I'm the organizer of a HN meetup in Milan, Italy. We met once one year ago, only a few people attended. Then too many other technical meetups to attend to and one of them to organize. I didn't call for a second one but if anybody from the Milan area is reading this, send me a message. Maybe we'll meet again. The link is
There's a Meetup with this theme here in the RTP (NC) area, although we haven't met in a while. If anybody is interested in getting together though, we could put something on the calendar for Real Soon Now.
There are plenty of /r/philadelphia reddit meetups, and there's a decent number of tech people there (the ratio was higher when reddit was young and mostly tech articles, but the meetups weren't very good). There's also the Philly Linux User Group, which has meetings in multiple parts of the city: phillylinux.org
I'd be up for an occasional HN Philly Meetup though! And if HN folks wanted to invade a reddit meetup I'd be down for it.
I appreciate the information, thanks! Maybe we'll get enough Philly people here responding that we can slap something together.
I've been a longtime lurker on the /r/philadelphia sub and have thought many times about going to one of the meetups. I think I may need to stop by one of them.
There's a meetup at Cooperage in center city every Thursday. If you decide to go one day, shoot me a reddit message (same username) and I'll try to swing by.
As far as organizing, there's an /r/philadelphia discord, and we could probably persuade them to make a channel about HN meetups. Or Discord servers are easy enough to make yourself.
EDIT: I've just made a HN Philly Discord. Feel free to jump on to talk meetups. https://discord.gg/jFeJUsJ
Also look for Indiehackers meetups, there’s a lot of overlap. The one in Berlin is going pretty well, I’ve attended almost all of them and it’s always an interesting crowd.
I doubt the whole concept is sustainable. FWIW though, I'm just a bit south of you, in Indialantic.
Noting your interests: I had a fusion researcher in my family, Ray Dandl. According to his brother, Ray got the first "stable" plasma going. That was probably prior to 1985, in San Diego. He had also been a minor (?) participant in the Manhattan project. Another relative did calibration/testing/burn-in for gyrotrons that the Japanese used for heating plasma for fusion.
I didn't recognize the name of Ray Dandl, so I did a little research. Apparently he was the mind behind the Elmo Bumpy Torus, a device half-way between mirror designs and a tokamak. I recall reading about it many years ago. He also seems to have had a hand in early microwave plasma heating (not sure if that is in conjunction with your other relative).
While looking around, I ran across an interesting book, "Fun in Fusion Research", by John Sheffield. It contains a bunch of interesting anecdotes, including ones about Mr. Dandl. I thought I might mention it to you in case you enjoy it.
Well that puts a name to the mysterious device Ray showed me. Thanks. I recall it being larger, in a cube-shaped 2-story room. According to his sister, Ray was really held back by his lack of a PhD. He had an IQ of 180.
I wonder why nobody seems to have tried electronically cycling the field direction (alternating perpendicular fields) faster than the particles can get out the end of the magnetic mirror.
That other relative, Pat Cahalan, did work for Varian, now called CPI. That was the supplier of the gyrotrons. He also was held back by limited education. The gyrotrons are pretty insane, with diamond windows about 2" in diameter that cost a $million. Megawatts of RF shoot out in one direction, while a powerful beam of X-rays shoots out in another direction. I've heard of them reaching 60 MW, and evidently they go over half a THz.
I'm told that it's a bad day when you shatter the gyrotron window, causing air to be sucked into the hot vacuum tube. It's also a bad day when you are inside the walk-in power supply and a capacitor blows.
@lainon HN meetups in Germany:
* Berlin http://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Hacker-News-Meetup/
* Munich https://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-Munich/