5 ms·

The article really already has that in it, better than you're going to get from anyone else.

by jerf 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
That simply is not true. HN is filled with subject matter experts that can break down complex topics better than popsci journalists, and provide commentary on how this fits within the framework of current and future research.
- krapp 5y ago
  HN is filled with people who believe themselves to be subject matter experts, and who refuse to engage with posted articles as they consider leaving the sanctum sanctorum of HN to expose themselves to the plebian knowledge and interests of others to be a waste of time. In other words, with people who wear their ignorance as a badge of elitism. Not unrelated, HN has a few actual subject matter experts who are often aghast at how wrong HN tends to be about any field or subject not directly related to programming, and how often their confidence is in inverse proportion to their knowledge. You can safely assume that while there may be actual, credible particle physicists on HN, their voices are likely to be drowned out by armchair expositors of bullshit ranting about dark matter being a hoax perpetrated by cultural Marxists or somesuch. Do the work yourself. Read the article yourself. Enrich your own mind and satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, don't expect HN to do it for you, or to be better than the mainstream in terms of general expertise, or you'll be misled and disappointed more often than not.
  - echelon 5y ago
    You're projecting here. I only stepped in to defend someone asking for an explanation from the HN community. I'm not putting aside skepticism and intellectual rigour when I read the comments here. I also think you're wrong about the members of this community. There are a tremendously wide assortment of backgrounds represented here. I come to Hacker News mostly for, not in spite of, the comments. I think telling people to not ask questions is dangerous. The person I originally responded to was not doing that exactly, but it felt borderline enough to remind them that the community here is filled with experts and teachers. It's also worth pointing out that we shouldn't silence curiosity. Attacking what you perceive as a lazy mind can only harm the desire to learn.
    - krapp 5y ago
      I'm not objecting to asking questions, I'm objecting to preferring the HN commentariat over at least engaging with the posted content. Asking questions after reading the article is fine - that's part of creating fruitful discussion. But HN does have a problem in that no one believes reading the article is worth the effort, and everyone prefers to just read the comments. The end result of that is a negative feedback loop of insularity and incuriosity, more people only engaging with the subject (or what they believe the subject is based on their reading of the title) on a superficial level rather than real intellectual discussion.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    "In Comments: Be kind. [...] Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" HN and Reddit are filled with people sneering at how dumb everyone else on HN and Reddit are. It makes for tedious reading, and a cringeworthy "I'm superior because I see how dumb everyone else is" status grab. If something is wrong, correct it or downvote it or ignore it; don't conjour up some imaginary mind-reading fantasy about how great the author must think they are and then sneerily tear down the strawman.
    - krapp 5y ago
      What status do you think I'm trying to grab? The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading."
      - jodrellblank 5y ago
        > "What status do you think I'm trying to grab?" The one where instead of saying "here's a good book", you side-eye your friends and say "OMG Becky can you believe it, they are reading Twilight! THEY think it's a GOOD BOOK! a-haw-HAW-haw-HAW!", where the purpose is not to enjoy whatever book you are reading, or to share good books with other people and why you think they are good, not to improve the quality of books in general or to observe and people-watch with curiosity, but to re-inforce that people who read Twilight are inferior and therefore your group is superior. From a PG essay[1] "When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people [...] will try to emphasize [their status] by maltreating those they think rank below. But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy." The status grab is "I must be superior to those people, because I'm here, and they are there so I'm not part of them, and they are inferior". > "The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading." That will continue regardless; a big part of your rant was that Dunning-Kruger dross about how people who write a comment on the internet without adding a pile of IMHO to it must be cock-sure idiots who don't know how dumb and wrong they are. If that's correct and they don't know how wrong they are, how are they going to identify as the target of your rant and change? If they are "soooo confident", why would they know to change their belief? The only thing that's going to change it is people pointing out incorrectness in a way that helps (i.e. without closing off avenues to change with insults), or downvoting it to hide it so it doesn't spread. In the "be the change you want to see in the world" sense. [1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
That article didn't clear up a whole lot for me personally. Maybe some others are like me. I also read the actual CERN article, which this article copied almost entirely. But after reading twice, what seems to be going on is that a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle. (That is the most unbelievable sentence I have written so far this year! It's just... wow. I didn't think that was even theoretically possible.)
- dukwon 5y ago
  > a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle This is not the case, and that would violate CPT symmetry. There are two states with different masses (the mass eigenstates) but they are not antiparticles of eachother. They are linear superpositions of the flavour eigenstates: |D1> = p|D⁰> + q|D̅⁰> |D2> = p|D⁰> − q|D̅⁰> where p and q are complex coefficients. The difference in mass between D1 and D2 is directly proportional to the oscillation frequency. If p/q ≠ 1, you have CP violation in this mixing. The amount of CP violation in this measurement was found to be consistent with zero.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Thanks. That's quite informative. But... having flavor eigenstates not being mass eigenstates is almost as mind-blowing to me. How is that possible? And, by "p/q ≠ 1", I presume you meant their norms?
    - dukwon 5y ago
      If you think of the Hamiltonian as a 2x2 matrix operating on the flavour eigenstate, there are off-diagonal terms arising from the amplitude of spontaneously changing from particle to antiparticle. The leading-order diagrams look like this: https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mixing.gif https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mix... You get CP violation even if |p/q|=1 but Arg(p/q)≠0.

The article really already has that in it, better than you're going to get from anyone else.

by jerf 5y ago

The article really already has that in it, better than you're going to get from anyone else.

That simply is not true. HN is filled with subject matter experts that can break down complex topics better than popsci journalists, and provide commentary on how this fits within the framework of current and future research.

krapp 5y ago
HN is filled with people who believe themselves to be subject matter experts, and who refuse to engage with posted articles as they consider leaving the sanctum sanctorum of HN to expose themselves to the plebian knowledge and interests of others to be a waste of time. In other words, with people who wear their ignorance as a badge of elitism. Not unrelated, HN has a few actual subject matter experts who are often aghast at how wrong HN tends to be about any field or subject not directly related to programming, and how often their confidence is in inverse proportion to their knowledge. You can safely assume that while there may be actual, credible particle physicists on HN, their voices are likely to be drowned out by armchair expositors of bullshit ranting about dark matter being a hoax perpetrated by cultural Marxists or somesuch. Do the work yourself. Read the article yourself. Enrich your own mind and satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, don't expect HN to do it for you, or to be better than the mainstream in terms of general expertise, or you'll be misled and disappointed more often than not.
- echelon 5y ago
  You're projecting here. I only stepped in to defend someone asking for an explanation from the HN community. I'm not putting aside skepticism and intellectual rigour when I read the comments here. I also think you're wrong about the members of this community. There are a tremendously wide assortment of backgrounds represented here. I come to Hacker News mostly for, not in spite of, the comments. I think telling people to not ask questions is dangerous. The person I originally responded to was not doing that exactly, but it felt borderline enough to remind them that the community here is filled with experts and teachers. It's also worth pointing out that we shouldn't silence curiosity. Attacking what you perceive as a lazy mind can only harm the desire to learn.
  - krapp 5y ago
    I'm not objecting to asking questions, I'm objecting to preferring the HN commentariat over at least engaging with the posted content. Asking questions after reading the article is fine - that's part of creating fruitful discussion. But HN does have a problem in that no one believes reading the article is worth the effort, and everyone prefers to just read the comments. The end result of that is a negative feedback loop of insularity and incuriosity, more people only engaging with the subject (or what they believe the subject is based on their reading of the title) on a superficial level rather than real intellectual discussion.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  "In Comments: Be kind. [...] Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" HN and Reddit are filled with people sneering at how dumb everyone else on HN and Reddit are. It makes for tedious reading, and a cringeworthy "I'm superior because I see how dumb everyone else is" status grab. If something is wrong, correct it or downvote it or ignore it; don't conjour up some imaginary mind-reading fantasy about how great the author must think they are and then sneerily tear down the strawman.
  - krapp 5y ago
    What status do you think I'm trying to grab? The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading."
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      > "What status do you think I'm trying to grab?" The one where instead of saying "here's a good book", you side-eye your friends and say "OMG Becky can you believe it, they are reading Twilight! THEY think it's a GOOD BOOK! a-haw-HAW-haw-HAW!", where the purpose is not to enjoy whatever book you are reading, or to share good books with other people and why you think they are good, not to improve the quality of books in general or to observe and people-watch with curiosity, but to re-inforce that people who read Twilight are inferior and therefore your group is superior. From a PG essay[1] "When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people [...] will try to emphasize [their status] by maltreating those they think rank below. But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy." The status grab is "I must be superior to those people, because I'm here, and they are there so I'm not part of them, and they are inferior". > "The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading." That will continue regardless; a big part of your rant was that Dunning-Kruger dross about how people who write a comment on the internet without adding a pile of IMHO to it must be cock-sure idiots who don't know how dumb and wrong they are. If that's correct and they don't know how wrong they are, how are they going to identify as the target of your rant and change? If they are "soooo confident", why would they know to change their belief? The only thing that's going to change it is people pointing out incorrectness in a way that helps (i.e. without closing off avenues to change with insults), or downvoting it to hide it so it doesn't spread. In the "be the change you want to see in the world" sense. [1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

That article didn't clear up a whole lot for me personally. Maybe some others are like me. I also read the actual CERN article, which this article copied almost entirely. But after reading twice, what seems to be going on is that a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle. (That is the most unbelievable sentence I have written so far this year! It's just... wow. I didn't think that was even theoretically possible.)

dukwon 5y ago
> a particle has a slightly different mass from its antiparticle This is not the case, and that would violate CPT symmetry. There are two states with different masses (the mass eigenstates) but they are not antiparticles of eachother. They are linear superpositions of the flavour eigenstates: |D1> = p|D⁰> + q|D̅⁰> |D2> = p|D⁰> − q|D̅⁰> where p and q are complex coefficients. The difference in mass between D1 and D2 is directly proportional to the oscillation frequency. If p/q ≠ 1, you have CP violation in this mixing. The amount of CP violation in this measurement was found to be consistent with zero.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Thanks. That's quite informative. But... having flavor eigenstates not being mass eigenstates is almost as mind-blowing to me. How is that possible? And, by "p/q ≠ 1", I presume you meant their norms?
  - dukwon 5y ago
    If you think of the Hamiltonian as a 2x2 matrix operating on the flavour eigenstate, there are off-diagonal terms arising from the amplitude of spontaneously changing from particle to antiparticle. The leading-order diagrams look like this: https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mixing.gif https://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/e871/public/images/Kaon_mix... You get CP violation even if |p/q|=1 but Arg(p/q)≠0.