skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The title should probably be: "So you want to learn theoretical physics".

While generally little known and appreciated among modern theorists and mathematical physicists, physics is actually an empirical science. In other words, every single section of that reading list is based directly or indirectly on a diverse and sophisticated set of devices and measurement configurations (aka experiments). Also, most progress in our understanding the physical universe follows simply from inventing ever better probes and opening new observation windows.

A computer analogy of the theoretical/empirical physics relation might be fun: You can spend your whole life writing application software and never even know what digital devices you are actually using. That's totally legit. But if you want to write a new computer language (= a new theory) you most likely will have to dig into memory architectures and caches and all that stuff. If you want to dramatically increase the speed of computation (= a new observation window) you have to design a new chip. And if you want to go really deep and invent new computing paradigms, well then you need to learn quantum mechanics :-)

In fairness, she does have a final sentence about that weird place called laboratory (= a place of labor).

> And, finally, a note on learning in a laboratory vs. learning from textbooks. Physics is both an experimental and theoretical science, and while research happens in laboratories and on blackboards and computers, the majority of any physics education does not take place in a laboratory but in lecture classes that teach from textbooks and assign homework problems that are found in textbooks.

My recommendation for a comprehensive intro into theoretical physics is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. Alas there is no such profound review of all experimental physics.
I'm preparing to do something similar but attack a lesser beast that is the general relativity. I had a Master's degree in Statistics but unfortunately 1) Statistics does not really match Pure Mathematics and 2) I forgot most of it.

A beast it still is, I think it is contained in its own walls. I can skip any topic in Quantum Physics and others that is irrelevant.

I'm wondering if it's helpful to you too to focus on something smaller.
I know "the Bendix" as the part of the starter motor that automatically engages and disengages from the flywheel, and that was invented before they were known for brakes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Hugo_Bendix

On the topic of automotive companies making other products, GM used to make refrigerators, and Chrysler (non-automotive) air conditioners.
Book (PDF)

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

2021 Murphy, Thomas W, Jr

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

https://doi.org/10.21221/S2978-0-578-86717-5
Executing a bunch of npm modules locally, having a Mongo and Redis database running 24/7.

I don’t have a great answer. One thing I’ve noticed on Mac is that, using Activity Monitor, before installing all the dev dependencies for local dev nearly all processes seem to run under the local user’s user space, but after installing a bunch of stuff (with sudo) a ton of processes default to running as “system”

I haven’t had time to research whether this actually has a meaningful impact on security, but TLDR I trust Mac’s out of the box security, but I instantly stop trusting it the moment I start installing a bunch of stuff via Homebrew and NPM.
Is it? Ever heard out the loud minority?

95% of people are probably centrist and neither comment and neither create content.

It's the 5% of the extremist that generate 99% of the content.

So if those 5% of the extremist are leaning more towards one end you'll get the illusion that "the internet is mostly liberal", while in reality that "mostly liberal" is generated by sub 5% of the actual population.
Vaccines are only one preventative tool we can use. We are hardly even using them (what is it, ~17% of us even bothered to get the bivalent shot?)

All the other stuff (masking, airflow, quarantining, etc) are additional tools we could also choose to use, if we cared about extra death.
DCs are power hungry and so can have lots of strain in local places.

In popular siting locations like Ireland, the local power grid is struggling. Data centers make up 18% of Irish electricity consumption: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/06/13/data-centres-gobbl...

In developing countries like India where the power grid is not stable, to maintain DC uptime you probably need backup generation, which is very expensive very fast.
I've seen chatgpt really struggle with anything visual. What things have you got working?
Perhaps nit picky, and I know you were joking, but I think this is the wrong way to think about it. It's not that the other behavior is undefined, it's you essentially have all of these functions that use "C" in their definitions, and then you have "#define C ..." in a header file somewhere.
It is sad that they couldn't think of a way to distract investors that didn't encourage investment in GPU technology.
The standard theoretical technique for encoding a list of numbers as a single number is Gödel encoding. It can be applied as many times as you like—e.g. to encode a list of lists of numbers, or a list of lists of lists of numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering
> Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?

No, this is CO2 per kwh, so is proportional to population.

What you have just discovered is that Germany does a lot of greenwashing. They may have spent trillions on renewables but, well look at the graphs, they still burn insane amounts of coal.

They chose the politically popular choice of closing nuclear and in doing do sabotaged their climate agenda. Turns out building a grid of only variable renewables doesn't work yet.
Reframing it abstracts away the root cause and shifts the focus to symptoms and intermediary causes rather than the root cause: money! The people that can make a difference (policy makers) will look at this and try to find a "complex multi-faceted soution" or whatever that shoves the problem under the rug and polishes it up and fixed some symptoms here and there.

This actually made me rethink of socialized health care and other social programs in europe because in tech at least the salaries are horrible there, it seems the line of thinking is that the government should take more money from everyone and support social programs to solve all kinds of issues, which until now I thought was a good idea but it seems it isn't just more taxes, the salaries there and job opportunities are not good. Even on HN you hear about companies in tech struggling because of the investor mindset there.

My new opinion is that while I support socialized programs to care for those who can't care for themselves, it does not absolve policy makers' responsibility to make that support in form of better income and opportunities as much as possible and even direct cash and tax credits, not more programs and bureaucracies but more jobs and better paying jobs and more rewarding jobs with job security.
Inventors are a different animal. One doesn't start with a reasonable theory but one works from the other end, one quite unreasonably starts with what would be wonderful to have. One doesn't test a theory but one ponders how the seemingly impossible might be accomplished which is a problem that can be broken down into more reasonable things until it's impossible component is defined properly so that one may make an often futile attempt to ask the question differently. With few exceptions there are no results. Those not skilled in the art consider that part cheating. This is logical because their line of reasoning seeks to further validate that what they already know, it thus involves an effort to prove something can't be done, or at least not by someone like that, or at least not by that person, or at least not by that method etc etc

The cheating in this context would be to study the thing the file represents rather than the representation.

A dumb example would be to make a 10 hour movie from a single image that doesn't move. There is no reason for the file to be larger than the original jpg.

> I can not only get Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. I can get Citizen Kane in colour!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5qy9Zoh_0

To argue that this was not the method Sloot used is missing the point. The question is: How to do it, not how to imitate someone else.

In his demo Sloot was playing 16 full movies simultaneously on a 1995 laptop at any speed. A high end computer had 32 MB memory, 133 MHz cpu, PCI video cards had 4 MB ram, 66 MHz, 560 MB HDD

If it was not what he said it was why didn't he just sell what he had? Without the extraordinary claims the demo already requires cartoon physics. He drives the truck into the match box, making an U turn inside doesn't at all seem necessary???
There are commentors on HN who seem to care enough about fault in order to say that it's Cruise's fault. In that setting it's not irrelevant to offer a different view.
>There is clearly something I don't understand here. Consider an int -- you can dynamically allocate one, you can put it in a tree putting a box into a tree will still require other data applicable to the tree itself, same as an int), and so on. So I don't understand the point being made here.

To make a tree, you need something allowing an object (a tree node) to own an object of the same type as itself (another tree node). There are various options for this: raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, auto_ptr, box. Without using one of those options, the tree isn't possible. That's the author's point. std::box can be used in place of one of the other pointer types.
What would prevent me from making a std::box<FILE*> and blowing up my program?
My first “private” hard drive, that was all my own, was a WD external. It was a birthday gift from my parents. Ever since then I had purchased WD drives and recommended them. I used them exclusively in every computer I built and used them exclusively whenever I needed external storage.

They were hanging on a thread as far as I was concerned when they shipped NAS drives with SMR. I was burned by that. I’ve moved to Seagate now. WD has lost all the trust I had in them. I’m soon buying over 100TB worth of drives and not one of them will be WD.
Public speaking.

Sales.

Being a good human.
For one this article is wonderfully out of season <wipes sweat>.

If you generated electricity you'd be able to also use it for cooling.

For two... how much land do you need to have for a 8 meter windmill and a reservoir with 20 tons of water? Looks out of the question even with detached house suburbs.
Given that a heat pump can be a lot more than 100% efficient, it's likely more efficient to generate electricity and then use a heat pump to heat the house.
And not to be confused with UC Berkeley's Robert Sproull, though I suspect he'd already died prior to this story's timeline:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gordon_Sproul>
I don't think so.

What does a book e-reader have to do with the ReMarkable though? Why does that question still matter?
I’m convinced this is HN-themed satire.
Indeed. Also, Zoom calls replacing car journeys.
On the contrary, it can be extremely difficult and expensive to do with waste heat from datacenters. Your average cooling equipment, of the energy conserving kind has 2 modes:

First mode, for cold outside weather e.g. in winter is free cooling, where you just use convection or fans to bring in cool outside air, push out warm inside air (there are also variants of this like "tokyo wheel", but those are unsuitable for heat reuse). You could at best use the warm air output (~25°C) to directly heat neighboring buildings, but the air ducts you need for that will be massive. Comfort level in the buildings heated this way will be low due to high air velocity and associated noise. Also, air ducts are a fire hazard and high maintenance to keep dust and vermin out.

The other mode is water cooling (either direct or indirect) where you cool your servers directly by water or the air through water radiators. The warm water is then either cooled down with outside air, outside air plus evaporation (both possible only when it is not too warm outside) or compressive cooling (aka heat pump, the usual big MW-scale machines in the cellar). In those cases, district heating will only be possible if you can reach a sufficient water temperature somehow. E.g. directly cooling your servers uses at most 30°C intake and outputs at most 50°C. District heating usually runs at 70°C, so you would need a running heat pump to make up for the 20K difference. When the servers are indirectly air-cooled, the difference will be even larger. So you will always need those big MW-scale heatpumps running, just to make use of your waste heat, at great expense and for the uncertain benefit of maybe selling your heat to neighbors. This is deadly for mom-and-pop datacenters because of the uncertainty (maybe you can sell your heat, maybe it'll be too expensive) and the huge investment, your cooling equipment will be far larger (more and bigger heatpumps), more expensive, redundant (because in summer you will still need to have equipment to give of heat into the outside air).

All the sufficiently large customers I know of are looking to move abroad, for this reason and the astronomical cost of electricity in Germany.
Especially when combined with a heatpump that can move a multiple of the input energy as heat.
Website is somewhat inaccurate. The Appalachian Power (AEP) for central VA is 100% hydro, yet the whole of Virginia is colored like coal.
>Think about what he's killing - one of the internet's most powerful drivers of social change

Also mob rule, bullying, jump to conclusions tweet bs.

As someone from the outside, Twitter seems like a worse cesspool than Reddit even that people are so hung up and caught up on.

>* The blue check-mark saga - destroying a lot of it's hard-earned value...

"Value"
how is it valuable?
lmao the funniest shit I've read.
I can tell you are a heavy Twitter user.
could just count in stead of pi, the offset would be the same number as the value at the offset.
All the computers that we use to access data in those data centers likely consume far more power than the data centers themselves.
Yeah, it's this.

It's not that tough to keep up with FE. React has been dominant for closing in on 10 years now. ~2015 was probably peak framework fatigue. If you left the industry in 2016 and came back now, you could probably get productive and you would even recognize a lot of the tools.

The HN meme is that "Well ackshually you could build Figma with ASP.NET Forms, just like we used to do back in my day." That just doesn't resonate with anyone doing the work day to day because applications themselves (not necessarily the front-end tech) have a much higher bar today.
nvm for Node + use containers for database services?
I have written and been using that same smart pointer type for years, under the pretty horrible name of holder_cloner_t<> (at least it's clear). It is indeed the right solution to a very common and important type of problem. Looking forward to something like this in the standard library one of these decades.
Marvelously most of the LLMs are bad.
only one of the things you instance (goland) actually seems to be an IDE - the others are text editors with plugins. arguably goland is too.
Hadn't actually heard of that. Might be similarish but Blazor uses standard html/css/JS and just sends DOM diffs down the wire. Don't think at first look Vaadin works in the same way.
Sorry about that, should be fixed now.

An app is just way to group multiple related functions/prompts.

It was throwing a 403 because it thought the app didnt belong to your user. Im storing those permissions in the session and recently introduced a bug that only updated the user app permissions on login.

Youre one of the first users, so thanks for reporting that. Let me know if you have any other feedback.
Easy to slam poor countries and their governments when you're practically living in the most powerful and rich country in history. You sound like one of today those who never ventured outside their bubble.
I dunno if they have the most to gain, but they certainly have a lot to gain. There's also sports fishermen that will benefit, as well as wildlife in general (eg osprey), and the associated tourism.
Cross platform support is the primary reason I use 1Password over the others.
I'll just have to guess the reimagined IDE is not longer very text-centric given that without proprietary JavaScript the page is just a green background.
Engineering is about tradeoffs, everything has its place.
But it would it be good standard?
How would we look at that api when:

New frontend is needed?
Other team/company would like to acces the data?

When we other clients for example anderiod/ios app?

Wouldn't a generic api, with some custom api calls. Ensure that we are more consistent, and require less maintenance in the future.

That way we could focus on adding business value, or solving those hard problems, we normally don't have time for.
Agreed, and my company has done exactly that.

Our public API is fit for the use-cases of our big customers that want deep integrations, and our frontend’s API is able to handle our specific workflows.

We have a bunch of shared backend code, but the endpoints that our API customers use are very specific. Sometimes we build custom endpoints for a single customer which would be useless for our frontend/services. Keeping them separate allows them to gain needed functionality without trying to bolt it on to existing internal APIs, and cluttering it all into one messy blob.

Of course our internal API is a mess in a bunch of other ways but at least we don’t have to deal with the public parts making it even messier
This has the same omission that my undergrad program had: continuum mechanics. Even just the very basics (pressure, velocity, etc in a moving, non-equilibrium system) and translating between the terminology used by different science and engineering fields (static pressure, total pressure, velocity pressure, stagnation pressure, hydrostatic pressure, dynamic pressure, plain old pressure, head, oh my!) is very useful.

Hydraulics are everywhere. Ever used a sink? Flushed a toilet? Contemplated an air filter? Felt both sides of a small fan? Wondered how, exactly, a utility pump causes water to go in the inlet and out the outlet, and tried to read the manufacturer’s spec? Contemplated that the ripples when you throw a rock in an actual pond really don’t resemble the average “look I made water in WebGL” animation very much?

And more fancily, and very much in “Physics”, cosmological models usually model the universe as being full of a spatially varying continuous fluid. Stars are plasma or weirder things, and those are fancy fluids.

Yet, for some reason, the basics are missing from “Physics”. You can sometimes find them in mechanical engineering departments, and Feynman covers it a bit in his lectures.
Despite "British fish for British fishermen" being a significant factor both in the coastal towns themselves and lots of other places where people voted for Brexit.

I know we're not supposed to call Brexit voters thick, but it's difficult sometimes...

As to failure modes, the decline in small and midsize ports generally in favour of huge container ports, Felixstowe etc., also the offshoring of processing either to factory ships (conveniently located beyond the reach of employment law) or distant countries. Quite a few South and East coast places used to have passenger ferry services to Europe and no longer do - Ramsgate, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Folkestone spring to mind but I'm sure there were more.
From sailplane straight to (at least) a Cessna looks more like another level, supercharge and weight class all in one. I guess it's fair to locate 'micro' rather somewhere in the in-between, a middle ground and then there are in fact not that many contenders on the CLI, or else they're fossils. I would've thought this is what makes it attractive to some? Whereas others don't really have a use case. As for 'nano' on the other hand frankly there are about as many proper and more modern alternatives as there are Linux distributions and I'm sure anyone who's still a console regular has their favorite or two. I'm a vimmer but for quick snaps or in very strange places I *really* like dte. Am not associated with the project: https://github.com/craigbarnes/dte
Lifetime annotations are somehow complicated without subseting the language.

It isn't as if Microsoft, Apple and Google haven't been doing it for a while.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/high-confidence-lifet...

https://reviews.llvm.org/D15032
How many moved to Mastodon again?
> (By the way, the UK is not an island. For example, you've omitted Northern Ireland.)

There is a very, very deep rabbit hole here. Because it's late and I have to be up early in the morning, I'll merely point out the entrance [0] and quietly back away...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles_naming
std::variant is a nasty thing. I always try hard to find a way around it, and there is almost always a better way around it.
> AI assistants generating code are like senior engineers with only a notepad.

this is a bad thing?

deciding on data structures, data flows and abstractions to build is the hard bit of being a software developer, which works perfectly well on paper

turning that into the code is the easy bit, with or without a boilerplate generator
> Russian space agency were the first to land and operate remote rovers off world

Roscosmos (the Russian Space Agency) didn't do any of those. Those were all accomplished by the Soviet Space Program, which had major centers across the Union, and ceased to exist after the USSR broke up. Roscosmos was created in 1992, and every one of their lunar and interplanetary missions has resulted in failure before even reaching their destinations.
So? White coat of paint and a sun sail?
Never heard of this book, just got it for £0.55 (ok, £3.35 including postage).

In my unsuccessful search to get it even cheaper, I came across this book, seems to be by the same Bob Sproull: https://www.routledge.com/The-Problem-Solving-Problem-Preven...

From graphics to management.
[b] Lisp claims another soul. [/b]
Basically. It's been a while since I've worked in wetlabs (clinical now) but looking at their methodology the fixed equipment costs would seem comparable to ddPCR and I'd expect cheaper than NGS currently used for ctDNA. Per-unit consumable costs also seem negligible.

The specific AFM setup they used here is pretty old and can be replicated (relatively) inexpensively.

I would guess the biggest cost barrier/disadvantage would be throughput rather than setup costs but these results appear to be a potentially good and/or cost-effective solution to the sensitivity issues.
But they didn’t 30 years ago and we were all doing well. Data centers are not required for them.
> It is indeed the right solution to a very common and important type of problem

if it is such a solution to such a common problem (both of which i dispute), why do you think it is not alredy in the standard library?
What about using a regular usb keyboard? With A to C adapter.
neat project but no mention of what model printer you got?
> What I'd like to see more of in physics texts is presenting a problem before offering the solution.

Yes.

> If you present the hard problem first, the student may flail around and realize: I need something to help with this! Now that they know they need it, and why, you can give them the tool that fits the bill.

No.

If an instructor deliberately gives a student a problem that they know the student _cannot_ solve, then it rightfully destroys trust.

I never taught at the university level, but with middle and high school math students I taught them to how (re)discover the solutions, rather than teaching them the solutions directly.

As a practical matter, many of my college classes went too quickly to do anything _but_ teach the solution -- or tell us to learn it between classes and bring questions back.