Hacker News: emhs

New comment by emhs in "Mastering Emacs"

emhs — Sat, 23 May 2015 18:25:00 +0000

I hadn't tried Magit before now, but on the suggestion of this blog I'm giving it a look through. Looks good so far. I also enjoy the style the blog is using: anyone know what backend the author is using?

New comment by emhs in "Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?"

emhs — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:20:46 +0000

Somehow, even though Collapse is insane if you think about it hard enough, and even though Pilot-waves are semi-classical and seem to be adding an additional complication that may not be necessary, both of these seem to be more popular among physicists than Many-Worlds. Somehow, even though superposition is observed and observable, even though the scale on which we can observe it is climbing steadily larger, people keep assuming that it either dissipates sometime before our scale, or that it's an illusion produced by some sort of semi-classical, overcomplicated reinterpretation.

The original idea—that the wave function is the whole deal—works just fine if you accept that we can be in superposition too. If you simply accept that the entire classical concept might be an illusion, and work up from the wave function, there's no reason to shoehorn in an idea like Collapse or Pilot-Wave.

Yes, Copenhagen is wrong. Yes, Collapse is patently absurd. Yes, assuming that there is exactly one, stochastic, probabilistic reality makes no sense. But that doesn't mean we need to add something complicated like an underlying superfluid that supports all of spacetime. This smells like Aether.

Why does no one talk about Many-Worlds?

New comment by emhs in "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2"

emhs — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 03:22:17 +0000

What's this about the death of SMTP?

New comment by emhs in "Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?"

emhs — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:05:05 +0000

I've seen a couple new sites out here in the bay try paying "beta testers" $5 or so each to contribute a little content. I remember doing that with BlockAvenue (they advertised via Craigslist SFBay).

New comment by emhs in "Race Conditions == Random Number Generation"

emhs — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:22:27 +0000

Color me impressed. I do wonder if there's any way to reliably influence the pattern of the mutations. On the surface, with the differences in thread-scheduling patterns, I'd say it seems like a meaningful improvement on the randomness of the system PRNG.

If you have a sufficiently well-developed model of thread-scheduling patterns, then the randomness reduces in quality to that of the system's PRNG. But thread-scheduling is a serious pain, so this seems promising.

New comment by emhs in "An Update on HN Comments"

emhs — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:30:13 +0000

Some of this (especially the new post indicators) can be provided by a Chrom{e,ium} extension I've been using called Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0].

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...

New comment by emhs in "Sandstorm Personal Cloud Platform"

emhs — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 23:01:04 +0000

The key is that it's just like normal web apps, except they talk to each other easily, despite possibly belonging to different suites, and don't put your data at as much risk by operating on an external server.

New comment by emhs in "Ask HN: Will we be using Unix derived OS's for the next 50 years?"

emhs — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 23:44:33 +0000

I don't know if basing things on source is necessarily a negative. Perhaps better binary distribution mechanisms would be worthwhile, but maintaining the source-basis is a good way to ensure we're less susceptible to falling into a pit of proprietariness.

New comment by emhs in "People Don’t Actually Like Creativity"

emhs — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 21:38:39 +0000

They're right that people don't like creativity or dissent. There was a good post on Less Wrong about this [1], and about how the rejection of creativity, the rejection of what to you, is blindingly obvious, is key in the break between the creative person, the independent thinker, and their trust in society's expectations and sanity [2]. Seeing the things that the established process missed requires valuing finding a better idea more than how many people you might piss off along the way. It make take several ideas to get there, but you have to learn to reward your brain for producing ideas, and you can't expect society to provide that reward. You have to produce that reward all on your own, until you find the right idea and succeed with it. Then everyone shuts up for a moment, before talking about how they knew you'd figure it out all along, and they were starting to think in that direction just the other day.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/

New comment by emhs in "Taboo Your Words (2008)"

emhs — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 21:01:53 +0000

This is where the Less Wrong post on Occam's Razor [1] comes in handy. It helps make clear how to respond to someone who argues that backward perspective.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/

New comment by emhs in "Taboo Your Words (2008)"

emhs — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 20:57:36 +0000

As far as Intelligent Design, Yudkowsky has another useful post [1]. It's part of his sequence "The simple math of evolution", and provides some interesting perspective on the subject.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

New comment by emhs in "Taboo Your Words (2008)"

emhs — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 20:53:08 +0000

Well, one could call "Christianity" a superset of individual religions that fit within a certain range, and do the comparison off of individual denominations. That has the further advantage of demonstrating how individual denominations within Christianity often themselves have incompatible beliefs.

New comment by emhs in "Service lets you "certify" a document using the Bitcoin blockchain"

emhs — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 02:02:14 +0000

Hashing is performed locally, probably via crypto.js, so you can verify it, I'd wager.

New comment by emhs in "The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone"

emhs — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:55:15 +0000

Open source != free (libre) baseband hardware that you can directly modify the software on. Being able to compile and modify is fine and has no impact on the network if you're not able to run it on the primary network.

New comment by emhs in "The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone"

emhs — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 20:52:31 +0000

> The source could be released for inspection and audit,

Dude, that's exactly what he asked for.

New comment by emhs in "End of Inception decoded [video]"

emhs — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 11:04:55 +0000

Does Cobb know the ring indicates dream/reality?

New comment by emhs in "End of Inception decoded [video]"

emhs — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 11:00:47 +0000

Post-catharsis, pre-wake, in Limbo to get Saito, he has the ring. If letting go of Mal got rid of the ring, it wouldn't be there on him in Limbo.

New comment by emhs in "The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science"

emhs — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:44:11 +0000

Well, they're using the static, known density at 4 degrees Celsius to produce water with a known mass, and then test what the measurement of that mass comes to. Basically they're using a known mass of water as a calibration aid. But I don't know that this level of precision could compete with the efforts underway.

New comment by emhs in "The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science"

emhs — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:40:19 +0000

Because that maintains the imprecision. Multiplying won't somehow scale the precision up as you go. It will in fact magnify the imprecision.

New comment by emhs in "Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion"

emhs — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:04:48 +0000

The key difference is that we no longer posit that we know everything. We assumed we knew things we didn't, in ancient times, and in the process relied on hand-waves to keep moving, until some scientifically minded folks got too frustrated with the inconsistencies and started to accept that perhaps we didn't know it all. Now we know we don't know, and use the inconsistencies to tell how close we're getting to knowing enough to have consistent understanding.

The key is that we continue to improve our ability to gather evidence about what the universe looks like, and insist that our theories keep pace with the evidence we're gathering. So, the previous hand-waves occurred in large part due to insufficient data, and unwillingness to look for more. We've moved past that, to a large extent.