The Tau Manifesto Launched on Hacker News on Tau Day, 2010

46 points by mhartl 5 years ago | 5 comments

Today is the 10th anniversary of the original publication of The Tau Manifesto, which I launched on Hacker News on Tau Day (6/28), 2010:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468341

Thanks to everyone for your support!

boulos 5 years ago |

Amusingly, the domain in which I used to work (physically-based rendering) primarily computes hemispherical integrals that would all conveniently be tau (the solid angle of a hemisphere). The only downside is that tau is almost always used for optical depth in scattering / Lambert-Beer’s law, but as that’s a distance tau always seemed a weird choice anyway.

mhartl: feels like you should organize Wikipedia editing parties to make alternate equations in terms of tau. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_angle would be an easy target :).

mhartl 5 years ago |

For the latest tau updates, see this year’s State of the Tau newsletter:

https://tauday.com/state-of-the-tau

dificilis 5 years ago |

Once again I suffer from time-zone-ism, where someone on the internet announces it on "28 June", but it's actually already 29 June and it's too late for me to fully enjoy Tau Day.

labster 5 years ago | |

I guess you live at least 3𝛕/8 radians east of me.

m4r35n357 5 years ago |

Mmm, time for some pie!