xelxebar

65 ms·

691.
by xelxebar 8y ago
> String Theory feels like a theory which is starting at the wrong place. I think there's also a place for setting aside our prescriptive rulers and looking at String Theory in its own right. As a programme it has contributed signif
692.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Regarding energy production and climate in general, the sheer abundance of data and articles has, overall, left me feeling less informed than when I started. However, another HNer introduced me to this amazing site: https://ourwo
693.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Oh sweet. I was an xmonad user for years and just recently switched to bspwm. Defining the entire control interface on a socket feels very much in the aesthetic of Plan 9---expose control that interops well with coreutils and friends. My pr
694.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Not OP, but I have a hard time killing any insects. Will capture and place them outside if I find any in my home. Watching the little guys move around, they just seem to be doing the best with what they got. I kind of see myself and humans
695.
by xelxebar 8y ago
I'm a Ph.D. student in a pure math field, and just coming from personal experience, the overall relationship with TeX is a pretty strained one. The overwhelming majority of working out is done by hand on paper or a chalk board. That sa
696.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Ooh. My curiosity is piqued. What bird is this? If like to read up a bit more.
697.
by xelxebar 8y ago
> No, you've misunderstood my argument. I'm jumping in the middle here, but mind if I make a meta-comment? Phrases like "you've misunderstood my words" can sound quite confrontational and, in my experience, tend
698.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Oh cool. My thought process went pretty much the same way. Essentially we're just using time as units and dividing circumference by diameter. The nice denominator is what makes this interesting at all though, so the question sort of bo
699.
by xelxebar 8y ago
The impact on livable land is a good point, though we also should probably consider how many lives we're willing to sacrifice for said land. If swapping out nuclear for photovoltaics saves 100 km^2 of land but costs one more life on av
700.
by xelxebar 8y ago
In spirit, yes. However, it gets more interesting if we try to make Occam's Razor more precise with something like Solomonoff induction, then it get's trickier to decide in practice what "simpler" actually means. Even if
701.
by xelxebar 8y ago
The Japanese is also awkward. The recording is also extremely non-native.
702.
by xelxebar 8y ago
Just in case anyone's interested, I think this is the primary paper being discussed: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0147-7 which redirects to the Nature Energy page and so is behind a paywall. I'm not sur
703.
by xelxebar 8y ago
This is a nice misrepresentation. Your Vixie cron example offloads the day of week check to `date`. I'm sure there are examples where mcron syntax is superior to anacron as well. I didn't know about mcron until this post either, b
704.
Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful x86 assembly code?
278 points by xelxebar 9y ago|87 comments
705.
by xelxebar 9y ago
> This problem is why getting two tests is always a good thing... It's important to note that the tests results should ideally be as uncorrelated as possible. At worst a test always gives the same result as its first outcome, so fur
706.
by xelxebar 9y ago
I completely understand your frustration, but let me offer somewhat of a different view. Try reading Euclid's Elements. It was written before equations had been invented and is for the most part "plain language". However, it
707.
by xelxebar 9y ago
FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME https://www.youtube.com&#x
708.
by xelxebar 9y ago
Not quite sure, but I think this is the main paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02711 Just reading the titles of Riess' other papers on arXiv gives an interesting peek at the clever work that went into
709.
by xelxebar 9y ago
In this vein, are there some people here who use Guix as their daily driver? I'd be interested in hearing experiences, comparisons, etc. I have both nix and guix stores on my (voidlinux) system just trying them out. Package availabilit
710.
by xelxebar 9y ago
Here's the original paper, for those interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10007 Looks to be from September of 2017.
711.
by xelxebar 9y ago
> under the hood Surely, we don't have to work with raw quantum electrodynamics when designing an FPGA, even though that's what's going on "under the hood". Thinking that way, gets me wondering about different la
712.
by xelxebar 9y ago
Your point about a prior distribution over universes is a good one. It just got me thinking about the quantum version of the Sleeping Beauty problem. Apparently, Sean Carroll has used this kind of idea and Everettian mechanics to derive the
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by xelxebar 9y ago
> I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse. The example I have in mind is the Everettian interpretation of QM. Formally, we have a Hilbert space and decoherence
714.
by xelxebar 9y ago
Occam's Razor, essentially. The basic idea is that most multiverse notions arise naturally out of lower level mechanisms. A theistic explanation requires extra low level mechanics. Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X
715.
by xelxebar 9y ago
Just curious, but what use case do you have for such a voluminous quantity of hardlinks?
716.
by xelxebar 9y ago
I just wanted to mention that the Schwartzchild metric doesn't only apply to black holes. It's the general metric for a spherically symmetric, static space-time, so it's good for roughly spherical bodies like stars and planet
717.
by xelxebar 9y ago
I'm working through Sean Carroll's "Spacetime and Geometry". So far it's been quite accessible and is replete with exercises. Carroll's explanations do a really good job of motivating definitions while also int
718.
by xelxebar 9y ago
I'm not sure what class of error this is, but it's a common reasoning mistake in discussions on evolution. By your same logic, you could pick any species at all and call their traits "the winning strategy for long-term surviv
719.
by xelxebar 9y ago
It seems like you got snared by the title. My gut reaction was the same, but I was pleasantly surprised by the article. Its main point is that ageing follows a roughly Gompertz-Makeham distribution, the statistics of which also nicely descr
720.
by xelxebar 9y ago
You might like the book Axiomatic. It's a collection of short stories by Greg Egan, and one of them has a plot involving Chiral humans.

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