Hacker News Reader

gradi3nton US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules

So if I ask my ISP if they are selling my data do they have to admit it? Or can they now do it in secret?

gradi3nton Metamaterial based flat lens promises possible revolution in optics

You have to love pop sci headlines with phrases like "...promises possible..."

I promise you, BBC's Roland Pease, that it's possible the sun won't rise tomorrow and Linus Torvalds with announce that he will be Microsoft's next CEO.

gradi3nton Making UX Choices Based on What You Hate About the Internet

So CKs brilliant talent for comedy had not so much to do with his ticket sales, eh?

That sounds like a sales pitch. Oh wait, scroll to the bottom, this is a sales pitch. Classic tactic of making the incredible sound easy, just pay a small fee!

gradi3nton University Title Generator

Changing the zoom on this page is trippy.

gradi3nton The Case Against Reality

This is a very nice argument!

Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of EM waves.

I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

gradi3nton The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." - Eleanor Roosevelt

gradi3nton Machine Learning Meets Economics, Part 2

So the Sell/Check/Recycle model only requires 33% of the labor compared to the Check only model. The author suggests that this means tripling production would be possible, but that depends on QA being the factories bottleneck. If QA isn't the bottleneck, than you might as well fire 2/3 of Quinn's QA workers. Hooray, the computer didn't take my job, but it took the jobs of the guy to my right and the gal to my left.

gradi3nton Google says self-driving car hits municipal bus in minor crash

Here in the US we stand with you on the issue of BMW drivers.

gradi3nton A number that fascinates physicists

Physics experiments have ruled theories like this out. They can put a very very small upper bound on how much the constants can change over a volume the size of the universe, and over the lifetime of the universe.

gradi3nton A number that fascinates physicists

You don't, it's just that h-bar = h/2pi is the variety of planck's constant that is more useful in quantum mechanics.

gradi3nton Show HN: Sense2vec model trained on all 2015 Reddit comments

The first name to show up when I search 'evil man' is 'Mr Rogers'...what the hell, reddit.

(first name, not first word, had to scroll down a bit, past words like 'Nazi soldier' and 'evildoer')

gradi3nton Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

So that's wayyyyyyy outside our galaxy? Any idea how many galaxies fit into a 1 billion ly sphere around the milky way? I'm guessing a shit ton, which makes the detection of a bh merger seem more realistic to me.

That's some serious range!

gradi3nton The result would be a catastrophe (1985)

What would us change about the letter? Commenter djcapelis above disagrees.

gradi3nton The result would be a catastrophe (1985)

I'm turning 25 in two weeks. So this is it? 2015 was my last year of music? Damn...it went by so fast!

gradi3nton The result would be a catastrophe (1985)

> It's turtles all the way up.

That's just perfect

gradi3nton The quantum computing era is coming fast

Scot Aaronson does understand this work very well, and he mentions several times (with citations) that there is no widely accepted proof or disproof that a quantum speedup will ever exist for quantum annealers.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2555

gradi3nton Entering Public Beta

So then why is it important? What is the argument for encrypting all web traffic? Does it act as a sort of camouflage for the actually important encrypted traffic?

gradi3nton Entering Public Beta

Ignorant question: If they are making getting a certificate easy for everyone, what is to stop "bad guys" from getting certificates for their sketchy sites? I usually look to the green "https" in my uri bar for reassurance when I'm on an unusual site.

gradi3nton Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

Hah, Is this a joke or is there actually a doge service that does this?

gradi3nton ColorBrewer: Color Advice for Maps

brewer2mpl moved to: https://jiffyclub.github.io/palettable/

Great package, thanks for sharing!

gradi3nton A metabolic master switch underlying human obesity

There is at least one fundamental truth: obesity is on the rise. Why?

I think it is safe to assume that a rapid change in the human genome is not responsible for skyrocketing obesity rates around the world. From what I have read it seems that dietary shifts towards more processed and simple-carbohydrate rich food are the main culprit. Increasingly sedentary lifestyles are accomplices.

These effects are on a statistical and societal level. Also, they don't imply that and individual can just change their diet and easily loose weight. It is possible once someone gains weight their body irreversibly changes so that losing weight becomes much more difficult (I mean irreversible to imply hysteresis, not impossibility).

gradi3nton The gimp.org domain has expired

Is there a good alternative idea?

gradi3nton Inside the D-Wave Fridge [video]

Anything that has an energy can be turned into a temperature by dividing by the Boltzman constant k_b (units: Joules/Kelvin).

The meaning of that temperature can be hard to interpret, though. Temperatures make the most sense when you are thinking about thermodynamics, not when you consider a single isolated particle.

gradi3nton Inside the D-Wave Fridge [video]

But if they call it a quantum computer enough times it's almost like it is one, right?

Troyer's group has done some great work looking for any quantum speedup from one of these annealers, for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/420

gradi3nton In Defense of the Midwest

Epic Systems (digital healthcare records) employs 5,000 people just outside Madison, WI. Soon to be 10,000 according to their roadmap. I wouldn't be surprised if other corporations looking to hire gobs of college grads start popping up (or already have popped up) near other small midwest cities.

gradi3nton Quantum hard drive breakthrough

This is a misleading headline! This 'hard drive' needs to be in a superconducting magnet and held at 2K. I'm not aware of any desktop chassis that comes with a a cryostat...

gradi3nton How medieval astronomers made trig tables

Very interesting. Life was seriously tough before series expansions were invented!

gradi3nton The hammer-feather drop in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber [video]

Imagine being inside of a closed box like an elevator. Without leaving the box there is no way to tell the difference from being in free fall towards Earth versus floating in interstellar space. Therefor, general relativity take the perspective that gravity is a fictitious force (like centrifugal force) that arises from the shape of spacetime.

gradi3nton First life with 'alien' DNA

This is basic science. It doesn't need to be directly useful. The possibility of creating lifeforms that use different base pairs in their DNA is fascinating. It has implications about how similar or dissimilar life that evolved separately elsewhere in the universe could be. I hope they keep up the good work!