MisterMashable

Legalized quote stuffing.

Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .

It's opposite is probably also true, how very common things are made to look rare and exceptional e.g. blood moons.

Fields are real because perturbation theory (Feynmann diagrams) is unable to describe solitons, vorticies, monopoles and bound states.

Quantum Field Theory is really just ordinary Quantum Mechanics. It is necessary to use fields instead of "wave equations" because the number of particles can vary when the energy of a system exceeds a certain threshhold. (e.g. a single photon having an energy equal to or higher than the E=mc^2 energy of two electrons can transmute into an electron-positron pair. 1 particle transforms into 2. This is very common in high energy processes.)

Quantum fields are REAL because certain phenomena like solitons, vortices, monopoles and quark confinement can only be understood properly in the full field context. Quantum field theory cannot describe these phenomena in terms of Feynman diagrams. Feynmann diagrams and scattering cross sections/lifetimes were once considered fundamental and fields were believed to be a tool to derive them. Physicists now understand (the competent ones) that Fields are more fundamental than the diagrams. The Fields are also real in the sense that the do much more than just represent particle states, field symmetries are fundamental symmetries of nature, e.g. the strong force has SU(3) symmetry, electroweak SU(2)xU(1) etc.

Steven Weinberg gives a very strong argument for the necessity of fields in his vol. 1 QFT book. It's very technical but a brief summary is... QM + relativity + cluster decomposition principal (which more or less says the results of distant experiments should be unrelated) --> fields

Hey, I knew a MUMPS programmer. Nice family guy too. Anyone would have guessed by appearances he was a car mechanic (dirty jeans, greasy hair etc.) and not a programmer. Not many MUMPS programmers out there, sound like anyone you know?

We will all speak Schwiitzerdüütsch or at least be able to spell like we speak it.

Whatever the official cause of cancer it will never be food additives, processed or poor quality foods, prescription drugs, air pollution, contaminants in the water supply, contaminated vaccines (I'm a believer in vaccines so don't go there!), new car smells, pesticide residues in food and clothing, fire retardant chemicals, xenoestrogens, secondary cancers caused by chemotherapy or radiation... it will just be bad luck.

If Finland's great teachers were to teach in U.S. schools, they would encounter significant pressure to conform from students, parents and administrators. The ones who tow the line and preserve the status quo would get to keep their jobs while the others would be mobbed, manipulated and discarded. Administrators would fabricate a false narrative using negative performance review. Parents would blame the teacher for failing to "teach" which means graciously ignore their child's poor behavior and hand out high grades. This is what would happen to the great majority of great Finnish teachers were they to work here in America. The few who by good fortune places themselves in American school communities which closely resemble Finland would fit right in.

Microsoft has turned into Ma Bell. Microsoft is so large that any innovation at this point has to be minimal and highly managed or it would rock the boat, threatening the cohesiveness of the company. This is the worst environment for the hacker. It's an excellent environment for office slime who know how to play the game and lean more toward the psychopathic end of the spectrum. It's a world tailor made for the venal and the mediocre. A word about priorities, let the pricks take all the money, it's really worthless anyway compared to your mental health. In lieu of any positive creative talent middle management and HR thrive on destruction pursuits like emotional abuse, gas lighting and lying. Start living a real life worth having, live by your own rules and play your own game even if it means living on $20,000 per year which is all you really need anyway. Most of us are fighting an uphill battle with corporate suits to protect our clutter, distractions and excesses. Go outside for a nice walk, feel the sun on your face, read a good book, talk to a friend, take your child to the play ground, throw out the stuff you don't need, just start living for God's sake. Be happy now and leave all misery and bad feelings with them where they belong. Do not take the anger and resentment of your bitter experience with you (that's their greatest weapon BTW). It's very difficult to just drop your anger and resentment but do it fast, hard and don't look back. You want to be happy don't you? You want to be free? Don't waste your time thinking about them. Only think about good things. If it doesn't make you happy, you shouldn't think about it. If it makes you happy, you should think about it. You can and should become the happiest person you family and friends know about. Happiness isn't free. It requires a disciplined mind that allows good stuff in a throws out garbage like grudges. Happiness costs you but it well worth the price. There will always be enough money in your life. Social status is overrated and useless. Imagine yourself on your deathbed, are you going to regret not making $X million dollars and being the center of attention or the opportunities for true happiness that you let slip.

In 2004 a whole layer of top CIA officials were forced out. Defense Secretary Colin Powell resigned. Dick Cheney purged the CIA of personnel who might have served as some counterbalancing force. Once the good and reasonable people were gone (fired, forced to resign etc.), the CIA ran amok. If we look honestly at what went wrong, it's pretty clear how to fix it. Fire all the people that lied to Congress and broke the law by employing prohibited techniques. Prosecute them to the fullest extent possible. Simultaneously, conduct an internal review of all the former CIA fired for political reasons and hire them back. These are the people America desperately needs to repair our broken system. The CIA is desperately in need of reform. The world is too dangerous and complicated a place to have the wrong people running our foreign policy. If they lied about torture, what else are they lying to Congress about? Clearly it isn't the solution to every problem but it would be the best possible, immediately actionable step. Bring back the good patriot Americans who were fired from their job with the intelligence agencies for political reasons. Get rid of and prosecute the bad apples.

Interesting how Peter Thiel who froze $45,000 of assets of Facebook competitor Diaspora* has taken a special interest in bad mouthing Twitter, call them "horribly mismanaged" etc. It's very clear he wants Twitter to fail. Peter Thiel influenced the debt downgrade with his comments. Knowing how the world works Thiel may very well have called up an analyst and played some dirty tricks as in the case of Diaspora*.

I wonder, what is the ratio of exercise programs articles vs. people who actually follow them?

Minikanren is featured in a follow up to 'Seven Programming Languages in 7 Weeks' by Manning Pubs. 'Seven More Programming Languages in Seven Weeks'. I think Elixir and Julia are also going to be included in the book. Anyway, if anyone here is into Manning books there's a MiniKanren chapter to look forward to. Disclaimer?!: I do not work for Manning. Just a reader.

The most fruitful definition of a real number is as a limit of a Cauchy sequence. That way is much more useful in proving theorems.

Using infinitesimals is logically valid (alternative real analysis), useful for physics and other practical calculations but not at all helpful proving theorems.

Might I add that the concept of 'nearness' introduced by Riesz is the contrapositive of the usual limit definition and might be the way real analysis is taught 100 years from now.

Hyperreals are much more involved than mere epsilontics as they include all kinds of infinities. It's so mind blowing that I simply must defer to minds like Conway to play with such things.

Well there is no way Lisi's E8 theory can fit gravity and the standard model at the same time. At first glance the group structure seems to allow it but the actual group representation (which are the actual particles allowed if one wishes to construct such a theory) don't allow it. I'm totally fine if someone wants to pursue this area of research the problem is the MAGAZINES have printed his theory as though it were a valid contender or alternative to string theory or some other theory. Lisi's theory isn't. If it were a plane, it never got off the ground, it blew up on the runway. A recent TIME magazine special issue features this broken 'theory'. It's deeply misleading and shows a lack of concern about misleading the public. Loop quantum gravity, simplicial quantum gravity, and causal sets etc. are all examples of broken theories that just don't work. Just so you know there ARE valid alternatives to superstring theory regarding unification or physics beyond the standard model. Alain Connes non-commutative gravity, superconformal field theories, Kac Moody algebras, twistor gravity, twistor string theory, plain old N=8 D=4 supergravity is a contender, SO(10), SU(5), MacDowell Mansouri gravity, matrix models,... I could list more. These theories aren't broken, they actually work. Those are the kinds of things the public deserves to hear and read in the magazines.

The dilepton events are the best evidence yet IMO

Not confirmed in the sense that many in the community are denying the result, which is as it should be. Even considering many models including dust a robust result remains. I think PRL and others are being unreasonably pessimistic but the only way to settle this is for there to be more experiments at different frequencies. Then they can move from the shock and denial phase onto the grieving process. BICEP scooped Planck, big time. It doesn't matter to me but it matters a whole lot to some people and the degree of sour grapes and poor sportsmanship is really stunning. Yes, I am saying a good deal of this is motivated by the tiny team beating the much bigger team though I absolutely disagree with their hypercompetitive interpretation of the whole enterprise of experimental physics. History will tell us that BICEP got lucky, very lucky and they got there first. The dust up is happening on Earth not in space and the latter is certainly much easier to explain away and still have at least a six sigma result. I've read the dust papers with an open mind and none of them add up.

Regarding SUSY, strictly speaking no particles have been directly detected but anomalous currents abound and just about everything seen works perfectly with light SUSY and much better than with the standard model. The dilepton events alone are very compelling. http://www.science20.com/a_quantum_diaries_survivor/a_susy_e... SUSY is in plain view much the way the Higgs was in plain view for about a year before the official announcement. I have no special insider information, just a humble internet connection to download the important papers and a decent knowledge of particle physics. In hind sight, everyone will say 'of course' which always happens. From a theory point of view, SUSY is simply not an option unless there is some spectacularly new theory out there with novel concepts to replace QFT. The Coleman-Mandula theorem is extremely compelling. It basically tells us accept SUSY or find something to replace QFT. Since QFT works and there's no good reason to move on to something else (especially when something else doesn't exist presently and possibly never will), it's a safe bet SUSY must exist somewhere. It just so happens to be light SUSY and we're seeing it at the LHC right now. I think we're presently seeing the equivalent of a COBE picture of SUSY and next year it will sharpen up into a WMAP picture.

There's a very subtle undertone of negativity in this article about physics. Before I get into, William Bardeen is not in the same league as 'Surfer Dude and his E8 Theory of Everything' which throws basic facts about representation theory out the window, coming up with 'todalay boogus' arguments which amazes auntie, mommie and magazine editors but a real physicist would instantly dismiss.

Bardeen is the real deal. His papers are very interesting and feel a bit like reading Sidney Coleman's papers. If you're interested...

http://arxiv.org/find/hep-th/1/au:+Bardeen_W/0/1/0/all/0/1

Is nature scale invariant? So far the answer is absolutely NO but I strongly advise to wait and see. There are many topics that point to some breakdown in scale or reorganizing what we think of space and distance (dualities in string theory, conformal field theory).

OK, now the important thing I want everyone here to realize. You are living through a GOLDEN AGE of physics. You wouldn't think that based on what all the popular magazines tell you. Here's why...

1. Higgs particle - discovered!

2. Inflation - discovered! Denying this one is like denying the Big Bang itself. The evidence is overwhelming and in fact I would list this as the single greatest scientific discovery of all time. The concurrent discovery of gravity waves, quantum gravity and a real life example of a Hawking process only sweetens the deal.

3. Supersymmetry has basically already been discovered IMHO. They aren't announcing anything at CERN and won't until they have so many sigmas under their belt but trust me, it's coming and truth be told, it isn't really so surprising. SUSY physics has always been rock solid from the beginning. The situation is very similar to that before offical Higgs announcement and before someone went knocking on Andre Linde's front door. Many were extremely confident in the Higgs particle a least a year before the official announcement. The BICEP 2 results were even more glaringly apparent than the Higgs results. Many people were walking around the Earth with 'secret knowledge' that inflation theory was correct even 2 to 3 years before the official announcement.

So you are living through EXTREMELY interesting times but you wouldn't know it with all the big science bashing being thrown around.

We can only hope their new package system will contain something that allows the programmer to chose their own database. I want to use Couchbase and Elasticsearch. I can't see why any other document store couldn't do the same job as Mongo. Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with Mongo (but it's not for me) but can't we make at least some choice???

I was a bit turned off by the term 'isomorphic javascript' when I first read it mostly because of how it is so fundamental to mathematics and we can say the term isomorphic definitely earned its keep there. In programming I'm not so sure. The term does fit but it's a mouthful, almost as bad as XMLHttpRequest. Is there a cool word like AJAX to take the place of Isomorphic Javascript? Airbnb has a certain coolest factor and they've been using the term so it's most likely here to stay.

If we take relativity at face value, the speed of light is c = 2.997 x 10^8 <<<locally>>>. <<<Globally>>> the speed of light can be anything. Cosmologists talk about the universe expanding faster than light during the inflationary phase, which sounds confusing because we're told nothing can move faster than light. While it is true that the speed of light must propogate at only one velocity for all freely moving frames of reference, the speed at which space itself expands can be anything! Relativity does not restrict the speed at which space itself expands or contracts. TL;DR The maximum local speed of anything moving through space in a freely moving frame of reference is c. The speed at which space itself expands or contracts is not limited in any way by Einstein's theory and is consistent with observations of the the inflationary universe in which the universe expanded at faster than the speed of light.

I hope this clarifies the appartent contradiction. Light can't help but move at any other speed than c = 2.997 x 10^8 m/s. It can't go faster, nor slower. So how does the speed of light appear to slow down in certain circumstances? In a vacuum, the speed of light is always c. There is nothing to interfere with the propogation of the individual photons (little atoms of light) as they move through the vacuum. However, in a material such as glass the individual photons of light are absorbed and reemitted many trillions of times by the molecules making up the glass. The photons do a "stop over" and don't move at all, the velocity of these photons is zero (actually the photons temporarily don't exist except as energy absorbed by the atoms in the glass). Between lattice points or individual atoms the photons travel at velocity c. The combination of stop overs (absorbtion and reemission events) and free propogation gives the appearance light is travelling at a slower overall velocity than c.

From experience I would have to say 'differential forms' seem to fit the bill for a unifying mathematical language as applied to geometry and physics. GA seems to me as more of a computation tool. Differential forms are pretty standard in many maths and physics texts. Many paper on the preprint Arxiv use differential forms. The only thing about DFs is that they are very efficient for communicating ideas and doing proofs. For practical calculations they don't really simplify anything (actually get in the way) but it's easy to transform them into the usual vector tensor notation. GA seems less flexible in this regard, you take the product it uses and you either like or lump it.

Gauss-Bonet all the way! :)

I studied several of Hestenes' papers around ten years ago. Most of them are computational in nature and do not proceed to do geometry in an axiomatic way. This isn't to say he didn't write such a paper but I never found one and I read nearly all his extent papers. The thing I liked most was his derivation of the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole. I couldn't find anything wrong with it and I could actual understand every step, unlike Kerr's original paper. Other than that GA has done absolutely nothing to help gain a better understanding of QFT, GR, string theory, Lie groups etc. (for that an in depth understanding of differential forms is best. Physicists, even mathematicians who truly understand the magic of differential forms are even more rare than programmers with a deep understanding javascript!!!) IMO Geometric algebra is a useful collection of interesting computation tools. It reminds me of Pedrag Cvitanovic's "bird track" diagrams to calculate representations of Lie algebras. Nothing unique or fundamental is gained but it is remarkable that a completely orthogonal viewpoint to some very traditional topics exist. Other examples (from mathematics) of surprisingly novel viewpoints of traditional topics include Kuratowski who has a very unique approach to general topology and F. Riesz came up with the notion of "nearness" which simplifies difficult theorems in functional analysis but it could be used to recreate all of basic mathematical analysis.

The point is this has nothing to do with software or anything of interest to Hacker news. Why bother reading HN if it's going to be cluttered with posts and comments that clearly belong elsewhere (Huffingtonpost.com, Disqus, Twitter whatever...) then some sour grapes crybaby who seeks attention voted down your Karma to prove a point. I'll still read HN but some participants are just trollish. I'll never hire or work with anyone with the usernames above because in my world civility and good behavior counts, even with the "little things" like respecting HN guidelines (see below) but it's your life and do what you want with it. Sooner or later you'll put your foot in your mouth in the very worst way and panic all day over your mistake.

Hacker News Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Unless the plane crash was due to a software bug, this story, however important it is, has no place here. I appreciate your interest and concern but this isn't the right forum.

Teenagers act crazy bc biologically they are adults. If we were doing our job raising kids and not depriving them of real life experiences and honest learning opportunities, they would be better prepared to channel that amazing youthful energy, the risk taking, the ability to stay awake longer, learn faster, compete. They would be starting businesses of their own perhaps even competing against well established players and occasionally beating them at their own game. Most would simply become (find out) who they are and find their place in the world. They would be thinking independently, writing their own life script. Parents don't like that bc it doesn't validate the choices they made. Their child might fail in their endeavors thereby making the parents look bad, God forbid! Universities don't like it bc success is supposed to depend entirely on whether or not they get paid lots of money. Governments don't like it bc it would force them to change and adapt. Corporations hate it bc those kids are supposed to work for THEM for cheap and buy their CRAP. Did I mention clergy? They don't like it bc some of those kids might become something they aren't and usher in a new form of spirituality they don't 'agree with'. Kids (especially teenagers) are DANGEROUS. It's far better to undereducate them, setup barriers to keep them out of the real world, and deprive them of all the respect and responsibility accorded to 'read adults'. Then when they become neurotic and act out, claim that's the real reason kids need to be watched so closely and excluded from participating in the real world.

This was an amazing and somewhat sad story. How's Gembe doing today? Based on his near adoration of the Valve developers, it would be fitting if he worked in the gaming industry. Maybe he could set things right by helping to make Half-Life 3?