Sniffnoy

> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".

You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825

I don't think having an opinion and summarizing it are indicators of bias.

> They intentionally broke bitwise operators on volatiles because they wanted to be impose their atomic religion everywhere.

Could you elaborate on this?

Wondering: if the process for the upper part of the sandwich is the complement of the process for the lower part, why was it so much more difficult? What would go wrong if you took one of the earlier lower-sandwich processes, and complemented it in a similar way? I have to assume it's something, but what?

At least according to this article[1], you're correct; the practice of eating brains that caused kuru to spread was a recent innovation. However, the article doesn't say how recent. I guess I'd need to go read the actual book, since I can't quickly find anything else on how long this was occurring.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family...

So I got a really high score before I signed in, only signed in afterwards, and now, even though my high score displays on the "best wave" display for me, it's nowhere on the global high score board. I'm just going to have to, like, get it again somehow?? That's annoying.

It's especially bad that they can hide behind the UI sometimes...

The controls/rules are pretty unclear. This thing could use a controls/rules option.

So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.

The article mentions at the end the problem of coloring graphs on other surfaces. It's worth noting, it's known, for every surface, what the maximum chromatic number is of a graph on that surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heawood_conjecture

The odd thing about the Ringel-Youngs theorem is that proving the upper bound on the chromatic number is, with the exception of the case of the sphere (i.e., planar graphs, i.e. the four color theorem), not that hard. For the sphere, the lower bound is easy and the upper bound is hard; for other surfaces, the upper bound is easy and the hard part, if any, is the lower bound! (And then also the Klein bottle is an exception and requires only 6 colors instead of 7, so that one also requires a separate more-involved upper bound argument, but nothing on the scale of the four-color theorem...)

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

Responding to something from the linked Patreon post:

> Blackboard (as well as Epic and SharePoint) are classic examples of software where the user and the purchaser are different and the purchaser basically doesn’t care about the user, so you don’t expect the software to be good and it would be a bit of a surprised if the software didn’t deliver a bad user experience. But it was even more surprising to me that someone working on some of the most reviled software out there could think that the software was widely loved.

I worked briefly at Epic and the attitude there seemed to be more like "yes we know people hate Epic but they're wrong". :P People there didn't think Epic was widely liked!

(The explanations given were basically, 1. people hate Epic because their IT department configured it wrong, if they configured it in a more suitable manner they wouldn't have these problems, and, 2. it's not Epic per se that's the problem it's all EMR software, if you think Epic is bad you should see the competition, they're even worse. I'm not sure that second one is really such a good excuse, but, that was what I remember hearing.)

That's not what the term "backfire effect" refers to. The term "backfire effect" refers specifically to one specific consequence of this; namely, it refers to the idea that presenting evidence against something can make people more likely to believe it. (And my understanding is that in later studies this "backfire effect" appears to not actually exist after all, as Wikipedia appears to back up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance )

I'm not sure what the term is for what you're referring to, although it's certainly a real and known effect.

I expect the name is more of a joke, not a tease of some result they've yet to reveal.

It's kind of buried in the article, but it's worth noting that this vest is meant only to guard against solar storms, not cosmic rays; those remain a significant problem.

> The vest, though, does nearly nothing against galactic cosmic rays (GCR), which are the other major radiation source astronauts face. Unlike solar storm radiation, GCR arrive continuously at much higher energies, which makes them harder to shield against. “Using the vest against these rays would not be reasonable,” Houri says. “You’d have to wear it at all times.”

See for instance this article on how the cosmic ray problem would affect a Mars mission: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/radiation-tradeoffs-for-ma...

Do you know until when?

I think what's going on here is that you've misunderstood the theorem's hypothesis. The hypothesis isn't that no three of the points are collinear; rather, it's the weaker statement that there isn't any one single line that all the points lie on. It's true that with your version of the hypothesis the theorem would be trivial; but with the actual hypothesis it is is nontrivial.

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

You can, in fact, predict the effect of an atomic bomb without detonating it. Sure, you can't have the same certainty as if you'd detonated it -- empiricism is important; they tested the Fat Man design for a reason. But you may also recall that they were sufficiently confident in the Little Boy design that that one they didn't bother testing, and as it turned out, they were correct in their confidence. That's the power of understanding.

Which is to say, empiricism is important, but if your practice of empiricism is purely looking at what happened before and predicting that things will continue in that vein, rather than using your empirical observations to actually form a model of the world that will allow you to make more general predictions, you're not really using the full power of your intelligence. This is the sort of mistake that led many to not prepare for the covid pandemic, for instance! Meanwhile, others looked at what was going on, realized it wouldn't stay confined like it currently was, realized that it would get much bigger, and prepared.

"I'll believe it when it happens" can be a decent guideline a lot of the time, yes, but at some point you have to actually think. Evidence often comes not in the form of prior similar events, but in the form of models or arguments. To discount these as non-evidence is to blind oneself!

> History may be written by the victors, but the losers still get to dictate theory.

I feel like Tanner Greer's old post "History is written by the losers" is relevant here: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

I was confused at first when you asked if the 8-flow is relevant, when like, the 8-flow is a key input that the cycle double cover is built out of. Then I realized, oh, I guess technically they're not using the 8-flow, they're using the Z_2^3-flow. But like. The existence of an 8-flow and the existence of a Z_2^3-flow are equivalent, and I gather most graph theorists are going to talk about it in terms of the existence of an 8-flow, so noting that having a Z_2^3-flow is equivalent to having an 8-flow helps the reader to put this information in context.

I'm not sure why you find this proof so hard to read. I found it mostly quite readable (and the definition of L is straightforward? I wouldn't have written it quite that way but it's hardly inscrutable), although I feel like some parts are maybe lacking some exposition to explain the reason for certain things -- it doesn't feel written "in order". I also don't like that it's not cleanly separated into theorems and proofs -- some of the proof occurs in parts that aren't set off, for instance, and there isn't even a proper main theorem statement! But overall I was able to get through it without a lot of trouble and I'm not even a graph theorist...

I think "importance" here is just being rated as 1 to 4 stars. So it's not "second-most important" but rather "one of the top 5 most important". That doesn't change much, but FWIW.

People don't talk about the cycle double cover conjecture here because this isn't a math website. Its lack of mention here is therefore poor evidence.

Based on the title, I was expecting this to be about the idea of power transmission via microwave (as seen in e.g. SimCity), but actually it's about microwave communications links used by electrical companies.

This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.

I feel like you ought to be go lower than 17, down to 9, by not counting the 3 generations of fermions as distinct (so you've just got up-type quark, down-type quark, electron-type particle, and neutrino). After all, if they can mix with one another, should they really be considered entirely different particles?

(2020)

I like this explanation of cricket for Americans: https://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/baseball.html

The blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?

I put in my name, and four boxes popped up -- one for "American mathematician", one for "spelling bee contestant", one for "American poker player", and one for "fitness industry entrepreneur".

In fact, both of the first two are me, but I wonder if Claude Opus 4.8 (the only one that hit both of those two) realizes they're the same person? :P