skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh. Sure, it's possible, but very unlikely.

These "MOND" gravity theories purport to explain observations better than the theory of dark matter, but they don't. They explain some things and leave gaping holes elsewhere. On the whole they are hugely inferior theories in terms of matching observational evidence. Their only advantage is that they lack the existence of massive, weakly interacting particles, which a lot of people seem to have strong objections to despite the fact that several types of such particles are already known to exist.

Throughout the entire history of the development of the theory of dark matter the bias has always been against the idea of true dark matter, unseen particles that make up most of the mass of the Universe. But at every single step all of the other possibilities have been eliminated as realistic explanations of the evidence. The cold WIMP dark matter theory is the only one that explains the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the large scale structure of the Universe, and the structure and behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters. At this point the theory of dark matter is remarkably well hemmed in, it would be absolutely shocking to an extreme degree if it did not truly exist in the form we think it does.

There's additionally a very elegant mechanism behind the formation of dark matter. It seems most likely to be composed of super-symmetric particles. Such particles would only be able to form in extreme, high-energy conditions. Precisely the sort of conditions that existed in the early era of the Universe immediately after the Big Bang. So the early Universe would have been creating huge quantities of such particles, which would then not interact much due to their weak interactivity. It wouldn't be until the Universe had expanded enough and cooled down enough to halt their production. This would neatly explain why so much of the mass of the Universe is in the form of dark matter rather than conventional matter.
I've always wanted to read (or write?) a book about us determining we are in a simulation, but we find subtle flaws like this we're able to exploit in weird ways. Kind of like breaking out of a VM through register flaws or something. Anyone know of a story along those lines?
You're right. It is also a common misconception that nuclear reactors cannot load follow, they can:

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-de...

One of the main limitations is the stress it puts on the fuel.

Many advanced reactors overcome these limits, and if financially incentivized, they will definitely load follow. On top of that, the UPower reactor has a thermal transport time constant nearly 10 times that of other reactors, and its fuel is immune to the shocks that bother LWRs. In fact, the same type of fuel was used in a research reactor and would be ramped in power from 5 watts to 150 billion watts in less than 50 millionths of a second. That puts a lot of stress on fuel, yet this fuel kept its stride without breaking a sweat.

This reactor is built like a tank, and is designed to be quite resilient and flexible. It can definitely load follow to support a renewable heavy grid system. In fact it's been considered for use as a grid stabilizer at substations because of these abilities.
Google Photos Mislabels 2 Black Americans as Gorillas
sounds like majority of the folks on Hacker News... a javascript developer !
The problem with anything nuclear is insurance. The only way reactors got insured was because Uncle Sam underwrote them.
" I think it's easy to get trapped in our own little bubbles and forget the bigger picture. " - A major modern epidemic
I tried BRL-CAD while trying to finish my transition away from Windows to Linux. Although BRL-CAD has features that arguably make it more 'powerful' than Solidworks (the package I had learned previously), it was incredibly less intuitive to use.

To me, it seemed like a software package. Of course, it /is/ a software package, but making models in CAD doesn't feel like writing software to me. Making models in CAD reminds me of playing with LEGOs, a very visual activity. Typing in coordinates just seems wrong.

Now, I failed to effectively learn the software. It is totally possible that if I were a faster learner, or had more perseverance, I would be born again as a BRL-whisperer. I was just hung up on how wrong and difficult it felt compared to SolidWorks.
Any plans to increase the breadth of covered agents?
As an example, one of the things I immediately searched for was Fluoroscein, and Indocynanine Green, which are dyes used in ophthalmology.
> accurlate

I was really really hoping that was a real word
Check out Greg Egan's Permutation City in which sort of the opposite happens.
Write it. Always thought about it, never seen it... except for Reggie Watts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc
No one needs a lawsuit. It's all about taking responsibility for your actions. Getting knocked unconscious is pretty serious.
3 Changes to the iOS Apple Map App That Would Make It Useful
Had to find a way to keep the framerate from dropping below Planck time levels.
Hi Ryan, founder here. Just seeing now -- what happened on your end? Did purchases fail to load? Nothing drop in price? Would love to be able to learn from a not so great experience
Would you mind posting more information about your experience? I'm interested.
> completely legitimate opinion

Exactly. Your opinion.

The tone of your original comment came off as a little insulting, which is why I claimed you were being a "snob".

IMO, people showing off stuff they've been working on and or have created is one of the more interesting aspects of HN, and I think insulting nitpicks about subjective stuff like color schemes discourages more people from showing off what they've done.

Green text on a black background may not win a design contest, but has been "good enough" for displaying information on a computer screen for over 30 years: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/IBM_PC_5...
Right, from Shell's perspective Dutch intelligence services are probably expensive and ineffective. Manipulating Nigerian officials to incarcerate activists is much cheaper and achieves the same goals.

But let's not assume that the Dutch government is therefore off the hook. I would not be surprised if Dutch diplomats extract trade information (through pacts, treaties and simple espionage) that gets passed on to Shell.

We might be low on the James Bond style intelligence signals, but as a country that's an order of magnitude richer than we should be by any sane measure you can bet we've got our trademark smiling men in suits wherever the money flows.
> If you're a programmer and you feel like curing malaria is more important than Uber

Um, this, for one. I see no possible reality in which a disease that kills almost one child every minute[1] could possibly take a backseat to you not being able to get a taxi when you call for one. The above could be put in the dictionary next to "first world problem".

I would love to hear your reasoning if you have some opinion to the contrary.

[1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/
Cellauto.js – a library for creating cellular automata simulations in JavaScript
That's where the batteries come in. To continue the software metaphors, batteries provide caching, and the cache is tunable for cost and performance. This wasn't viable a decade ago, but with the advances in solar/wind cost/performance, and the advances in battery cost/performance, it's really becoming a powerful option.
I'm not really sure what your point here. These are implementation details of how CL works. Has nothing at all to do with what s-expressions are in principle.
The trouble with questions like yours is that we're the ones asking them. The results of an unobserved measurement cannot be known, so there's no way to completely remove agency from our experiments.

Personally, I think the simpler and less egocentric view is that all measurements produce wavefunction collapse, even when there's nobody looking.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpretat... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem if you want to read more.
You can make an observation of a system whose state is undetermined. By interrogating the system for its state, a state becomes determined. Suppose, for example, that you have a flipped coin and sent it rotating in space, never hitting the floor. Is it heads or is it tails? Until it is looked at, the question doesn't really make sense. And for this case, we'll define "looking at it" to mean sticking out your hand and catching it. There is a probability that it's landed heads up in your hand, and a complimentary probability that it's landed tails up. Once it's in your hand though, you can confidently say which state it's in.

Now, you could definitely take issue with this example, because you could argue that the rotation of the coin is well described, so with initial conditions, you can predict its position at any given moment. But imagine a microscopic quantum system, and, for the sake of this simple explanation, believe that its "rotating through the air" state really does not have any precise heads or tails definition. Until something gets in the way of that system, creating an interaction that exchanges information about its observable state, it's not meaningful to say that it's in one of the observable states at all.

A superpositition of states, as such, is essentially the representation of a state in terms of a basis set of observables. In the case of the coin, heads and tails are the two observable states, they are orthogonal, and they fully represent the state space of the coin. You could flip the coin, and put its state vector into the form of sqrt(2)/2 * Heads + sqrt(2)/2 * Tails. This state isn't observable, but it can be described in terms of observable components, where the coefficients represent the probabilities that a given observable state will be measured upon observation.
With the obvious axioms that anyone with 1st world single-payer insurance behind them, or, say, the Gates foundation, isn't poor, could you give some examples?
Collection of FPV Racing Builds
Solar scales MUCH more fine-grained. There isn't a convenient source for 10kw nuclear power, and there probably never will be, but it's easy to build solar at that scale.
We need to talk about startups
PixQL: SQL for image processing
Retrochallenge
> Then some more experimental evidence comes in (galactic radial velocity), and we are thinking about modifying the theory a bit more (MOND). This is good for the radial velocity explanation, but not certain other things. We suppose there's some dark matter, and think about the consequences that would have. Then we see evidence consistent with that.

Just to be clear, in case someone interprets that as being a time-ordered list, the existence of some "dark" matter was the proposed explanation prior to the development of MOND (though MOND followed very quickly).

Robust evidence for dark matter is generally (rightfully) attributed to the work of Vera Rubin (as in the parent article), but it is worth noting that Friz Zwicky also proposed dark matter in the 1930s to explain the velocities of galaxies in clusters.
"Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe."

Check out this TED talk on just that subject. http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as...

Here's the punch line, space, time and matter are components of a user interface produced through evolution. We don't take the desktop and icons of our computer UI literally and we shouldn't take our evolved UI literally either.
A game whose source code fits in one tweet
Isn't operating an RC helicopter over a parade already an FAA violation?
Basic Saucer Physics
Right. This way of describing it is much closer to "zero-worlds" or relational quantum mechanics, and to my mind is a far simpler, deeper way of understanding what's really going on - reality is simply all entanglement.

What really still gets me is the way it's not simply that the atom wasn't interacted with, but that if the information about the interaction never leaks to the outside world - if it's "erased" after the interaction takes place - then the system still behaves as if the interaction never took place.

It undermines not just the concept that matter really exists, but time as well.
Between Macsyma, S-Graphics, and Statice Symbolics could have been a really great software business. S-Graphics was sold off to Nichimen and developed and marketed as Mirai until the early 2000s, and the Statice guys all left to make ObjectStore. I read on Usenet somewhere that there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Macsyma as a separate business.
Ah, but wouldn't Google want to keep it's investments in sectors that it believes will grow, even if they're competing with them, a la Microsoft & Apple[1]?

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/05/apples...
Is that really the case though? An observation collapses a wave function. The Copenhagen interpretation suggests that the collapsed state arises from a probability distribution, but it does not address the "fundamental" origin of that distribution. MW attempts to address it by suggesting that the rest of the reality just went elsewhere, rather than disappearing or never having existed at all, but it still does not explain why "we" get "this" reality. Both rely on observations to collapse the wave function, and neither specifically calls out a conscious agent as necessary for an observation to occur. Observation is a measurement, whether intended and registered by a brain or not.
Janine Benyus talks about this in her TED talk Biomimicry in action: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.

We should look to nature before designing things since it may have already solved the problem for us. Future technology should also be designed to gracefully degrade like nature, otherwise we're just replacing one problem with another.
Is there any reason why you can't use a sorted vector (possibly of pointers into pooled memory actually storing the strings)?

Would this be necessarily worse performance than a Trie or Hash ?
If I'm standing here, all the stuff that the atoms in my body could conceivably interact with have to be backfilled for me to interact with them according to this experiment, but since I'm not special to the universe, atoms three billion light years over, they are still interacting with each other, just not with me. So am I decohered to them? Is this like a divergent timelines theory such that coherence is defined as when different possibilities converge while following possibilities, reducing them and then so must necessarily collapse as other possibilities drop off? So what's the difference between cohered and decohered reality then? It sounds then like it would just be one of those paths, the one that we happen to be on that we only notice because we're conscious so that's our arbitrary (to the universe) observation point. That's the only way I can make sense out of this without attaching significance to human observation.
Very good question/idea indeed. At the moment we work with XML-as-String, but we'll make it possible to work with DOM. Would be great if you can submit other questions to Github, we'll resolve them one by one. The framework is still in beta phase..
Cool. I'll check it out!
> What does it mean to exist? A thing exists specifically when it affects something else. What is measurement? It's a reciprocal affecting.

All that's starting to sound an awful lot like Orthodox Christian theology about the essence of God…
I've written thoughts on this before, and concluded that it's not just any one thing, but a never-ending evolution of media based on a new medium: https://medium.com/@arxpoetica/a-new-mythology-6ab0aaad0f37
Once you read Teller and Hanrahan's SIGGRAPH paper on potentially-visible set computation, you instantly grok what quantum mechanics is for. At least in an "I want to believe" sense.
The Autism Advantage (2012)
Rultor.com, free open source hosted GitHub bot
Study Suggests That Google Has Its Thumb on Scale in Search
How do we go about determining if we are in a lossless compression or not?

I wonder if there is some ordering of "conservation of ---" laws that is strictly enveloping/hierarchical, such that you could choose a level at which to simulate/design a universe.
Cool, but pricey... you think you can get a thousand backers for this? =) It would be awesome if you do.

We just finished porting our Apple II BASIC interpreter to Go. If we'd known about your project sooner maybe we could have helped each other with that...

Also, 32K? Seems a bit low. There's a lot for the II that needs 64 or even 128K
I think it is the most digestible title. "The Causality of Atomic Particles is Symmetric with Respect to Time" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Extensive discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9794941
Blessed – A high-level terminal interface library for Node.js
armchair musings of a layperson physicist/philosopher follow:

the non-interference pattern is the optimized result of a deterministic universe that requires the observation to occur. The measurement didn't reach back in time, the results were specifically determined by the same causal chain that determined an experiment would be performed.
I tend to agree that it wasn't a particularly useful comment, although I don't see it as black-and-white as you seem to.

However:

Losers like you are the reason HN is a piece of shit now.

I don't think this is acceptable at all.

I've flagged that comment, though I'm sure you realized that would happen - and I suspect that was the point you were trying to make.
It's a nice looking site but I don't see how this is an efficient means of getting information across. It seems a bit to broad to deliver useful information. Given it's an unknown brand earning consumer trust will be hard. Without specific articles it will be hard to gain organic traffic. And generally its functions seem covered by a quick google search.

I cant see this taking off. That said I'm a sample of one so take my comment with a pinch of salt.
15 Proven copywriting hacks got from experts to boost landing page conversion
Or we just don't undestand the next level down.

This "reality doesn't exist until it is measured" business is utterly reprehensible. It is masturbatory science/journalism.
I'm saying that nuclear waste is treated with far more paranoia than it deserves, as illustrated by how we dispose of other waste much less carefully, even though it's just as dangerous. And mostly successfully, too. That doesn't mean that it's something to be ignored, or that current methods of waste disposal are perfect, but if we aren't shutting down the entire chemical industry (for example) over this problem then why should we require that nuclear waste and only nuclear waste be solved for all time before nuclear power can be used?
Lightning fast e-commerce built on AngularJS and Google Sheets as the database
This was on hn 17 and 21 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9710958 It's nice, I was able to see, via the bookmarklet that my <a> colors are unclear.
There are neat ways to make sunlight into fuel, but it's about what form that energy takes. If it is a fuel that needs to be burned - in the case of sugars from photosynthesis - we already do this by burning wood.

I think Cosmos missed a really important lesson which is that the fuels at our disposal are all a function of time and distance. The longer a fuel source has been building, and the less distance it has to travel to be useful to us, the more valuable it may be. The sun is a result of billions of years of the shape-shifting games between mass and energy, all driven by gravity. The fusion energy produced in the sun then has to travel 93 million miles to us to be useful. The food chain harnesses this energy and accumulates it over time, and after hundreds of millions of years much of that energy has been sequestered into fossil fuels. While there is a tremendous amount of power emanating from the sun, it has to go a long way or accumulate for a long time to be useful to us. Nuclear fuel sources on the other hand bring the billions of years of nucleus building that previous generations of stars did for us to our door step. The parent stars of our sun produced heavy actinides like uranium or thorium, as well as the abundant light elements like deuterium, helium, and boron, and then scattering them across the cosmos along with leftover hydrogen in brilliant novae and supernovae. In our case, many of these elements were in the stardust that formed earth, and are here beneath our feet and above our heads.

Solar, wind, and nuclear will dominate the 22nd century, but we need both, and they do and can play well together. They just need to be treated and respected equally.
A lot of problems look this way. If you want to really start thinking about this: ask yourself whether we should be focusing on obesity and heart disease at all. What greater rich person problem than too much food. You could argue that we should be focusing entirely on "real" problems like malaria first, then deal with the side effect of first world culture. We choose to focus the lens in our own frame of reference, so "taxis" seem like rich people problems, as opposed to having the frame of reference be something more objective like the state of the world, when all of a sudden many more issues reveal themselves to be "rich people problems".

Of course, funny enough, many of the same people that complain about this will simultaneously tell you how many unexpected discoveries came from seemingly abstract government funded projects (from pure research that has no clear immediate benefit to huge projects like landing on the moon). Such side effects are not exclusive to government projects however. So too the problems we choose to work on voluntarily. I think its not necessary to get into the great many benefits studying the heart for the sake of heart disease have given the medical community in general. Another example I like to use is how the gaming industry has led to the development of super powerful graphics cards that now have enormous medical uses. Personal computers themselves have enabled so much for our society. But before there could be a 200 notebook there had to be a 10,000$ rich person computer.

In my experience, it is a trap to worry about what is "impactful". You will make a much greater impact on the world working on what you're good at and what you enjoy, because you have more control on making that GOOD than making the alternative impactful. If you look at the history of truly amazing discoveries, they are rarely straight forward, so its a better bet to invest in what you like than what you think is important.
Ive worked on embedded systems where stuff like that would be a problem, howver I also knew the memory map for my target.

I wanted to make some crypto run faster so i used memcpy on a pointer to a function to copy executable code from slow flash to fast ram.
How did you validate your program?
Stuff hit people every day. People run away from it everyday, and sometimes get caught.
But you only hear about it if its a toy "drone", and if possible, it's lacking details.
> Um, this, for one.

Actually, that is a pretty neutral position. Your position sounds much more "privileged", as you appear to be attempting to tell people not only what they should do, but how they should feel. I'm going to assume that you didn't imply that anybody holding a contrary opinion on the best use of their time is somehow cheering on malaria :)
I've long thought that Microsoft should sell off the Bing business - I recognize that they gain benefits from Bing, but it is fundamentally a different business that they have shown no little ability to capitalize on for a long, long time.
Memcache Bundle for Symfony now also available on Windows