dizzant

This is an interesting take, the article touches on it too.

> “Physicists are much less concerned than mathematicians about rigorous proofs,” says Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the Collège de France and a Fields Medal winner. Sometimes, he says, that “allows physicists to explore mathematical terrain more quickly than mathematicians.”

GP is right that the currently observed physical laws go far beyond our ability to observe them in reality because of the cost of observations. International effort over decades is required to create facilities capable of making helpful new observations: think of LHC, LIGO, James Webb, etc.

On the other hand, once the facilities are built and ground-breaking observations appear, we suddenly have a debt of theoretical and simulated exploration to understand all their implications. The low cost of computation greatly extends the value we can take from every truly new observation of reality.

In order to observe something new, we must be able differentiate it from something already understood. It seems like the physics and math communities are currently in a season of increasing our understanding of the existing models well enough to motivate trying to break them.

If this is real, this might be the most helpful thing I learn all day. Thanks stranger

Great video, thanks for sharing!

Did you happen to attend a prestigious school? I find that the level of rigor (and corresponding freedom) varies tremendously from program to program.

I did my undergrad at a state school with a middling engineering program, where I had ample free time to explore topics in depth, pursue extracurriculars that taught me far more than my classes, and have a thriving social life.

Contrast that experience to what I saw as a teaching assistant at Georgia Tech: undergrads who are so full of classwork that they're punting on the least-valuable graded assignments, never mind extracurriculars. The level of rigor in courses is much higher, but it presses out freedom to explore independently.

Another datapoint: I competed against GT extracurricular teams during my undergrad years, and we beat them handily almost every time because their students couldn't justify high effort for work that wasn't graded. I once saw a GT team arrive a day late to a competition, work on a robot for three hours at the adjacent table, realize their robot did not work, and drive home without competing.

Is the original intent of strncpy() germane to the GPs comment? Explicitly stating the max length to copy is an effective tool for avoiding buffer overruns, regardless of whether the designers imagined that important use case.

This is a fascinating observation about the funding of nutrition education, thank you for sharing it.

What do you think are the reasons most education efforts are spent on children? It seems to mirror the fact that children spend a significant part of their time on education, while adult education is ad-hoc and self-directed. Are there other factors that you can see from inside the field?

The press release that went along with the study is here: https://iac.gatech.edu/electric-scooters-car-use-atlanta?utm...

> We have largely moved away from viewing humans or “consciousness” as something special.

Who is “we” in this comment? Christianity and Islam emphasize consciousness and the uniqueness of human experience, and their adherents still account more than 50% of the population.

As much popularity as the many worlds theory is gaining, the generic “we” almost certainly still doesn’t believe it, and many (most?) probably don’t even know about it.

The link you posted supports the GP’s assertion that not declaring the current economic situation as a recession is politically motivated. The third paragraph specific cites common criticism of the NBER on that very front.

That there could and should be some more sophisticated, objective definition of a recession than “two years of GDP decline” isn’t in question. But, at least according to your own source, NBER fails to provide that definition and is commonly criticized for is subjectivity during political years.

I really like the idea of using the motor as a combined power source/user interface component! As the proud owner of a 2004 sedan, hacks to get digital audio on the original stereo are a common daydream of mine.

Maybe Bluetooth low energy could fit in that power envelope too?

The appearance of this article on HN strikes an uncanny valley for me. I independently recalled and told a friend about this river just a few hours ago, having not thought of it or done any digital interactions with the idea in probably more than a year. I searched it on DDG to show a picture. Now, suddenly, it’s #3 on HN.

Am I going mad? Is the surveillance state so deep in my subconscious that I fail to notice it’s observations? This article isn’t even tech related, why is it here?

> Competition keeps people from being evil. Evil only happens when there's no reason for them to NOT do evil things.

I don’t agree. People generally don’t steal, but if they have no food, they will resort to theft to survive. Competition can prevent some ill effects of monopolistic tyranny, which I think is what you’re getting at here, but it breeds other evils.

When motor vehicles do that, it’s called Talladega.

I don’t understand the downvotes. Your conclusion is wrong but you make a good contribution. Thanks for the anecdata.

I too have seen this phenomenon, and I think it’s pretty common recently because the used car market is really out of whack. In my case, last year I bought a lightly used Sonata for about $30k with 12k miles, and today I could still trade it for about the same price with 31k miles on it.

Where you’re wrong is that this phenomenon doesn’t apply in general to the used car market but only in the last few years because of the chip shortage shrinking the supply of new cars. Short supply in turn increased demand for used cars, raising the prices.

He discusses the engine in a previous video. The integrator is RK4 with fixed step size (no error adjustment) and constraints are maintained by reaction forces. Numerical instability in that type of system comes primarily from energy added to maintain the constraints.

Are you defending the position that as a society, we should continue to allow funding the creation of child pornography through means of crypto?

Visa states openly that they weren’t aware of the situation at issue, don’t support child pornography, and have taken steps to avoid supporting it. This isn’t a case of cutting off some “industry”; child pornography is already widely and rightly maligned.

For me, "no one" translates more accurately to "no one I care about." I keep my journal physically on my person, in the backpack with my laptop. If the backpack is stolen, I actually don't care if the thief reads my notes -- maybe he'll find something of value there. More than likely, he won't care about my interior conflicts.

My wife and friends know not to look through the journal without my permission, and I trust them. If I didn't trust them, I would find different friends.

As with most things related to the interior life, what works best for you is intensely personal. For myself, I have journaled sporadically for the last decade, as the occasion presented itself.

At first, I bought the notebook to catalogue a trip to Europe. The first pages contain detailed daily logs of about 2 months of my life while I was there. At the time, I recall feeling like I was wasting valuable time that I could spend having more experiences, and there are many missing days as a result. But now 10 years later those pages contain stories I have failed to retain in my memory, and help me to reconstruct the days I didn't record. People and interactions I would have forgotten, short-lived but vivid crushes, a tomato sauce recipe transcribed poorly via a picture dictionary from a retired Italian grandmother at a hostel in Lourdes.

Other times, I've used the journal to clear my head during times of turmoil. Weak and unfinished thoughts on difficult circumstances, poetic images of my emotions, scribbled bullet lists of what happened and in what order as I tried to piece things together.

For a spell, the same journal was where I kept daily todo lists. Today, I'm using it as an outlet for my personal thoughts and goals, to keep them distinct from research notes and work notes. I find that writing them down helps me to clarify what I want and to move in a consistent direction over longer periods than focus and determination alone would allow.

The only consistent format for my journal is putting a date at the top of each entry and writing in pen so I can't erase it.

Every time I look back over what I've written, I take something different away; Rarely do I read what's there and count the act of writing it as a waste of time. It's a window into the past.

While retaining the typical high school separation between math, biology, chemistry, and physics, but given control over the curricula taught in those courses, do you think it is possible to teach a single very high-level concept such as the Krebs cycle in full complexity at a high school level (i.e. starting from algebra and very limited science education, completed in four full-time years)? This seems like a foothold for a potentially interesting restructuring of how we educate children, oriented toward depth in a few things to enlighten future breadth. I ask specifically about feasibility, since that seems like a necessary prerequisite to a discussion of beneficial value.

Wow I needed precisely -Wl,-whole-archive about a month ago to solve a missing symbol issue in a plug-in. I didn’t find the solution then, and moved on to a different strategy. This is why is scroll hacker news! The random tidbits are essential when you need them.

OWA has a known issue with Firefox on Linux where it incorrectly believes that Ctrl is pressed while typing an email. This results in frequent missed characters and spurious actions, including moving focus to the search bar, archiving messages, saving the current message as a draft and closing it, etc. This makes OWA extremely frustrating to use. Another issue with OWA is the unhelpful completions (which I've noted before on HN), which in my experience seem to be related to the spurious actions (more suggested completions = more spurious actions)

This. I've been looking for a new Exchange client since Outlook Web stopped properly supporting Firefox. I reached immediately for Thunderbird, but switched away quickly because of the need to pay for (somewhat clumsy) Exchange integration. If Owl were free, I wouldn't mind the long delays or weird synchronization issues. As a subscription service, I'll take my business elsewhere.

I use high math (very high math — control theory, numerical analysis, theory of optimization) in my day job as I finish grad school. I believe the article is correct in that I am one of very few in my office who actually employ this level of skill. I suspect that many enterprises are the same, in that a small number of technical experts are supported by a large cast of surrounding actors. But it is essential that the others share in the technical knowledge!

How could managers evaluate my performance, make decisions about where to apply my skills, or understand my value if they knew nothing more than high school math? How would I remain sane with no one around to rubber duck proofs or concepts to, to commiserate or bounce ideas with? Sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic; deskilling of the workforce makes the black boxes even blacker.

Every colleague may not know the precise details of my work, but that this remains a strategic decision and not a limitation due to their lack of skill is essential.

Can you expand on why you think performance hacking degrades correctness? As I understand it, “yes” (with no arguments) is supposed to output “y\n” continuously until terminated. Throughout/latency are unspecified, admitting various implementations with various concerns, like GNU’s focus on throughout vs BSD’s focus on latency/simplicity. Even an implementation that took 10 seconds between each output could be desirable for some use cases! Is that version of “yes” less correct?

Thanks for this perspective. I am one of these mismatched PhD students. When I entered 6 years ago, no professors in my department had time to advise me. The professor for whom I was a GTA took pity on me after two years of rejection, and now serves as my committee chair despite having little to no expertise in my field. I am coadvised through a different department, but again, my coadvisor has little overlap with my interests. I am nearing completion, but stumbling over the lack of support, technical leadership, and community of practice. I am unconvinced that my proposed dissertation is meritorious or valuable in any way, but the only advise my advisors can give is “persist and finish quickly” because I am more expert than both of them. Defending feels like a gamble. The bitterness that comes from poor-fit advising is real, even when both advisors are earnestly doing their best. I wish I had learned this lesson sooner and quit with a master’s when I had the chance.

I work in academia. Frequently, I need to convey various levels of confidence about facts when writing emails to my colleagues.

Microsoft Outlooks suggestions are more than a mere annoyance on this front. They consistently suggest that "probably" and "perhaps" and "maybe" and "almost certainly" should be removed from my writing precisely because they convey uncertainty. That is why I wrote them in the first place! If I knew a result confidently, I would say so.

Please, let's not have another venue algorithmically pressuring everyone to uniformly remove nuance from communication. There is no one-size-fits-all threshold for "too wordy" or "too passive" or anything else with regard to language. Context is everything.

This grinds my gears. I'm a part time at my office (govt contractor), and do more work in 20 hours than some others on my team do in 40. Restrictions on firing underperformers put us in the position of "needing" 40 hours in the workweek.

Comments like this are a dime a dozen on HN. Every time I see one, I wonder what horror raises such ire. I like C++ and use it voluntarily for my research. How did it bite you?

It is good to see support for better urban planning on Hacker News. Issues of urban planning and city design often escape notice of the popular milieu due to the banality of local politics, but are nonetheless important.

One of the lasting impacts of our lives is the places we build. Make America Walkable Again.

Reading the thread, I'm surprised at the number of nearly identical "How much do we have to pay to keep it down? xD" posts I'm seeing, often from throwaway accounts. Some accounts with multiple near-identical posts within the same minute.

Could this be a coordinated smear in HN comments?