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Ask HN: What concepts have you never truly understood?

• tra3 5y ago
  Still don't understand dew point/vapour/condensation. When I read/watch about it it sounds trivial, but if you asked me to explain it right now, I'd say "I don't know". So I don't really understand it.
  • netizen-936824 5y ago
    Its all about energy. Water condenses when it doesn't have enough energy to keep zipping around in the air. This means kinetic energy, physical movement. Water has one oxygen and two hydrogens, this makes for a pretty polar molecule. At a purely mechanistic level, you can think of polar molecules like how magnets work. N is attracted to S and vice versa. In polar molecules, + is attracted to -. When water loses energy (like through cooling down which is just when it runs into other molecules and loses energy) it doesn't have enough momentum to not stick to other water molecules. When this happens they start clumping together and can fall out of the (gas) solution. Water in air is moving around pretty fast and this overcomes the attractive force of the polar interactions with water molecules, so no clumping (water droplets) Since amount of energy (temperature) determines how much water the solution (air) can hold, dew point is the temp at which the air is fully saturated with water molecules and can't hold any more. Water will condense if the temp is lowered past the dew point if we assume a constant water content and air pressure
    • tra3 5y ago
      I appreciate the time you took to write this up. I think this is the clearest explanation I've had yet. So, when I have a cold glass of beer and there's condensation on the outside of it, it's because molecules of water vapour bouncing around, cool down rapidly, lose their kinetic energy and end up being captured by the existing water on the outside of the glass?
      • le-hu 5y ago
        yea they just "warm the glass" giving it their energy, thus slowing down and eventually condensating because they've lost so much energy (cold stuff absorbs heat from the warm stuff) on the contrary if you boil the water like madman you're giving water molecules so much energy it flies away as steam :)
        • netizen-936824 5y ago
          Yea, from our huge perspective it's a bit strange to think about. Heating a pan means you're giving kinetic energy to the pan itself, the pan molecules are then smashing into the water molecules
• manbart 5y ago
  call/cc in Scheme. I’ve tried a few times to understand it (and I kind of do on a certain level), but still don’t get how to actually use it effectively in my code
• jschulenklopper 5y ago
  Time; the nature of time itself. I know that time prevents all things happening at once... but what _is_ time? How does it work? How did it start? Mind-boggling...
  • joaofiliperocha 5y ago
    Time is a reference invented by men
• magusd 5y ago
  trigonometry
• 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  Best trick that I have ever learned is to build resilience or “stick-with-it-ness”.
  • yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
    Do explain please?
    • george_ciobanu 5y ago
      This is my take on it: when you start something it's at first easy and then it gets really hard. Or boring. Or you get distracted or disenchanted. But if you stick with it long enough you eventually become an expert in the space (or what you are building becomes good enough) that it's not state of the art. And then you can innovate on it or sell it or sell your skills. But you have to get through that tough valley in the middle.
• simonblack 5y ago
  Atomic theory after about 1960. I had no trouble at all getting down to photons, neutrons, electrons, protons, etc and how both fission and fusion works. But when it came to quarks, mesons and spin, I could never work it out to my satisfaction.
  • CornCobs 5y ago
    I think the old adage about math applies to theoretical physics as well - you never understand it; you only get used to it
  • wnkrshm 5y ago
    I think to get some sort of understanding (instead of just operative understanding of quantum mechanics) you have to dive relatively deep into theoretical physics. Spin can then arise from enhancing the Schrödinger equation with a relativistic description of mass and impulse [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
• tonetheman 5y ago
  Haskell. Not a concept exactly.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  How gravity and mass and time interact. I get the description of planets in gravity wells and can understand the basic technical explanations. But it still just doesn't make rational sense on any level to me since I view time and gravity as static concepts from my experiences.
  • MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
    Same. The only path I see is to really learn GR (and the requisite differential geometry) and do lots of examples. I never got far enough to grok it.
    • FrenchAmerican 5y ago
      I feel that I sort of get it - after listening to many many podcasts by scientists trying to make it understandable. It took me years. And still I may be wrong, so please consider what follows as an essay. My first major step was to really understand that gravity is a law and not a force. This is totally counterintuitive since we feel gravity as if it were a force, and because many people use the expression "force of gravity". So a mass should be viewed as a "tag" that an object has - and the higher the number on the tag, the higher it deforms the space-time around it. My second major step was to understand that all objects, for example planets, always go straight along a line. They appear to have an orbit because they move in a space-time that is deformed by other planets and mainly stars or black holes. The moon goes along a straight line in its space-time. But the latter is deformed by the mass of Earth so it looks to us living in Earth's space-time that the moon is orbiting around Earth. The third major step is to understand that the two space-times mentioned (the Moon's and Earth's) are not "related". Someone on the moon lives in a different space-time than someone on Earth. So the duration of time that person lives on the Moon as measured by an atomic clock he/she brought will diverge with an atomic clock on Earth. The difference won't be huge, in truce very very small - but measurable. Everyone of us lives in its own space-time. Because the gravity is not equal on the point of Earth surface. Because of mountains, and because the Earth itself is not homogeneous, and because we move around and up and down all the time. In final, this means to get rid of two related notions that appear so self-evident that it is almost impossible to really get over with: - there is a common 3D space that we all share ; - there is such a thing called time that is totally independent and flows continuously. What really exists - for each person or object or planet - is its own space-time. And all these space-times are unrelated to each other. The proof of it is that there is a maximum speed limit to any existing thing. That maximum speed does not vary whatever are the speeds of two considered space-times. The only thing we know that reach that maximum speed happens to be the light in space. If the two space-times were related, then the speed of light would vary if one space-time is moving in a different direction and/or speed relatively to the second considered space-time. But it doesn't. So you and me don't share the same space-time. So, between two encounters, we won't have lived exactly the same duration of time. Our personal atomic clock, if synchronized at the first meeting will have diverged when we meet again. Of course, the difference will be so super small that it's unnoticeable to us (but measurable with today's technology). GPS satellites orbite at around 36,000 kms from Earth. That's far enough to make GPS calculations quite wrong if Einsten's relativity is not taken into account (by around 50 meters). That is noticeable. By the way, Einstein deeply regretted his poor choice of words. Because its theories of "relativity" precisely demonstrate that the different space-times are NOT related. We need to understand that space and time don't exist. Only unrelated space-times co-exist, within which time as we feel it flows at a different pace than in other space-times. But there is only one "Reality", right? Well... that really depends what we mean by that. The only common point among space-times is the respect of causality. That sort of reinstates time as we feel it. If A causes B, then B can not precede A. In a sense, events creates time as we know it. After all, we are all very often surprised by the time it is on our watch. So this "unstoppable Time that flows no matter what" that we think as self-evident in our representations ... just doesn't match our very variable perception of time in our lives. Isn't it weird that we commonly consider obvious a notion that contradicts directly our daily experience of it? Maybe it is time to reconsider the way we teach physics at school ; we learn Newton's laws and then we are supposed - much later if ever - to unlearn it in order to grasp Einstein's relativity. Some will argue that Newton's laws are good enough for our daily lives. Well... not anymore since we use GPS all the time. And Newton's law can't explain Mercury's orbit either so why are we taught Newton to explain the orbital system when 1 planet among 9 contradicts what we are taught? Science is by principle a work on ourselves to deconstruct reality as we perceive it spontaneously, through our senses, our biases and also the inherited paradigms from the established Science. It is super difficult to unlearn. If you play tennis for years without taking lessons, it is super difficult to train our body to unlearn the bad habit and learn the proper way taught by a professional. So maybe let's stop calculating where will land a cannonball without even taking into account the effect of the air! This is not even a practical teaching of everyday life since the major effect of air on the cannonball is obliterated to teach us Newton's laws that are not totally true either. Let's learn Einstein first. That the nucleus of an atom is 100 000 times smaller that the atom ; that no graphical representation of a nucleus composed of neutrons and protons is possible ; all these illustrations with agglomerated spheres of different colors are ... just wrong. Phycists don't know how to represent a nucleus, which is not a static thing but rather something that is animated by opposite forces but kept close by a vastly superior force. Physics is like History. We keep on learning at school things that we know to be at best approximate and very often just plain oversimplification that leads to misrepresentations that are super difficult to correct. Hence the so many Russians, including Putin himself, considering that Ukraine and Russia are historically one nation. Totally ungrounded but war nonetheless.
• yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
  Decorators in Python
  • turndown 5y ago
    Have you ever read the chapter on Decorators from Design Patterns? I’d recommend that for a full treatment, but basically it’s just a way of letting you add on additional work for a function call to do. If we had a decorator called @log(), and a function add_two, if we added this decorator on to add_two it will log the function call or some other aspect(as we define it.)
    • yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
      Wow thanks im gonna read that today! That explanation makes quite a bit of sense. Ive been reading over some code to try understand what it does and now its starting to make more sense.
  • mrfusion 5y ago
    It’s just a super fancy way to put a function around an existing function.
• yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
  Functional programming (and how it is even useful)
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    A lot of things can be conceptualized as an operation that takes some stuff, and gives back some new stuff, and does absolutely nothing else. It's like a lot of other strong constraints on complex endeavors. If you run with it you can get surprisingly far, but only by twisting your understanding of how to do things. Whether that's good or not seems highly personal though.
    • yoloyoloyoloa 5y ago
      Haha thanks love this explanation!
    • george_ciobanu 5y ago
      This is a great explanation. As someone who's a relatively recent convert to FP and am currently writing both imperative and functional code I will test my own depth of knowledge by trying to explain it 1. In traditional (imperative) languages you can have functions that deliberately or accidentally either modify the data they were given or do some other stuff that changes data somewhere else in your program or the computer. Let's take an example of each. Say you have a function that adds two numbers a and b. In imperative languages you could return a+b into b. In other words the sum(a,b) operation would change b. That's not cool in FP: you are (almost never) allowed to change the input you received. This way whenever the function is called with a and b it always returns the sum (otherwise if you call sum(a,b) again you will pass in a modified b). This makes every function guaranteed to always return the same value for the same arguments. If you accidentally try to change a parameter in your code it will fail. But you still need to make changes to the world - you do so by chaining these functions and using the output from one as input to the next and so on. Last but not least, functions that have side effects (e.g. print to the screen) are marked differently and usually their effect is isolated.
  • HideousKojima 5y ago
• psyc 5y ago
  Still don't have even the vaguest beginnings of a clue what the fuck a monad is, after reading 50 articles promising to make it simple, as well as their accompanying 500-comment HN threads. I suspect the real problem is that, as a C/C++/C#/ASM programmer, I lack concepts that are strict prerequisites, and people underestimate the importance and/or existence of those prerequisites. What I did was I gave up and no longer click those articles.
  • lwerdna 5y ago
    This is very relatable :) A workmate and I have fun making variations of "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors!" and sarcastically suggest the other tries OCaml, Haskell, or Idris when something isn't going their way.
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    I've been pretty deep in to functional programming for years including implementing my own little lisp with macros and all that shit and I still couldn't confidently tell you what a monad is. I read those articles sometimes when I come across them and feel like I understand a little more of... something... and I mean I have some intuition for what they are but still I don't really get it and never have.
  • exdsq 5y ago
    When you have some spare time write a function that returns a Maybe<Value, Error> and see what a pain it is to compose multiple of them. Then, try store your programs state by passing it as a function argument to every function so it stays available for the lifetime of the program (no mutable state? This is basically what happens) After realizing what a pain this is and wishing for boilerplate, look at the State monad. This is what did it for me :)
    • eternityforest 5y ago
      I don't see why I would ever want to do the first one in real life, when exceptions exist. I'm honestly not even sure what function composition is, or why you would compose two functions instead of just explicitly making a new function that calls the two original ones. The second one makes more sense because of the rumored bug-freeness of side effect free apps, but it seems like for that too, you'd need to understand a lot more than just monads.
• tipiirai 5y ago
  React hooks
• mft_ 5y ago
  OOP. I’m a self-taught programmer, so have probably missed lots that might help, but every time I come across anything OO, it always seems unnecessarily complicated and awkwardly structured. It always seems (to me) that everything could be done more simply procedurally. I don’t get why. Further, while I can follow OO code that others have written, as a beginner, how to structure something simple I’m writing de novo in an OOP style has a very steep learning curve.
  • andrei_says_ 5y ago
    What made OO click for me is watching some of the talks of Sandi Metz and reading her book POODR - Practical Object Oriented Programming in Ruby
  • nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    Are there any GUI frameworks that are not OOP?
    • pubby 5y ago
      I mean React is pretty popular. And then there's stuff like immediate mode UIs and FRP UIs.
    • kristov 5y ago
      Dear ImGui
      • prewett 5y ago
        Dear ImGUI keeps a bunch of state under the hood, based on the name of the object. It's not object-oriented, per se, but each object has its set of functions that operate on it, except that the object reference is not a pointer but a string. Kind of like object-oriented C (NOT Objective-C), but with strings instead of pointers.
  • psyc 5y ago
    FWIW, after I learned/memorized the semantics of C++, it did take me at least 3 years of writing lousy code to develop a sense of how to structure a program, e.g. what ‘should’ be a class, when inheritance is appropriate, etc. As for the why, I find it a useful formalism for how to organize (as in, group and associate) code and data, as well as a way to create mental-cycle-freeing guarantees (invariants).
• gedy 5y ago
  Redux (including Thunks, and Sagas)
• lwerdna 5y ago
  - How type theory can prove mathematical theorems. I can limp through the first exercises of Software Foundations, but eventually realize I'm just "making it work" instead of knowing how it works. Only made it halfway through My Little Typer and even implemented STLC and used it to prove simple propositions with implications. But I still couldn't tell you how dependent types magically make it possible to prove real theorems. - How opamps work and how they're used to make a differentiator. - How quantum computing works. I want understand it to understand why factoring and discrete log fall to QC but not the post-quantum algorithms. I never make it past the intro chapters. - What exactly makes cryptographic hash functions have desirable properties like collision resistance? Bits go in, bits go out, why can't full observation of the process not yield a method to construct inputs for a target output? Similar questions for block ciphers. It is much easier to "see" the impossibility in public key schemes because you can play and experiment with the math. In symmetric algorithms it looks like just a bunch of arbitrary bit operations. EDIT: - Relativity. I accept things like time dialation and nothing can go faster than the speed of light. But I have no idea why you would experience less time passing than me after a high speed rocket trip when, from your perspective, you saw me on a high speed planet trip. Or what prevents a rocket in space with 3m/s^2 acceleration from reaching the speed of light after 100,000,000 seconds.
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    >How opamps work and how they're used to make a differentiator. An op-amp is just a very high gain amplifier. It senses the difference in signal levels and just amplifies that difference by a large amount, usually between 1000 and 10,000,000 times. The first op-amp circuit you usually use is a negative feedback linear amplifier. In this circuit, the positive input to the op-amp is simply grounded. The input voltage is put through a resistor R1 into the negative (AKA inverting) input. The resistor limits the current into the negative input to Vin/R. As soon as the voltage on the input becomes non-zero, the output of the op amp becomes a quite large signal, of the opposite sign. If you feed a small amount of that signal back to the same negative input, (through a feedback resistor R2) the signal will rise until the feedback current balances out the input current. Now it's not exactly in balance, as there is a very small deviation that has to drive the amplifier to keep its output up, but for most uses the higher the gain of the amplifier, the lower that deviation has to be. This circuit has a gain of -R2/R1 If you replace the input resistor in the above circuit with a capacitor. It will pass a current proportional to the change in voltage/time and the capacitance. If you feed in a steadily rising voltage, you'll get a current into the negative input of the amplifier that is proportional to the derivative of the input voltage, the feedback current will balance this out, and you'll thus end up with a scaled up derivative of the input. This circuit has a gain of dv/dt * -R2/(1/c) If you start with the first circuit and replace the feedback resistor with a capacitor, you'll find that the output has to rise at a rate proportional to the input voltage to balance the input, making an integrator. This only works up to the limit of the output voltage, and there may be a small amount of uncorrected input bias.. to counteract this, a large resistance will be placed in parallel to the capacitor, to keep the output from becoming pegged with no input. This circuit has a gain of -Integral(Vin)* (1/C) / R1 Notice in all of these equations, the gain is the ratio of the -feedback impedance/input impedance Does that make sense?
• sparker72678 5y ago
  I can't reliably figure out the Big O notation of an algorithm for the life of me. I can compare two implementations and tell which is better/worse, but actually calculating it? Not gonna happen.
  • Jemaclus 5y ago
    I struggle with this sometimes, too. There are some examples that are very easy, but others that are very difficult. For example, finding a word in a dictionary. One algorithm is to start at the beginning and read all the way through until you find it. Worst case scenario, you read all N records, thus it's O(N). A binary search would start 1/2 way through, then repeat with either half, depending on which branch you take, and you wind up with a worst case scenario of O(log N). Nested for loops often wind up as O(n^2). Beyond that... I have a hard time being any more detailed than the ones I just mentioned.
  • quadcore 5y ago
    Well it can get hard sometimes. Ill assume you dont get the basics and try to explain them to you. For the sake of simplicity, it's just all about getting a ballpark of the resources an algorithm take (often time, can be memory too) without taking into account the specificity of the machine the program runs into. Let say the algorithm is x+1, x being a number. Now, you can certainly tell that whatever is the computer, it should be fast right. It's O(1). 1 here means, we know it takes one number (x) to compute the result. Wait you gonna say, it takes 2 actually, x and 1. Well yeah, it's 2 then. But it's always gonna be 2. Its not gonna be 3, its not gonna be 4, its gonna be 2, always. Lets take another example of O(1): x+y+1. How many operations here? 3. Always 3. So its always a constant number of operation and we call that O(1). Now let say we have the following algorithm: result = 0, for each x in L: result += x How many operations? Well now, it depends on the size of L and if L is big, its gonna take a while to compute. Its not a constant anymore. We call that O(N). N here means: the ballpark is: the size of a list. Its not a constant number of operation, its a number of operation the size of a list. Now, say you have: result = 0, for each i in L: for each j in M: result += i-j Whats the ballpark here? The size of a list multiplied by the size of another list. So O(N*N) or O(N2). Now youll find some algorithm runs at O(log N) on average for example. It means its in the ballpark of the size of a list but...no; weve been able to prove that its quite better than that. Say you search in a binary tree, on average, chances are you wont visit all nodes. On average the ballpark is better than the size of a list. Its log N. Why log? Because its a binary tree and binary trees divide by 2 the size of the remaining list after each step or operation.
• quadcore 5y ago
  I dont get why people say (with reason, Im not contesting) time passes slowly for a fast-moving object. Since there is no fast moving object since its all relative. My (wrong) understanding is that when you observe a fast moving object (relative to you then) then you should perceive this object as moving slowly in time. And my understanding is that we all go to the speed of light, since its all relative (which would explain why e=mc2). There is a bit I dont get in there. Namely, its relative but its not. I also have to admit I never tried hard to learn more about it.
  • leereeves 5y ago
    > Since there is no fast moving object since its all relative. I don't know if it will help you, but the explanation that worked for me was: "If two events occur at the same place in an inertial reference frame, the time between the events will be shorter than in any other inertial reference frame." In other words, each observer sees time slow down on/in objects that are moving fast relative to them (i.e. greater time between events). For example, if a spaceship zips past Earth at nearly the speed of light, someone on Earth will see the clocks nearly stopped on the spaceship, but someone on the spaceship will also see clocks nearly stopped on Earth. As you said, it's all relative - including time. Edit: As you brought up the twin paradox in a now deleted question, I should point out that this is indeed "wrong" (or just not applicable) to that scenario. This analysis is only for inertial reference frames and ignores perceptual differences due to moving toward or away. The twin paradox introduces a really mind blowing idea called the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, all the asymmetry in the twin paradox is introduced while turning around.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • quadcore 5y ago
      Basically, all the asymmetry in the twin paradox is introduced while turning around. Cause light goes at speed of light. Nice. Im intrigued by matter now. What is it exactly it does to a photon if I attach some to it. Edit: or more like, time must be why a photon doesnt teleport (or even exists), so matter does something to time. Matter and gravity must be the same thing or something. I wish I had time to study, love it.
• CornCobs 5y ago
  No one seems to be answering the second question, so I'll take a crack at it: When something just isn't clicking in my brain I move on from it! Then some time later (not a fixed time) I happen across it and read through it again with a fresh mind. This has happened too many times for it to be a coincidence, that the 2nd attempt ALWAYS makes things click very naturally. It has happened with probability concepts such as Bayesian networks or HMMs, optimization algorithms like EM, Monte Carlo sampling, bootstrap, functional programming concepts like monads, C++ move semantics; the list goes on. Whenever you're stuck, just take a break! And not a 30 minute coffee break but still at the back of your mind kind of break - completely forget about it and come back in a few days, a few weeks or even a month or 2 later
  • sbmthakur 5y ago
    Indeed. I prefer going for a run or playing a sport as it completely shifts the focus of your mind as well as the body. I have also noticed that cooking can also be a good mind shifter.
  • charlysl 5y ago
    Excellent advice. In my experience it works only if you tried really hard the first time though, even if you failed.
    • iKlsR 5y ago
      Agreed. I've never really gotten into neural networks, most of the times I start but get distracted or bored/lost and suddenly enough a Vertiasium video pops up and about everything just slots into place, stuff you've glossed over or heard before just make sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg. Start at minute 4:00.
  • MisterMower 5y ago
    College was immensely frustrating to me for this reason. You can’t just put it on the back burner for a few months (or even weeks): you have quizzes and exams coming up five days from now. I’m probably a slow thinker, but there are so many concepts from my engineering textbooks that make perfect sense now that were baffling at the time. There’s something about studying those topics in a relaxed, low stakes environment that makes understanding them much easier.
• perrygeo 5y ago
  git. Even if I understand the codebase well, I always manage to get my working branch into a merge conflict.
  • 8note 5y ago
    i always pull up the docs on rebasing and do that every time
    • klysm 5y ago
      I can not remember the order of —onto for my life but use it all the time.
  • throwaway_au_1 5y ago
    I'm not sure of your exact problem, so this might not be helpful, but learning about the reflog in Git accelerated my learning Git because I was no longer fearful of getting my repo into such a state, as I knew the reflog would get me out of trouble, i.e. I could try most any old Git op knowing that if I stuffed things up, I wasn't doomed to re-clone.
  • auspex 5y ago
    With Git everyone has their own personal repository on their machine. Like you could “break away” and be “the central repo and people could start syncing from you. So like remember it’s all “self contained repos” you’re just syncing changes from “somewhere upstream” Make sure you’re merging changes from your upstream regularly. When two people change the same area of code, you get a merge conflict. So sync often and merge often. Don’t wait until you’re ready to push to merge upstream or you’re gonna have a bad time.
  • TomNomNom 5y ago
    The Git Parable [0] was the thing that gave me my "aha!" moment with git. It may work for you too [0]: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html https://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.ht...
• gtirloni 5y ago
  Space-time
  • kristov 5y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc
• pyuser583 5y ago
  I understood Incompleteness Theorems for about five minutes 15 years ago.
• throwthere 5y ago
  How to start a successful SaaS business.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    Solve some problem people will pay for. SaaS is useful inside enterprises because you don't have to provision software on machines. SaaS is useful for entrepreneurs to build businesses by chaining APIs together. SaaS viz a vi Shopify is useful because smaller business can leverage larger Amazon like tooling.
  • auspex 5y ago
    The first part is finding something people will be spending money on in like a year. You either have to be in an industry and see the “next major iteration”, “now that this tech exists let’s make it simpler” or you have to talk to a lot of people to find a common trend. Once you have that you start talking and showing your MVP to people. They will give you product excuses not to buy. Use those excuses to slowly iterate your product to remove those excuses. If at the end there are no excuses and people aren’t buying your value prop isn’t strong enough. Start with “why are people allocating budget here when they could allocate it to something else” … it needs to affect the bottom line somehow because someone who’s buying your product needs to make a business case internally. So find a trend, iterate on the product, make sure there’s a “reason to spend money on your product instead of another product”
• Imnimo 5y ago
  I do not understand why the Oberth effect works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect I understand the math, but I cannot form an intuitive understanding of why it works. My brain just insists that it shouldn't matter how fast you're going, you have a certain amount of energy in your fuel, and that's all there is to it.
  • magneticDuck 5y ago
    Your fuel is measured in delta-V—the velocity you can accelerate by in an inercial reference frame—and kinetic energy scales with the square of your velocity.
    • kubanczyk 5y ago
      Yes, Wikipedia offers a grokable example of increasing speed by 1 m/s: > at 1 m/s, adding 1 m/s increases the kinetic energy from 1 J to 4 J, for a gain of 3 J; > at 10 m/s, starting with a kinetic energy of 100 J, the rocket ends with 121 J, for a net gain of 21 J
  • verve_rat 5y ago
    But the energy of the spacecraft is not static. As the craft falls towards a body it is trading gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy. Thus the fuel/reaction mass gains kinetic energy along with the rest of the craft. So at the lowest point to the body that reaction mass has the most kinetic energy. From here it could go two ways: a) The craft does nothing. The full mass continues to get higher and the kinetic energy the reaction mass gained is turned back into gravitational potential energy. b) The craft ejects (maybe by burning) the reaction mass. The kinetic energy of the reaction mass is transferred to the craft. Ejecting the reaction mass slows it down and that speed is transferred to the craft. Now the craft continues with all the energy it had going in, but because it is much lighter less of that kinetic energy is transformed back into gravitational potential energy. Or think of it this way. You have a big rock at the top of a hill. You roll that rock down the hill and convert 100 units of energy in to kinetic energy. At the bottom of the hill is a see-saw. The big rock hits it and launches a small pebble. That pebble still only has 100 units of energy, but it's moving much faster than the big rock did. It is not about getting more energy, it is about shedding mass at the right time to transfer (what starts as gravitational) energy from the fuel to the craft.
• thyrox 5y ago
  Why we say nothing can't go faster than speed of light when on the other hand we have quantum entanglement which shows otherwise. I knows this is a dumb question but please pardon me as my knowledge of physics is very limited.
  • pxue 5y ago
    Quantum entanglement has not been able to show any usable information can be passed faster than speed of light. So for example, if two bits are entangled, you flip one bit, the other bit flips at a completely unpredictable way. Hence, no rule is technically broken.
    • kristov 5y ago
      Hasn't some information been passed? You flip one bit, and if your observing the other bit you know the first one was flipped? So you know when something was done to the first bit...
      • atombender 5y ago
        But observing the other bit changes the outcome. The whole point is that you don't know the outcome until you observe one of the particles.
      • spartanatreyu 5y ago
        > Quantum entanglement has not been able to show any usable information can be passed faster than speed of light. The key word being: "usable". You can have two bits of quantum information entangled together so they are always opposite values. Then (while keeping the two bits entangled) separate the two bits and place each inside a box without looking at the bits. Then move the boxes apart to the other side of the world. Quantum Entanglement says that we can open one box to look at the value of the bit inside that box and know that the opposite box has the opposite value. Alice opens her box and sees the bit "0", so she knows that inside Bob's box is a bit with the value "1". So depending on which quantum mechanics interpretation you're using, Alice's bit has to share some information with Bob's bit to determine what each bit's value is. Depending on the time that the boxes are opened, we have experimentally proved that if information is getting transmitted between the two bits and if it is travelling through the space between the two bits, then it must be transmitted faster than the speed of light. The problem with trying to use this "transmission speed" to send information is that there is no actual way to send any usable information with it. We can open a box on our end to see which value we got, but we don't know if we got value because we opened the box first, or if the other person opened their box first. The only way to tell is to go and talk to the other person to tell them the time that we opened the box which in and of itself is slower than light.
• yamrzou 5y ago
  Inflation. Everybody talks about how increasing the money supply means increased demand, which drives prices up. But nobody explains how does this *practically* happen. Prices don't go up on their own, it's the retailers who increase them at some point. So if the retailers' perception of the reality is not accurate (Suppose for example that money was printed "secretly", or that the increase in demand wasn't very apparent) prices won't magically go up, no? There is a common knowledge component in all those equations that's missing and nobody talks about it. Maybe it's too obvious that I'm overlooking it.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Everybody talks about how increasing the money supply means increased demand, which drives prices up. But nobody explains how does this practically happen. Money supply isn't the only thing that does it, but when demand goes up sales go up, the additional production to keep pace with the sales has higher per-unit cost (because marginal costs increase), and everyone in the supply chain raises prices as a result. (That's simplified, a lot of price changes are anticipatory based on predictive singles, but that's the basic process that ultimately acts to align prices even if the anticipatory pricing misses movements.)
  • auspex 5y ago
    Companies compete for resources. When there is more money out there (low interest rates from the Fed) companies will be able and willing to pay more for resources. When that happens it becomes more expensive to create products which lowers margins. Companies need to keep margins at a certain level (effort is related to … is the profit worth it to run this business?) prices need to go up to keep those margins. Commodity and base resources go up—>retail prices go up Very simplified explanation.
  • moltke 5y ago
    >retailers' perception of the reality More food will be sold (because why not buy the extra whatever since you can afford it) the better workers will demand more pay (otherwise they can go somewhere else that can afford them.) It's much like gas exchange/osmosis/pressure. Sure the individual particles aren't "thinking" about the behavior of the macro system but their velocity changes every time they bump into each other and that creates the macro effects of osmosis, pressure, heat etc. In the same way inflation is a macro thing that results from the behavior of individuals. You can see it with boats and cars today: lots of people now have spare money and buy boats/cars -> people selling see that they can charge more (because there are fewer being sold, the ones that do get sold go for more etc) -> boats/cars are more expensive.
• ZYinMD 5y ago
  I'm a 5 year web developer and I can't understand what web3 is, after spending about 15 minutes trying. Good luck to those senators who try to understand or pretend to understand it.
  • HideousKojima 5y ago
    Instead of big tech giants like FB and Google controlling big centralized databases, you should use a decentralized (but defacto centralized) database that is less efficient.
  • gaza3g 5y ago
    Instead of recording transactions of a coin on the blockchain, you are storing web3 app data on the blockchain. Unlike a centralized DB controlled by corporations/organizations, it is distributed just like all the nodes in ethereum(for e.g). That was how it was explained to me.
• eternityforest 5y ago
  Most anything mathematical. Monads, kalman filters, algebra, calculus. Also, how people are able to practice and improve at something, like practicing guitar and eventually being able to hit every note, or being able to never leave their wallet behind, or stopping at every stop sign and never forgetting which pedal is the gas. The fact that people are capable of developing true "skills", where they can do every detail of something, every time, rather than just the vague familiarity a modern programmer needs to get by, just amazes me. I don't think I've ever truly acquired a new skill in the sense people usually talk about. I can't draw, paint, carve, drive, juggle, dance, etc. I can't cook without a timer, unless I stay in the room and don't do anything else. If something has a way to fake it with more tech, I'm pretty good at that. As long as I can hide behind the screen with my undo button, where my ability with my own hands is irrelevant, I'm fine. But there's nothing I can just do without thinking. I never know where I am. I run into tables all the time. It must be super cool to be able to just do stuff without planning every moment, and still succeed most of the time. Practicing and actually getting better just by doing something, rather than through research and accumulating a library of patterns, is a totally foreign idea.
  • Zababa 5y ago
    > Also, how people are able to practice and improve at something, like practicing guitar and eventually being able to hit every note, or being able to never leave their wallet behind, or stopping at every stop sign and never forgetting which pedal is the gas. That is something I can relate to. I do most things without really thinking and usually do pretty well, but this makes building skills in the long run very hard since I don't really think much. I don't really know why but I feel like thinking while doing things in the moment is hard for me.
  • Wiseacre 5y ago
    Are you able to tell right from left without thinking?
    • eternityforest 5y ago
      Nope, I have essentially zero spatial abilities. I get left and right confused constantly, and frequently write letters backwards(In addition to writing totally unrelated letters if I don't stop and think about each one) I also can't really rotate something. When I spent a few hours with a driving simulator game to see if it was at all possible one big issue I had was not being able to figure out which side was the right side of the road, relative to the new perspective after a turn. So I turned straight into traffic more than once.
• Brian_K_White 5y ago
  leasing a car
• tomcam 5y ago
  Difference between force and energy? If I hold a kilogram weight it requires me to expend energy. But a magnet can somehow do it for free?
  • le-hu 5y ago
    What if you hold the magnet that holds something? ;d I think we should talk force/work/energy/material structure. Force is just force, how hard you push something. Work is force times distance you moved that thing - moving something 10 meters is twice as much work as moving it 5 meters. Energy is the abstract term that is basically Work, but normalized so we can define energy of any action (not only pushing something but like heating this, or spinning that). Power is energy output per second. (not relevant here) Person holding 1kg first uses energy to pick this up, then unfortunatelly because we're squishy uses energy to stabilise muscles (chemical energy) holding it against gravity. Magned uses electric field energy (either static or dynamic cos there's two types of magnets) to pick up something - but once grabs it, it's no longer using energy (there's no movement) - things get 'frozen in time' and that thing magnet is holding just becomes part of the magnet. If you separate them - the thing "gives back" the energy to the magnet (you supply the energy by using force to separate them). Now the thing that hold the magnet holds both - as long as it's not squishy human but for example the metal bar - it does not use energy to hold stuff (thanks to internal metal structure that's stiff enough to not move under magnet's weight, of course there's a border value of weight a metal bar can withstand without collapsing) Think of a lamp post holding a lamp above a road - the post does the holding for 0 energy but someone had to use the energy to install the bulb up there. Person holding the same lamp would use energy because we're not stiff as metal.
    • tomcam 5y ago
      Thank you very much! Itch finally scratched! You had me at force times distance. I was forgetting about the D part of the equation.
    • tomcam 5y ago
      Still re-reading and learning more from it. Thanks a million.
• throwaway_au_1 5y ago
  I have a very poor understanding of mathematical operators and how they relate in formulae. How I have phrased that might even suggest how poor it is. I have learned 'what to expect' from operators, like exponents/log will graph curve-ily etc, but I have never felt a solid sense of understanding that meant I could see any formula containing beyond +-*/ and feel confident that my solution would be close to right. I recently tried to implement a basic compound interest calculation to graph something and understanding the formula did not come easily. By that, I mean that exactly what the terms represent and what each operation is achieving was something I really had to focus on. Being a dev, most of my counterparts have always seemed very comfortable with this stuff and I'm usually 30s behind. I'm really astounded when I see complex formulae - I just can't imagine ever understanding them, let alone coming up with them in the first place. It's easiest for me to just imagine that I didn't develop a brain that's good at this stuff. It seems ironic to me because one of the enjoyable parts of writing code for me is modelling scenarios, assigning responsibility, laying out entities, etc which seem (to me) like activities that exist in the same 'abstract thinking' kind of space that math is in. Maybe that's another thing I don't understand :)
• bjourne 5y ago
  I don't understand why x^n+y^n=z^n has no integer solutions for n > 2. I tried to understand it for a long time but it was too difficult so I gave up. :)
• austincheney 5y ago
  Certificates, certificate chains, certificate installation. In theory the concepts sound easy and there are numerous guides and instructions online. Once you try to become your own CA the challenge becomes real. Trying to write an automated solution cross-OS feels like running a marathon on your hands.
  • klysm 5y ago
    I’ve always been confused about this too. It seems to me like asymmetric encryption is all there is to it… shouldn’t it just be a bit of data encrypted with a private key? I don’t understand why it’s so complex.
    • PeterWhittaker 5y ago
      The basic idea is simple: A certificate is just a signed document. The document has been encrypted with a private key so that anyone can decrypt it with the public key and know which private key was used to encrypt it. The complexity comes from the many layers of detail that get added. First, we don't encrypt the document directly, because public key operations on arbitrarily sized data can be slow, require padding, etc. So we hash the document, and encrypt the hash: Hashes are fast, they produce fixed sized output (mostly), etc. Second, the document itself isn't an arbitrary document, it contains very specific, structured pieces of information. The two most important things are a) the public key being certified and b) the identity of the owner of that key. We need "b", the identity, so that when we decrypt a signature using "a", the certified public key, we can have some assurance as to who the holder/owner of the private key was. Identity gets complicated: A person? A machine? An email address? Etc. The original X.509 spec had directory names (think LDAP names) only; later revisions added email addresses, machine identifiers, etc. Third, why should we trust a certificate? And what for? Above, I wrote that the important things were "a", the certified public key, and "b", the owner's/holder's identity. Well, we also need "c", the certifier's identity. The original X.509, e.g., basically had a, b, and c, and some date information (during what period is/was the certified key, a, considered valid); we date-limit keys for security assurance, because we cannot guarantee that key pairs generated today won't be cracked tomorrow or next year or next decade. The bigger we make the keys, the more resistant they are, but the slower is the crypto, so we strike a balance and go for more frequently generated and certified smaller keys, unless we really need long-term, in which case we use bigger keys. But hash algorithms get cracked too, so, again, a tradeoff. So I've got a certifier's identity. Great. How do I verify the certificate they issued? For that, I need THEIR public key. Now we start getting into chains. Somehow, I have to have a trustworthy copy of the public key of the certifier, the so-called certification authority (CA). The CA's certificate looks like mine and yours, a document containing a (key), b (identity), and c (CA), and some date info, etc. I use that trustworthy copy of the CA's public key to verify a certificate, and that lets me know that I can rely on a, the key in that certificate, for some purpose. But what purpose? In the original X.509, it was "fill your boots", whatever purpose you like. Does that mean I can verify with that key? Encrypt with it? Use it for email, ssh, TLS, or even acting as a CA myself? Later versions of X.509 addressed these questions by adding various markers that a CA includes to say to relying parties "I say this certificate is good only for these purposes". You are free to use it for other purposes, but if you get burned, you cannot go back to the CA, because those markers basically told you the certificate wasn't to be relied on for that. Three of the most common restrictions are 1) is/isNot a CA (that is, does the CA recognize the certificate subject, the b, as a CA themselves? mostly the answer is no, this is an end-user or end-device; while there is nothing we can do to stop them from issuing certificates on their own, we DO NOT recognize them - the chain ends here); 2) encrypt/verify, used in two-pair cryptosystems, e.g.: the CA is saying that THIS key is good for verification, but don't encrypt with it, while THAT one is good for encryption, don't verify with it (there can be policy and security and operational reasons for all of those); and 3) purpose, e.g., this certificate is good for email only, that certificate is good for TLS only, this certificate represents a person, that certificate represents a machine, etc. Fourth, what about that trusted copy of the CA's public key? Where does that come from? That requires a specific action OUTSIDE the overall infrastructure, outside the chain of trust. In many cases, it is a certificate import: We specifically say to our system "trust this specific certificate". How it gets used, the purposes for which it gets used, depend upon where it was imported (into a root certificate store, an intermediate store, a machine store, a user store) and upon the certificate properties previously discussed. Fifth, and probably last, what if something goes wrong along the way? What if, despite my best precautions, a private key is compromised during the valid lifetime of the certificate? How do I let people know? That's where revocation lists and online status checkers come in. I cannot remember who said it, but they described revocation lists as wandering anti-matter for certificates. The basic idea of an RL is that it is a signed list of zero or more certificate identifiers - turns out certificates also include serial numbers which are intended to be unique within the set of all certificates issued by a specific CA. If the certificate is compromised, the CA writes the certificate's serial number on an RL. Part of verifying a certificate is verifying that it isn't on an RL. Like certificates, RLs have validity periods, so one has to verify that the RL is also valid. And that's pretty much what the original X.509 said about RLs. The expectation was that they would be in the directory (the whole point of X.500), in the CA's entry (the CA's certificate contains their directory name as their "b"; cf "a" and "b" way above). Original X.509 did make one distinction, between an RL for end-users, a CRL, and one for authorities, an ARL, but that distinction wasn't well described. What if I am not using a directory? What if I want to have multiple RLs, maybe for different purposes? What if they get very large? How do I segment them? How do I tell people where to look for the RL that would apply to a given certificate? And how do I know I have the right RL? If I am using a directory, what if an attacker replaces the RL I am expecting with another valid one? E.g., puts the ARL where I expect to find the CRL? Absent other information, the ARL will validate and of course the enduser certificate I am validating won't appear on it (it's on the CRL, the one the attacker hid), so it will appear valid. Finally, what if the reason for revocation doesn't affect my purpose? The simplest example would be revoking certificates because of a change in business purpose. Maybe the business went out of business in July, so anything signed by them after July is invalid, but anything signed before then might still be. Later versions of X.509 addressed all of these questions by including reason markers, revocation time markers, and a few other things. Most importantly, these later versions of X.509 included the distribution point concept, the most important applications of which are 1) segmenting RLs so that instead of having a single monolithic CRL, a CA can maintain many smaller, perhaps more frequently issued RLs, and 2) tying a certificate to a specific RL BEFORE it is compromised. In other words, the certificate contains a marker that says "if ever I am compromised, the CA will list me on an RL in this place", wherever that is. It goes one step further (since we trust signatures, not places): RLs themselves contain issuing distribution points that identify where they are from or are/were expected to be: The IDP on an IRL should/must watch the RL distribution point identified in the certificate itself. That way you can know for sure that this is the right RL: If this certificate is NOT listed on this specific RL, then the CA has NOT revoked it. This gets around attacks on the storage place, e.g., the directory, etc. And that's just the management side of PKI, Public Key Infrastructure, and doesn't touch the crypto side, which is as complex. So, yeah, it's a complex ball of wax. (I worked for a PKI company for many years in the 1990s, did some PKI work before then, some X.500 work before that, and an awful lot of PKI, security, compliance, audit, and directory consulting in the first two decades of this millennium, but right now I mostly write code, either for high assurance network security devices or for an integrated risk and compliance management software product; this quarter is mostly the hardware product....)
• entropicgravity 5y ago
  Entropy.
  • le-hu 5y ago
    your nickname says otherwise :>
• george_ciobanu 5y ago
  Eigenvalues. I can do the math for them but don't quite understand what their intuitive meaning is - if any.
  • goldtownjac 5y ago
    This would have been my answer too, before I found this [0] video. If only I had found it during my EE degree, not after… [0] https://youtu.be/ue3yoeZvt8E https://youtu.be/ue3yoeZvt8E
    • george_ciobanu 5y ago
      Thank you both, that was super helpful
  • klysm 5y ago
    Geometrically, it’s the vector that remains on the same line after applying the linear transformation of a matrix.
• gxt 5y ago
  The halting problem hegemony. I can tell if a program would exit eventually or not. At some point there must be a subset of all possible programs we can tell, can stop, and can tell would stop under x,y,z conditions. So the whole problem thing always felt like a strawman.
  • JohnDeHope 5y ago
    I run into this problem a lot on my day job. A lot of things are easy for people to do. A person can look at one example and categorize it A or B. No problem. But trying to get a computer to do it, en masse, at scale, algorithmically, in a reasonable amount of time, can be impossible. Some things just require a fuzzy neural network, I guess. One thing about the halting problem too... the computer can't run the program to determine if it halts or not, it has to be able to tell through essentially static analysis, without running it. I'd say for a human looking at a program, if they did the classic "run the program in my head" which many of us learn to do, then you aren't really abiding by the halting problem's strictures. It may not be as easy to "tell" as you think!
    • Tainnor 5y ago
      > the computer can't run the program to determine if it halts or not, it has to be able to tell through essentially static analysis, without running it. Not really, as a turing machine is fully able to simulate any other turing machine. The problem is not that the "termination checker" may not run the program it's checking (it is allowed to do that). The problem is that if that program runs forever then the "termination checker" program will also run forever and thus never return "yes" or "no". (You could say, well just output "no" if the program runs for longer than x days / weeks / months / years, but it's quite easy to write programs that run for a very long time but do eventually terminate. At best, you'll manage to write a checker that can output "yes" or "I don't know").
  • twistier 5y ago
    Can you? Try proving the Collatz conjecture. It's a very simple program.
  • 5y ago
• JohnDeHope 5y ago
  I've never been able to fully grok parsers. I can write them, but can't make a functioning programming language out of them. I've read books, some of my favorite programming books ever (hat tip to Robert Nystrom). I've read papers, some of my favorite papers ever. But I never can quite seem to get it all to stick.
  • burntoutfire 5y ago
    > I can write them, but can't make a functioning programming language out of them. What do you mean? A parser is just a program that parses input following a grammar into some kind of internal representation. Did you mean you can't write a compiler? A parser is just a small part of that.
• prewett 5y ago
  I've never been able to understand how matrices like 3D transformations relate back to the idea that a matrix represents a set of linear equations. What set of 4 equations are 3D matrices representing?
  • jportet 5y ago
    I'll take a stab at this. Remember that linear transformations satisfy: 1. T(ax) = aT(x) 2. T(u + v) = T(u) + T(v) Consider a linear transformation from Rn to Rm. i.e. T[x1,...,xm] = [y1,...,yn]. Let's simplify the left-hand side with what we know about linear transformations: T[x1,...,xn] = T[x1,0,...0] + ... + T[0,...0,xn] (by 1). And T[x1,...,xn] = x1T[1,0,...,0] + ... + xnT[0,...,0,1] (by 2) We don't know what T[1,0,...,0],...,T[0,...,0,1] will be (cause we're generalizing for any linear transformation) so let's just assume the values will be [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn]. So now we have: [y1,...,yn] = x1[c11,c12,...,c1n] + ... + xn[cm1,cm2,...,cmn] And using the properties of linear transformations we can revert it back to the original form: [y1, ..., yn] = [x1c11 + x2c12 + ... + xnc1n, ..., x1cm1 + x2cm2 + ... + xncmn] So no matter the linear transformation, all entries yi of the vector you output will be equal to a linear combination of x1,...,xn. So if all linear transformations satisfy this condition, what makes a linear transformation different from the others? It will be the set of coefficients [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn] that multiply with the x values. This set of coefficients is unique to every linear transformation from m to n (it's what defines it), this means that we can set up a one-to-one correspondence between these coefficients [c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn] and any linear transformation (from m to n)! So let's make it easier for ourselves to describe every single linear transformation from m to n by setting up a rectangular array of the coefficients with m rows and n columns: [[c11,c12,...,c1n],...,[cm1,cm2,...,cmn]]. And so if we find a matrix [[A,B],[C,D]] then we immediately know it corresponds to the linear transformation [y1, y2] = [Ax + By, Cx + Dy] Note: You won't find a one-to-one correspondence between a matrix and a non-linear transformation with this method because non-linear transformations could have terms like xy, x^a, sin(x), etc... that can't be captured by a linear combination.
• audiometry 5y ago
  How astronomers “see into the past” by looking at dim stars, and how bigger telescopes see farther back in history?
  • adamhp 5y ago
    You probably know that light has a speed, right? It takes time for light to get from point A to point B. Even from our Sun, light takes around 8 minutes to reach us. From that, you are actually viewing the Sun (relative to yourself) from about 8 minutes ago, by the time the light reaches you. If the Sun just disappeared magically, you wouldn't really know it for about 8 minutes while the light traveled from where the Sun used to be, to your eyes on Earth. So, expand that concept to distances that are billions of not just minutes, but years. A "light year" is just how far light travels in an Earth year. So, we can see about as "far" as 13.5 billion light years away. Which also implies we can see as "far back" (in time) as 13.5 billion years ago.
    • audiometry 5y ago
      Yeah, I understand that the photon hitting my eye right now was ejected from the sun 8 minutes ago. And if I could see it, a photon hitting my eye now from the big-bang was ejected 13bn years ago. But if I have some super telescope here on earth, and I'm looking through it now, the photon that hits the eyepiece of the telescope also was ejected 13bn years ago. I don't see how magnification allows me to see even older photons.
      • burntoutfire 5y ago
        Maybe there's fewer of those old photons reaching us from any particular angular slice of the sky, so you need a more sensitive detector to see them?
• 7373737373 5y ago
  - how mathematicians reason about proof space, when obtaining any metamathematical property of a statement - such as proof complexity - is formally undecidable - the mathematical formulation and simulation of relativistic systems and the standard model - quantum anything - axiom independence proofs/"forcing" - the shader pipeline - historical mindsets that caused religious schisms - why individual particle decay is truly random - how to reason about complex electronic circuits - why it makes sense for countries to artificially devalue their currency - how the execution of passed laws is organized - how dna recombination works - p-values and tests of randomness - mathematical induction
  • le-hu 5y ago
    If someone buys your bond for 10 mil of X currency, you have to pay them back 11mil in couple years, if you devalue the currency in the meantime you just pay them back worthless papers while they've invested real money into you back in the day. Also US dollar is like global currency (everybody country trades in that) - so like 70% of dollars are outside of US. While US prints 100 bucks, 30% of devaluation hits US, 70% hits the world - that's why the world is pissed at US FED printing money like crazy.
  • kobalsky 5y ago
    > - why it makes sense for countries to artificially devalue their currency it's an unavoidable tax. if there are 100 bills in circulation and I print 100 more, I took 50% of the purchasing power of the bills that were originally in circulation.
• giardini 5y ago
  jportet says: >"Is there a specific topic, concept, etc.. that no matter how many times you try to wrap your head around, you can't ever seem to get it? "< Yes, <edit>Russian political thought patterns</edit> Make that 'Political thought patterns' or hell, maybe just "Thought." >"If you were in this situation, what would you do?"< Go to war? Kill the enemy? But seriously, I'm completely flummoxed by human group behavior vs individual behavior [i.e., the crowd vs the individual]. We have no meaningful way of extrapolating from one to the other. The closest complete model is thermodynamics, which is so primitive as to be useless in this context.
• peter-m80 5y ago
  Covariance and contravariance
• disambiguation 5y ago
  Bell's theorem. I did an whole B.S. in physics and I could just never get it.
• gnuvince 5y ago
  "Modern" devops (and kubernetes). It seems to me that people want to avoid human error and dependence by replacing human operators with complex networks of dozen of services, each of which can fail in isolation or in conjunction with others. How do we measure the costs and benefits of putting in all that extra complexity in our stacks, how do we ensure that the friction they cause will not be a greater detriment than the previous situation they aim to improve? Are we in a situation where the solutions to existing problems have so many problems themselves that they need solutions of their own, thus creating an infinite tower of ever more complex software?
  • vladfr 5y ago
    The crux of the issue is scaling. Devops is, for the most part, automation. You could never run 500 nodes across 10 geos and 2 clouds by hand. What works for 100 http reqs/s cannot work for 100k. Kubernetes is a different beast. Most people think of it as a cluster manager: instead of managing your own nodes, then running scripts or automation on them, you write a bunch of yaml and K8s deploys and runs it. While that is fine and true, that's not why Kubernetes was built. Instead, k8s is a platform for building platforms. You don't run your microservices on it, you run your clouds on it, which in turn run your stuff. At this level, you can see why you need the comical amount of complexity.
  • seanw444 5y ago
    This is it for me as well. The best way I can describe it is "bloat."
  • plooooooop 5y ago
    The best success measurement is described in Google’s SRE book: you’re doing it right when you can scale the number of services/features/products/customers you support faster than the size of your ops/devops/sre team.
• pjungwir 5y ago
  The three forms of heat are radiation, convection, and conduction. I see how radiation is different. But how are convection and conduction different? Conduction is heat transferred when things are touching. Convection is heat transferred via a gas or liquid---but isn't that just a special case of conduction, applied transitively (from a solid A to a gas/liquid B to a solid C)? It doesn't seem like it's genuinely something different.
  • le-hu 5y ago
    Because you are right - convection is just a special case of conduction https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/497923/is-convection-just-a-variant-of-conduction-where-the-matter-is-circulating https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/497923/is-convec...
  • yesvee 5y ago
    Convection is with fluids. The molecules themselves move (not just transfer of energy). So different issues arise.
• MAMAMassakali 5y ago
  Basic explanation for hawking radiation. Maybe the concept is too complicated to be explained in simpler terms.