skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This looks like an eternal inflation model

Yes, and the particular one I was thinking about was Carroll & Chen arXiv:hep-th/0410270.

Rather than an expanding cosmology < (t-axis horizontal; x vertical) or an expanding and recollapsing <>, they have something closer to ><, which close to what I had in mind with, "... RW metric [might not be] always-expanding or always-contracting". Of course <> fits that too.

I'm not sure we're really disagreeing on anything now - I think that we agree that while the homogeneity-on-every-slice constraint is a useful picture for many things, it's not really useful for distinguishing the ends of time of e.g. a collapsing universe with three crucial epochs: one that's smooth and low entropy, one that's lumpy and higher entropy, and one that's even higher entropy, exactly (as you wrote) because that's not what the standard model can yield on its own; you need to perturb around the model, for instance. Once you're doing that, you're not doing physics in the model sensu stricto. But surely for a question like this we want to depart from homogeneity on every slice?

For smoothness I just assume that reheating after inflation does that and we get clumping after baryogenesis. For a recollapsing universe (with eventual galaxies), if you can give me a sketch of a mechanism for dismantling late-epoch structure into something reasonably similar to the dark ages in our universe, I'd go away and have a think about think about how to distinguish the different ends of time. But otherwise, I agree '"big crunch" state would be very different--lots and lots of inhomogeneities being magnified by the collapse' and argue that distinguishes the two ends of time sufficiently that a thermodynamic arrow of time points towards increasing entropy.

> If you choose the initial configuration precisely enough

Yes, that's the kernel of the argument.

> > in a collapsing background, can we have observed systems in which Boltzmann entropy is increasing?

> Why not?

Let me try to tighten the wording: in a collapsing universe where the entropy the entropy at one end of time is higher than the entropy at the other, can we have long-lived mutually-interacting systems where one is decreasing in Boltzmann entropy as it gets closer to the higher-entropy end, while the other is increasing in Boltzmann entropy as it gets closer to the higher-entropy end? Or does the one with more DOF's "correct" the other?
Eventbrite claims the right to film your events – and keep the copyright
The articles I read about LIGO detecting collisions between black holes said they were medium sized, meaning several solar masses. I kind of assumed that they wouldn't be able to detect anything orders of magnitude less than solar mass. Is that not correct?
>Wow, it is amazing to see how many people's has come to this incredibly pessimistic view.

It's amazing to see how many people ostensibly a part of "hacker culture" come to this view.

What's gone wrong here is not that "connecting people at mass is bad," but that those connections were supposed to subvert and tear down the systems of centralized authority and information control set up by governments and the media... but we've just replaced one set of suits with another, and now we pretend the internet only has a few channels the way television used to.

I'm all for ending the quasi-monopoly that Facebook and other big sites have on the public's awareness, but please let's stop implying that the problem with the web is its power to connect people.
Evolving Street Smarts: How City Birds Evolved to Be Smarter Than Rural Birds
You have given an example of a shitty company using a shitty process. It's unfortunate that it's nominally 'Scrum', but that's kind of irrelevant.

If someone asked me for an account of what I did for a whole six (assumed to be productive) hours yesterday and how many story points have been burned, and wanted this every single day, I can only imagine that the person has no experience with software development whatsoever.

This is wrong. If this is happening, you are following a broken process.

On the tools, yes, whatever I've seen in Scrum dictates a lot of time spent updating the tools with estimated hours, hours spent, remaining hours, everyday.

No it doesn't. This is wrong and broken.

Lastly, the "story points not related to effort but related to effort" conundrum confuses developers

If a software engineer can't immediately grasp this abstraction then they are not good software developers.

too low and you're not working hard enough; too high and your estimates are wrong

Velocity should not be used as a stick. It's a measure of the amount of work being done which can be used for planning. If it fluctuates, that can indicate problems that need to be dealt with.

Give me low process overhead iterative waterfall any day over these schemes. Repeatedly trying to turn software developers into predictable manufacturing style widget makers is not a good idea.

"Low process iterative waterfall" is basically Scrum.

I work two-week sprints. There are a total of four hours of meetings for those two weeks. 5% overhead seems pretty reasonable.
The difference is between empathy and compassion.

Just because I understand doesn't mean I care.
Interesting results, though I do wonder if this may be one of those situations where the results depend significantly on the individual and their personality.

Don't like to use anecdotes, but still... I'm definitely someone who has a breakdown whenever having to do something with the possibility of an audience, let alone a live one. Fine doing something off camera, completely screw up whenever a capture card or camers is anyway in the vicinity (and hence end up having to throw out tons of failed recordings).
That's a great question and one that I'm not really qualified to answer. It's a huge theological topic, though.

In my own life, I don't identify as a Christian anymore but I continue to draw inspiration from Christ's life and the few teachings I felt I could attribute directly to him.

Even when I called myself a Christian, I never believed that the Bible was the literal word of God. It's just a book. When I studied for my confirmation my pastor took our group through a lot of interesting history around how the Bible was actually written and put together. There was tons of material that never made it in, so it's at best an approximation of beliefs that people who call themselves Christians have had over time.

For what it's worth the history of Christianity is fascinating. There were many schisms and lots of infighting within the Church even prior to the Reformation. I suspect the same may be true within Judaism and Islam - there are "mainstream" sets of beliefs and then people on the fringe. Likely the fringe folks were more tapped in to the real mystical teachings but got shut out.
> If you're in a room full of klansmen who are all going on about how whites are the superior race, and you disagree. Are you the problem? NO!

Well, yes actually, you are. By what mechanism does a group of clansmen become one notch less destructive? Certainly not by having newcomers tell them non-whites are equal.

They become less harmful by A) feeling like they have the institutional support to take care of their own, so they have less need to lash out, B) having safe, passive exposure to The Other, and C) having people they trust question their worst ideas.

If you’re not making some similar constructive move, then yes: you’re part of the problem.

Notice that we’re not saying you’re wrong. Of course speaking out against white supremacy is right, that’s a separate question from whether it’s problem or solution.

It’s easy to be correct while contributing nothing to solving a problem.
Electric Scooters Are Causing Havoc. This Man Is Shrugging It Off
On guitar, it's only if I practiced first :D otherwise it seems to have the opposite effect
Is this also the case in the boudoir?
If your head hasn’t been in the ground for the last twenty years you should have an idea on how bad the business is.

Here is a recent article about the situation if indeed your head is below ground: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-news-041...
For certain apps, if you're on OSX, file system performance is horrible when developing, especially on apps with a lot of file churn. I wrote about it here, and how I was able to get most of the performance back: https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rail...

Even so, this seems like a silly problem to have to worry about, since I could easily run the app on my machine at full performance with no workarounds.

I think the biggest disadvantage is the herd mentality. Rather than use Docker where it provides a compelling advantage, we're being told to Dockerize all the things and accept any pains that comes with as the price of progress. To me it's as if you had a purely static site yet were told you needed to use React and webpack. Solve for the pain you have, not what others have.

> But someone who likes to tinker with servers using scripting like bash etc, I don't get docker.

I will say that there is a point where if you like tiny utilities and the "unix" way, Docker starts to make sense. Rather than have a giant OS with all its varied dependencies, making tiny containers that do one thing well and are tied together (for instance, I have a tiny container that monitors a networked folder and uploads to s3) - you start seeing Docker not as VMs, but as isolated but connected processes.
Yep! I think modern fundamentalist Christians are actually more disciples of Paul than they are Christ.
Sure, maybe, but if you have been aware of the issue for a year and it's still going on 2 years later it might be considered just a good excuse... How often do you get that problem trading stocks?
While on the subjects of glasses and monitors, what are your thoughts on blue light filters in glasses?
Goodhart is talking about life, not a self-contained system like a game.

>Some measures should be targeted, the problem here is that it is done in an non genuine way

The "not in a genuine way" is exactly what he's talking about.
You were specifically referring to people with no jobs collecting disability benefits. I certainly agree that people obtaining these drugs when they don't need them through insurance/medicare/medicaid is a problem.
Scrum seems to have a very poor implementation rate and seems to draw the ire of most engineers.

Engineers are as responsible as any other actor for poor Scrum implementations.

Scrum, or any agile method, isn't a silver bullet. It doesn't compensate for bad teams. It's something that teams can use to deal with some common software development issues. It's also not the only tool that can be used for that purpose. Developers pouring ire on "scrum" when they aren't practicing it in the first place are attacking the wrong target.
How to wint $287,000 in 3 months using lottery winners prediction system
Do you recall what precipitated the invasion of Iraq?
When you let engineers run around doing our own thing, we never have to show that the work we're doing is the most productive use of company time. We just have to show that it plausibly could be. Nobody will hesitate to reward the well-liked engineer with a cool sounding project, even if other things would really be more important.

As the author noted, Scrum solves this problem by making number of story points completed the primary tool for a team to measure its productivity. If the cool-sounding project isn't important enough to take other items out of the sprint, there's no way to offer a post-hoc justification for doing it anyway. It has no story points, so work on it is considered non-productive.
Me neither, on desktop:
ERR_BAD_SSL_CLIENT_AUTH_CERT
Blogging and tweeting (and podcasting, and Facebook Liveing, er c) are also Real Journalism.
I think you may be overthinking this a little, or applying philosophical reasoning where it doesn't quite make sense.

If someone writes a book about me, that has nothing to do with me, even if the person who writes the book claims to know everything about me. Only I know what I believe and you should only assume I believe the things you hear me say, whether in word or in deed.

EDIT: also, Paul never actually met Christ. He came along later after Christ had already been crucified. If you believe Paul's account, Christ revealed himself in a vision. But everyone agrees that Paul and Christ never actually met in person.
Yeah I was confused by this also. It is cutting a precise vector shape by making small adjustments to compensate for hand shake and such. The "circle" you can see it drawing on screen is the amount of error it can tolerate before it will start cutting in the wrong place.
They should have gone upstairs and pulled her out of class beforehand and demanded she sit in the announcement proceedings.
Actually looks like it's a hybrid approach: you have to move it by hand within a certain range of the path it's attempting to follow/cut, but the path it actually cuts when within range is determined by path data given to it (in the form of an SVG it looks like).
Well when I had my ops they always (in the UK) go through what can go wrong and the odds - my major one had a long list of possible outcomes the surgeon (cheerfully ) ended on 1/5000 chance of death.
Assange intention has been rather clear after the statement Hillary gave as the Secretary of State during cablegate and the involvement of US diplomats in the Swedish investigation. I don't get it why people think that he is supposed to be unbiased in his view of her and trump.

What is a normal reaction to be publicly declared a murderer and enemy combatant (with an implied statement to be droned) for publishing documents from people involved in the US military that wanted to give the public information? In the context of what he perceive she has done against him, what is the likeliest outcome if he comes into contact with damaging information and a request to publish it? "No thank you, only if you provide equally damaging information on her opponent or else it will look bad?".
I'm suspicious of anybody who starts out with a clear picture in their head of "what the architecture should look like".

I've almost always found that the earlier on in the process I made hard-to-reverse architectural decisions, the worse the architecture ended up being. The more the architecture came about as a series of gradual, iterative refactors that took in to account the various trade offs that became evident, the better it ended up being.
This is a Bitcoin service provider, not Bitcoin, in the same way that Paypal!=USD.
It's just a guess, but I think the main reason to run VSC in a browser is that they can later also let in run in a browser, without install. You will develop, store, and run your code on Azure, without any local installation.

(I don't know if that is a great vision, but it is a good rationale to use Web tech for IDE development)
Yep- I was reminded of how much I like magit by this thread so I just made a $100.00 donation to its development. I hope it inspires other people to at least give magit a try (if I'll donate that much it must be good, right?)
Political ones mostly
Per Wikipedia:

"In political and sociological theory, the elite (French élite, from Latin eligere) are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a society."
you cared enough to respond, syrrim
How do you convert non-bitcoin currency into bitcoin without a trusted entity?

If masses are expected to do so then there will likely be a sort of centralized "trusted few".
Could anti-matter form a blackhole?
It's pretty cool so see a combination of manufacturing, installation, and operation. For a distributed power grid this might be a clever addition, add some solar, wind and perhaps battery-backed buffer and emergency fuel-powered generator and you might have yourself a pretty reliable self-sustained power source. I imagine out of those, the wind one might need the most maintenance, or if a lot of crap comes down, the solar panels need periodic cleaning. I wonder what maintenance this generator needs, besides the obvious stuff (brushes? lube on contact points? bearings?).
Clickbait title change from "Bicycling Wastes Gas?".

The very premise is ludicrous, since driving still includes a human using at least 80% as much metabolic activity as driving.
Yes, it does.

Everyone has deadlines. Either customer imposed ones, or the market running against you. At some point, you'll have to meet them. When do you stop accepting changes and deliver? Can you welcome last minute disruptive changes? Sure. But the market won't wait for you to implement them.

There is no point in delivering software which doesn't meet customer requirements. If changes to software are required because it doesn't meet requirements, pretending otherwise solves nothing. Agile processes make it easier to cope when these changes happen, and accept that if change is required then other constraints have to move – such as deadlines.

Some tasks require longer attention spans. This is the classic technical debt accumulation choke point. Now, iterations + deadlines make sense. But does it have to be a fixed 2/3 week period, always? Where the flexibility in that?

Most tasks do not require 'longer attention spans', whatever that means. Almost literally every task can be broken into smaller parts with minimal effort, helping to expose implementations to scrutiny at earlier stages.

And while Scrum traditionally has a fixed sprint length, there's no requirement to follow that to the letter. If your constraints are such that it doesn't work, then adjust the process to suit.

But this point is in direct contradiction. Scrum is about diluting the individual. Everyone is a replaceable resource.

No – Scrum is about the team of individuals. Depending on a single individual is obviously stupid regardless of what process you use.

The only remotely close way of doing this is turning everyone into cogs in a machine.

Not at all true. A nice sustainable pace is reasonable for any team of skilled professionals. If you are not achieving it, your team is broken.

And takes time. Ops, sprint's time is over. I guess that refactoring can wait.

And pretending otherwise does nothing. Make refactoring a requirement for completion, and you will avoid this problem.
My step-father had sepsis two weeks ago. IV antibiotics and a few other interventions and he was sent home from the hospital after a few days with some Cipro. Antibiotics are fantastic and I hope we somehow stave off the dystopian post-antibiotic future.
> No over-arching design (Implement feature after feature however the hell anyone likes) Once said features are implemented, taking the time to "refactor" (read: completely rewrite because the code was so bad) becomes a really hard sell.

Can I ask why do you deliver stories before refactoring, if that's what you're saying? We'd tend to do necessary refactors as part of features or bugs when we touch related code and rarely have pure refactor chores.

Also, why do you have to _sell_ code quality? At least where I work there is a pretty strong divide between what to build and how to build it. There is two-way trust between the product manager and engineers that they know their domain and when they say "this is important right now", it's probably the right thing. After that it's just a matter of communication and prioritisation between the the two sides.

I could easily see how this might fall apart if either side was not trusted or not doing a great job, but I guess it would probably fall apart no matter what development process you followed if that were true.
But wouldnt be all visible light bend and wobble like looking through a pond of glass pearls when looking at the stars?
Science as an institution has definitely grown exponentially by any metric: the number of journals, papers, citations, academic positions, administrative positions, PhDs awarded, PhD students.

This does not necessarily correspond to growth in real rigorous knowledge about the world.

The former is easy to measure, the latter is hard to measure, but is what we should care about.
There's no such thing as a reasonable bias, if a belief is accurate then it's a good judgment, and if it's inaccurate it's a bad one.
Had you actually read the article, you would have seen that:

> From there, she took it upon herself to create a database for Enquirer reporters, documenting the time, location, and nature of every opioid-related arrest that occured over those days.

The article also says that because of that database they were able to fill gaps in the article and make it as compelling as it was.
It does absolutely nothing interesting. It's a broken database with a buzzword attached
I found none, that's why I'm asking. There is technologically no way to connect me (my browser/phone that sends no information to FB) and my "profile" made up by a few photos of me that my friends have uploaded.
https://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts/
I've noticed this in real life. If I run in the city I push myself harder than if I run in a more remote park. Further if I run in the city along a route popular with other runners I'll run even harder (the stats provided by my running app also backs this perception up).
Please note that LSD is one of the most academically researched drugs and we understand its effects on human body really well. Moreover, general consensus is that is it a "safe" drug. I know this is a cliche anology, but something like alcohol is not even remotely as safe as LSD but majority of the world, including me, and even supposedly "rational" people drink it quiete often. Also there is nothing that makes LSD inherently more dangerous because it is synthetic.
The history seems speculative, but I'll speculate a little more anyways. Lets suppose that those mummies wheren't fake, is not probable, but lets assume that. Could we theoretically find nicotine in an old egyptian mummy?.

In theory is possible. There is one species of Nicotiana native from Africa (Nicotiana africana). The problem is that this plant is a Namibian endemism, in the other coin of Africa. For people mastering the complicated process of embalm a body, with a trading area that extends to the entire Mediterranean sea, and taking a lot of precise steps and hassles to be sucessful, a local plant able to stop insect damage would had been noticed and treasured. We can speculate that the current Namibian populations are relict populations of a much wider distribution area, and that this is another white rhino. Maybe the north populations were wiped by the old Egyptian empire?, then the flower must appear painted somewhere or some obscure text should talk about such treasure.

And in any case, there is still the Cocaine issue. There are also some members of the family Erytroxylaceae native from Africa, but If you find three of the most popular drugs when putting a sample of a mummy in a machine, you should suspect that either the mummies were fake, or where real but used later to smuggle drugs, or that the drugs were into the machine previously (the laboratory has been used before for analyze drugs).
Depends on the parent.
The energy in the flush is used to push the sewage down the pipe. Take that momentum away and things start to clog.
I believe that is closer to the definition of "sympathy".
> There aren’t many (any?) distributed databases with permanence built-in.

Git.