skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>(1) We should see this as some inconsistency in how gravity scales with the mass of a black hole. The larger ones would have proportionately greater 'drag' on leaving gravitrons.

Perhaps, no clue how a quantum mechanical gravity would interact with a black hole.

>(2) If they are massive, and therefore subject to slowing, shouldn't gravity waves leaving a black hole be subject to some sort of doppler effect? Should we be looking for red/blueshifts in these waves?

The Doppler effect happens even for light, which isn't massive at all (that we know of).

>(3) If gravitrons have mass and are subject to gravity, what brings that gravity? What sub-gravitron particle regulates gravity going in/to/out of the gravitron?

There's no reason they couldn't interact with themselves, in fact I guess that's probably the most likely case.
Chief issue with Zapier is that my use pattern doesn't seem to be represented. There have been a few times (yesterday, for one) where I've wanted to push through a large number of jobs really quickly, like manipulating and syncing some records through some different services- Zapier is so useful in building the pathway, but getting the job done needs me to sign up for the 20/mo plan when I'm only interested in using it for one job every few months...

I've wondered about micro-accounts, or even better: accounts with a gradual replenish rate on the job cap so that for a few dollars a month I can run a couple of records through every five minutes...

I'm nonsensical now. Going to keep a keen eye on Zapier for the day when membership becomes economical.
I agree, Songza was a big win for them. I was really impressed at how quick they got their features moved into Google Music, not super typical for Google.
People who were excited about GitHub years ago are slowly walking away. Perhaps it's inevitable, perhaps it's tools, perhaps it's culture/policy.

I'm pretty sure there is some kind of weird tipping point happening where a few start to leave, then many start to leave, then it disappears.

It seems ludicrous to say, but GitHub might be cable tv/mac/whatever, and a new "switcher" movement might be starting. Not sure where people will go, but I don't think they'll stay at GitHub.
Another re-phrase: how can we detect that space has stretched out if all of our rulers also get stretched by exactly the same amount?

The answer is that we have a ruler that doesn't get stretched in this way: light. The speed of light is a constant dictated by the laws of physics; stretching out our flashlight to twice its normal size wouldn't make the light it emits go twice as fast. So if you just measure the time it takes for a light ray to go from one point to another, you can compute the distance that it must have traveled, and if that distance changes, then you know that the space in between must have been stretched.
I completely agree, but the extremism in the essay is ridiculous. If I'm writing some software, I don't want to have to roll my own version of every little thing when there are battle tested libraries out there that already do it and benefit from many people using it. If my use case is vastly different, sure, but if it's the same use case as everyone else then I see little benefit.
Still not explaining it. If spacetime is stretched why doesn't light "speed up" to accommodate for it is what he's asking. I'm assuming it's because the speed of light is invariant to that.
It's really great that Dr. Habib is talking about this publicly and I think his word "solidarity" is very helpful. If you've ever experienced what he's describing it is baffling and excruciating and the very nature of it is you feel that everyone else is on the other side (not against you, necessarily, but out there watching).

I've experienced this more than once -- the first time when I was in my 20's and on live TV being interviewed about a local community group I was part of. The lights and live camera inexplicably turned my brain to complete mush, despite the fact that the interview was a completely friendly one. I've also had it happen in front of live audiences -- both as a speaker and as a musician.

But here's the interesting thing. I also love being up in front of an audience. I've performed as a professional musician (and dancer) and also given numerous talks. And, speaking of music, there are artists of the highest caliber who've struggled with debilitating performance anxiety.

And it's relevant here on HN. I was in a Founders Institute demo day a few years ago when one of my classmates had exactly this kind of meltdown.

But there really is a lot you can do to get a handle on performance anxiety. It starts with having plenty of practice in pressure situations. And with not being too hard on yourself if you do screw up.
Interesting quote from the article that goes along with that clip:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/excruciatin...

"He said his condition is "always going to be there" but the fact that it was out in the open was "immensely liberating" because he would no longer have to spend emotional energy trying to hide it."
Why ancient Roman graffiti is so important to archaeologists
Nope, one guy made more than the both of us, but he was the team lead.
In with the new web technologies, out with the old
The original science paper is here [0]

[0] http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116...
I really liked this article. It reminded me a lot about Tim Rogers' Earthbound review, which is my all-time favorite game review article: https://web.archive.org/web/20080219052007/http://www.largep...

I think one easy improvement could be putting some headers throughout, so the reader has a better sense of the outline, structure, and flow of your argument. Personally, I'd also love to see more comparisons across games: like, why does Cave Story matter in the context of the other games of its time (or even games that have come before)?
I didn't say typical dumb engineers. I said typical engineers. Looking for technical solutions when the problems are not technical. That's pretty typical in my experience.

I'm not underestimating the issues they get. I looked at it before I wrote what I wrote. It's a lot. But I'm not going to feel bad for them. They have a massively successful open source project. And only 5 people. Despite lots of use. I wonder why more people aren't getting involved to triage the issues instead of looking for a technical solution?

I'm not being lenient on Github either. Their issue tracker is incredibly limited. It always was. I remember when they launched it and they were very clear about its simple limitations. Simple is good. Until you're a massive opensource project using it as a catch-all bin for troubleshooting issues.
There is a counter example of his reasoning in the Python world. There is a HTTP client library "urllib" in the standard library, but nowadays everyone rather pulls in the external dependency "requests" because the urllib API is terrible.
It is mature, well tested, good documented code though.
Parkland?
Shortcuts to Data Literacy?
Weird - I posted this as an Ask HN. Anyway - this is an idea for a book, I'd love to get some feedback on it.
Yes. I agree. Cash would solve this.

All the people making money on books about ES6 could kick in. All the folks making screencasts could kick in.

All the companies making money on open-source could kick in.

And volunteers? They should cycle out and move up into more interesting work, making room for new people to do that. That's what I was thinking.
30 Percent of Science Teachers Give Misinformation About Climate Change
If you're interested in scanning many documents, I suggest you take a look at a ScanSnap from Fujitsu[1]. I've seen these used in a business environment (~30 machines) without any problem on Windows. The throughput is great and all employees were able to use the machine in less than 5 minutes.

[1]:http://www.fujitsu.com/ca/en/products/computing/peripheral/s...
Political contributions are how the current labor laws came into being.

Abuse of said political contributions are another (but important) matter.
Did you read the article? https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github

Github issues is missing features that would vastly reduce the amount of work they'd have to do. So they can either switch to another issue system or find someone willing to do all that manual grunt work for free. One of those seems easier than the other...
I don't understand this statement. I recently received a similar reaction after talking about some of my research, so I'm wondering if this is a common approach to new ideas in the startup world.

How is the algorithm bogus (assuming that there isn't a mistake somewhere and that the results are validated)? Just because the output in the examples is similar to other edge detectors doesn't mean the work is 'bogus' or worthless. It's a new algorithm, a new way of doing things. It may have advantages in specific areas over your 'trivial contrast-enhancing filters'. For example, there are many sorting algorithms, but you can get the same results regardless of the algorithm. Does this mean that any sorting algorithm other than the most trivial is 'bogus'?
That's quite true. Trusting a company to stay alive for ever is a problematic strategy, though.

I guess the best we can do is to encourage people not to upload their stuff to soundcloud or any other for-profit website in the first place if marketing their stuff is not what they aim for.
Would a truly distributed and more complete Git be feasible?
Since people are talking about migrating off Github, I was thinking about having a truly distributed code management/sharing platform.

Here's what I'm thinking (rough and mostly incorrect ideas):

- have a blockchain-like global repository where there's consensus over the code

- have a way of handling issues that's somehow built into git (e.g. having a .issues subfolder into the repository with append-only functionality, permissions, tags, etc.)

- a way to sign your code. AFAIK in git you can pretty much impersonate anyone, which is problematic

This is a rough idea, but it should be kind of doable. What do you think?
Yes, but these things shouldn't be happening. Default builds of packages should be kept more minimal.

I understand it's hard with Nix philosophy, and things are improving with different package outputs. For the record, python was pulled indirectly via the gnupg dependency I think.
Economics on Buying vs. Renting a House
grep < log -- "$query"
Yeah, I think a lot of people are moving to Spotify. I myself never paid for either but have use both (using someone else's account on Spotify).

Being able to play offline + any song/album + similar artist play mode makes Spotify hands down the better service.

I think Pandora used to have something special with their Music Genome Project recommendation system but I don't think they really rely on it as much anymore as it now seems based off of the likes and other activity other online radio recommendation systems use.

I wish some one would do a open data version of the Music Genome Project that you could hook up to a personal playlist.
Sandstorm Security Non-events
Google's physical web
Newly-revealed date glitch may render some iOS devices unusable
> I need a dependency, my os hasn't packaged it, and it's the path of least resistance.

What I tell you back: you probably don't need it, you're just being very, very
lazy, which will cost later in bugs in those dependencies, and it's not that
easy to fix a bug in a dependency.

Additionally, it's not that difficult to make a package with that dependency.
I routinely do so, both for things other people wrote and for my code. Sure,
it's not as easy as adding a line in package.json, but there should be some
friction in adding a library to a project, so the library would justify
itself. Keeping many dependencies is very expensive in the long run, but
short-term is somewhat beneficial. Look at how it works for Node.js and gems
and Python packages: every library needs its own `map()' function
implementation (or anything else similarly trivial), so typcial application
requires few dozens of other libraries.
The problem is that survival and prestige in the academic community is directly related to publications. Also, journals don't accept non-novel research. So helping someone scoop your current or future research directly hurts you.

Obviously that's not a good thing, but it's a pretty straightforward response to the circumstances of academic papers. It has all kinds of other side-effects too: salami slicing, non-reproducible results, publication bias, etc.
Swift Mailing Lists Are Self-Selecting
Striim's target audience includes people looking for logging too.

I was referring to the aggregation of the logs, including taking columns / data types from different log streams and combining them (in real time) to create new objects. You can then set alerts and build dashboards on the new objects.

Additionally he mentioned standardizing the request across the stack. Since Striim can import the logs from all these types of services and combine them to create a new object that represents the request across the stack he could accomplish his second request as well.

Combine that with the ability to ingest huge amounts of data and query in real time, it sounded like what he was looking for.
And I paid for this Mac. Apple doesn't care about my feedback. :)

Just because you pay for something doesn't change the rules. New code has to be supported. And if it's a business, you have to pay people to support that new code.
Colaua: GNU social conversations in static HTML pages
My Docker Powered Ghost Blog Survived HN Front Page
Would such a gravity wave cause a tsunami on a world circling the two black holes?
The obvious alternative is using git through a mailing group like Linux has been doing for years. I say obvious because it's the workflow for which git was built in the first place. ;)

It's amazing to me that git's power to easily manage distributed software development been lost/forgotten with Github. You don't need a web interface to contribute code. Linux is doing just fine.

You just need git and some sort of communication tool to distribute patches, email being the most powerful, flexible, and ubiquitous I've seen.
Do you really find cold emails effective? Personally, whenever I get a cold email I make a note of the company name and vow to never purchase a service from them.
Your dynamic website (often called a webapplication) is very probably
OS-specific anyway. I've seen websited that can run only on Ubuntu. Most often
you could as well settle with what OS provides to deploy it, especially that
you won't need another instance on the same server. Even more so if it's not
a hobbyst project, but a professional one.

> I don't use OS specific packaging because it was intentionally written to be
non-portable.

Only if you use it mindlessly. It's not really different to build a package
for Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, or Gentoo (been there, done all of these). All
it takes is to properly separate downloading sources and building things,
which is a good engineering on its own. And guess what you get in exchange?
Easy dependency installation, both for development and for deployment.
I don't think they are expected to tell its fake though? It's hard to do a double blind experiment without a "placebo universe".
As an Indian who has lived in both majorly socialist and now a mixed economy India.

I can tell you corruption is way worse under a more capitalist society. Reason is simple, if people are making nice profits why not ask them to pay a little extra bribe.

Every one starting from the government to the private citizen is involved. Scams run in the tune lacs of crores, government servants think they are entitled to a bribe, you will be hard pressed to get a driving license without greasing some one's palms(I was asked by a license agent, why I was worked up about paying a bribe while I was getting paid well as a programmer), the postman thinks if he delivers a important document like a passport he deserves a bribe(because you are going to US, and will earn well anyway, why not pay me a bribe tip here), clerks in the income tax office rake up all kind of false flags when questioned they will tell you, they put it out if you pay a small bribe. The list is endless. Every single activity or a movement of a file, has a bribe fee on it. Every single one, no matter what activity you do.

Lastly this isn't just government corruption. Private companies have rampant corruption issues. Even in top MNC's managers routinely favor people from their states and people who speak their mother tongue. Promotions, raise, stock bonuses, salary bonuses, foreign travel and many such things are decided based on which state you come from, which language you talk, may be even caste and religion too. God save if you, if you don't have a match with your manager.

But surprisingly every body thinks, every one apart from them is corrupt. So corruption is somebody else's problem. The very same manager who cheats openly will complain why India isn't making progress because of corruption. Irony.

One guy even told me he was not cheating or doing anything wrong. He was simply "Helping" people from his state.
I'm a physicist, but in a different field, but my (possibly incorrect) impression is what a quantized particle is is a bit mysterious when the field is strong, for example, with lensing.

Best example: the Hydrogen atom is supposedly quantum, but if it is quantum, where are the photons? the q^2/r potential is a mean field that one finds from classical electrodynamics, it isn't formed by the summation of photons. [Another mental poker, photons are momentum eigenstates, so how can potential be described in position space? You'd need to sum up an infinite number of them! (For EM students, recall how to represent 1/r in spherical harmonics or in terms of sines and cosines)]

What happens, as I understand it, is with strong fields, one tends to use a semi-classical description because in the strong field limit, one deals with many photons, which should approach the classical limit.

Basically, quanta are like "pertubations" of the fields from their "free" solutions, as they are in GR (linearization of the GR field eqns) and as they are in EM. Free essentially means in the absence of sources, like charges, or masses for GR. So trying to explain general phenomena in terms of "pertubations", which are basically the solutions for "free" fields, is not always fair.

One doesn't always face this in high energy physics because in HEP, most of the incoming and outgoing states in a problem are these "free" solutions. For example when doing scattering off a hydrogen atom, the incoming states are "free" (a free nuclei, a free electron), so one can use photons for that phenomena, and one finds that the scattering is like scattering against a (mean) 1/r potential.

But in the case where the strong fields don't turn off, like when you are bound to a Hydrogen atom, or when considering nucleons in nuclei in the low energy limit, one turns away from the pertubative, photon/gluon model and either solving the problem numerically or treats the fields as semi-classical, as with the Hydrogen atom. For my field of laser-plasma physics, this shows up in the so-called "Volker-state", rather than treating the strong laser field as a sum of innumerable (ie., not-simulatable) photons, one treats the Laser field as a semi-classical background for the quantum guys (electrons, ions).

I think lensing is like strong static fields in EM. One wouldn't really think of them in terms of quanta of the field.
>A central-hub choice of implementation shouldn't be confused with a centralization requirement however.

>Indeed, we had this, in the form of NNTP and older news servers;

You're focusing on the technical aspects. The other forces are social and economics. Both of those lead to centralization.

Take your example of Usenet news groups. Yes, in a technical sense, it's decentralized but once you get economics/money involved, what happens? My ISP like Verizon doesn't carry all newsgroups (e.g. exclude newsgroups with large binaries.) Or another ISP may carry more newsgroups but the retention is 1 month instead of 1 year.

So the economics converges to an central entity like Deja News that emphasizes the archival of usenet posts. Then Google buys them (Google Groups). Google Groups is now "centralized" for finding very old usenet posts. Conceivably, any of us besides DejaNews could have archived the posts but we didn't spend the money on harddrives to store it whereas DejaNews did. Hence, we end up with a centralized archive.

When I had Verizon, their newsgroups feed was very poor. I therefore paid $10 extra to GigaNews because they had everything with multi-year retention. That's another "centralized" hub driven by economics.

Looking only at the usenet RFC technical specs for distributing news posts doesn't reveal how the economics makes centralization emerge.

As for github's centralization...

A lot of us want to host a public git repository. Hmmmm... if github didn't exist, what do we do? Pay for a VPS for $9/month plan and host git on that? What about extra bandwidth costs if it's a popular repo and lots of people are cloning it? That's a lot of ugly financial bookkeeping that we don't want to do since we'd rather just concentrate on programming. Wait -- there's an ABC company out there that lets me conveniently host a git repo there? For free? Sign me up!

That "ABC company" by way of economics and social dynamics has turned out to be Github and BitBucket. And since Github has been winning the mindshare, you get centralization. There is no irony in git-the-tool being distributed and github-the-focal-point being centralized.
Dues are how you pay the folks who are spending their time working for your rights. Lawyers, administrative assistants, marketing... these are not cheap.

Abuses aside, you don't get the positive - that is someone fighting for your rights - for free, and without playing in the field of politics.
Good to know that there's a tool out there to release features in measurable chunks. Thanks!
Don't know if it's already usable, but I really like the idea.
so, pedantically, it isn't through the jumper cable - the sound is generated by plasma between the cable and the tower. I think i heard something about "plasma speakers" before.
Since I haven't noticed anyone mention it directly while advocating for voting functionality: GitHub issues originally had voting. The feature was removed with the release of Issues 2.0. Back when the GitHub blog had comments, the Issues 2.0 announcement's comments included this one from pjhyett (https://web.archive.org/web/20110412131836/https://github.co...)

> Issue ordering and voting were used by an incredibly small number of users and we made the decision to drop them. Leaving features in that only ten people use is how to create Jira, not GitHub.

Obviously, that was a while ago and things might be different now.
No, but I am suggesting which databases people should or should not be able to make. Or more specifically, which databases the police should or should not be able to make and access.

"Who was seen where and when" isn't particularly privacy-violating. It's the search capability that is. This is especially true when it's targeted at a particular person - I'm not that worried about the police finding people who were in a particular area at a particular time. They've had that power for a long time, through canvassing and other traditional detective work. What I'm worried about is giving them the new ability to quickly and cheaply compile a list of everywhere someone has been and when.
I don't think it's that irregular for small or medium sized businesses to negotiate with states or even the local town, and these are businesses at the 2MM to 5MM scale. This can come down to preferential tax laws in exchange for at-cost services or zoning exceptions. This is certainly the sort of thing that happened with the birth of broadband well before they started merging together.
How an American Diplomat Solved the Case of Murdered Churchwomen in El Salvador
The Flip Side of Optimism About Life on Other Planets