mbenjaminsmith

> Do you sincerely believe it?

Do I believe in myself? Yes. I'm a genius (by I.Q. score) and work hard every day. That's why I own a software company and have a beautiful family, money, a passport full of stamps, etc.

Do I think I just solved one of the biggest mysteries physics? No. I think you'd have to be a moron to have read it that way as I went out of my way to say I wasn't qualified, that it was just an idea, etc. If I were a physicist and working on the idea in earnest I wouldn't have presented it here.

I don't want to make this too much of a personal attack because it's less about you and more about HN (and the internet) in general:

People like you really (actually, as in for real) make me sad. I'm 100% confident that you're not bold enough to call me an idiot in person but you're happy to do it via a textarea on a web page. That's cowardice. That's a lack of character.

Why are you like this? Because you're a loser. You don't have the courage to carve out a real life for yourself so you attack anyone you can -- especially people who seem to have the qualities you lack. That's what losers do.

Let's turn this around:

You're obviously lacking something. I'm 40 and successful and violently independent but I have had some help along the way -- people who were willing to give me advice, insight into the life of a successful person. If I can help you by way of advice or mentoring to turn your life in a positive direction, reach out to me m@lattejed.com. I'm 100% serious.

Having said that, this will be my last contribution to Hacker News. This used to be a great place for intellectual discussion. Not so anymore. Leaving has nothing to do with someone not liking my waterbed analogy -- I've been thinking about leaving for a long time. I waste too much time here and get nothing in return.

Yeah, I understand that the trampoline analogy is inadequate but I believe that we don't consider empty regions of space to have any type of "opposite" curvature or to exhibit negative gravity. I believe curvature is thought to be [0, black hole], not [-black hole, black hole].

Happy to be corrected on that, IANAP.

The disparity between what GR predicts and what we observe has led to the cosmological constant / dark energy / dark matter. Of course, those aren't really things in themselves, they're just a measure of that disparity, a fudge factor.

I'm suggesting that the disparity could be explained by spacetime "responding" to regions of curvature by mass with an opposite curvature.

Unfortunately I'm not qualified to do anything with that idea. I just wanted to throw it out there. It's something that's been bothering me for a long time.

Maybe a physicist can tell me why I'm wrong here:

We often visualize the effect of mass on spacetime by using a trampoline and a bowling ball. The outer edges are flat and the closer you get to the bowling ball the more spacetime is warped downward.

On the outer edges, the effect is almost nonexistent and the trampoline's surface is nearly flat. What this suggests is that spacetime without mass is flat and that mass warps spacetime in a downward direction. So no mass = flat, mass = curved downward. So the effect is in the range of [0, black hole].

Obviously this is an very loose analogy but bear with me.

What if spacetime acts more like a waterbed? Not only does mass warp spacetime "downward" but something (in our analogy the displaced water) pushes the rest of spacetime upward.

To use a signal processing analogy, a filter will (nearly?) always affect the passband to some degree, with very high Q filters creating a knee where amplitude is increased significantly before the filter rolls off. That seems counterintuitive (at least to me) but it's nonetheless true.

Using another analogy, curved spacetime creates regions of "downhill-ness". What if the space between masses get a little bit of uphill curve as well? That could explain e.g., the Pioneer anomaly and possibly at much larger scales the effect in the article.

I think it's generally agreed upon that the Space Shuttle program was needlessly wasteful and more PR- than science-driven. A heavy space plane has zero advantages over a capsule for most work done in LEO. It's good to see this renewed focus on more practical designs.

(If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)

Having said that, the name Starliner writes a check that a manned capsule won't ever be able to cash. This is the first time I've heard of Boeing's Starliner and it got me really, really excited until I pulled up a picture of it. They really should have picked a less grandiose name.

> I prefer to teach 3D graphics without matrices because it's really not anything more complicated than a compact notation.

From a programming perspective it's much less verbose. Also the 1:1 mapping of "spaces" (camera space, world space) makes it very clean to manage transformations between them.

> and isn't easily separable because it steals the "w=1" constant for depth remap and also adjusts the "w" afterwards

I'm sure you already know this but x,y,z,w == x/w,y/w,z/w. It's easy enough to move between a 3D rep and a 4D rep of the same coordinates.

Using 4D coordinates may be somewhat awkward as they're not necessary for representations of points in 3D space but it is a very elegant solution for lighting where it is necessary to represent infinity.

[Edit]

Sorry, the point I was making is that I was also bummed to not see matrices in the article. They are a little bit to wrap you head around but they've a very elegant solution to a lot of stuff in 3D.

"[T]he obvious solution is to compel Apple to let people shop for applications wherever they want, which would open the market and help lower prices"

Is that a joke?

I'd love to be able to sell iOS software directly to users. Even if there were no viable channels outside of the App Store having the choice would make me rest a lot easier.

But to state that "Apple's monopoly" has driven the price of software up is to be laughably out of touch with reality. Maybe this has to be argued from the point of view of the consumer and they thought "monopoly driving prices down" wouldn't be a very good case?

What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.

> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.

I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.

Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.

You mean variety. A varietal is a wine made from a single variety of grape and labeled as such.

I'm working on a project where I'm doing boolean ops on 3D meshes that need a lot of tests.

I do a mixture of traditional unit tests w/asserts along with visual feedback. I have a rig set up that will dump final (or intermediate) results of operations to the screen with several tests being presented at the same time.

If I'm actively developing something and am going to be spending a lot of time in the debugger I can solo a test. Having the additional visual feedback makes everything go a lot faster.

For higher level stuff having a number of tests on screen at once gives visual feedback about regressions, which again speeds things up a lot.

This combined approach is the most useful I've found so far.

Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.

"Deconstructed essence of cuisine"?

I couldn't agree more. Food is one of the most accessible luxuries. The most expensive meals, with fine wine, cost less than most business class tickets (to wherever). On the other hand, a soft cooked egg on a piece of toasted bread after a workout can be just as delicious and costs pennies, available to all.

Next they're going to tell us they've found a way to eliminate that pesky sexual reproduction that's been plaguing us...

What's more bothersome: If you withdraw access (after they've already scanned your contacts) they'll disable the app. That's why I deleted the app and won't use it again.

If a privacy-focused app makes you nervous about privacy they've already lost the war, haven't they?

I think that's entirely too apologetic. The innovation was the original protocol. They were premature (as a lot of people warned) setting up anything as massive as the DAO, someone found a way to creatively interpret the rules and make a lot of money. Instead of sucking it up as a very expensive bug bounty, they decided to manipulate the entire system -- going against the very essence of that system.

The DAO's own terms state: "Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered for educational purposes and do not supercede or modify the express terms of The DAO’s code set forth on the blockchain; to the extent you believe there to be any conflict or discrepancy between the descriptions offered here and the functionality of The DAO’s code at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413, The DAO’s code controls and sets forth all terms of The DAO Creation."

Obviously the hacker's intent was theft but under the DAO's own terms it was a valid activity.

Basically the code is law. If we're going to then interpret that law then we've created a system similar to the current systems we have, but lacking in maturity. The point of something like Ethereum is not that it can't be manipulated, it's that it doesn't need to be in order to function. It can be trusted explicitly because its functionality is not open to interpretation.

If I'm not being clear enough -- what they should have done is taken this as a very expensive lesson and otherwise left the system alone. Yes, a "bad person" would have profited but the system's integrity would have been untouched.

FWIW, I was an early backer of Ethereum and bought ETH during the pre-sale. I invested because I thought it was promising -- without any real expectation of return. Coincidentally I sold all of my ETH just before this hack (40x ROI). Because of the fork I would not invest in ETH again, regardless of potential returns, because Ethereum is no longer what it set out to be.

> Doing something about that number would no longer make us human.

I really struggle with this. Apart from "evil" countries like China we do very little to try to steer the reproductive outcome / health of our own species. We aggressively breed domesticated animals and plants but apart from class stratification we do almost nothing to ensure a positive genetic future for ourselves.

Why not? I'm not suggesting we prevent certain people from having kids (who? who decides?) but awareness of really basic concepts like "kids are expensive, have fewer or none if you're poor" simply aren't out there or are ineffective.

My wife and I (I'm an entrepreneur and a software engineer, my wife is GM of a company in architectural design) very deliberately decided to have one child. Our nanny on the other hand has three (grown) children. They're all in the same income bracket as she is and all having children of their own.

It's pretty well known that smarter / better educated people have fewer kids. That means that our current 7 billion is mostly those least equipped to raise the next generation and also those most likely to increase its size.

Again, I'm not suggesting we have the government try to regulate reproductive rights. (Governments rapidly accumulating power via technology is another problem we have to deal with as a species.) But what about global awareness? Or what about incentivizing the poorest people to have fewer children via social programs, education, etc.

And, just in case: No, you can't compare what I'm suggesting to Nazi Germany. This has nothing to do with race. I don't think race is even a meaningful concept when discussing humans. This is about us taking responsibly for our future and the health of the only planet we'll be able to call home for the foreseeable future -- by raising awareness of our collective responsibility to future generations, our strengths and weaknesses as custodians of.

[Edit]

Was really hoping to spark a meaningful discussion here. I think this is the elephant in the room wrt our future as a species -- as important as curbing CO2 emissions or detecting / destroying the next killer asteroid.

1. Just for the record, no, I did not call China evil. I thought that was self evident. I guess not. If I thought Chinese people were evil my son wouldn't be half Chinese.

2. Yes, there are a number of reasons poor people have more children than they should. None of those negate what I am saying. I'm suggesting we need to educate the poor on choices that will benefit themselves, their children and the human race as a whole.

> Unfortunately, this kind of "optimizing for all cases" comes at the expense of how good the music can sound in any one environment.

Sorry, but that's not the case. The reason music gets mastered poorly today is because of poor mastering engineers. I've had this conversation numerous times with an engineer that has designed some of the most well-received studio equipment (including analog compressors) ever made.

Listen to The Dark Side of the Moon. Regardless of your like or dislike of Pink Floyd that album sounds good regardless of how you're playing it (car stereo, single speaker boom box, headphones).

Now why there aren't many good mastering engineers left (or properly equipped studios) is a separate, lengthy conversation.

Depressing to see this thread immediately devolve into dismissals from people who obviously didn't take the time to read the article. It's actually pretty interesting -- both because of who it's about (pretty serious classified government dude) and what action he's taking (collecting hard data).

To paraphrase:

I've spent a lot of time in classified programs and there doesn't seem to be any official government UFO program, so getting the government to disclose what it knowns won't amount to much. Having said that, if such programs exist they're likely conducted by separate, extra-government organizations. Personally, I think the phenomenon is worth studying based on a high number of credible people giving credible reports. Because of that, I've joined the board of UFODATA which is using automated surveillance stations to try to collect (more) hard data about UFOs.

God, hearing that team cheer when they make another first -- gives me chills every time.

The resulting product is fast, easy to tune (for my particular application) and handles every edge case and language I've thrown at it.

Do you have any specific concern you'd like to share or are you just generally dismissive of other people's hard work?

Trigrams are a very straightforward solution to this but they have one major limitation: They break with misspellings / alternative spellings. For example the words "vodka" and "votka" share no trigrams yet are obviously very similar.

I recently worked on this problem for a project and came up with a more robust solution using pre-computed Levenshtein indexes. You've probably heard of Levenshtein distance as a measure of word similarity. It counts the number of single-character edits that are required to transform one string into another. For example "vodka" and "votka" have a Levenshtein distance of 1.

Using a related approach (single character edits) it's possible to build a so-called Levenshtein index.

The major issue with a vanilla Levenshtein index is that it's impractically large. There is a way to make a space / time trade-off however that makes it much smaller. The basic idea is that instead of generating all Levenshtein variations for a word you only use the set of variations created by deleting single characters for a word.

Since that doesn't match all possible variations we have to compensate somehow. For example with a full index "votka" would be in the set of variations for "vodka" which means if we had misspelled vodka when searching for it we'd still get a match. With our deletions-only index, however, we'd get "voka" as our closest match. To work around this, we generate the deletion-only variations of our search term as well. In this case our search term "vodka" would become "odka", "vdka", "voka", etc. and each of those terms would be matched against the index. That means our query is slower overall as it contains a number of sub-queries but in practice it's more than fast enough.

I wrote a meandering blog post about it here: http://lattejed.com/writing-an-embedded-full-text-search-eng...

There are some additional ideas in there such as how to make a Levenshtein index handle prefix matches better (for e.g., incremental search) that may be helpful if you need to implement something like this.

If you do read that I'd like to point out that I no longer recommend LevelDB. That doesn't change anything of importance in the post though.

I think it's surprising / disturbing that the discussion here is centered on the importance of open sourced apps. What security does an open source encryption app offer when it's running inside a closed hardware / software platform that has direct access to your messages in the clear before they're encrypted and after they're decrypted. If Apple (not picking on them I'm just an iPhone user) wants to or is compelled to monitor what you're doing on your phone they can. Period. End of discussion.

As a thought experiment I think it's valuable to consider what secure messaging over an iPhone would look like. It's actually very simple, just very inconvenient. You encrypt your messages on another, air-gapped computer with known and trusted hardware (a Raspberry Pi works). From there you deliver your encypted text over the phone via whatever channel is convenient -- SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. On the receiving end you do the reverse.

If you're not doing that then your communication is theoretically and practically insecure. Discussion of the security of encypted messaging apps is not only worthless it's actually dangerous. It's security theater and takes the focus away from the actual issues -- at best, at worst it convinces people that insecure channels are secure.

I can't figure out if this is lost on most people, they're in denial or if there is actually a concerted effort to mislead. Smartphones -- and most computers -- are insecure by definition. People need to understand that and act accordingly if privacy is important to them.

Came here to say the same thing. I've abandoned storyboards and nibs in favor of SnapKit and it hasn't let me down so far. It's one of the better libraries I've used on OS X and iOS.

Brunch Weasel is great -- and I don't particularly like stout or any alcoholic beverage mixed with coffee. I get it whenever I see it for breakfast or brunch.

It's also worth visiting a Mikkeller bar. They have a number of small-run beers on tap and those get rotated frequently. I once had a pilsner that he managed to pack 10% ABV into while still making it taste good.

That's correct; IIRC, they were private at the time.

> there's nothing to stop a clever company from competing with them

I wish I could remember where I read/saw it, but Musk stated that the goal of Tesla was to make the market shift to EVs, not generate profit. My memory is a bit hazy but I'm pretty sure he even said that after that goal was reached, he didn't care what happened to Tesla. With that in mind, the motivation for opening up patents seems pretty straightforward.

I'm surprised there's no discussion of "Gypsy brewing" in this article. The pioneer of Gpysy brewing, Mikkeller, has brewed beers in collaboration with BrewDog before and Gpysy brewing is counterpart to this "open IP" style of doing business.

I think it represents a much more interesting vision of "postcapitalism" than just opening up IP. Renting out excess capacity (in a brewery or other production facility) allows IP-only companies to get into the business. Not only has it allowed Mikkeller (and others, including his estranged twin brother) to get into beer with litte or no capex, it's allowed him to operate on different continents, solving another host of problems for working in a global marketplace.

Apply that model to other industries and there could be a Cambrian explosion in innovation and creativity.

I don't think anyone with zero wine experience could tell the difference between a Burgundy and a Bordeaux. At the same time, I don't think there's anyone with a normally functioning nose and tongue that couldn't tell the difference with the right training.

I think people are dismissive of wine because it carries a lot of socioeconomic baggage. If we were talking about beer, however, I doubt you would say you couldn't tell the difference between a stout and a pilsner or a really hoppy IPA and a lambic. Now, if you had never had any of those before, you'd need to learn the vocabulary and the flavors associated with them. Once you did you'd easily be able to detect and talk about the differences.

Wine is no different. I imagine that someone pointing out a Bordeaux is either a Left Bank or Right Bank would either sound like BS or incredibility pretentious, but understanding what grape varieties dominate those two wine regions and how they influence the taste makes it pretty easy to tell them apart.

Understanding wine isn't necessary for enjoying it, but for the most part it is necessary for being able to buy a wine in a shop or order one in a restaurant you're going to be happy with. Unfortunately wine is a mine field. Price and quality are loosely correlated and quality varies greatly from vineyard to vineyard -- even in the same region. It can also vary from year to year within the same vineyard.

Unless you're an expert, the best wine is usually curated. Find someone who has wine as a hobby or find a shop that makes good recommendations and you'll really start to appreciate wine. There's something about good wine that really transcends a normal drinking session.

Also, don't be shy about asking a shop for an inexpensive but good wine. In my experience the people who really know wine will always look for value and will probably spend less on average than someone who drinks wine to try to impress people.

Assuming you're in the US and have a favorable tax environment, you might have some luck with Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. It's generally an earthy wine with relatively low acidity and tannins which means it will be easy going. It's usually more interesting than similarly priced New World wines. It seems pretty hardy as well -- I've only bought one bottle that was faulted (out of many, many bottles) and that was just a little Brett and it was still drinkable.

You might also be able to find a $10 Chianti Classico. That will give you more structure which will make the wine feel a bit more "refined".

Also check out Cotes du Rhone reds. These will often be cheaper than the more famous regions in France but share a lot of the "refined" characteristics of their more well known counterparts. One of the best wines I've had recently was Cotes du Rhone (sorry, didn't get a pic of the label) and held up favorably to a Burgundy I had brought (to the lunch) at 4x the price.

Echoing what someone else wrote here, find a local wine seller. Wine is such a complex topic you really need someone to point you in the right direction. Wine is also a great way to meet interesting people. A local wine seller is a good place to start.

Good to know. Thanks.

Where exactly are you located in the city?

Also, are you offering US or local-level salaries?

I find most companies setting up here are looking for "world class talent" while offering less than what you would make working remotely / on contract with US-based companies.

Add in a bad commute & local taxes and it's a tough decision to make, even though the social aspect might be rewarding.

Top Gun, combined with an improbable series of events, is the reason my older brother was never a fighter pilot.

After some time in the Marines followed by a number of years of commercial aviation, my brother decided to become a fighter pilot. As he had never gone to college, he went to a state school to meet the minimum requirements for acceptance -- which at the time was an Associate degree with a certain minimum grade point average.

As he was doing this later in life, he had just enough time to finish his degree and submit his paperwork for the program before a birthday would disqualify him. That May, Top Gun came out. The effect on interest in the program was so strong that they raised the grade point requirement to get in.

My brother wasn't always the best student but he had worked very hard on his degree and had the required grade point with room to spare. Now here's where it gets stupid -- after finals at the end of the year he found out that one professor had given him a failing grade, which under the new grade point requirements would disqualify him.

A phone call revealed that there was a mix up with a student with a similar name -- but at that point the professor was traveling abroad and wouldn't be able to fix the issue until after the holidays, and, unfortunately, after my brother's birthday.

My father, who had been a naval aviator himself, took my brother to D.C. to visit some old friends to try to rectify the situation. He was told that enrollment had spiked to the point where even they couldn't help.