The Decline of E-Empires (Paul Krugman) - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/opinion/krugman-the-decline-of-e-empires.html#!

<comment><USER2> "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Paul Krugman, 1998

<comment><USER3> Adjusted for inflation, I would not at all be surprised if that was right. The FAX machine was a critical business tool for a large fraction of businesses for a very long time.

<comment><USER2> If you turn off everybodies fax machines right now, it's a bit of an inconvenience. If you turn the internet off right now, it's a major global disaster impacting the economy as well as every other activity of modern societies.

Adjusted for inflation, I'd say people do have something to say to each other, as well as that the economic, social and otherwise impact of the internet is enormous.

Ironically, this written on the internet...</comment></comment></comment>


Walmart will start requiring all customers to wear masks - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/business/walmart-masks/index.html <comment><USER2> I have my plague doctor mask all ready for this, but honestly I don't find much reason to go in to a Walmart store anymore. Overall retail shoppers have become a lot more self-centered and a lot less socially aware than they used to be. Walmart seems to have a excessive concentration of these people.

I remember being taught as a child don't leave your cart in the middle of the isle when you need to get something or examine a product. Move it to the side so there's room for people to pass. To be aware of others around you who might want to get products your standing in front of and move to the side so they can get them. These kind of basic things have vanished. It seems people don't even try and corral their children anymore, or at least that its so common it seems everyone is this way.

While Walmart can't always control their patrons they seem to have management issues to. The express line seems to allow and ever increasing number is items. They usually put the oldest and slowest worker on the express line instead of the fastest. The self checkout is kind if a joke of a mess herding people around.

I guess if there was no other options Walmart would be where I would go, but it's so rare for me to even step in their store anymore. I'll order Walmart products online, but in store shopping they better have a fantastic deal but overall their prices are that much different than other places that don't have that kind of Walmart mess.

<comment><USER3> > They usually put the oldest and slowest worker on the express line instead > of the fastest

They put whoever is available there.

Your belief that walmart goes out of its way to inconvenience you is laughable, as you call walmart shoppers self centered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprising that all these big box retailers are allowed to be open at all when smaller businesses are forced to close.

</comment><comment><USER5> All reports I've heard from family members indicate that Walmart store managers refuse to enforce any mask requirements of any sort.

I don't think this corporate policy change is going to have any impact on that.</comment>


The Reality Self-Simulation Principle - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/file?h=37075171&i=5607562 <comment><AUTHOR> Chris Langan showed reality is a closed self generating simulation since his first paper in 1989, please give the man any credit? No?

</comment><comment><USER2> Well. I'm not fond of "metaformal" thingies.

It's nice that we have universal formal systems like cellular automata, Turing-completeness and all. Yet formalism ever only happens on an actual substrate.

The substrate typically has different principles and the properties necessary for the formalism built on top emerge from lower-level, simpler interactions, that typically have nothing to do with the formalism.

This is why quantum mechanics appears so weird. The substrate is so different from the emergent formalism of classical mechanics that we have to give up the mere notion of time that seemed so central.

For another example of unexpected substrate you can build logic gates on top of the overall behavior of swarm of crabs [http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.p...](http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.pdf) . In theory, with enough logic gates you can build a Turing-complete system. Not a very efficient one, sure. Generally, remember not all outcomes are determined by efficiency, only by chains of causality.</comment>


Internet Monarchists Are Coming for Your Children - <AUTHOR> https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/07/06/internet-monarchists-2/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. Possibly also relevant: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> a defector explained subversion very clearly back in the 1980s "after it is done, no one is sure what is true and there is nothing you can do to roll it back. The only defense you have against it comes from older institutions like religion." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgmg2VFX058](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgmg2VFX058)</comment>


Applied Cryptography Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cryptography/ <comment><USER2> Normally tptacek would be right here to shill for himself, but I don't see him around, so I'll say it for him:

If you're interested in learning about the ideas in this piece via practical attacks you perform yourself, you should definitely check out his company Matasano's Crypto Challenge:

[http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto- challenges/](http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/)

I've gone through the whole thing, and I can report that it's incredibly fun and incredibly enlightening. And you won't have to read a book to figure out that what Thomas is talking about here is legit.

<comment><USER3> Persistence is key to participation -- they've got almost 10,000 participants, and e-mails seem to fall through the cracks sometimes. (I've been trying to turn in my set 4 answers for two weeks. Hopefully some filter isn't eating my e-mails because they contain the phrase "#YOLOSWAG"...)

<comment><USER4> Ah, OK, I don't feel so bad now. I didn't realize so many people had joined this. Kudos to the organizers for taking on such a huge task, and sticking with it.

<comment><USER5> Current standings, in case you're intested: level 0 (8490), level 1 (675), level 2 (193), level 3 (67), level 4 (64), level 5 (42), level 6 (62)

(Each is people _currently at that level_ ).

We're still donating for every person who actually finishes.

Level 7 should be out ~nextweekish.

<comment><USER4> If I've turned in a problem set but haven't gotten a response, at which level am I counted? b^)

Sorry, I can't resist being a dick. Ignore me until I'm up to two weeks like the guy above...

<comment><USER5> You're not being a dick! Mail me directly if you've submitted responses and it's been a few days; totally possible we lost you somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I agree that elliptic curve cryptography is the near-future (not necessarily because of new attacks, but mostly cost-effectiveness), I have trouble seeing how you'd explain the possible pitfalls and attacks to laypeople, without taking an unreasonable amount of pages.

It's one thing to explain the Weierstrass equation, the chord and tangent rule, and how group structure comes from that. But the details get really hairy really quick: anomalous curves, MOV/FR attacks, Weil descent, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly very very hard to reasonably pull this off.

Another note about elliptic curves is that the safest choices are often not doable by developers because of external pressures. For example, ideally you'd want to use a curve (like Curve25519) that has complete addition formulas, so that you could avoid checks for explicit doubling or points-at-infinity, like you do with Weierstrass curves. Montgomery and Edwards curves allow this, but you can't use them if you need to support standard NIST curves, since they are not reasonably convertible to Edwards form (you can do it, actually, but the arithmetic is now in F_{p^3} instead of F_p).

<comment><USER5> So, what do I have to do to get your help with an 8th set of crypto challenges with an ECC focus? :)

(We have some basic problems, but you seem to know this stuff better than I do.)

<comment><USER6> Nothing, I'm always happy to yap about things. Do I email you or something?

<comment><USER5> That'd work great! My email is in my profile. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Applied Cryptography taught me several new modes of thinking about software design (which is not directly related to crypto at all) and provided a good overview of things that someone probably solved or failed to solve with cryptography. Plus, it has a decent historic overview of some algorithms failing. What else could you ask for?

I mean, yeah, it's an optimistic book. It talks about possibilities. How can someone to treat is as a developer reference is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER8> >> If you're reading this, you're probably a red-blooded American programmer ....

Err right. I'm black, Nigerian and have an interest + background in crypto...what's up with that man! :)

Anyway great coverage.

<comment><USER9> Eh, you have to let that stuff slide imo: the Internet presumes you are American. It used to annoy me, but since a large amount of the English- speaking internet _is_ American I've learnt to ignore it. It's only really frustrating when you go down the rabbit hole of some product pitch only to find it doesn't apply to the particular chunk of dirt-above-water you happen to sleep on.

<comment><USER10> I don't think tptacek actually presumes everyone is American, he is simply using a figure of speech which is local to America.

As an American, my impression is that the phrase "good red-blooded American" derives from the Cold War, or possibly earlier. For example, during the anti- communist movement of the 1950's, the term would be used judgmentally to distinguish from those who might be "pinko commies". C.f. "better dead than red".

Since the communist threat has obviously subsided, today I would interpret Ptacek's use of the term "like any red-blooded American" as both calling to mind a shared experience which many of us have had (growing up in America, reading Schneier's Applied Cryptography), as well as reminding us of the risk of failing to think _beyond_ it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm trying to write a book version of my talk, Crypto 101. The "tour guide versus handbook" problem is one I definitely have a hard time staying on the good side of :)

Like the talk, the book will keep the structure of taking primitive X_i, showing why we don't just use a system based entirely on X_i, and instead also need X_{i+1}, and how eventually \sum X_i (perhaps excluding a couple) leads to complete cryptosystems, for some value of \sum (obviously, you can't just throw stuff together and expect it to work).

This blog post was great motivation for me. I will keep the aforementioned structure, but now I'm extra motivated to also add actual exercises instead of just showing it's broken :)

Thank you.

PS: I understand you're really busy, but there are few people I'd rather have as a reviewer.

</comment><comment> B-Con > If you're reading this, you're probably a red-blooded American programmer > with a simmering interest in cryptography. And my guess is your interest > came from Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography.

Yep. I read it at... age 16? It was old by the time I got to it, since I'm relatively young, but I still loved it. It didn't give me a spark for crypto, I had the spark when I ordered the book, but it did a very good job of nurturing and kindling it.

> The biggest problem with Applied Cryptography isn't the technical content, > but the tone. It can't decide whether to be a tour guide or a handbook.

That's a good summary. Personally, I've always thought of it as a hands-on encyclopedia.

</comment><comment><USER12> > If you're reading this, you're probably a red-blooded American programmer > with a simmering interest in cryptography.

Well yes my blood is red, I'm a programmer and I have an interest in cryptography. What makes you think everyone's American?

<comment><USER13> He did not say that the thought everyone was american. He said that _if_ you're reading it, you're _probably_ an American. This assertion is well- supported by the server logs of many similar websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And what book should be the replacement?

<comment><USER5> If you're not actually going to read anything, you can probably use any book to equal effect. I recommend Vollman's _You Bright And Risen Angels_.

<comment><USER14> I've recently started reading Applied Cryptography. Should I give it up in favour of some other alternative? For example "You Bright And Risen Angels" does not look like the one.

<comment><USER15> I think tptacek's point is that the answer to your question is spelled out very clearly on the page. ;-)

From the page:

> _You should own Ferguson and Schneier's follow-up, Cryptography Engineering > (C.E.). Written partly in penance, the new book deftly handles material the > older book stumbles over. C.E. wants to teach you the right way to work with > cryptography without wasting time on GOST and El Gamal._

Plus a whole section at the end which starts with "If this stuff is interesting to you, here's some additional reading:"

<comment><USER14> Thank you, I've missed this part and additional reading is all over my head</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong

<comment><USER2> Horrible horrible article see why here [http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/worst- sci...](http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/worst-science- journalism-of-the-year-darwin-completely-wrong-again/)</comment>


Microsoft smartwatch reportedly in the works - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/microsoft-smartwatch/27065/

<comment><USER2> Note that they already did smart watches once, as part of Microsoft SPOT [1], starting in 2004, discontinued in 2008, with service dropped at the end of 2011.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technolo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technology)</comment>


Superdeterminism may help us overcome the current crisis in physics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/how-to-make-sense-of-quantum-physics <comment><USER2> I tried to argue against superdeterminism the last time this came up and got a pile of downvotes because people mixed it up with determinism. And I see this is happening all over again in the comments below.

I'm not even going to try this time, I'm just going to say to everybody reading this: superdeterminism _is not at all the same thing as determinism_. It is a far stronger assumption with far far more unintuitive consequences for our understanding of nature. If you're reading this and just thinking "superdeterminism is okay because there's no free will", then you've been suckered by this article into believing a massive oversimplification.

<comment><USER3> I really agree with you here. Superdeterminism is much weirder and harder to accept than non-locality. Of course, with enough non-locality you'll end up with something just as awkward as superdeterminism. I'm trying learn more about decoherence as an alternative to wave-function collapse.

I'm listening to the Into to QM course from mit's open courseware [0] and I have to say that QM represents a complete break with the classical past, not because of a scientist's ambition or a quirk of history, but because the experimental evidence demands it. The evidence results in a few postulates, and QM is really the only theory that satisfies the postulates, in the sense that _any_ theory that satisfies those postulates will look like Schroedinger's eq. The story is not over at all, we're still very much at the beginning of understanding it.

[0] [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-04-quantum-physics- i-s...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-04-quantum-physics-i- spring-2013/)

<comment><USER4> To me decoherence always seemed so obviously the solution to these 'problems in QM' that I genuinely don't understand why are still having these quasi- scientific discussions. Am I missing something or is there a ton of uninformed arm-chair science going on?

What are the scientific arguments against decoherence? What do up-to-date theoreticians think?

<comment><USER5> No mainstream physicist really objects to decoherence - it is obvious. But _just_ decoherence doesn't give you single outcomes - it gives you many worlds.

And people do debate how to derive our single world experience from many worlds. It can't be done without more assumptions.

Many in this field do accept it, but say the other worlds are not real (QBism, dBB).

But that position is philosophically weak, so those against many worlds still look for alternatives.

<comment><USER4> I don't see many-world arising from decoherence, please elaborate.

Decoherence doesn't give you single outcomes, but it gives you a classical probability distribution (like an enthropic ensemble) over pure quantum states, with the pure quantum states having reduced coherence (i.e. they 'look classical').

Classical probability distributions are nothing new, we don't need a many worlds interpretation to explain the butterfly effect.

Quantum states with a small amount of residual superposition also seem fine to me, as long as you are willing to accept that the world is ultimately quantum and not classical. That we don't see any quantum effects in daily life is just because the scales are too small, similar to how we don't observe relativistic effects because the scales are too large, or how we don't observe the atomicity of water. But in all these cases we can do experiments to reveal the true nature.

<comment><USER5> So during decoherence you don't have classical worlds - the probabilities interfere so you can't ignore the other terms. Over time that interference reduces, but as you say never disappears completely.

But at no point does one world even approximately emerge - it's always many. I can say only the one I experience is real, but there's no justification for it.

Your main problem though is thinking classically - you can't justify your theory by saying it can be reduced (after an infinite amount of time) to an old way of thinking. Classical probability is fraught with issues; just saying it's always been acceptable isn't true nor a rational argument.

<comment><USER6> What are the issues with Classical probability relevant to accepting there being a single world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny, a couple of days ago I googled about superdeterminism again to see if there are any developments and came across Hossenfelder's and Palmer's paper on arxiv [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462) . Strangely enough, even though I've studied theoretical Physics, the fact that some of Quantum mechanic's claims are based on assumptions such as the fact we have free will, were never really discussed except in a course in the Philosophy of science I took, which, unfortunately, was not very scientific. I actually never heard about superdeterminism until I read one of Gerard 't Hooft's papers (see e.g. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548](https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02874](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02874)). Universities should put more emphasis on teaching the things we take for granted and give students the opportunity to question them, if we want to further our understanding.

</comment><comment><USER5> Superdeterminism in general is a pretty absurd idea. It basically says the measurement settings you choose were predetermined. But you can use a random source from another galaxy to select them. So something like the configuration of stars in another galaxy must be conspiring to help you choose just the correct settings to fake the results QM predicts, instead of QM being actually true.

<comment><USER8> I see it more as if the universe was a 4D picture, with time as the 4th dimension, any concept of time "going forward" is just an illusion by how our brains work (we need time to compute every moment), so the outcomes are already written, we just havent seen it.

<comment><USER9> In that framework something most still be moving through an external time to be experiencing individual parts of it sequentially.

<comment><USER10> Here's a thought experiment, similar to the one-electron universe thought experiment: there exists one particle, the "consciousness particle," which randomly jumps around throughout 4D space. Whenever it appears at a 4D position, consciousness is experienced as computed by integrated information theory (or a similar model) [1].

When you experience a moment of consciousness at a specific 4D position, you experience all the memories of the "past" that are in your brain. Thus, the consciousness particle interpretation of consciousness is compatible with your direct perception of living a 3D life along a time dimension.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory)

<comment><USER9> You still need real time for this. Without real time that particle can't move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any coherent fixed theory of superdeterminism at all? Something with a system of equations that are nailed down and that one could build solid thought experiments on top of?

The article mentions it but kind of downplays the fact that the prevailing theory of QM has a very clear mathematical formalism without any wiggle room, while superdeterminism doesn't have this.

That seems like a far better explanation for why QM has won, and makes me wonder whether superdeterminism wouldn't just be the next string theory.

<comment><USER12> Superdeterminism isn't supposed to be an alternative to QM, usually it's an alternative interpretation of QM which allows hidden variables from what i've gathered.

<comment><USER13> It allows _local_ hidden variable theories. Non-local hidden variable theories have existed for decades (de Broglie-Bohm/Bohmian mechanics).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is very exciting.

To a computer scientist, superdeterminism seems like the most elegant solution to most of the current problems in physics. But it has always been firmly out of the mainstream, perhaps because it runs directly counter to our human experience. Gerard t'Hoofts framing of the universe as a cellular automaton ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548](https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548)) is relatively intuitive, but still only a rough sketch. Hopefully, Hossenfelder and Palmer now publicly arguing for superdeterminism will recruit some more bright minds to fleshing out these models into workable theories.

<comment><USER6> It has been proven to require fine tuning though. It's a very unnatural solution from a physical perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well I just went down the rabbit hole [http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten- solut...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution- superdeterminism.html) and I still don't see how this is not a cop-out of theological proportions

Two statistical dependent variables "can be made" independent, for example by feeding one into an PRNG. This seems like a similar cop-out as the "particle changes behaviour when it is observed _hence_ consciousness is needed in the universe"

(And this answer explained it better [https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some- crackpot-scientists-go-aft...](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot- scientists-go-after-super-deterministic-theories-when-Bells-theorem-has- proved-that-local-realism-is-false/answer/Paul-Mainwood) as usual for Quora, awful questions with great answers)

<comment><USER13> > Two statistical dependent variables "can be made" independent, for example > by feeding one into an PRNG

No statistical test can _assure_ statistical independence for all possible cases. The very fact that you pipe it through a PRNG means the output is deterministically correlated with the input, because PRNGs are deterministic, and _some_ statistical test will be able to detect it. At the base level, a test that tries every conceivable PRNG, for instance.

<comment><USER15> That's why I said it's a theological problem

In practice the universe can't know all the ways you can mix-up a variable

<comment><USER13> Who says the universe can't "know" all the ways? That's like saying momentum can't be conserved because the universe can't know all the ways that we could transform momentum into other forms of energy and back again.

<comment><USER15> Momentum comes from the interaction of forces, there's nothing that's "needed" to know. Two billiard balls colliding and a billiard ball colliding with a ball of mud conserves momentum (in a vacuum, in space, etc) the same because it all boils down to forces. F=dP/dt

That's very different from "regardless how you throw the dice it will always "know" what you did".

<comment><USER13> In other words, we invented some concepts (force, momentum, energy) that exhibit a symmetry under various transformations.

It's only "very different" in superdeterminism because that which is conserved doesn't yet have a widely accepted formulation that you've internalized the way you've internalized the other common concepts in physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Superdeterminism appears to aspire to come up with a classical model that would explain quantum correlation. If successful it would render a quantum computer to be fancy, highly parallel, very expensive but still a classical one. A non-classical superdeterministic model would just substitute one mystery for another (sneaked in non-locality or something).

</comment><comment><USER17> Everything old is new again. Superdeterminism is basically the concept that everything follows from the initial conditions of the universe in a deterministic fashion. In short, it's a clockwork universe below the quantum level. It is compatible with Bell's theorem because it's not local hidden variables, it's global hidden variables--i.e. the state of the entire universe.

The problem is, according to my current understanding, superdeterminism cannot be tested.

<comment><USER18> This is the my first time reading about Superdeterminism and the author hits on my of my amature/novice intuitions on issues like the measurement problem, hidden variables, and Bell's theorem (call me weird but these are topics I enjoy reading, studying, and thinking about--technically and philosophically).

I'd be very interested in hearing and explanation and understanding why superdeterminism cannot be tested (it's not clearly obvious to me how that's the case) because if that is the case, it would explain why it was largely unpursued/undeveloped (similar to what someone else in this thread posted--if it's true, it supposeldy offers little useful insight beyond better explaining issues in quantum mechanics by replacing one blackbox of uncertainty with another).

Based on the author's description, much of the issue is that the theory has had little attention and as such, is largely undeveloped (and therefore, isn't going to be developed enough for experimental testing).

<comment><USER19> > I'd be very interested in hearing and explanation and understanding why > superdeterminism cannot be tested

What experiment could you run in a superdetermined universe that would distinguish it from a non-superdetermined universe? Vice versa? There's nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that I am disappointed is not discussed in the article are the experiments done to validate statistical independence based on extremely old and far-away phenomena. There have been experimental validations of Bell's inequalities with measurements chosen based on distant quasars, and they held up very well. This would suggest that the state of two particles we just fired is caused by reactions in a quasar millions of years ago, or by even older phenomena.

This suggests there isn't even some kind of 'local-ish' theory of hidden variables, like in the case of throwing dice, and we would really need to account for the state of the whole universe for all of its history to accurately predict what happens when we type at our keyboards.

<comment><USER13> > This suggests there isn't even some kind of 'local-ish' theory of hidden > variables, like in the case of throwing dice, and we would really need to > account for the state of the whole universe for all of its history to > accurately predict what happens when we type at our keyboards.

Yes, because all particles in the universe share a common entangled past because they all originated from the same source, ie. the Big Bang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think progress in physics is going to be on hold for a while. This kind of fundamental scientific inquiry does not proceed in a linear fashion, and there was incredible progress in the last century. Physicists seem to realise this on some level - in the last 5 years I have noticed physicists turning up in other fields, particularly origin of life and consciousness studies.

<comment><USER22> I think this becomes even clearer if you look at what the major recent experimental results in physics are.

The two that come to mind are gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson.

Gravitational waves were observed by LIGO and Virgo. These observatories were built in 1993/1994, but did not observe a gravitational wave until 2015 (many have been observed since then).

VIRGO costs ~10mil Euro/year to operate and is staffed by over 300 people.

LIGO had an initial budget of $395 million in 1994, with a $200million overhaul in 2015.

The Higgs Boson was detected using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC began in 1995, and would not discover the Higgs until 2012. The LHC had a construction cost of $4.4 billion, with an annual operating budget of $1billion.

Most of the discoveries of the 20th centuary did not require anywhere near this scale of experiment. There is still some room to grow here (more powerful colliders and more sensitivy gravitational observatories are being planned), but fundamental physisics seems to be fast approaching the limits of our current engineering capabilities; and may need to enter a quite period while it waits for the more applied sciences to catch up. Or, worse, the laws of physicis end up being such that the "next step" of experiments is simply outside the range of what we could conceivably build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe not the right place to ask, but does anyone have an opinion on GRW/Spontaneous Collapse Theory? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghirardi%E2%80%93Rimini%E2%80%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghirardi%E2%80%93Rimini%E2%80%93Weber_theory)

It seems so sensible compared to other theories but I don't hear much about it.

<comment><USER24> Isn't it largely obsolete after decoherence theory explained most of the issues GRW had?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ok, particle states are correlated in a way we've missed. Fine. Every set of particles has fewer degrees of freedom than we assumed. We can check experimentally: the heat capacity of your set of particles is proportional to the number of degrees of freedom.

It would be nice to see something about this point in the essay.

<comment><USER26> > _the heat capacity of your set of particles is proportional to the number of > degrees of freedom_

IIRC that is only valid for a classic system.

<comment> tom-thistime Sure, but it's the same issue. In a quantum system some degrees of freedom are "frozen out"\--the energies are much higher than (Boltzmann's constant)(Absolute temperature) and they become irrelevant. But the _accessible_ degrees of freedom show up in the heat capacity.

<comment><USER26> When the Cv of a diatomic gas goes from 3/2R to 5/2R there is an intermediate part that is complicated. A photon gas has also a strange Cv. I think it's not easy to dismiss superdeterminism using just the Cv, because sometimes Cv is more complicated.

[Disclaimer: I really really dislike superdeterminism. I just think that Cv is the wrong reason to dismiss it.]

<comment> tom-thistime For sure. The transition from 3/2kT to 5/2kT is a good example of a frozen-out mode getting "unfrozen". Within the transition we have to count density of states and not screw around with classical analogs. ( I'm an optics person, so I think the Cv of a photon gas is normal and understandable ... If I take half an hour to write it all out again!) This is technical stuff we're talking about ... but it's not difficult for particle physicists to address!

Anyway I don't think I'm dismissing the idea of "superdeterminism". I'm only puzzled that directly measuring degrees of freedom, which was a central reason for adopting quantum mechanics, isn't even mentioned in an article where the public is being told there are fewer "real" degrees of freedom than generally thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Even more importantly, no one has ever proposed a consistent, non- > reductionist theory of nature

It seems the point of non-reductionism is that you can't propose such a theory.

For instance, if we were in a simulation that decides whether to optimize quantum to macroscopic transition based on what we're looking at, we're simply not going to find what causes wave functions to collapse because there isn't an underlying rule to find. We're "observers" just because we're flagged as such. For us in the simulation, certain things just happen for apparently arbitrary reasons because we can't peer into the source code.

It'd be like a character in an FPS trying to figure out why shooting breaks some things but others are indestructible.

</comment><comment><USER28> _This update (aka the "collapse" of the wave function) is instantaneous; it happens at the same time everywhere._

So it's like the refresh rate of The Universe?

</comment><comment><USER29> Non-determinism requires some kind of RNG which is truly random (TRNG), right? So the next value can't be calculated from the previous one. This means all values of truly random RNG just exist as we don't need to iterate all of them in order to calculate what's next? So truly random RNG is just pre-determined instantly from step one and RRNG is as pre-determined as TRNG?

</comment><comment><USER30> An interesting discussion can be found here: [http://mateusaraujo.info/2019/12/17/superdeterminism-is- unsc...](http://mateusaraujo.info/2019/12/17/superdeterminism-is- unscientific/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I hope we will see more sci-fi take the route of super-determinism as opposed to multiverse theory.

The latter is a nice plot device, but its wide spread use in pop culture has overblown its likelihood of being correct.

Maybe in a thousand years from now, people will begin their analogies with: 'Long ago, people used to believe the universe split up infinity many times at an infinite scale'

\---

I believe the idea that we have to give up free will or that fate exists is unhelpful at best.

If super-determinism is correct, then there is nothing to give up. But more practically, if complexity theory is correct in that some things are inherently complex, there is a case to be made that the universe with its variables 'locking' into place from moment to moment is far beyond predetermined from the perspective of anything in it.

i.e. you need a universe to simulate a universe.

<comment><USER32> I don't believe in free will because it doesn't make sense when you understand determinism. You cannot be free when every thought & action is the outcome of the past forces exerted upon you.

My understanding of superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out the multiverse theory. Maybe my idea of the multiverse theory isn't traditional but I think the universe can very well identically repeat and or repeat but be somewhat different by how forces can be occurring at different intervals than the past cycle of the universe.

edit: people downvote on this site because they don't like thinking of not having free will lol.

<comment><USER20> Your explanation of why you don't believe in free will is very philosophically unrefined, and your smug tone (implying people who do believe in free will must not understand determinism) is not helpful.

The reality is that a great many philosophers believe that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible. There is also supernatural defense of free-will, as in many religions (where the physical universe may well be deterministic, except for interaction with a spiritual world of will, which may produce physical effects without a physical cause). Both of these ideas are example of people who believe in free will even if they do understand (physical) determimism. There are probably other groups as well.

<comment><USER32> > philosophically unrefined

No. It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. It would be only wishful thinking with ignoring logic to assume you can make a choice that's truly your own and not the outcome of the system we're in. Furthermore, neuroscience illustrates determinism (no free will) and physics has as well until people lost their minds with quantum physics that's grossly unfinished. please email me if you want to discuss in great detail.

<comment><USER20> > It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from > the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will.

And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett.

The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.

<comment><USER32> Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense.

The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.

<comment><USER20> It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people).

But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality.

In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness.

There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?

<comment><USER32> My opinion is compatiblism (like it or not) does delude people into not understanding they have no control over how they came to be as a person, the wealth they accumulate, the relationships, the awful things that happened to them if they do, all these things were by fate, and that people deeply believe the "thought" of realizing free will is an illusion equates to an unpleasant existence or some nonsense of realizing consciousness is really fake (in a sense similar to the colour red changing to orange with yellow added).

I'm sure some people read about compatiblism and shortly later go back to believing the traditional free will nonsense. I don't think many people think about not having free will for much time at all. Thinking about determinism for awhile makes it hard to not understand predeterminism. Progresses into making it fairly easy to understand we're just part of a complex system and the system works from a collective mesh of subsystems being "us" to the smallest thing.

We're similar to the concept of robots. The universe wrote code for the instructions of us. Similar, we made the robots "code" and people don't consider the robots having free will from our "human code" functioning the operating robots. When people have their thought on robots, they think of determinism subconsciously and think "no.., the actions are really from us, who coded & setup the robots" while the residing of the robots has environment external forces interacting with the robots' outcomes.

I personally think the world is good but resembles evil and overtime becomes less resembling evil. I further think the universe repeats more likely than not ever repeat throughout infinity. A good majority of people don't realize they don't have free will; that's keeping evil resembling experiences around longer on earth from what I observe and while people are punished severely. They're never being told they had no free will required to have a better outcome or being given the time observing how their mentality came to be that resulted in the bad outcome.

Most people don't even experience what the punishments are from unfavourable: genetics, financial status, health condition, and whatever life variable factoring into conflicting with the system of society; outcomming in not living a mediocre or higher status life but an awful one.

So yes, I get freaked out when I even observe all the travesties in society, that likely would have more empathy if people understood "success isn't earned" but given to you at birth and like everything else that follows after birth. Awareness of how the universe at the moment of the creation, resulted in the future (sad or happy) outcomes from the summation of sequential forces upon everything and then thinking of the more privileged vs misfortunate situations in comparison.

The forgoing makes me think the system of society would adapt to be more compassionate than the opposite incorrect belief of traditional free will. It's like when people thought it was better to think the world was flat. Delusion isn't better than realism. Eventually, leads me into thinking people can eventually be more likely to agree on universal healthcare and even futuristic things like universal income & homes.

So I think free will belief needs to be killed sooner than later. Even though whatever happens is what fate already decided on upon creation. So I'm somewhat hopeful people examine this topic.

<comment><USER20> I think your perspective on free will is somewhat closer to my own then I originally thought. I completely agree that outcomes in life are determined much, much more by the world than by any kind of personal responsibility. I think that there are plenty of people who believe even in magical free will (say, christian concepts of it) who actually understand this same thing, though you are right that there are many who don't.

However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either. If you did, you would not think about improving the world, or convincing people of things - if you believe that the next speech by the president was determined at the time of the big bang, then thinking about change is meaningless, and none of us can help feel or not feel however we do.

However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.

To articulate my own belief about this more clearly, I think the example of robots you gave is very good. I believe that even a robot with a simplistic machine learning algorithm can be meaningfully said to have a kind of free will, in that it can do a better or worse job at what it was designed to do based on the examples it is given and on accidents of its training process. Two such robots may well have different beliefs about the world (in a very basic sense)and they could even influence one another based on their experience (training set) and conclusions (parameters of their algorithm). This is how I believe humans and animals work as well - we have a pre- determined algorithm (vastly more complex), with different starting parameters between different people, we have a training set consisting of all of our lived experiences, and our algorithm can modify itself or its parameters during training, in pre-specified ways. This does end up meaning that some people end up with better models/algorithms than others, based on better starting conditions, or on more luck with experiences. And decision points in this algorithm are what I think represents our experience of free will.

<comment><USER32> > However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either.

I actually do believe in complete predeterminism.

Example: everything you & I wrote was fated to happen and similar to our thoughts on the subject. Multiple persons I've conversed with (even hard determinists) will express similar opinions as you "well then your thoughts on improvement don't matter because if the universe is functioning under under predeterminism, well it was fated to improve if it happens" and then try to use that assertion as an argument in some way to make a rhetoric against my personal thoughts or the discussion.

I personally, enjoy reading about what you wrote to me and similar to myself writing about the subject. Otherwise I'll never learn something new on the topic. I don't care knowing it's all fated and same are my thoughts on thinking the world slowly improves without me having a real will separate from the system.

My thoughts continue to be, I'm a person that enjoys learning about this topic and that requires conversing about it. I think the understanding of free will being an illusion, will one day improve society exponentially faster than a universe that didn't result in people coming to realization sooner. The majority of people just need to function with understanding of the illusion to the point of understanding complete predetermination.

> However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and > it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program > code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you > get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try > to influence things in some direction or another.

My idea is that the universe is more probable to repeat than not repeat. I do have wishful thinking and it makes me agnostic. I like to think if there is a higher power that people typically name as a God. Well, God cannot do the impossible like making traditional free will be real. So, I like to think that the universe repeats with adjustments made after it runs its course. I take a position close to Einstein, such as once the universe iteration starts, God doesn't interfere, and I acknowledge that belief is impossible to prove. I only assume my thought on that are more probable from the horrible things that happen to people and this is under the assumption a higher power wouldn't want suffering in the complex system created. So again I think after universe runs the course for humanity, it will repeat and there will be adjustments so things improve for the previous stories the humans experienced.

The forgoing will now provide you with different thoughts on what I previously wrote. The last part of what you're expressing is how our brains function and we could describe nature similar to what we define as evolution. But I wouldn't say that's free will. My idea is free will isn't a possibility even if I die, ..the universe eventually repeats, and I live again from the recursion but with new improvements making everyone have a happier story; created from an higher power understands my desires in the previous life I lived. That's not anymore free will because every universe iteration would be fated from the previous summation of forces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand, how super-determinism explain interference in, for instance, the double-slit experiment?

It's not the result of that experiment a proof that the photons are interfering with something?

</comment><comment><USER34> This is just what you get if you combine Bohmian mechanics with Bell's theorem, right? If QM relies on hidden variables, they can't be local.

<comment><USER20> Just because this relies on global hidden variables doesn't make it the same as any other global hidden variable theory.

<comment><USER34> Ah ok, thanks for answering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope not. Superdeterminism is fate.

<comment><USER17> How are control and the illusion of control distinguishable from a first- person perspective?

<comment><USER35> Good point. This seems to be the exception though. If it's fate to be shown that fate exists, some might find that disappointing. Others might find it a relief. Your happiness or sadness at this revelation would also be predetermined. An extreme form of bondage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> No. It. Won't.

Only philosophy will.

</comment><comment><USER37> If superdeterminism is true, it appears to imply that the universe is discrete at the smallest scales. Were the universe continuous, 'definite' position would be impossible, meaning that certainty itself would be impossible. Everything would be 'fuzzy' meaning superdeterminism would be impossible.

<comment><USER38> This is easily falsified by imagining that the computational nature of physics itself is stronger than a Turing machine. There would be no issue with certainty in a continuum if you were actively computing with the continuum itself as data

<comment><USER37> It's not a matter of computability though, it's a matter of exact precision not being physically possible in a continuum.

<comment><USER39> But that assertion is based on a set of assumptions that come back to information theory and hence computability.

You are right that in modern information theory exact precision on a continuum is physically impossible (for others: as we continue to subdevide the precision we require more bits of information, which has known physical limits).

But what I think the other posters was getting at is that if the universe runs on a machine that is not bound by those rules, say rules where arbitrary precision on a continuum can be stored as a value (which again violates physicality as we know it but such a machine is "outside" the universe so physicality is moot already), then that is possible.

Which is to say the universe is a machine which can compute things a Turing machine can't (a Turing machine can compute everything that can be computed that we are aware of, ergo if the universe can compute things it can't then the assertion being made - albeit somewhat clumsily - is that the universe doesn't follow the asserts we know).

<comment><USER37> I understand that if we posit a super-Turing machine in which arbitrary positions on a continuum can be maximally expressed as finite values what I am saying does not logically follow.

However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible. In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

<comment><USER39> > However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically > impossible.

I mean we are discussing it so it's certainly logically possible.

> In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with > certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Why would they need to be physically manifestable? Again how can you make assertions about what parts of physicality are maintained by the machine that is computing physicality? How can you make assertions about the world containing our own?

> Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle > in my pocket".

Except it isn't. It's more like "I launched my square circle beyond the observable universe". If it was in my pocket I could take it out and show it to you.

Positing a "super-Turing" machine is pointless because it isn't testable. But it is possible. I feel like that distinction is important which is why I commented. Which is much how I feel about super-determinism in general, sure it's possible, but how do we test it? It's pointless because whether not it exists doesn't change anything. The issue of the discrete values is an interesting facet of that, one that might lead to something testable, like those "is the universe a hologram" experiments. Establishing what would be required of such a system is useful, but it doesn't dismiss it out of hand.

I guess my issue is that your arguments don't fully embrace the theory so they are bit like trying to disprove the existence of a different god using the holy book of your own god. There are valid reasons to disagree with superdeterminism, but arguing from the lens of physicality misses the issue at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Complex solution for a simple problem. I'll sound naive, but I think that quantum entaglement is a very simple thing: it's a link, like an edge in a mathematical graph, between two particles. The length of the link is 1. Not nanometers or something else, just 1. The particles rapidly change their state, but they are synchronized via this link and at any moment they are in the opposite states. Measuring one particle is done by bombarding it with another particle, which stabilizes its state, and also the other particle, via the link. In other words, our world is just a mathematical graph that appears to have continuous properties at scale.

<comment><USER41> My own theory is that there is no entanglement and no link between the particles, it is just that the particle states are affected the moment they are created.

I also think that light is not a wave and that light particles are not fired in a straight line in the double slit experiment; they are fired at an angle, and then they bounce off the slits and create the interference pattern; and when we put a detector in front of the slits, it only serves as creating new light particles that do not have this angle in them and they go straight ahead, making the diffraction pattern disappear.

And it's not that quantum math is wrong; it's right, but my intuition says that any system can be described by statistics.

As for quantum mechanics applications, all the applications mentioned (from clocks to computers to anything the article and other articles mention) are not based in any QM specific property. None of those applications are actually dependent on entanglement and on collapsing the wave function, and entanglement cannot be used for any application despite what they write in articles because it would violate the principles of relativity. And none of those applications would cease to exist if light was not an actual wave and photons simply moved in wave patterns.

Let the downvotes begin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> All these people working on the foundations of quantum mechanics must somehow have missed the fact that quantum mechanics has been superseded by quantum field theory. Quantum field theory resolves basically all of the typically interpretation of quantum mechanics questions in a rather sophisticated way. Unfortunately and I guess this is why these "Interpretation of QM" are still popular most things become harder to calculate with QFT instead of plain old quantum mechanics. Still I think that the perspective of taking quantum fields and the path integral as fundamental clarifies a bunch of things even about measurements. In the path integral formulation you can view a measurement as an additional term in the Lagrangian (for example a non-zero external magnetic field for Zeeman-Splitting). You then have to expand around the classical solutions summed over all initial conditions, so if you have for example a spin-1/2-based dependence as it is the case for the Zeeman-Effect, you would have to expand around these two different classical solutions. There is nothing mysterious about this and in the cases where you can carry the calculation out you get the correct predictions. Fundamentally there is no such thing as measurements, just local interactions of quantum fields and any measurement can be either modelled as such an interaction or as an additional term in the Lagrangian.

The truly interesting things discoveries within in the framework of quantum field theory, such as ADS/CFT, going from String Theory to low energy effective theories or the Amplituhedron. All of those have direct and immediate connections to state of the art quantum field theories.

What is done in ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf)), especially the last part, where they suddenly invoke p-adic numbers in support of a very vague argument and a cartoon of Penrose's impossible triangle in a similar vague manner, won't be taken serious by most physicists, but is sufficient apparently to convince non-technical people to continue funding them. Nautil.us probably is just grateful for the free content.

<comment><USER7> Do you consider Gerard 't Hooft also one of those non-technical people? Mocking the use of certain diagrams does not give you any credit. I would refrain from such petty arguments if you want to be taken seriously.

About your argument, as far as I know, the measurement problem is not solved in QFT. I have also never heard of adding a term to the Lagrangian to represent a measurement. The addition of the external field to hamiltonian of the atom when calculating the Zeeman effect is something unrelated to measurement afaik. If you have any references on your claims please point them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> From a brief stint in Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism)), Superdeterminism looks like it better satisfies Ockhams' Razor than the standard QM interpretation. All we have to give up is free will, and why should science try to defend that?

<comment><USER44> Because free will is supported by some pretty overwhelming evidence. Every human who has ever lived has had the experience of making a free choice. That experience is every bit as real as the experience of, say, seeing the moon. If you're going to seriously entertain the possibility that there is no free will then you need to be ready to entertain with equal seriousness that the moon does not exist because both are supported by similar bodies of evidence.

<comment><USER45> That seems more like evidence that humans believe they have free will than evidence that they actually have it.

<comment><USER46> What really seems a mirage to me is mistaking free will for unpredictability. That's like saying that your mind needs to be outside the physical world ("a soul") to make "real decisions", which is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've mentioned this in a couple different HN posts regarding QM recently and I'd like to mention this again. I'd greatly appreciate it if we could do some back and forth. I think the "current crisis in physics" has much to do with the foundations of QM. If what I present below is just false, then fine, I'd appreciate an explanation of why instead of a downvote.

In short, I believe what Planck found was not an action constant, but rather it was an energy constant. Planck's constant has the wrong units. The constant should be in Joules/oscillation as opposed to Joule*sec.

Planck inadvertently "hard coded" a one second measurement into his constant.

His equation should be E=htf where h is in Joules/oscillation t in seconds and f in oscillations/second. I think there is a reason why the units for frequency aren't explicitly listed as oscillations/sec. the units of E=hf don't balance if f has the units oscillations/second.

But you don't need to believe me... please read the following paper by Juliana H.J. Mortenson (Formerly Juliana H.J. Brooks). [https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/e266e5e7-739c-437c-89c3-eed...](https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/e266e5e7-739c-437c-89c3-eed60d3a9f3f/downloads/1cfqec4a8_58871.pdf)

Can you find an error in her paper? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!

Upshot: Every oscillation of light has the same energy, and what we regard as a photon today is actually a one second measurement of oscillations of light at some frequency f.

<comment><USER48> > Can you find an error in her paper?

Sure, just one you say? In Ch. 2 §1 Mortenson, MD tries to derive the "mean energy per oscillation". She refers to the dimensionless scalar "N" as the number of "waves" the photon is comprised of.

Not only doesn't that make any sense whatsoever, since a photon can only have a single frequency, and is hence described by a single wave. She also introduces a "unit" that doesn't exist - namely the "osc" (=oscillation), which is DIMENSIONLESS, i.e. it's doesn't have a physical representation and therefore cannot be unit...

She then continues to fail to apply the most basic dimensional analysis and I basically stopped right there.

It's a bunch of hogwash and esoteric pseudo-science, sorry.

<comment><USER47> > since a photon can only have a single frequency

The current interpretation of E=hf is what suggests that a photon is the elementary particle of light, and that a photon can only have a single frequency so I dont think that is a fair critique. She is trying to point out that E=hf and the current interpretation is wrong and is not assuming it's true in her analysis.

> DIMENSIONLESS

Although this is an aside to your point, can I hear your thoughts on using the dimensionless fine structure constant in equations?

Following your reasoning are we not allowed to use radians (an SI unit) in equations either?

<comment><USER48> > She is trying to point out that E=hf and the current interpretation is wrong > and is not assuming it's true in her analysis.

If you want to prove an equation wrong, you cannot use it as a starting point. Let me show you the fundamental error she makes in detail:

E=hf

Dimensional analysis: J=J * s * s^-1=J * s / s=J * 1=J

So the original checks out ok.

The paper tries to argue that J _s is the wrong unit for h and replaces the "1" from above with bogus "oscillations", which are never defined. The proper inverse of frequency is not "oscillations", however, it's period (singular!), which is measured in seconds.

Dividing by "oscillations" gives you the same unit you started with and changes nothing. This is independent of your interpretation of what a photon is. Since she also never specifies the relationship between "oscillations" and wavelength, I wonder how E=h_c/λ follows, let alone the de Broglie wavelength...

> can I hear your thoughts on using the dimensionless fine structure constant > in equations?

Using the fine structure constant in equations is equivalent to using pi in equations. Proportionality factors exist in nature.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CSS3 Features That You Can Finally Start Using - <AUTHOR> http://tutorialzine.com/2013/10/12-awesome-css3-features-you-can-finally-use/

<comment><USER2> "Finally Start Using"??

If you're waiting for all browsers to implement these CSS3 features correctly, you'll end up never using them.

For example, CSS animations have been around for at least _2 years_. Only Firefox and Webkit browsers supported them and you had to rely on vendor- prefixed properties, but animations were exciting enough for me to start experimenting with them as soon as I could.

There is permanent rant towards "fancy" CSS3 features that haven't reached a "W3C standard" status yet. But a website experience doesn't need to be visually consistent across browsers. If you're using a plain hexadecimal color code as a replacement for rgba, it's ok. If your intro is animated in Chrome but not IE, it's ok too. If your last paragraph has a margin that the pseudo- element :last-child should have canceled, it's ok as well.

Front-End developers have waited more than a decade for CSS improvements. You can't wait for a unified browser environment to start implementing them. I'm surprised by this article's tone, as if today, _suddenly_ , everything changed. No way: browser support is a permanent process. Don't wait for that perfect day because it will never come. Just start having fun with CSS3 _while_ providing a decent experience for IE (the main culprit).

<comment><USER3> Did you say 2 years? Make that 4 and a half: [https://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css- animation-2/](https://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Roughly 4% of our users still use MSIE 6 (some report that they need to due to their restricted work environment). I need a good reason to risk 4% of our revenue for some eyecandy, or a good fallback mechanism (difficult if my layout relies on calc(), for example). HTML/CSS is a sad story ...

<comment><USER5> I feel your pain. At my current gig, we target an IE8 minimum, which still severely limits which of these techniques we can use. Microsoft should be tremendously embarrassed by how bad their browser has been for so long.

<comment><USER6> At our company we also support IE8. I almost never touch the CSS and HTML files for that. I just load some polyfills that make IE8 more compatible [1][2][3][4]. It seems like magic, because those scripts give me support even for Foundation 4 out of the box ( they dropped legacy IE8 in v.4 ) and I don't have to think that much for websites such as caniuse, etc...

The downside is that most of the CSS work is done by javascript and if you are one of those IE8 users you will be unsatisfied with the pageload speed, but given the bad architecture of IE8 you will not be surprised by that fact. Although the pages using those polyfills work pretty good.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/](https://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/) [2] [http://selectivizr.com/](http://selectivizr.com/) [3] [https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond](https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond) [4] [https://code.google.com/p/css3-mediaqueries- js/](https://code.google.com/p/css3-mediaqueries-js/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the article, it's mentioned that there isn't great support for flexbox, which is only half true.

Using a combination of the older and new syntax (display: box and display: flex), you can already do quite a bit.

I've been using autoprefixer ([https://github.com/ai/autoprefixer](https://github.com/ai/autoprefixer)) for a few months now, building simple flexboxes all over the place with the attributes from the new spec, and have only run into one or two little issues that I can generally hack away.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the article: "The standardization bodies have probably had their reasons, but it doesn't feel at all intuitive to have the CSS width and height of an element affected by its padding and borders."

And not only are height and width affected by padding+borders, they are affected in different ways, respectively. It's just weird. Does anybody have any insight into what the standardization bodies' reasons were?

<comment><USER9>
      > And not only are height and width affected by
      > padding+borders, they are affected in different ways,
      > respectively

What do you mean by that? Difference between block and inline elements, collapsing margins or something else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm still waiting on decent attr() support.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435426](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435426)

In an ideal world, instead of attr() and calc(). I'd like a simple pure functional language to calculate values for CSS properties. Properties defined by such a system could be efficiently cached and recalculated as required. Easy Parallel evaluation would be a bonus too.

I'd like to be able to do things like define a path as a mathematical function and then have an <UL> that evenly spaces <LI> items along that path. Preferably without requiring the browser to be specifically aware of the concept of a path.

<comment><USER11> This is an interesting idea. You could implement a compiler that spits out CSS as a proof of concept and then maybe lobby for browser support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a brief mention in passing, but the lack of good support for CSS columns is really frustrating. I have a requirement on a project that I'm working on for columns, but they just cannot be satisfactorily implemented in CSS alone, in any browser. Apart to resort to JavaScript instead.

<comment><USER7> What's the issue?

<comment><USER12> _SO_ much. Mainly a) lack of support for control over element breaking (I haven't gone really in-depth with the spec, but even the most obvious things are supported terribly) b) the weird behaviour of margin collapsing (and adding _extra_ margins - WTF?!)

<comment><USER13> Just use tables. I know that everyone recommends against it, but IMO they are the only solution which works as expected. Everyone says they have a fancy workaround, but none of them works well enough. And besides, whats wrong with tables? Semantic HTML is hip again :-)

<comment><USER9> Please, show, how do you make tables that work like CSS columns, i.e. reflow the content to fill the specified number of columns. Unless you hardcode content for each TD, but what the point then? And that's exactly what's wrong with tables (semantic purity aside)—they shackle you content to one specific structure, meanwhile using CSS for layout you can move your blocks around more or less freely.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Instead of just resorting to tables, I'd be much more likely to resort to a couple of DIVs which would involve less markup and be less semantically incorrect. But the whole point is that I don't want to have to decide, on an article-by-article basis, exactly where my break between two columns should actually be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bunch of those demos don't work on the Android browser. I also happen to know that calc() doesn't work on Safari 6.x, among others.

I've been updating my webapp software to use flexbox-based layouts, and I have to use a fair number of calc() styles to get the layout I want. (The newer css grid layouts would probably work better, but for now flexbox is the best available.) I've found that a combination of old and new flexbox syntax, Modenizr's flexbox detection, and javascript code that detects whether or not calc is available and runs a method to simulate all of my calc() styles when it isn't, is all necessary to give me good browser compatibility. IE7 and IE8 work surprisingly well, Safari 5 on Windows and 5+ on Mac work, Mobile Safari 5 on the original iPad 1 works, and Mobile Safari 6+ on newer iPads and iPhones work. Firefox, Chrome, and IE9+ work great as well, of course.

It's a lot of additional effort, but it's worth it and definitely doable if you need the browser support and you want to use modern techniques.

<comment><USER15> > I also happen to know that calc() doesn't work on Safari 6.x, among others.

Works fine on Safari 6.x, you just need to add the prefix -webkit.

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=calc](http://caniuse.com/#feat=calc)

<comment><USER14> Ah, good catch. It's 5.1 that doesn't support it at all. I was working on a new feature last week, and it looked great on Firefox and Chrome (my main dev browsers), but both my boss and UX designer use Macbooks so when I asked them to check it out they both said it's broken. It was because I was working quickly and didn't put in all of the backward compatibility hacks yet. So, my memory was a bit fuzzy about which versions supported what, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Modernizr is a great way to be able to start using some of these features with legacy browsers. I actually have to battle with some of my customers to _upgrade_ to IE8 (and not to set the group policy that forces "compatibility mode").

</comment><comment><USER17> Calc() is a huge deal. For non-business oriented applications where IE8 may still be in use, calc() is going to be a god damn lifesaver. I replicate the function in javascript all the time, no longer!

</comment><comment><USER18> There are soo many pointless uses of calc()… in this example `margin: 0 20px` gives identical result.

In most other cases all authors really want is `box-sizing: border-box` (which works in IE8+).

<comment><USER19> The real benefit is mixing percentages with pixels. This makes things like sidebars and sticky footers a breeze.

<comment><USER20> As the OP says you can usually solve this problem by applying padding to a element that has box-sizing: border-box set.

calc() will obviously have some niche uses though, and given the creativity of the industry I'm sure some neat tricks will rise out of it.

<comment><USER21> > you can usually solve this problem by applying padding to a element that has > box-sizing: border-box set.

And what if your element is already using padding/a border for something else and you don't want to have to fill your DOM tree with loads of pointless levels of wrapper elements?

<comment><USER20> As I say, you can _usually_ solve your problem this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Speaking of cool CSS animations, try this pure-css library:

[https://daneden.me/animate/](https://daneden.me/animate/) (Animate.css)

<comment><USER23> Nice!

<comment><USER24> Another one: [http://tympanus.net/Development/ModalWindowEffects/](http://tympanus.net/Development/ModalWindowEffects/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I run Ubuntu on my PC, it's an i7 8 core machine with nVidia GTX 660 and the latest tested Restricted driver from the repository. That animation drove my CPU aggregate by top to 90% usage. I clicked the Edit button and while the code was showing the CPU activity dropped back to minimal.

<comment><USER26> i run Ubuntu as well (13.10, Dual Core 1.1GHz - though i set the clock to 800MHz, Intel HD) and nothing unusual happened when the animations were being displayed - if a shitty Intel chip can run the animations - i can't help and wonder you tweaked something you weren't suppose to?

<comment><USER25> What was your CPU time? I run GKrellM so I notice when something starts hogging the CPU, the animation did play just fine, should it take 90% CPU time to run an animation on modern hardware? That was the point of my post. That CPU usage costs me money.

<comment><USER26> i've installed GKrellM and i got around 23% of cpu load when the animations were displayed \- clock set to 800MHz [set via indicator-cpufreq] \- mind you during the "test" lost of things were running to

if the CSS3 animations got up to 90% on YOUR hardware - where does that leave the rest of us [i.e. shitty intel HD card owners]? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Calc is the most interesting item here in my opinion and the browser support. [http://caniuse.com/calc](http://caniuse.com/calc)

I'd kill for the ability to do variables in CSS like LESS and SCSS.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pet peeve: Default z-index makes elements farther down in the code display on top of elements higher up in the code. With multiple backgrounds, the first listed has the highest z-index.</comment>


What is a good site to find programmers? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Apart from Elance.com, what are the other websites where one can search for programmers to outsource work?
Many thx <comment><AUTHOR> are there any design studios that also deal with programing?

</comment><comment><USER2> oDesk and RentACoder</comment>


Coding Error Forces 2019 Subaru Ascents to be Scrapped - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/coding-error-leads-293-subaru-ascents-to-the-car-crusher <comment><USER2> _Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed."_

Something doesn't feel right, when the cost of adding the missing welds is somehow higher than the cost of a whole new vehicle...

If missing welds were discovered on an airliner, for example, the fix would almost certainly be to add them, and not replace the whole plane.

<comment><USER3> A fun anecdote to explain the absurdity that is Auto manufacture.

When Ford made it's own vehicles in Australia, the engines were made in Melbourne, while the body and final assembly of the two was in Geelong. That's an hour away on the busiest freeway in the country

A friend is a process Engineer and did a big investigation into what they could do when the engines were late arriving due to traffic jams. Of course the whole thing was Just In Time because reasons, so they needed the engines to arrive just at the right time.

At the end of a multi-year study it was concluded the most cost-effective thing to do when the engines were not ready to put into cars that were ready for them, was..... let the cars fall off the end of the line, crush them, and eventually crush the engines when they showed up.

Any attempt to re-integrate them, or salvage stuff, or push them back on the start of the line, or anything else you want to think of costs more money than the above solution. They ran the numbers every which way, and as shocked as they were, it's the truth.

It was a rumor for a long time that every single time the production line was stopped, even for five seconds, it cost $1Mil. It was investigated, and found to be higher than that.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like having the plants separated by a road with traffic jams was very expensive.

Probably way more expensive than colocating the two factories.

JITs are really susceptible to shock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still remember when I started playing around with computers, 40 years ago in a Tandy store on TRS-80, you were told something like "it doesn't matter what you do on the computer, you can't hurt it or damage anything". Now everyday when I work (on networking and security for large enterprises) I constantly am thinking about how I have to really make sure the process I am about to execute isn't going to break something or disrupt someone's business operation. Rarely do I have to contemplate that what I get wrong might kill someone though!

<comment><USER6> Here's an interesting series of articles on Risks to the Public by the ACM Special Interest Group for Software Engineering: [https://dl.acm.org/results.cfm?query=Risks+to+the+public&Go....](https://dl.acm.org/results.cfm?query=Risks+to+the+public&Go.x=22&Go.y=4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was really an inspection error. A human can miss a weld, too, so manufacturing lines rely on inspections. Someone was signing off on work that wasn't done. Whether a human or a robot was supposed to do that work is a nit.

<comment><USER6> From TFA: "[Subaru] found an Ascent with the missing welds during a routine sampling inspection on 21 July"

The affected vehicles were built between 13th and 21st.

Not sure how long QA takes for a vehicle, but they found it within a week.

<comment><USER8> _sampling_ inspection. Not a hard software check: `assert ( numWelds == 30);`

Or a camera that takes a picture of each vehicles undercarriage. They probably thought that was unnecessary until now.

<comment><USER6> Could have been an error of requirements causing both the robot control code and any automated testing to be incorrectly implemented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm interested why over-automation caused so many problems in manufacturing plants.

I would think that once an assembly line has been set, full automation would be completely ideal and perfect. Is it because plants are always changing and getting tweaked, and changes require software updates, which invariably have bugs and take time to adapt to changes?

<comment><USER10> > I'm interested why over-automation caused so many problems in manufacturing > plants.

A robot will uncritically do what you tell it.

An experienced welder will tell you you're an idiot when you're an idiot.

<comment><USER11> So is the issue over-automation or bad QA after the system is set up?

<comment><USER12> I would imagine theyd try to automate QA too, akin to unit testing

You could imagine a situation where the automated QA is trusted and does its job in sets, with humans interspersed to backup the QA programs. But one of the QA checks is actually buggy and OK's the missing weld, but the full batch of work covers it up before reaching a human for the double-check

In which case, both issues are at fault: too much reliance on the QA program, and allowing too much work to be done before it reached a human (bad double- check setup)

<comment><USER13> I imagine if you have a list of welding points and feed that list to both the assembly and inspection robots, stuff like this happens.

Especially in case the robots share code and e.g. have the same parse error when loading your list of welding points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Coding error? Maybe... but I would bet it all started in business where some management decision was made to replace "Bob" who programmed the bots for years was replaced by a cheaper less experienced person, all in efforts to reduce IT costs. So let's rename this thread, "Business Management decision forces 2019 Subaru Ascents to be Scrapped".

</comment><comment><USER15> Despite being the title of the article it isn't what it seems. The coding error was in the production of the cars which led to them needing to be destroyed.

The coding error didn't literally send them to the crusher instead of the showroom floor as the title implies.

<comment><USER16> I was picturing some oversized Subaru-branded Rube Goldberg machine, with the final step being a shiny car being tossed into a crusher.

<comment><USER15> Now that's news!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When you move your plants to the US.</comment>


Ask HN: Can Big Data Cure Disease? - <AUTHOR>

I had an idea tonight.  What if 100,000 people tracked everything they ate for four years -- and a team of researchers mined that data for correlations with certain health outcomes.  Would this yield significantly useful information?<p>Because I was thinking tonight about ways the data could be collected.  College students might gladly opt-in to a special low-priced meal service provided in exchange for their participation.  Maybe large-scale volunteer organizations (like the Peace Corps) might find people willing to participate in the study, just as a way to help identify health risks.  Maybe there could be a new movement -- instead of MOOCs, we have could massive online volunteer opportunities...  There's even ways the government could get involved (with voluntary participation from servicemen or prisoners).  Even before you get to the possibility that someone might actually try to privately fund the massive study with an eye to eventually benefiting from its data... <comment><USER2> This is called "Nutritional epidemiology"[1] and there are quite a few really big studies already done about this[2][3]

Technology and big data would make them easier to do, but not sure whether you were thinking along this line or not.

[1] [http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/4/486.full](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/4/486.full) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurses'_Health_Study](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurses'_Health_Study)</comment>


Want to Be an Entrepreneur? Listen to Angel Investor Naval Ravikant - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/05/13/video-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur-listen-to-naval-ravikant/

<comment><USER2> OK, so one of my major, major gripes about the current trends in modern web developments is putting stuff in videos. This is over 8 minutes long, and I'm sure it's fascinating, but I could probably skim a transcript in 15 seconds to decide if it's worth my time.

If it is, then I could read a transcript in 60 seconds, possibly less. Then I could re-read the important bits, print them out and put them on my wall to catch my eye at odd moments for the next two weeks.

But no, I have to sit through a video. I've got no idea whether it's worthwhile, no summary, no abstract, no method to skim.

And no time.

And I took this time because you, the Hacker News audience, can benefit from knowing this. Some of your audience won't take the time to sit through a flashy video, wonderful graphics, or clever animations.

Some of your audience have limited time, limited attention, and want to hear your message clearly, quickly, and effectively, or not at all.

Video isn't always the right medium. Write this on your wall - provide a summary.

</rant>

<comment><USER3> The way I deal with this is to first decide if it's something fairly important to me, and if it passes that test, I'll do some physical chores on the side while listening to the video.

Since you'll need to 'waste' time cleaning or cutting your fingernails anyway, if you're not watching physics lectures you can probably clear up those chores without getting bored and learn new things at the same time.

<comment><USER2> That's a good technique, and I use it, but it doesn't help if English isn't your first language and you're having trouble understanding it anyway. Naval Ravikant speaks clearly, but he speaks _fast,_ and having constantly to rewind to listen to something again makes it really, really hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I HATE videos with no transcript, but I like karma, so here's the summary I made for my bookmark:

 _Best piece of advice you received?_ \-- "It's the people, stupid." Everyone ignores it, he ignored it too at first. It's the same advice anyone who's been in business for a long time will give you.

 _What advice do you give entrepreneurs?_ \-- Find a great partner no matter what you do. Qualities to look for: high intelligence AND high energy AND high integrity. Every one of these is important.

 _How important is it to be in Silicon Valley?_ \-- A: It's more important than people outside the Silicon Valley really realize. He learned this the hard way: he started out in Boston. Networking. The atmosphere -- "It's in the air, it's in the water". If you're doing a consumer web business, it's winner- takes-all. No place for second Facebook, no place for second Twitter, so you need every advantage you can get.

 _What do you look for in an entrepreneur?_ \-- You're not evaluating the product as much as the person presenting it, what are they capable of. "Show don't tell." Separating talkers from doers.

 _How to get a meeting with an investor?_ \-- Sorry, didn't watch, it's irrelevant to me.

 _Whether you should be public or private with your idea?_ \-- Again, didn't watch, it's irrelevant to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting video. I especially enjoyed his comparison of angel/VC investment to the Keynesian Beauty Contest.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's always nice to hear someone talk about the entrepreneurial process.

Great interview and great reminder of things to not forget as you go forth with your business.

</comment><comment><USER7> J.F.D.I.</comment>