djaque

Ummmm... Ashli Babbit was a QAnon conspiracy theorist who broke into the capital during the Jan. 6 insurrection. She was at the front of a mob trying to get into the Speaker's Lobby containing representatives sheltering in place. The mob was commanding the police to let them in and started chanting to break down the door. Police warned them multiple times. Instead, Babbit climbs through a window in front of a police officer with a gun pointed at her after being commanded to not enter. She got within feet of representatives (who... mind you the mob was screaming death threats about). There was no way to know if she had hidden weapons on her body, especially with others at the insurrection carrying assault rifles. Any reasonable person would say the shooting was justified doubly so with a mob of conspiracy theorists behind her ready to brutalize some politicians.

Don't gaslight people by just calling her "unarmed" especially when QAnon is turning her into a martyr for their movement. It's fundamentally dishonest.

[deleted]

Rush Limbaugh hosted a regular segment on his show where he would read off the names of gay men that died of AIDS and celebrate it with bells and horns in the background.

I'm not one to celebrate people's death, but I will sleep a little easier tonight knowing that he now belongs in the past.

I too dream of a day that even a group as oppressed as Christians are in the US will be able to hold the presidency, the highest office in the land. Who knows, maybe one of these days they'll even manage it 46 times in a row. /s

...

Cut it out with the regurgitated Fox News talking points. My college has a university funded Bible studies club, an entire religion studies department, and a rather large college conservatives political club. My advisor is literally a Deacon in the Orthodox Catholic Church and another professor in the same department used to be a protestant pastor. Nobody is coming to brainwash your children.

Anyone else think this is a pretty bad time all things considered?

Hot take: the fact that HN comments have an academic/professional tone doesn't make the noise go away. It just makes it easier to pass for useful comments.

On huge threads with like 1k comments, I do find that the high quality ones float to the surface (having more to do with stuff like hiding vote counts and restricting down vote access IMO). However, it's not hard to find people confidently talking out of their ass making it to the top of threads with even hundreds of comments. Look for people talking about something you are an expert in (or do a brief google search on a topic somebody is claiming expertise in, especially if it is related to ideology) and it isn't hard to spot. There are even all the bad cliche comments of the other platforms even if they aren't as simple as "have an upvote my friend" or "username checks out".

I find threads on politics and culture particularly unbearable here because it's the exact same chest beating and narratives that you will find on any other platform except that the posters possess the same self-rightousness and academic tone as if they were talking about mathematical fact and not a political opinion. Even more so, it often comes without the self-awareness to know that your opinions and arguments are most often being taken from whatever social media you frequent. Everybody is a "free thinker" here even though they spout off the exact same political arguments as everybody else in their clique. It makes some threads pretty toxic IMO because of how seriously everyone takes themselves. I'm of course making general claims to which there are exceptions, but this is something I've seen.

Thinking that you need to be super-intelligent to post on or browse HN is a bad meme. Take the guy below me that thinks jokes on HN "require higher levels of intelligence to parse". It's the same mentality that part of the Rick and Morty fan base gets made fun of for.

Also certainly not an expert here, but here is a good definition I found:

Toxic masculinity is a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly “feminine” traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as “man” can be taken away.

It seems to be a catch all term for the problematic parts of the way men are idealized by society. IE stuff like how men can be expected to hide away their emotions or be perceived as weak. Stuff like that shows up in suicide statistics.

Part of the problem with understanding the concept, IMO, is that ideological forces have managed to sway part of the public (or at least certain echo chambers) into believing that the people talking about it really mean "all men are bad" or "traditional masculinity is bad." I think there's something real here that needs to be addressed though.

Edit: Case and point... somebody further down in this thread accused the term "toxic masculinity" of being designed by "academic Marxist feminists" who are waging culture wars in order to hyper-feminize small boys.

[1] https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-difference-b...

I remember watching some sort of British documentary on Alan Turing on youtube when I was in high school. It had interviews from all of the people that knew him during his lifetime. This was long before his story was popularized by "The Imitation Game" and so I can't find it now that there is so much other content.

Does anybody else remember it? It was one of the good ones. From what I remember, the "asshole genius" trope was greatly played up for the film and he was much more human than that even with the treatment he endured.

Having taught undergraduate physics (at one of the ivy leagues), that echos my experience. The math and memorization are quite simple. But, it is the exposure to the concepts that takes time and seeing them a year or two prior makes a big difference.

I ended up socializing a bit with the students during optional study sessions and it was usually the people that came from more disadvantaged schools that needed to be there in order to keep up with the class. Some of them also had to take a job (or two) to manage their bills during college which meant that they didn't always have the time to be at the study sessions.

I will also recommend reading "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler (Feynman's PhD advisor). Excellent discussion in a kind of old school style (which is how I like it).

Off the top of my head, that sounds like you're off in the pressure requirement by multiple orders of magnitude. The pressure used for the superconductor is enough to shatter diamond. Creating strain in a lattice like that would just shear the materials apart.

Does HN auto-captilize GaN to GAN? I was super confused for a second about that title.

Handwavey explaination: the particles pair up because of vibrations in the crystal. It's modeled like a bunch of metal balls on with springs between them and you can imagine tapping one end and sending a wave of vibrations through. However, these springs are a bit non-linear and so I imagine that if you pack the atoms closer together then you will change the spring constant.

The other knob you can use to change the vibrations is the mass of the balls. This can be done by using different isotopes of the same element and the critical temperature goes down with mass.

In a related note: I've seen a huge surge in good quality original products that were engineered in China, manufactured in China, and then sold by China. Take Rigol and Miniware for instance. They have the hobbyist electronic market captured and their gear is also used professionally. They have found the powerful combination of cheap and pretty good quality. They are full Chinese companies and I haven't seen anyone match them yet.

I'm trying to find and am not having luck, but I swear that Scotty from the youtube channel Strange Parts had an excellent interview with Rigol about this.

This is some nice work, but doesn't really pave the way to what I'd call "practical superconductors".

Of course, the material studied here requires some of the highest pressures we can produce and so we can't deploy the technology. More importantly IMO is the fact that we were already expecting room temperature superconductors with this route. There is a theory of superconductivity which accurately describes these materials.

The more interesting materials are the unconventional superconductors which have a high transition temperature. From the side of physics, we still have no idea how they work other than something involving many body interactions. Plus with their rising Tc, they might be a route to practical superconductivity.

The biggest argument to use a CRT to me is interfacing to a computer using a literal particle accelerator pointed at your face. How metal is that?

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

- Commander Adama

Not at a week yet, but all of my time is spent on derivations and then translating them to code too.

It isn't a problem in Julia editors.

You input characters using the same notation as latex (IE \mu or \hbar) and then tab autocomplete to unicode. Even jupyter notebooks support that convention. Most people in Julia's target audience know latex already and so there is zero learning curve.

It did hugely simplify my scientific code where I already had variable names like hnu, omega_squared, and k_prime_prime which become arduous when checking against long equations.

It 504s for me.

I think this gets at the discussion of whether education should provide you with a broad base of knowledge to appreciate a subject as well as use it or whether it should just, in a sense, add to your toolbox the minimum required methods to go into the workforce or move onto more advanced classes.

IMO, I really enjoyed learning about differential equations (DEs) and found that solving them analytically, besides being a nice intellectual challenge, also helped me with advanced courses later on. All of AC circuit analysis and the signals theory classes you take as an electrical engineer, for example, are firmly rooted in the language of DEs and just being able to plug some equations into a computer misses out on all of the real understanding you need to have in those fields to use them in practice.

One of the big red flags a junior electrical engineer can show, in fact, is too much reliance on simulation tools without having a good background understanding of what to expect from them.

here’s the paper, which is published in Nature, that famous scientific tabloid

Then they can say that themselves.

It's not nitpicking even though it might seem that way to someone who doesn't deal with these journals regularly. The two are so wildly different that making sure you are clear about the difference is quite important.

I've published in Nature Photonics for instance and if I listed it as a Nature paper on my CV then I would be lying. Any potential employer would also see that as an intentional misrepresentation (given how prestigious Nature is and how "normal" Nature Photonics is) and end the hiring process right there.

It's annoying that they took the name, but they are still literally two different journals. Saying that this questionable paper was published in the super prestigious journal Nature which is well known for desk rejecting most manuscripts is misleading and incorrect. It was really published in a much more commonplace journal.

It's important because I would be hugely surprised if it was accepted into Nature (and would be a much bigger story). Not so much for Nature Communications.

Whether or not Nature is tarnishing its name with these offshoots is a different story completely, but it is still true and an important distinction that the article was not published in Nature proper. It's to the point where I think most practicing scientists would know to look for whether it was Nature Nature (as one of our lab techs says) or some other derivative.

There's still two separate journals: "Nature" and "Nature Communications". The paper was published in "Nature Communications" and saying that it that it was published in "Nature" as the article did is factually incorrect. It was literally not published in the journal named "Nature." Those are just the facts here and aren't really up for debate other than saying that you should open up the paper yourself and read the journal's name from the heading. You'll find that it says "Nature Communications."

I agree that it is quite confusing and probably intentionally so to take advantage of Nature's prestigious name. That still doesn't make them the same journal.

Alternatively, I'm gay and even though I grew up in an area of the US which wasn't that homophoboic. I still hated myself for being gay enough that if I had an even slight attraction to women then I would have just killed off the male attraction side to me. If you're bi and grow up in a world where everything tells you that being gay is wrong, then that part of you that is attracted to guys will probably never get explored.

here’s the paper, which is published in Nature, that famous scientific tabloid.

One annoyance I've had with this whole discussion are all of the people saying it was published in Nature. This article even makes that mistake which I think is pretty egregious given that it looks like an academic website and the authors should know better.

The article was not published in Nature. It was published in Nature Communication. This may sound like a nitpick to an outsider but is a world of difference. Nature's impact factor is 42 versus Nature Communication's which is 12 and is wildly less selective than Nature proper. They are two completely different journals and the only similarity is ownership and a word in their name.

Edit: I just saw all of the comments on the article itself noting this. Glad I'm not the only one.

hasn't produced a single testable prediction after 30+ years

Not completely true. It is able model some aspects of quark gluon plasma. [1] Not a high energy theorist myself, but this is the retort some of my friends would give. It also is well motivated by an entire human history's worth of experimental data which any new theory needs to reproduce. Wolfram fails even to show that this is the case for his work. Note: I'm also not a "true believer" of string theory, but comparing it to Wolfram isn't fair.

Not convinced that's true.

Besides making a point about string theory, do you really have a reason to believe that? I know many high energy physics folks myself and work with some of them. I have never met someone that does this professionally that has given Wolfram's theories a second thought.

[1] https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news/091107/story2.asp

"It's friday and I want to go home" :)

But seriously, I'm sure it was made by people that just didn't stop to think about security and "it works, so we're done here" Then, as a business you're not going to try and fix it if the software already works. That would be pure cost.

Good point, even just being able to use it as a tool to play "gay or not" has some pretty aweful implications for people who aren't openly gay.

I guess the good news is that it requires knowledge of the user's email address to execute. You can't just run it on random people (emails aren't disclosed) and even if you know someone on the app in real life, chances are good that they use a personal address that you won't have.

Still a pretty bad vulnerability and pretty awful that grindr was ignoring it.