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flubert

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news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What evidence would convince you of intelligent extra-terrestrial life?

flubert
33pts42
www.doh.wa.gov 5y ago

Bluetooth-Enabled Anonymous Covid Tracking (Washington State Notify App)

flubert
1pts0
www.youtube.com 5y ago

Visual method for solving polynomials (Lill's method)

flubert
1pts0
Why US Malls Are Dying (and Why European Malls Aren't) 3 years ago

"Malls are dying" has been a meme for well over 20 years now. I guess it is "The Suit is Back" season.

Back in the year 2000, someone created the Deadmalls.com website that was notable enough to get a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadmalls.com

And it turns out there was a book published in 2002:

"Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls become Living Neighborhoods"

https://www.amazon.com/Greyfields-into-Goldfields-become-Nei...

...just a few random older articles from DDG:

From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"

"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125625/https://www.nytim...

From 2001: "Dying shopping malls reborn as old-fashioned downtowns"

https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-12/article...

From 2003: "Malls: Death of an American icon"

https://web.archive.org/web/20030707142032/https://money.cnn...

Cory Doctorow was talking about dead malls in 2003:

https://boingboing.net/2003/04/19/dead-mall-contest-re.html

From 1998: "Enclosed malls losing luster as well as tenants"

"Mintz thinks the vacancies signal a deeper problem -- that malls are outdated and out of touch with the needs of today's shoppers."

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/1998/02/09/st...

From 2018: "America’s malls are dying. Owners are hoping virtual reality and fitness centers will save them"

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-malls-revival-2018091...

Of course there are a plethora of recent articles as well:

https://duckduckgo.com/?va=v&t=ha&q=%22Malls+are+dying%22&ia...

0ThreadHN
Dark Web – Justice League 5 years ago

"When the parties agreed, they could lay their dispute before the moot, whose members, much like present-day mediators, attempted to facilitate an accommodation that the disputing parties found acceptable. When reached, such accommodations resolved the dispute in a way that preserved the peace of the community."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=586941

This is like a buy-one-get-one-free comment, not only is the above about evolved dispute resolution systems, it mention the moot.

0ThreadHN
Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge 5 years ago

You haven't been hearing it twenty years either.

Back in the year 2000, someone created the Deadmalls.com website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadmalls.com

...just a few random items from DDG:

From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"

"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125625/https://www.nytim...

From 2001: "Dying shopping malls reborn as old-fashioned downtowns"

https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-12/article...

From 2003: "Malls: Death of an American icon"

https://web.archive.org/web/20030707142032/https://money.cnn...

Cory Doctorow was talking about dead malls in 2003:

https://boingboing.net/2003/04/19/dead-mall-contest-re.html

From 1998: "Enclosed malls losing luster as well as tenants"

"Mintz thinks the vacancies signal a deeper problem -- that malls are outdated and out of touch with the needs of today's shoppers."

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/1998/02/09/st...

And it turns out there was a book published in 2002:

"Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls become Living Neighborhoods"

https://www.amazon.com/Greyfields-into-Goldfields-become-Nei...

0ThreadHN
Parable of Alien Chess 6 years ago

I think many comments here miss the point.

Is there an area of study that looks at how people discuss things? Including, but not limited to misunderstanding/miscommunication dealing with things analogies, thought experiments, and the like? So that you could make predictions. For example, since "story A" used analogies "B and C", then we'd expect ~50% of the commentators on said article will fixate on B, since that is their favorite topic, and they never tire of discussing B, even if it is purely incidental the point of the article. So you could potentially tailor your article help minimize misunderstandings. Micro-sociology or maybe some sort of specific behavioral psychology?

I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.

I liked:

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf

"...From his reply to EPR, we find that Bohr's position was like this: 'You may decide of you own free will, which experiment to do. If you do experiment E1 you will get Result R1. If you do E2 you will get R2. Since it is fundamentally impossible to do both on the same system, and the present theory correctly predicts the results of either, how can you say that the theory is incomplete? What more can one ask of a theory?'

While it is easy to understand and agree with this on the epistemological level, the answer that I and many others would give is that we expect a physical theory to do more than merely predict experimental results in the manner of an empirical equation; we want to come down to Einstein's ontological level and understand what is happening when an atom emits light, when a spin enters a Stern-Gerlach magnet, etc. The Copenhagen theory, having no answer to any question of the form: 'What is really happening when - - -?', forbids us to ask such questions and tries to persuade us that it is philosophically naive to want to know what is happening. But I do want to know, and I do not think this is naive; and so for me QM is not a physical theory at all, only and empty mathematical shell in which a future theory may, perhaps, be built."

...and...

"The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments"

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037

...but that probably only raises more questions, rather than providing answers.

0ThreadHN
Why Learn Prolog in 2021? 6 years ago

You will not make more money because you learn Prolog. I'd approach it like a hobby. Some people like collecting stamps. Some like pondering esoteric programming languages. With things like Prolog, you are closer to Nature, so to speak. Or maybe more mathematical. Learning about a lot of "modern" technology is a lot like memorizing minutia about the semi-arbitrary choices that have been fossilized and accumulating cruft over time. YMMV.

0ThreadHN
Parable of Alien Chess 6 years ago

I figured this was a riff on Jayes. From Chapter 10, section 8 of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" (starting on page 329).

     10.8  Mechanics under the clouds
"We are fortunate that the principles of Newtonian mechanics could be developed and verified to great accuracy by studying astronomical phenomena, where friction and turbulence do not complicate what we see. But suppose the Earth were, like Venus, enclosed perpetually in thick clouds. The very existence of an external universe would be unknown for a longtime, and to develop the laws of mechanics we would be dependent on the observations we could make locally.

Since tossing of small objects is nearly the first activity of every child, it would be observed very early that they do not always fall with the same side up, and that all one’s efforts to control the outcome are in vain. The natural hypothesis would be that it is the volition of the object tossed, not the volition of the tosser, that determines the outcome;indeed, that is the hypothesis that small children make when questioned about this.

Then it would be a major discovery, once coins had been fabricated, that they tend to show both sides about equally often; and the equality appears to get better as the number of tosses increases. The equality of heads and tails would be seen as a fundamental law of physics; symmetric objects have a symmetric volition in falling (as, indeed, Cramer and Feller seem to have thought). Of course, physicists continued discovering new particles and calculation techniques – just as an astronomer can discover a new planet and a new algorithm to calculate its orbit, without any advance in his basic understanding of celestial mechanics.

With this beginning, we could develop the mathematical theory of object tossing, dis-covering the binomial distribution, the absence of time correlations, the limit theorems, the combinatorial frequency laws for tossing of several coins at once, the extension to more complicated symmetric objects like dice, etc. All the experimental confirmations of the theory would consist of more and more tossing experiments, measuring the frequencies in more and more elaborate scenarios. From such experiments, nothing would ever be found that called into question the existence of that volition of the object tossed; they only enable one to confirm that volition and measure it more and more accurately.

Then, suppose that someone was so foolish as to suggest that the motion of a tossed object is determined, not by its own volition, but by laws like those of Newtonian mechanics,governed by its initial position and velocity. He would be met with scorn and derision; for in all the existing experiments there is not the slightest evidence for any such influence. The Establishment would proclaim that, since all the observable facts are accounted for by the volition theory, it is philosophically naıve and a sign of professional incompetence to assume or search for anything deeper. In this respect, the elementary physics textbooks would read just like our present quantum theory textbooks.

Indeed, anyone trying to test the mechanical theory would have no success; however carefully he tossed the coin (not knowing what we know) it would persist in showing head and tails about equally often. To find any evidence for a causal instead of a statistical theory would require control over the initial conditions of launching, orders of magnitude more precise than anyone can achieve by hand tossing. We would continue almost indefinitely,satisfied with laws of physical probability and denying the existence of causes for individual tosses external to the object tossed – just as quantum theory does today – because those probability laws account correctly for everything that we can observe reproducibly with the technology we are using.

After thousands of years of triumph of the statistical theory, someone finally makes a machine which tosses coins in absolutely still air, with very precise control of the exact initial conditions. Magically, the coin starts giving unequal numbers of heads and tails; the frequency of heads is being controlled partially by the machine. With development of more and more precise machines, one finally reaches a degree of control where the outcome of the toss can be predicted with 100% accuracy. Belief in ‘physical probabilities’ expressing a volition of the coin is recognized finally as an unfounded superstition. The existence of an underlying mechanical theory is proved beyond question; and the long success of the previous statistical theory is seen as due only to the lack of control over the initial conditions of the tossing.

Because of recent spectacular advances in the technology of experimentation, with increasingly detailed control over the initial states of individual atoms (see, for example,Rempe, Walter and Klein, 1987), we think that the stage is going to be set, before very many more years have passed, for the same thing to happen in quantum theory; a century from now the true causes of microphenomena will be known to every schoolboy and, to paraphrase Seneca, they will be incredulous that such clear truths could have escaped usthroughout the 20th (and into the 21st) century"

http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...

0ThreadHN
The Impossible Mirror Scene in 'Contact' 6 years ago

I'm apparently not a very attentive movie watcher. I've seen Contact several times, and nothing struck me as odd about this mirror scene until this article pointed out the obvious. Or maybe I become to engrossed in the story to notice these types of artifacts? Anyone have another favorite instance of subtle(?) movie making magic that a casual observer might have overlooked? And I wonder if the filmmakers would consider that good or bad that I missed this ingenious tidbit.

0ThreadHN
The Life in the Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable 6 years ago

$85,000, 4 bedroom, 2044 sf

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/308-W-7th-Ave-Milbank-SD-...

$89,000, 6 bedroom, 3,714 sf

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/801-Ogden-St-Oxford-NE-68...

$82,500, 4 bedroom, 1626 sqft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/522-1st-Ave-NE-Oelwein-IA...

$82,900, 4 bedroom, 1,424 sqft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/724-N-5th-St-Manitowoc-WI...

$50,000, 4 bedroom, 1,491 sqft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/130-Main-Ave-N-Fessenden-...

0ThreadHN
I made the DNA tricorder from front page HN. AMA 6 years ago

Does this make it feasible to make gardening robot that could differentiate weeds from the desirable plants? And if so, what is the cost of the DNA tricorder? If not, how many years are we away from something like that?

0ThreadHN