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GW150914

1,360 karma · joined April 8, 2018

“Asking questions in school is a great way to learn!

If you try that stuff here you might get your legs broke.

We once found a dead guy face-down in the Slurm!

It could easily happen again to you folks.”

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GW150914··on A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
The whole point of a black hole is that nothing can support its own mass past a certain point. A black hole is a region more than it is an object, with a singularity beyond an event horizon. If there really is a singularity, it is a point or ring, not a sphere. There are other conjectures which replace the singularity with something else, like masses of strings, but it doesn’t really matter to the universe outside of the event horizon.

As to it being a source of dark matter, the idea that black holes and other compact objects are dark matter is encapsulated in the MACHO (MAssive Compact Halo Object) theory. It is extremely unlikely to be correct, because observations largely rule this out. Black holes warp spacetime around them and result in detectable phenomena as a result of gravitational lensing. It would appear that such lensing is not common enough to allow for black holes in sufficient quantity to explain dark matter.

GW150914··on A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
If you really meant dense then you have to rememberer that the average density of a black hole enjoys an inverse proportionality to its volume. In other words a supermassive black hole is far less dense on average than a much smaller hole. However it is still far far denser than a whole galaxy, which is mostly empty space and diffuse dust.

I don’t think you meant dense though, I think you meant mass, because that’s sort of how your post seems to be phrased. The answer then is that it is a minute fraction of the mass of the galaxy. Sag A* is about 4 million solar masses, and the Milky Way has 250 billion stars, many of which are far more massive than Sol. Even ignoring other objects like stellar remnants and nebulae, the mass of the central black hole is negligable on the scale of the whole galaxy.

GW150914··on A Penthouse Made for Instagram
Well at least I nailed the personality disorder bit.
GW150914··on Coders Automating Their Own Job
Three articles of “data” yes...

So we have a HuffPo article, an article from MarriPedia (a religious site) and an abstract from the Sociology and Religion department of The Association of Sociolgy and Religion. Three famously unbiased, data-driven outlets (/s) which even then, only tangentially support part of your point, and then only through the loosest of correlations.

Quantity is no substitute for quality.

GW150914··on Coders Automating Their Own Job
I mean, he said it outright: “I think you'll find that most people who 'keep the wallet' are probably not religious...”

I don’t think it’s so much a carried or implied assumption as his central thesis, and his justification down the thread is a page of more claims and anecdotes. Call me cynical, but I don’t think there is any “there” there.

GW150914··on Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit
Tesla is facing the prospect of needing to sell a honking load of stock at a discount to deal with their debt, and to do that they need a high stock price. While Musk appears to be a liability in many areas, he is the focus for a cult of personality that has made Tesla what it is, and has shown incredible talent for inflating the price of Tesla’s stock on that basis.

So while Tesla as a healthy company without crushing impending debt would almost certainly be better off without him, Tesla as it is only really exits because of his presence. Long term they have to actually make a lot of money and stop hemorrhaging money, and get out of their death spiral. Short term the only way to do that is sell expensive stock, and that stock is expensive because of the cult of Musk.

GW150914··on A Penthouse Made for Instagram
Well that totally doesn’t sound like someone with a personality disorder. /s

I’m fairly sure that history will almost instantly forget them, because they exist to be disposable, to be replaced, and as interest and attention moves on their “mark” on history will be exceedingly shallow. Maybe that’s the difference between this constructed “reality” and... reality. Something real can be lasting, while this cotton candy version of reality only seems substantial from a certain angle, for a little while. It’s a kind of shallow “reality” for shallow people with minuscule attention spans.

GW150914··on Cincinnati Joins the List of Cities Saying ‘No’ to Parking Minimums
It’s a giant country, and despite what people in the Silicon Valley bubble think, there are a lot of cities with a lot of space. This is an insoluble problem if everyone demands acces to a spot in one or two major cities, because that’s where VC money is concentrated. That’s not a problem for most people though, who frankly don’t care about housing problems or traffic problems for techies. They’ll switch over to EV’s, but good luck trying to get them to embrace trains and busses.
GW150914··on Cincinnati Joins the List of Cities Saying ‘No’ to Parking Minimums
Considering that “cars owners” in America represent 88%, maybe it’s just an alignment of interests. Maybe alternatives are rejected not because of these subtle systemic issues, but rather because a supermajority of Americans own cars and don’t want the alternatives? Talking about “car owners” like that isn’t synonymous with “most Americans” is a very particular way to frame the issue that makes it seem like a top-down structure when it isn’t.
GW150914··on Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]
People will just “pirate” the web. As for no ads, people who want that experience already get it for free. Given the incredibly low quality of most ad supported content, maybe the real solution is for much of it to die.
GW150914··on Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
We already do pay to help raise other poeple’s kids through a variety of taxes, including public schools via property tax. This would be more of a subsidy for reproducing, rather than helping to raise them. I think it’s only rational for a community to invest in good outcomes for children, because the alternatives are not only undesireable and immoral, but more expensive. Actually subsidizing having children though, rather than investing in existing children isn’t something quite so simple. If you want to have children and are willing to make the associated sacrifices, good for you, it entire ask me to mitigate those sacrifices when I’ve chosen to not have children. I’m still happy to pay my taxes and invest thereby in their education and health, but propping up your career? No.
GW150914··on No Cash Needed at This Cafe: Students Pay the Tab with Their Personal Data
It’s sad that you can’t opt out and just pay for coffee. If it were just an option it would be fine, but this is the only way.
GW150914··on Blinded by the Bitcoin Meteor or Why Top Economists Are Wrong About Bitcoin
The article itself is... not worth commenting on, but I’ll just comment on the irony of referring to Bitcoin as a “meteor” when far from enjoying a meteoric rise, it has crashed and burned. Beyond that, it looks like they don’t actually refute any arguments, just float the lazy idea that the economists in question are protecting their jobs because crypto would... ruin them? Because reasons?

It seems like the equivalent of someone preaching homeopathy and saying that doctors who don’t like it are just protecting their jobs because if homeopathy takes off, they’re ruined. Only it’s somehow even more poorly presented in this article. You know the routine, pharmaceutical companies are hiding the miracle cure for cancer to make money on treatments, but... with crypto.

How did it come to this?!

GW150914··on Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges
Plus, he’s still facing a raft of civil suits beyond the SEC, even beyond the one from the man he kept accusing of being a pedophile.

As I said, beyond that suit, i.e. the suits he’s facing over the tweets. And the DOJ investigation.

GW150914··on "It is with a heavy heart that we report that Tidal is good now"
I buy my music, then I pirate a copy for archival and portable use. The artist and publishers get their money, and I get my fair use. I’m not willing to steal stuff, but I’m also not willing to jump through arbitrary hoops once I’ve paid. It isn’t strictly legal, but it is moral.
GW150914··on Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges
Their cases were already incredibly strong, given the nature of the tweet and his Twitter account’s status as an official corporate mouthpiece for five years. From a purely legal perspective the no contest nature of this settlement doesn’t do much to weaken or strengthen their case, but It also doesn’t matter because their cases are already ridiculously strong. Musk is still in trouble, but a death spiral is too strong a word (unless the DOJ brings charges), he could still pull up. If he backs off the Twitter and keeps his head down, he’ll recover.

Tesla though, is in a real death spiral with their debt.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deathspiral.asp

That’s going to be muuuuuch harder to correct, given that they’re going to have sell a load of discounted stock just to keep afloat in 2019.

GW150914··on Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges
There’s the still the DOJ investigation, so he’s very much in potential hot water, albeit less so than before. The odds of him facing criminal charges was always lower than the civil side, but he’s still at risk. Plus, he’s still facing a raft of civil suits beyond the SEC, even beyond the one from the man he kept accusing of being a pedophile.
GW150914··on What 61,000 hidden structures reveal about Maya civilization
Having been there too, I strongly endorse your opinion. Did you make it to Tikal and check out the pyramids? Climbing Pyramid 4 and staring over the canopy at endless jungle was one of the better experiences of my life.
GW150914··on Manta rays’ food-capturing mechanism may hold key to better filtration systems
Spider goat! That’s really amazing, and the promise of spider silk and related materials to everything from body armor to surgery can’t be overstated.

Also...

Spider goat, spider goat, doing whatever a spider goat does. Is it a spider? No it’s a goat. Spider goat. Spider goat.

GW150914··on Manta rays’ food-capturing mechanism may hold key to better filtration systems
That strategy can be very successful, but sometimes what you discover is that nature often depends on things like regenerating materials, and other things we can’t come close to replicating. We can understand how a dragonfly flies, but we can’t replicate it efficiently. Nature is also often unconcerned with long service lives, again looking at the dragonfly. What we want from our machine tends to be durability and reparibility, not to mention affordability.

Nature can only get us so far with the current state of the art of materials science.

GW150914··on Coinbase Wants to Be Too Big to Fail
People like a vast majority of people want the ability to recover after a fuckup or theft. The FDIC exists for a reason, as do chargebacks. With the exception of a paltry minority who care more about their ideology than anything else, reversible transactions are the winning feature.
GW150914··on SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.

You have to admit though, based on comments all over any story about Tesla here at least, that it works as a bogeyman. The only other fiction that’s more powerful is that Musk does everything he does to send humanity to Mars, save the world, etc. Musk has a true talent for figuring out what his target audience wants to believe, and then selling it to them at a premium. Smart, technically minded people (key early adopters of Tesla) are desperate for a way to keep humanity going in the face of climate change, possible impact events, and so on. Musk more or less frames his rather mundane personal aggrandizement and money-making endeavors as lynchpins in just those areas. He helps to convince people who want to believe, that they can help save the world not through anything like sacrifice, but by buying stock or a luxury car!

They eat it up, and are enraged at people who scoff, and no one scoffs harder than someone who puts their money on a bet that the stock is overvalued. As a result the short is already a subject of hate, and perfect to pin all of the evils of the world on. It perpetuates a classic tribal narrative and dresses it up in just enough pseudo intellectual finery to convince a target audience which already wants to believe. As a bonus that audience thinks it’s too smart to be fooled that way, and above tribalism, making it easier to sell the story and harder for them to admit what they’ve fallen for.

Look at some of these comments, and you see the evidence of just what I’m talking about!

The law says a lot of things. I'm ok with short sellers losing their shirts regardless.

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I also take the long view; Elon is instrumental to the long-term outcome for Tesla, our species, and our planet.

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Because he made short sellers look like idiots? I think not. I just bought more.

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SEC suing Elon Musk is , quite frankly one of the most abhorrent actions a US govt agency can ever do against genuine American Entrepreneurship and American innovative spirit. There is not a single human being on the planet who comes close to Elon Musk when it comes to big , bold innovation and tech entrepreneurship who is putting his heart and soul into leading the human race into the future.

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you can’t disrupt or otherwise show up all of these players: the us/eu/russian/chinese space industries (and by extension the governments of china and russia), the oil industries of russia/saudi/usa, the major auto manufacturers, power companies, professional car and truck drivers, and the us dealership association (what am i forgetting), all of whom are politically very well connected, and some of whom have their hordes of paid shill internet commenters, and upvoting/downvoting bot nets (not that that would ever happen on hn (and if it would it’s against hn rules to suggest it)) and expect not to get trounced. elon might have fucked up by sending that tweet, but the response here, on reddit, and by the gov’t is way out of proportion, esp considering everything positive that this man has accomplished and is currently working on.

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He didn’t screw anyone over. Wall street gamblers lost money, and our culture coddles Wall Street bros like helpless babies. Traders who lost money wouldn’t have had the stock to trade without Elon in the first place!

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The entire world will lose if Elon is forced out. He’s the biggest fighter for climate change and space travel in modern history, greater than Al Gore in marketing and execution, greater than Buzz Aldrin, Tyson, and cosmos. I’d much rather have an honest relatable Elon Musk than a suit. I’d rather have creativity than suffocating structure.

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The subtext is that Elon intentionally bumped the stock price to screw over short sellers like Jim Chanos. But the rationale behind 10b5 is to protect investors from fraud. Right, we are not concerned with protecting short-sellers who spend all day on twitter making up negative stories about their targets.

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The battery and solar operations side of TSLA are critical to spaceX's mission to Mars. Can't have a martian colony without being able to harvest and store energy. Additionally the CV being done at Tesla could prove critical in automating prefabrication of living spaces and life support infrastructure. Can't be doing anything like that remote controlled with 8 min latency.

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What a joke, there are plenty of scumbag and criminal leaders of corporations and this is the guy who doesn't walk. It'll be a sad day for the world if this guy goes to jail.

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I know where Elon comes from, what missions and goals he has stated for years now, and what he is trying to accomplish. I promise you, Elon legitimately thought there would be an opportunity to go private again. He's said he wanted to do so in the past, and even has said they never wanted to go public, but were left with no choice. I don't think any part of Elon was trying to commit fraud or security manipulation. He made a mistake, we all do. He said something that should not have been said at that given point of time. I'm sure he was excited. He even said he typed that tweet in the car after leaving SpaceX.

GW150914··on SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.

Plus he clearly lives for it, and when anyone makes even reasonable points against him, he loses his mind on a Twitter. That is after all what happened with “pedo guy” re the Thai cave rescue. Musk made an ass of himself by trying to inject himself into a potential tragedy for some PR and a man who actually helped to save the day called him on it.

I’m also not sure that it would be hard to idolize a group, people manage it for sports teams. Maybe if Musk put the effort he spends into grooming his ego into promoting his team he wouldn’t need to be the center of a cult of e-sychophants.

GW150914··on Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'
I’m somewhat familiar with Finnish culture, and to be honest I sort of wish the world worked that way. The Finnish version of the example conversation could have just been:

Merge my code! It’s great!

No.

Aaaand scene.

Hell, that “no” could even have been a silent stare, or a grunt and it would have worked. Sadly much of the World finds that crosses the line fopekm taciturn and direct, into either rudeness or lack of communication. Dressing things up with layers of words, while tedious, is also the basic way many cultures keep arguments from turning into murders. North America (and the UK and some other parts) probably do take it a bit far. Not as far as Japan, but still, too far.

All of which is to say, yes it’s probably cultural, but it’s also a matter of people who are invested in something missing the obvious. Sometimes you really have to drive a point home, and my general recommendation was that it’s better to do so directly and civilly, rather than rudely.

GW150914··on Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'
It costs time and energy, because there is no end to this kind of debate.

The end is “nothing more to talk about,” and then you stop replying. As to time and energy, if you’re so depleted than an extra few sentences will materially impact you, then that is a problem. Healthy humans won’t be exhausted by expressing themselves in a half paragraph rather than a muttered “crap”.

Some people are persistent and will blame you for explaining badly when they don't understand. These discussions never end; usually not even after things got labelled as crap.

So don’t call it crap, just clearly state that you’re not interested anymore and hit ignore. The rest is their problem, not yours, and you’ll gain a reputation for being forthright and firm rather than hysterical.

Personally, I just stop responding after the technical arguments have been exchanged. There is no point in repeating what was ignored already, no point in ELI5, no point to using swear words, silence is what works best.

Amen brother.

By the way, if you told me "I understand your passion, but...", I'd be angry beyond belief. That's the way you talk to children, and even my mother is no longer allowed to talk to me like that. I consider that a stronger insult than my code being called crap. Which probably shows that shutting up in time is the best response.

The person in the example was acting like a child, and deserved to be treated (politely) like one. Either way though, my particular wording was just off-the-cuff and only an example.

GW150914··on Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite'
It would cost you nothing to replace your last line with, “I’m sorry, but that’s not what we’re seeing and we won’t merge it until you fix it. I understand your passion, but I won’t sacrifice the quality of this project for that. Fix the code so that it no longer invokes undefined behavior and we’ll review it, otherwise we have nothing more to talk about.”

The end. No need to call it crap, no need to burn a bridge.

GW150914··on Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees
Is this the study that's based on some extremely small amount of bees (45?) being completely submerged in glyohosate? "We found that babies, when submerged in 100% water for ONLY 5 MINUTES, had extremely averse reactions. We must ban water before it continues to hurt our children!"

Did you read the methods section? They did no such thing, and I’m curious as to why you claim that they did. At least have the intellectual honesty to yourself if no one else, to skim the study before posting nonsense.

Hundreds of late-stage pupae were removed from brood frames and allowed to emerge under sterile conditions in laboratory. (Experiment A) NEWs were exposed to bee gut homogenate for 5 d, then hand fed 1 mM glyphosate or sterile sugar syrup on 2 alternate days. Fifteen bees from each group were sampled 2 d after the last hand feeding. DNA was extracted from dissected guts, used as template for qPCR analyses, and submitted for Illumina sequencing at the GSAF, UT Austin. (Experiment B) NEWs were exposed to a bee gut homogenate or sterile sucrose syrup. Each group was divided into two subgroups and treated with 0.1 mM glyphosate or sterile sucrose syrup for 5 d. After that, half of the subgroups was exposed to the opportunistic pathogen S. marcescens kz19, whereas the other half was used as controls. Bees were exposed to similar amounts of glyphosate (∼1.7 µg) in experiments A and B.

NEWs were hand fed 5 µL sucrose syrup containing ∼105 cells of S. alvi wkB2 or wkB339 or sterile sucrose syrup as control.

Hand fed does not equal “immersed in for 5 minutes” by any means.

In Vitro Experiments with Bee Gut Bacterial Strains. Honey bee and bumble bee gut bacterial strains (SI Appendix, Table S1) were cultured in InsectaGro or MRS broth in the presence or absence of 10 mM glyphosate in a 96-well plate and incubated in a plate reader at 35 °C and 5% CO2 for 48 h. Optical density was measured at 600 nm every 6 h. Experiments were performed in triplicate.

Plasmid Construction and Transformation. The aroA, yhhS, and tetC genes from various bacterial strains were PCR amplified and cloned into the arabinose-inducible pBAD30 vector (45) by Gibson assembly (46) and then used to transform E. coli strain BW25113 or a derivative lacking the aroA gene by electroporation. Primer sequences are listed in SI Appendix, Table S2.

Growth Rate Analysis of Transformed E. coli. Transformed E. coli cells were cultured in duplicate in 24-well plates containing M9 minimal medium (47) with appropriate antibiotics, varying concentrations of glyphosate, and varying concentrations of arabinose. The plates were incubated in a plate reader at 37 °C for 24–96 h. Optical density was measured at 600 nm every hour.

All in all it’s a diverse and comprehensive methodology which still needs to be replicated, but not dismissed offhand by you.

GW150914··on Linux – The beginning of the end?
Yeah, time will tell, although to be fair the same was said incessantly by the likes of GamerGate and they’ve just been folded into the larger alt-right and forgotten by most. In a sense, time has already told, and at the end of the day nobody has time for the petulant who frame everything in terms of “sjw’s” and basic human decency as “PC culture.” Tragically that group (having a surfeit of free time) is excellent at amplifying their own noise online, but inevitably it’s recognized as the same old noise, utterly lacking signal, and people move on until the alt-right concocts a new-sounding nontroversy.
GW150914··on Linux – The beginning of the end?
Presumably they realize that it would be an unproductive dead end next to the original, and don’t want to become a subject of mockery. They want to make noise and rattle their cages, and that’s where their commitment ends. It’s hard to see this extended reaction to something that is at the end of the day incredibly common and banal, as more than trying to suck up the air of publicity while its fresh. After all, people really do care about Linux kernel, so for a short time their “ideas” are given a hearing they would otherwise never seriously be given.
GW150914··on Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga
You seem very dedicated to making this a case of “everyone is bad, so no one is bad.” I’ll repeat that old saw, two wrongs don’t make a right. The injustices and acts of violence committed by America against others don’t justify, excuse, or mitigate similar acts by Russia.

Now, can we get back to the topic at hand without these diversions? You were claiming that the “circus” of the UK being outraged by the use of a chemical weapon to attempt to murder two people on their soil, and the incidental killing of a third and injury of a fourth (both civilians) was a “circus” I think. I’m still interested to your non-diversionary response to my take on why that would legitimately anger not just the government of the UK, but anger and terrify its people.

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