 years, they would have not known any better, especially given the propagation time for their TCP packets.
It looks like it might be sheet metal screwed to a wooden frame, judging from what look like screws near the edges. Why would aliens bring a solid block of aluminum all the way across the 8th dimension?
Given that the excitement will have died down by the time its precise structure is revealed, I'd say a simpler design served its purpose quite well.
Assuming the "monolith" is around 10ft tall with a 1.5ft square base, it would weigh 5 tonnes if it were made of solid steel. Whoever installed it would have needed serious machinery to haul it over there and stick it in the rock.
Thin sheets of metal, either welded or riveted together, would have been much easier to build and install. It could even have been filled with some other material (e.g. sand) before the top was put on.
> Thin sheets of metal, either welded or riveted together, would have been much easier to build and install. It could even have been filled with some other material (e.g. sand) before the top was put on.
Yes, it was a prism shaped object with 3 pieces of stainless steel panels riveted together, the bottom has concret and silicone:)
I would bet it is just metal sheets cut to size and then riveted or screwed together on site, then filled with rocks for stability. Metal sheets could be carried there, hole dug out and then assembled by 1 person basically.
While that's true, there are clearly screws or rivets in the video's of it. It's extremely unlikely to be solid metal, though it may be filled with rock/sand/something.
Probably they hit it with a rock and decided it didn't sound hollow. They may also have noted an absence of seams. Seams could be hidden with welding and grinding, but that would suggest it wasn't assembled on site.
"Probably". I wouldn't trust journalists on this sort of thing. It would be completely insane to make this solid. It's almost certainly welded sheets with ground welds, assembled off-site.
I have mixed feelings about this, but what if someone bankrolled this lawsuit? eg paid out to the author and pursued the case on their own. In the event of the author's death the suit still would continue, while the author gets the money they need immediately. It would change the incentives for Disney.
