Hacker News Reader

dbasedweebon Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity

This is already essentially how it works. A new theory has to be complementary to old ones. This is often said in terms of “matching the predictions of...” another theory. There are more standards of course, but that’s the baseline. A lot of pet theories people have for things like QM fall apart because they don’t match the tested predictions of QM. For example, Special and General Relativity make new and more accurate predictions which complement, but do not contradict Newtonian theory.

An issue with a theory replacing QM for example, other than the high degree of precision needed, is Bell’s Theorem, which tends to rule out LHV theories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

dbasedweebon Our Approach to Employee Security Training

It also makes researching what they talked about much much easier. I can google “demyelination” while some metaphorical treatment of the topic involving insulated wires may be substantially less amenable to that.

dbasedweebon Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity

When you think about particles as excitations of a field, the indistinguishable nature of said particles stops being such a puzzle.

dbasedweebon Why Men Love War (1984)

A fun drinking game is to ask them to rigorously define what “Hegelian” is, and every time the explanation becomes pointlessly vague or self-referential, drink. I take no responsibility for the inevitable stomach pumping though.

dbasedweebon [dead]

When did, “A few keyboard warriors Tweeted,” become “Stirs furor” exactly? This is a non-story, and the few people aware of it will have forgotten about it in a week. It’s not even compelling as nontroversies go, because it has no substance, it’s just some people who were offended out of a few hundred million.

dbasedweebon Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention

On one hand I agree with you, but on the other... why is this Amazon’s place? I don’t agree with how China censors, but what gives a private US entity the right to try and override that in this way? Their place is to choose to, or not to do business with China, not what amounts to a political operation. I think it’s fair to say that it’s the job of governments and intelligence agencies, and some things shouldn’t be privatized.

dbasedweebon YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

In the US what happens if someone on that list kills themselves? Lawsuit from hell probably, at the very least.

dbasedweebon YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels

Relax and Improve Your Sleep with Natural Calm Magnesium

If that’s your version of very clear, maybe you shouldn’t be giving people advice.

dbasedweebon Tesla explains Model 3 build in response to Munro’s teardown analysis

Sure, but it’s also a non sequitur in the conversation you decided to enter, and a point that was never up for debate or disagreement. Obvious, yet unhelpful in other words.

dbasedweebon Tesla explains Model 3 build in response to Munro’s teardown analysis

Maybe, but since I was responding to, The first year of a new car design of any model of any brand having qc problems is actually so common that sometimes buyers will actively avoid them... it doesn’t actually apply here.

dbasedweebon The NSA is not made of magic (2014)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

dbasedweebon Seattle vacates hundreds of marijuana charges going back 30 years

It's because so many people don't know, forgot, or choose to ignore that the US was founded on enlightenment principles of individualism.

Unless you were a child, woman, native, or a slave, right? It also helped to own land.

Come on, we can be against prohibition for practical reasons without resorting to pining for a history which never existed,

dbasedweebon Quantum “spooky action” approaches the human scale

If I call something “Elephant scale” and then claim I meant “an elephant’s hair” you’d laugh at me, and rightly so.

dbasedweebon Tesla Driver Banned from Highway After Being Caught in the Passenger Seat

Or even better, active lane control/assist, but of course Tesla is all about marketing to the hilt. If the “Gigafactory” were being honest it would be, “Panasonic with a Tesla sicker.”

dbasedweebon Tesla explains Model 3 build in response to Munro’s teardown analysis

I’d be fascinated if you could find three examples of panel gaps needing 40% improvement over one year from a major manufacturer.

dbasedweebon Controversial New Milk Shakes Up Big Dairy

Nutrition research is famously bad, worse than social science research. I would want to see a lot of replication before I took it with even a grain of delicious salt. The history of such research is a disappointing one after all. Humans are incredibly diverse, and it’s hard to do good research with controls on us when it comes to diet, but that still means weak prelim studies are often not worth the time of day.

dbasedweebon Quantum “spooky action” approaches the human scale

Approaches the human scale? This experiment was done on 10^12 supercooled atoms in a vacuum. That is at least FIFTEEN orders of magnitude away from the scale of the average human body, which is not supercooled or in a vacuum. This experiment is very interesting and an extension of previous work with massive oscillators, but the title is absurd.

dbasedweebon Patent Review System Upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

Objective and originalist are different things, and the constitution has never been immutable, hence the large number of amendments.

dbasedweebon Patent Review System Upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

I’m not disagreeing with the majority decision, just the argument for originalism.

dbasedweebon Patent Review System Upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

I agree with the decision actually, I just disagree with the originalist viewpoint.

dbasedweebon Patent Review System Upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

Except in this case it’s like being forced to resolve disputes according to your uncle’s inexpert and biased reading of how your great-great-great-great-grandparents settles their marital spats.

dbasedweebon Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video

In the specific example of the lottery, if people could intuitively grasp what the odds really meant, few would play. It may not be a tax on stupidity, but a tax on how many people fail to understand how probability works. It’s also a tax on the impulsive, the desperate, the uneducated and people who have a predisposition to gamble.

Then difficulty in explaining to people these facts, or convincing people of them doesn’t imply some broader cultural relativism. The lottery is stupid, it’s just very challenging to get people to understand that consistently.

dbasedweebon Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

Every time I see another iteration of this kind of article, it screams out to me that we need some kind of worker's cartel that can enforce an embargo on companies that don't meet some minimal standard.

Like... a union? A combination of aggressive union busting, anti-union ideology of many in tech, and aggressive offshoring/H1B hiring acts to keep that in check. The moment you try to raise the issue you’re either fired, or some “genius” who reads Ayn Rand like the Bible tells you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

dbasedweebon Random Darknet Shopper: A Live Mail Art Piece

Morgues absolutely do not embalm, they refrigerate. A body in a morgue is either unidentified, awaiting autopsy/examination, or yet to be claimed. None of those categories permit embalming, and in any case, morgues are not funeral homes.

dbasedweebon Random Darknet Shopper: A Live Mail Art Piece

You won’t do the work to back your own claim? Ok, well add me to the list of people calling bullshit then. Besides, who, but s cannibal would know the different between a leg of veal pork, and a... leg? Occam’s Razor says the books are jokes, pranks, or scams, and/or that you’re bullshitting. In the absence of evidence at least.

Well for starters you can try checking the watchpeopledie subreddit and look for human stew. I don’t work for free, I’m barely giving a fuck away.

If you can’t back up an extraordinary claim, and “lots of cookbooks for cannibals” is pretty extraordinary, don’t make claims. If you don’t give a duck, are lazy, whatever, don’t waste your time making claims. It’s really simple, unless you’re wasting everyone’s time for amusement, and there’s a name for that.

dbasedweebon No boundaries for Facebook data: third-party trackers abuse Facebook Login

If you print out FB’s T&C’s, plus all of the layers of embedded links within links, it’s 87,000+ words. That is designed to be unreadable and incomprehensible, it’s an attempt to baffle. Even stupid people, illiterate people, and just plain lazy people don’t deserve to be taken advantage of.

If you want to talk about what people “should” know, there’s s reasonable man statute, and it definitely doesn’t include what you’re describing.

dbasedweebon San Francisco’s Seismic Gamble

Cold and rain seem like they don’t belong on that list unless you’re homeless.

dbasedweebon Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food?

There’s another big factor: soups and stews maximize the nutrients you get from your ingredients. If you fry a piece of meat you’re losing some fat, if you boil and drain veggies or meat you lose a lot. If you throw everything into a pot and stock/soup/broth is part of the meal, everything that went in goes into you. Soups and stews are also excellent ways to utilize preserved meats which need rehydrating, softening, and can make use of their salt content. Legumes and pulses pretty much require that treatment as well, and can thicken a stew or soup.

Aside from equipment there is just the reality of nutrition.

dbasedweebon Microsoft built its own custom Linux kernel for its new IoT service

It’s pretty trivial to disable the data collection on the home version, and the corporate version doesn’t have it. For work Linux is perfect, for games Windows is still the better choice. Luckily nothing stops people from having both on the same box.

dbasedweebon Smart Condom

It’s actually a smart cock ring, and still a breatakingly bad idea. It’s like a group of people sat around a table and one of them said, “What’s the worst thing about cock rings today?” The response must have been, “Well I hate how no one can hack them.”