Particle physics may have reached the end of the line - <AUTHOR> http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics-may-have-reached-end.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I think a little context here is in order: from a 10000-foot high level, the particles that can be seen depend on the amount of energy present in the system, which is why we spend billions of dollars accelerating basic particles (protons in the case of the LHC) to high energies and literally SMASH them together, so we can see what flies out.

We see four distinct, different forces in the universe: strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Our Standard Model predicts that these forces become more unified at higher energy levels:

1\. Electromagnetism merges with weak nuclear force at 246 GeV

2\. Electroweak force merges with strong nuclear force at around ~10^16 GeV ('grand unification')

3\. Finally, quantum mechanics predicts these forces become _unified_ , which is to say indistinguishable, at the Planck energy, around 10^19 GeV.

As we get closer to predicted unification energies, we see different mixes of particles, and the Higgs boson is in fact the particle responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, with a mass of around 126 GeV.

The problem is that the LHC produces collisions of around 10^4 GeV, so from our current energy scale up to the next unification, with the strong force, we're off by a factor of 10^12.

Back of the envelope estimate is that a supercollider that can reach grand unification energies with our current technology would be around the size of the solar system.

Hence the article: particle smashing is a brute-force approach to investigating new physics, but now there is an extremely wide gulf between what we have discovered, and what we think lies next, hence we need to be more clever than using brute force.

<comment><USER3> The solar system is already close to a vacuum. Makes me wonder if a new solar system sized accelerator could just be a series of nodes orbiting far out to aim and accelerate the particles around.

Still way too hard for us but also way easier than building a tube going around the solar system.

<comment><USER4> > The solar system is already close to a vacuum

No. Not at all. You can expect particle density to be anywhere from 5cm^-3 to 80cm^-3 if you stay within 1 astronomical unit distance from the Sun. Besides, all that plasma is accompanied by frozen-in magnetic field, plus you have energetic particle events, recurrent fast solar wind emerging from coronal holes and plethora of other effects and structures which are terribly interesting to study but which will ruin your high energy physics experiment even if you somehow acquire god-like powers and build a huge non-contiguous accelerator.

<comment><USER5> >5cm^-3 to 80cm^-3

had to look this up to see what you mean. I think you mean 5g(cm^-3) to 80g(cm^-3)

<comment><USER6> Um, water weighs 1g/cm3. He means 5 particles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it fascinating that the prevalent comment on this are variations of "that can't be right, we still don't understand [things, such as dark energy, etc]." It demonstrates one of the most pernicious biases in science.

Particle accelerators have been the mainstay and principle tool for particle physics, and have produced amazing results. Further, there are obvious questions in fundamental physics that the Standard Model revealed by these experiments does not answer. But, it _does not follow_ these further questions can be answered via accelerators that us humans can construct. The universe has made no promise to us that its mysteries are accessible, least of all through some particular method. We had a particular reason to believe the LHC would reveal new physics (the Higgs boson prediction) and we have no such reason for the proposed future accelerator; our evaluation should change as a result.

My guess would be that astrophysics is a better route to understanding the mysteries of fundamental physics; astronomers can measure distant phenomena with surprising accuracy already, and objects such as black holes are one of the few cases where exotic phenomena are currently widely expected to occur. Perhaps the money is better spent on a truly gigantic space telescope?

<comment><USER8> the James Webb space telescope was originally supposed to only cost 1 billion, but now is around 10 billion USD. Still, we could build two more of those for the price of a new LHC.

And the JWST is going to give us insights about galaxy formation, exoplanets, and more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From : [http://chaosbook.org/extras/CNYang.html](http://chaosbook.org/extras/CNYang.html)

"In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is that `the party's over'."

Frank Yang, 1980

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure someone said everything in physics has been discovered just before the start of the 20th Century boom in theoretical physics too.

Michelson (of Michelson-Morley fame), apparently, IIRC. I'd warrant that despite his credentials Yang (of Yang-Mills fame) is making a similar mistake.

But I do think we're likely to see a retarding of the pace of change in fundamental physics (I think we're on to a reflective phase, where science consolidates, and social change progresses; leading to more focus on higher- order sciences - biology and such).

<comment><USER11> The difference is that back then there were experimental observations that couldn't be explained and that led to completely new branches of physics like general relativity and quantum theory. Right now that is nothing than can point the way. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Electromagnetism are extremely successful with no obvious flaws (other than not always working well with one another) and the few things about which we have no clue (dark energy, dark matter, etc) are so removed from our capabilities that they're intractable.

<comment><USER12> There are a lot of dark matter searches out there which would disagree with your last statement. But further than that, we still have a lot of puzzles to solve. Proton radius, muon g-2, proton spin, ...

<comment><USER11> And they'll keep searching... and finding nothing. :o) And is solving those puzzles worth the tens of billions of dollars needed to build the next generation of accelerators? How much further would that same amount of money go if invested elsewhere?

Hell, invest a few billion in building a true quantum computer or working towards true AI (just to name two areas where there are many more puzzles and obvious directions to explore) and see how much more impact that has and how much faster you can solve those same physics puzzles.

<comment><USER13> There is currently no quantum computer that can factor the number 15. And no one knows how to make one that can. Is this a useful field?

<comment><USER14> [https://phys.org/news/2014-11-largest-factored-quantum- devic...](https://phys.org/news/2014-11-largest-factored-quantum-device.html):

 _"New largest number factored on a quantum device is 56,153"_

Still something you can do in your head in less time than reading the paper takes, but more than 15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Several years ago, shortly after the Higgs discovery, I sat down with a couple CERN people, and their comment was that the current problem is that we need more theoretical physicists coming up with measurable predictions. As many of the other posters state, obviously there is more to learn, but we could learn faster if we had better (and more) predictions about what we might find.

<comment><USER16> It's harder and harder to do without well developed intuition. To develop good intuition, we need to make good mental model, but we got good (but incomplete) mathematical model instead.

<comment><USER17> I agree and I think the main reason is the anti-realist camp in physics which has taken hold in the past 100 years.

This view probably developed because the realist models of quantum mechanics were too difficult for people to accept. It was easier to say that intuitive models are outside the scope of science than to change their set of inconsistent preconceptions.

<comment><USER10> Could you expand on your comment; I thought a (small?) majority of theoreticians were, shall we say, "super-realists" such that they view the Many-Worlds Interpretation as actuality rather than merely a model?

When you say "intuitive models" do you mean ones that echo somewhat Newtonian/Classical physics?

Perhaps part of the problem is that schools follow a method of teaching physics where they teach what is easy to teach, knowing it's wrong, and then teach something a little more complex, knowing that's wrong too, etc.. Perhaps we need to start off teaching that the world is non-Newtonian, that it has Quantum weirdness and relativistic effects (according to our best models), and allow that to underlie our intuitions.

<comment><USER17> Many worlds is one of the more popular realist models, but it's quite rare for physicists to claim they think it represents reality. It's not taught in any textbooks I'm aware of and even now papers often dismiss experiments having multiple outcomes without even mentioning that they are doing so, coming to absurd conclusions as a result.

The situation has certainly improved a lot since the days of Everett, who was basically dismissed as a crack-pot.

<comment><USER10> I've seen Hawking quoted as saying MWI is obviously right.

My statement was based on an IoP survey result I saw some years ago (I'm a theoretical physics graduate); I'll try and dig it up as my recollection could be wrong.

<comment><USER17> Hawking said it was right but that it's "just probability". It's not clear what he really thought about all those worlds being real. He didn't seem to believe in quantum immortality, so I don't think he took it seriously.

There have been a few surveys over the years, but mostly of conference participants. The results depend heavily on which conference you attend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I could not disagree more with the general statement of the author.

Actually, we are now going from a boring phase of particle physics where the theory was able to predict anything we were able to measure afterwards to a phase where no theorists has a clue what might happen.

This phase is called "exploration". It consists of many "blue shots" of which many will probably have zero results but have to be done in order to find out what is really going on. Theorists had a good run with prediction, now it's the experimentalists turn to lead the way with exploration by producing new data.

When the Muon (basically a heavy version of the electron) was first discovered it 'seemed so incongruous and surprising at the time, that Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi famously quipped, "Who ordered that?"'[Wikipedia]

The new CERN collider has got to be build. To risk to miss the next great "Who ordered that?" moment would be grossly inconsequential.

<comment><USER11> Usually, when we reach the limits of theoretical physics we have unexplained experimental results or when the experimental side starts getting boring, we have theories that can be used to make new predictions. Right now, the problem is that there is no clear direction in which to proceed. No new theory predicts anything that can be feasibly tested and there's nothing experimentally surprising that can't be explained theoretically. Until there's a breakthrough, a theoretical framework with testable experimental predictions, there is no point in wasting a few more billion to build bigger holes on the ground in Switzerland.

While I am a theoretical physicist by training, I have no doubt that those same billions could be much better used by many other fields such as biology, chemistry, computer science, ai, etc...

<comment><USER18> This is the classic theorist talking who apparently knows nothing about the real world. It takes a lot of expertise to build a particle accelerator. This expertise will literally die off, if we stop building accelerators for say the next 50 years. The next generation will have to start at zero again and it will take 80+ years to build the following one instead of 20.

In my phd thesis I had to partly rebuild an experiment that was done 35 years ago. (We were not able to improve the systematical errors. The statistics was vastly improved due to modern electronics though). All people who were involved in the old experiment were either retired or dead. The practical problems we encountered were "theoretical trivial" but plenty and time consuming (e.g. finding the right glue with has the right optical density and which does not dissolve the radiation hardened wavelength shifters). If we had just one person to talk to who had done the old experiment we could have done it in 1/4th time or better.

<comment><USER19> > This is the classic theorist talking who apparently knows nothing about the > real world. This expertise will literally die off, if we stop building > accelerators for say the next 50 years.

If we're talking about that being the best argument in the real world for building accelerators at the moment, let's spend _$200 million_ on a project to archive every conceivable piece of information related to building an accelerator and save 99% of our budget.

<comment><USER18> In my case the problem was indeed that things that were "obvious" were not documented. Some of those "obvious" things were in fact the result of decades of trail and error. In the end the student did it in that particular way because it has always been done that way and for that reason found not necessary to document it.

But even if you document everything many essential things will be gone. Especially knowledge about things that have been tried but don't work because failures are usually not published or documented.

It is a little bit like having a document with runes of an ancient language where you may be can find out the meaning of the words and sentences. But you will never find out how the language actually sounded like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do think it's worthwhile to question building an incredibly expensive particle collider without a specific purpose in mind, when the money could go towards fields like fusion energy, quantum computing, or cancer research

<comment><USER21> We have more than enough money to do all of the above. Science is a sideshow; it absorbs a nearly infinitesimal part of the economy, and could be easily funded by a military funding decrease small enough that it'd scarcely be noticed.

Yes, a larger collider is unlikely to find much, but it's cheap enough that we should do it _anyway_. As bets go, it's a good one.

<comment><USER22> > it absorbs a nearly infinitesimal part of the economy

In 2018 the NSF requested $6.653 billion. (More than the stupid wall--don't tell Trump.)

That's some real money, and it should be well-spent. A new collider is probably not well-spent.

<comment><USER23> Or 1% of the budget of the department of defense. In other words, a sideshow.

<comment><USER24> The trick is to make the military finance your science project by finding a military justification for it.

<comment><USER25> It worked for Galileo: [https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/galileo-was- one-of-t...](https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/galileo-was-one-of-the- worlds-first-defense-contractors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone please help me understand why anyone outside of a small circle of curious science buffs should care about particle physics?

It seems the field has advanced so far that EVEN IF new discoveries emerge, they would be of no practical value.

I'm not saying it's not interesting (I like reading about it FWIW), and I'm not saying it will never ever prove useful. But from resource allocation perspective, tens of billions of dollars required for high energy experiments seem to be much better spent on other areas of physics. That is, until the civilization advances far enough that understanding the depths of particle physics or cosmology becomes relevant.

<comment><USER27> > It seems the field has advanced so far that EVEN IF new discoveries emerge, > they would be of no practical value

Particle physicists would disagree. A complete understanding of quantum mechanics, squared with general relativity, is very likely to have practical applications.

Cliche analogy: if you thought the world was flat and ships were falling off the end of the ocean, you might be investing your money in world-edge- detection; and you might say there's no point in studying the edge of the world itself because no practical value can come of it. You wouldn't have any idea that circumnavigation was (relatively) easy once you understood more about the nature of the world.

<comment><USER26> > A complete understanding of quantum mechanics, squared with general > relativity, is very likely to have practical applications.

But anything observable in the world of reasonable energies (up to whatever modern colliders achieve) can be predicted with existing theories.

If we discover something that only happens at astronomically high energies, would it really be that useful?

<comment><USER27> > But anything observable in the world of reasonable energies (up to whatever > modern colliders achieve) can be predicted with existing theories.

This is classic "world is flat" / geocentric argument. Breakthroughs are impossible to predict but can't happen if we give up.

Edit:

> If we discover something that only happens at astronomically high energies, > would it really be that useful?

We don't know. World being round turned out to be pretty useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe the real way of progressing is not by building bigger accelerators with the same technology (and of course a LHC successor would need several new _evolutionary_ developments), but finding out ways of producing higher energy collisions without resorting to accelerating particles in a tube.

We're not even sure if there's anything in those higher energy ranges, there are certainly knowledge gaps, but maybe a bigger collider is not the answer. At least not until we have some other hints and new theoretical ideas.

</comment><comment><USER28> I still think we have a lot to learn from Bose-Einstein condensates.

If we're hitting a wall with respect to increasing energy in a system as much as possible, maybe we should make sure we've picked all of the low-hanging fruit from decreasing energy in a system as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> It seems very strange to say that "particle physics may be done", given that are several enormous mysteries and problems in physics that clearly indicate our knowledge is incomplete.

A few examples: QFT and GR are not integrated, dark matter, dark energy, the vacuum catastrophe, and so on...

One could make the argument that a larger collider is not the best way to attack these (I have no idea), but that is a different statement.

<comment><USER30> The author's argument is not that there are not questions that still need to be answered; but there is no reason at all to believe that a larger collider, that we are capable of building with today's technology, will answer any of them. (This point is made explicit in the comments).

If the funding for your field is predicated on building a larger collider to discover new particles; then you're in trouble. That is the sense 'Particle Physics may be done' is meant in this context.

<comment><USER29> Ok, I see where the argument is coming from, thanks. I am having trouble buying the idea that without new colliders, there is nothing left to do in the field of particle physics or even with the Standard Model. But I could off base here, or perhaps my interpretation of the article is overly literal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well there is good news: The Universe contains structures capable of accelerating particles to the energies we want to observe and blasts them in our direction occasionally. It may take a lot longer, but we can observe those.

</comment><comment><USER32> Collider physics is not the whole of particle physics. There are in fact known inconsistencies in the standard model (for example, experimental evidence shows neutrinos have mass[0]) that remain unexplained and need further study.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Mass)

<comment><USER33> There's also the whole issue of figuring out what dark matter is made out of. Neutrinos account for a small part of it, but the rest is completely unknown.

<comment><USER34> Dark matter is a supersolid that fills 'empty' space, strongly interacts with ordinary matter and is displaced by ordinary matter. What is referred to geometrically as curved spacetime physically exists in nature as the state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter. The state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter is gravity.

The supersolid dark matter displaced by a galaxy pushes back, causing the stars in the outer arms of the galaxy to orbit the galactic center at the rate in which they do.

Displaced supersolid dark matter is curved spacetime.

<comment><USER33> I have a few questions:

1) What exactly do you mean by a supersolid?

2) How would this be described mathematically? What predictions would your theory make?

3) How does this account for some galaxies seeming to have large amounts of dark matter, and others seeming to have less?

4) What predictions does your theory make with regards to the expansion of the universe?

5) What predictions does this theory have with regards to places with extreme gravity, such as neutron stars and black holes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> That simply isn't true. Not discovering a new particle outside of the standard model, not discovering supersymmetry, or bumping against an energy desert does NOT spell the end of the line for particle physics any more than GR isn't over just because they discovered gravity waves. What you guys don't understand is that model building is not a hard activity at all. SU(5), SO(10), E6 whatever. Graduate students do those calculations all the time. What is hard is understanding concepts and there are more than a few surprises hidden away inside the standard model. Strange matter is poorly understood. There may be ways to pretty up the standard model that haven't been discovered yet. People like to go around complaining how "ugly" it is. It's not. It's prettier and smarter than they are, they're just jealous. Particle physics is doing just great and the only thing wrong with it is that it is dramatically underfunded.

</comment><comment><USER36> Before we throw huge money, we have to make sure we are really using it the best way. These ever larger colliders are big investments. The Higgs was an obvious hole missing in the puzzle, let's find another obvious hole in the puzzle.

</comment><comment><USER37> Damn the sophons :<

</comment><comment><USER38> Saying particle physics is dead because we discovered all basic particles that we could with our resources - is a lot like saying biology is dead because we discovered DNA.

</comment><comment><USER39> Particle Physicists are going nuts in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER35> Stephen Hawking said something to the effect that since the Higgs was discovered particle physics was less interesting. To him but not to me. Particle physics is better off than ever. Experimentally, things are going to change immensely. Deep learning revolutionize particle physics and it's only going to get better. Technology gets better. Regarding theory, I personally think particle physics is in that same awkward stage as calculus before Weierstrass, Dedekind and Cauchy made their pioneering discoveries in analysis. Even after that there was still much to do. That was just the beginning Lebesgue, Danielle integral, Moore-Smith convergence. We're at the very beginning stages of particle physics theory. Nobody even knows what the Feynman integral really IS. Most of the mathematics we currently use is sophisticated but in another sense, quite dippy. Even superstring theory is suffused with what we'll likely look back on as broken maths. All the easier discoveries have been made and now the game is going to be different. That's a great place to be.

<comment><USER40> > Particle physics is better off than ever.

yeah but at what cost? how many more billions of taxpayer money need to be poured into this only to further push the theoretical constraints of our parameter space?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Non-mobile link: [http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics- ma...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics-may-have- reached-end.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Perhaps quantum computers will help break the deadlock? They'll make it possible to extrapolate the consequences of theories that were previously intractable. This might mean that a large number of candidate theories could be tested wholesale to see of they match existing evidence. In particular I know that it's currently very hard to get predictions from quantum chromodynamics, which means that the standard model hasn't yet been fully tested.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is unfair. Obviously our knowledge is incomplete. We have yet to make that all important connection between general relativity and qft and as far as I can tell, next steps towards that process are not clear. So banging shit together even harder to see if it can produce some anomalies doesn't seem like the worst possible idea, and at the very least it might rule out more possibilities.

<comment><USER44> The author's point is that you wouldn't expect to see quantum gravity at any scale we could feasibly probe for the next few centuries. If one can't come up with a theoretical justification for such an anomaly then perhaps that money should be put towards a more promising project.

It's all about opportunity cost.

<comment><USER45> > The author's point is that you wouldn't expect to see quantum gravity at any > scale we could feasibly probe for the next few centuries.

However the next-gen gravitational wave observatories should be able to start poking at quantum gravity, from what I understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Well, as far as I know (I might be wrong) she hasn't done any HEP phenomenology, so maybe at this moment she can't get that electroweak precision tests at a Higgs factory aren't a question of if, but when. She has enough training to understand why, so it'd be an interesting exercise for her to explain why that'd be futile, leaving aside the blogging standards.

<comment><USER46> I'm surprised this has been downvoted. I just can't understand how can be relevant the opinion of a physicist about something they've not worked on just because they have a blog. Sabine is on some kind of crusade nowadays, that's not science, it's something else. You can't dismiss the whole field of particle physics just because, get into the details you're supposed to be aware of and then you'll be adding something more than noise. And I'm sorry she thinks there's nothing worthwhile to be found with upcoming feasible experiments, that's incredibly disappointing, to say the least. The SM is an effective theory, the details of any underlying physics are coded into observables that we aren't done measuring yet, how's that not important?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I can only hope we've reached "the end of the line."

I believe little additional monies should be directed to more powerful particle accelerators until compelling evidence of something worth pursuing comes from theoretical physics. Meanwhile there are many problems where the investment will provide a predictable and useful return.

<comment><USER48> The thing is, theory can never provide evidence for anything.

This is what experiments do.

<comment><USER47> You misunderstand: I am not critical of physics experimentation in general; I am critical of the never-ending pursuit of evermore powerful particle accelerators.

At this time I oppose further pursuit of ever-bigger accelerators which draw interest and money away from other more productive areas of science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> What has particle physics given us after it gave us fusion and fission?

<comment><USER50> Faster computers, modern transistor design takes quantum effects into account.

Better microscopes.

A priceless sense of wonder.

<comment><USER51> Quantum mechanics sure. Particle physics no.

<comment><USER48> There is no difference. Quantum Mechanics is the current theory of particle physics.

<comment><USER51> Quantum mechanics is not the same as QFT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 'There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.'

\--Albert Michelson 1894

<comment><USER53> To better my understanding, what new discoveries were made post 1984? Few I can recollect:

1\. Higgs

2\. Gravitational Waves

3\. ???

<comment><USER54> > 2\. Gravitational Waves

You probably mean Narendra Modi Waves[1] :-)

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- india-46778879](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46778879)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Perhaps it's time to stop building colliders bigger and bigger, start building the ultimate big one (like around the whole planet) and concentrate on doing math and other kinds of experiments until it's finished.

</comment><comment><USER55> "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

\- Kelvin, 1900

Prof. Stephen Hawking mentions this in general context that, 'they thought physics was a closed subject in early 20th century' & proceeds to state how the universe was unfolded in theoretical physics in 'Brief Answers to the Big Questions'.

<comment><USER56> Yes, we get it. You're the second person to cite that quote in this thread. But the article is not saying there is nothing new to be discovered in (particle) physics.

<comment><USER55> My bad that I didn't see the earlier comment, interesting that it was attributed to Albert Michelson; seems a similar statement was made by him as well.

As far the article is concerned, I didn't quote to suggest they say it is end of particle physics. I just didn't agree with,

> But with the Higgs found, the next larger collider has no good motivation

Theoretical physicists were in consensus that to find precise answers w.r.t what happened during Big Bang we need high energy collider of the size of our solar system, that didn't deter them from creating LHC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is reminiscent of the plot of Cixin Liu's "Three Body Problem" trilogy of science fiction novels, where an alien race actively interferes with particle physics experiments on earth in order to limit the progress of physics research. Highly recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.

<comment> T-A > Highly recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.

Only if they are willing to believe that entanglement enables superluminal communication and that protons can be "unfolded" to macroscopic branes.

<comment><USER58> Aha! This is the perfect place to ask this!

I've dipped back into reading SF after a long time of only reading the classics (Heinlein et al), and the Three-Body Problem, which I read a few days ago, _did_ seem to me to fit into that mould.

But what are some other modern "hard SF" books you've enjoyed?

<comment><USER59> Recent - James Corey (what the Expanse is based off of). Daniel Suarez would be popular in these circles, but more Crichton-y science than next 100 years. Some of Stephenson's books (Seveneves, etc). Others Stephen Baxter, Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon).

All great, but I'm more old-school, William Gibson, James P. Hogan, Greg Bear (Eon series), Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> While I do believe our knowledge of particle physics is still incomplete, the money spent plumbing its depths seems disproportionately high. When was fusion energy meant to be produced again?

<comment><USER61> Nuclear fusion won't work, because stars are not powered by fusion. What happens in the stars is that heavier elements capture protons, until they eventually reach lead, where it keeps cycling - lead 206 captures proton, turns into bismuth 207, which decays into lead 207, captures another proton, turns into bismuth 208, captures yet another proton, turns into polonium 209, which either decays into lead 205 (releasing a helium core), or captures another proton and the resulting astatine 210 decays into polonium 210, and the polonium 210 decays back into lead 206 + a helium atom.

Which is why direct fusion of hydrogen/deuterium will never work at expected temperatures and controllable speed, it can only work in explosions, if at all.

<comment><USER62> If what you say was true, the bombs wouldn't work either. The bombs are based on the same math as stellar physics.

<comment><USER61> They're explosions though, they can't be controlled. And they contain heavy elements as the trigger.

<comment><USER62> Neither of those sentences is relevant to, or contradicts, what I said.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I did not know jitsi existed - <AUTHOR> https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ <comment><USER2> It's also WebRTC based, which takes the load off the Jitsi server considerably. Popular alternatives like Zoom requires rerouting traffic through their servers AFAIK.

<comment><USER3> This is only for users that have public facing IPs. Most users are behind NAT, so WebRTC will still require relays (TURN servers). I'd assume majority of users are behind NAT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, they say they don't support Firefox or Safari, only chrome - although it seems to basically work in both Firefox and Safari [https://web- cdn.jitsi.net/meetjitsi_3875.548/static/recommen...](https://web- cdn.jitsi.net/meetjitsi_3875.548/static/recommendedBrowsers.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My brother told me today was looking for a way to move his classes online, to keep his income while coronavirus is hurting his art centre. I found jitsi.

</comment><comment><USER5> Zoom is also free for 1:1 meetings.</comment>


Sunlight Foundation shutting down Sunlight Labs - <AUTHOR> https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/09/20/statement-from-sunlight-foundations-board-chairman/ <comment><USER2> Is the Congress API shutting down? If so, I'd love to hear suggestions of some replacement options.</comment>


Show HN: LogicEmu – Online Logic Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://lodev.org/logicemu <comment><USER2> Definitely could have used this back in school ;)

Nice companion is AllAboutCircuits online textbooks:

[https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/)

Archive has the original Bell Labs manual from 1951, with some really beautiful logic gate diagrams

The Design Of Switching Circuits by William Keister, Alistair E Ritchie, Seth H. Washburn

[https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits](https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is insanely cool. Props to the author. I can see myself using this for sketching some personal projects up.

Unsure if the simulation is decoupled from the display, but it gets a little slow in graphical mode in Firefox. Could be a really interesting WebAssembly optimization project.

<comment><AUTHOR> The rendering slowness is probably because every cell is rendered as an individual little HTML5 canvas (two, one for off state and one for on state).

Some browsers have no problem at all with so many little canvases, but in firefox it causes a slowdown.

A solution that will hopefully be faster is to make one big canvas instead of many little ones, and blit the cells on it every frame instead of using CSS visibility to swap between on and off states for each cell. Such rewrite of the rendering engine is a todo.

<comment><USER4> Any reason for not using canvas or some kind of framework like Vue/preact/etc?

<comment><USER5> Snarky comments will be ignored. ╭∩╮⎛○⏜⏟〤○⎞╭∩╮

<comment><USER4> Wasn't snark, Mr Hostility. DOM manipulation is a very expensive operation and is abstracted by a lot of useful libraries - was wondering if there was a specific reason to not use them.

Canvas is another type of abstraction - and blitting to the screen is easier with it - so same applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is way cool! I've recently been trying to explain this stuff to my 14 year old and now I don't have to! This would be a great learning resource for kids studying STEM. Many thanks! :)

<comment><USER7> Among many other things with them, explaining stuff to my kids is one of the best way I have found to connect with them.

As I work in tech, explaining tech works better to me than explaining non-tech stuff such as gardening or politics :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just spent the past few hours going through the tutorials. Amazing work!

<comment><USER9> I agree! Well written and informative. Props to the author!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _This online logic simulator requires JavaScript to run and JavaScript is > disabled in your browser._

Is there same thing, but in _Python_?

<comment><USER11> No, but there's one in Java, called "LogiSim" [1], and works offline.

[1]: [http://www.cburch.com/logisim](http://www.cburch.com/logisim)

<comment><USER12> Or circuitVerse</comment></comment></comment>


The collapse of the Lisp machine market in 1987 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#The_collapse_of_the_Lisp_machine_market_in_1987 <comment><USER2> TLDR: Commodity hardware improved faster than the specialized and expensive chips, and by 1987 there was no longer any reason to buy a Lisp machine. A general purpose machine running software LISP was faster and cheaper and could run non-LISP programs.</comment>


Investor resigns after daughter,10, hands him list of milestones he's missed - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/11119318/British-educated-investor-resigns-after-daughter10-hands-him-list-of-milestones-hes-missed.html

<comment><USER2> "56 year old millionaire retires."

Wow, that's heartwarming.

<comment><USER3> British-educated! (why did the article find the need to say that multiple times?)

<comment><USER4> As a resident of said country, it's because British education needs all the good news stories it can get :) Granted, this particular education was private and massively expensive, but it still counts as a win for the British education sector!</comment></comment></comment>


How startup sausage gets made: The Launch Pad reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/how-startup-sausage-gets-made-the-launch-pad-reviewed/

<comment><USER2> He says twice that the companies are LLCs, but all YC companies are converted to Delaware C-Corps, correct?</comment>


Show HN: Static blog gen on the pile of thousands - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvwallin/ago <comment><AUTHOR> Small weekend-project to make an even smaller, more opinionated static blog generator with focus on writing.

Uses markdown for posts, got no real features at all, the code isn't clean and awesome and it has no tests at all (atm)

It works and it's lightweight. Love it or Hate it</comment>


Wireworld - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld <comment><USER2> This is my favorite cellular automata. The simplicity and elegance that allows for such complex logic.

I ported the famous wireworld computer[0] to javascript a few years back[1]. The source[2] is in c# transpiled to javascript so it may be a bit hard to follow, but still an interesting read of how to squeeze every draw call out of 2d canvas.

[0] [http://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html](http://www.quinapalus.com/wi- index.html)

[1] [http://dested.com/projects/wire/](http://dested.com/projects/wire/)

[2] [https://github.com/dested/WireWorld](https://github.com/dested/WireWorld)

<comment><USER3> [1] is soo enthralling. In case it isn't obvious to everyone, you can add an electron with left click and reset things to copper with the right click. It's loads of fun to introduce a few random errors and watch them cascade through the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you like wireworld, you'll love Factorio's conveyor belts [1]!

Also check out John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [2] and universal constructor [3].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mGdL4XKXew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mGdL4XKXew)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor)

<comment><USER5> Factorio is great. You a few dozen minutes or so thinking that this is a typical RTS with a twist, and then you suddenly realize that the opponent in this game is not really those hostile critters - the true challenge is _managing complexity_ of your logistics.

This game is _hard_ fun. I.e., the kind of fun that makes you want to write an autorouting programm for the converyor belts.

<comment><USER6> I just got a copy on last week's Steam sale. It's tremendously good fun and a real time soaker :)

<comment><USER7> That's my main complaint with it. Because you can only act locally around your little man you have slog all over the map, which doesn't add to gameplay much (the attacking monsters are infrequent, as far as i've gotten in the game, and easily dealt with by turrets).

I'm more interested, when playing the game, in making clever and efficient systems to move my bits around and the game, because of it's interface, makes that hard. Eventually I realize how many hours it's going to take to rearrange all my conveyers and I quit.

<comment><USER8> The late-game tech really helps with this - you eventually get technologies that all you to blueprint and paste groups of buildings. This doesn't alleviate all of the issues, but it allows for component re-use and standardization. I do think some of the limits in Factorio are what make it fun, and differentiate it from a pure programming game.

I usually struggle to play any game that's too similar to brainteasers, puzzling, or thinking about systems optimization: I would rather spend those hours just programming, which is just as fun, and far more rewarding. But Factorio is sooo much fun... especially if you set up a server and play with friends.

I learned Chef getting my Factorio server running :) It's turtles all the way down in automation land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome! I made a sort of action puzzle game loosely based on this a while back (without realizing it, as I had no idea about Wireworld) for a Ludum Dare. Cool to see this concept somewhere else!

I still want to, someday, flesh it out. I think it would make a pretty fun mobile game!

Source: [https://github.com/lytedev/ld26-almost- nothing](https://github.com/lytedev/ld26-almost-nothing)

Somebody "speedrunning" an earlier in-dev version of the game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z33Rmx8QHQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z33Rmx8QHQ8)

<comment><USER10> I never thought about making a puzzle game out of those automata. that's pretty awesome! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been working on steamdance[1] for the past few years, which is a little logic simulator a lot like wireworld. The project started as a way to teach digital logic and evolved from there. (It used to be called boilerplate, but we renamed it for obvious reasons.)

Its still not ready for prime time, but we've been making some cool stuff with it anyway:

Simple logic gates: [https://steam.dance/nornagon/logic](https://steam.dance/nornagon/logic)

2 full adders: [https://steam.dance/josephg/adder](https://steam.dance/josephg/adder)

A compacted 8 bit adder: [https://steam.dance/josephg/alu](https://steam.dance/josephg/alu)

The purple boxes in the top left are dragable. Hit play to see it calculate out.

[1] [https://steam.dance/](https://steam.dance/) Source: [https://github.com/josephg/steamdance](https://github.com/josephg/steamdance)

</comment><comment><USER12> I cannot view things like this and [https://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship- sp...](https://niginsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/new-spaceship-speed-in- conways-game-of-life/) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE) without coming to the conclusion that we, and life, are just massively complex self-replicating patterns.

May you find peace in the oscillations.

<comment><USER13> I find this to be quite amazing. Life within life. [https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8](https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did an implementation of this a really long time ago (Github says 3 years) to play with Dart.

[http://nicmalan.com/wireworld/](http://nicmalan.com/wireworld/)

[https://github.com/n1c/wireworld](https://github.com/n1c/wireworld)

</comment><comment><USER15> Golly [0], an open source, cross-platform application for exploring cellular automata, includes the Wireworld ruleset and some example starting patterns.

[0] [http://golly.sourceforge.net/](http://golly.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER16> If you liked that, you might also find interesting Drescher's 'Quantish' model where he demonstrates how you can implement quantum effects using simplish circuits: [https://xorshammer.com/2010/02/17/quantish-physics-a- discret...](https://xorshammer.com/2010/02/17/quantish-physics-a-discrete- model-of-quantum-physics/) [http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6486/AIM-1026a...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6486/AIM-1026a.pdf?sequence=2)

</comment><comment><USER17> I often think that this is what Minecraft should have used instead of redstone.

</comment><comment><USER18> This similar thing was posted here a while ago: [https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired- logic](https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic)

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me also of Conway's game of life. I love those kind of automata systems. I did an implementation of it a few years ago (it's pretty simple and bad I was just learning how to program) but it works [http://www.jonathanfromgrowth.com/lifebb](http://www.jonathanfromgrowth.com/lifebb)

</comment><comment><USER19> See also [https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired- logic](https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic) which isn't a cellular automaton, but was inspired by Wireworld.

</comment><comment><USER20> There was a book (which I had and lost) back in the eighties or nineties, and I think Wireworld was featured in the chapter on cellular automata. Other variations included Life with multiple levels of health, not just dead or alive.

Anyone remember it?</comment>


Coding Assesment Tests Alternatives? - <AUTHOR> I've taken many coding assessment tests in the past; I've designed a few; and now I'm deciding if I should issue code tests to my own candidates. Here are the concerns I have with code tests.
1) Code tests are generally poorly designed - unless a great deal of time is put into developing them and with a clear idea of what the test is trying to ascertain.
2) Code tests are subjective - there are so many programming philosophy's and opinions out there that I don't think any two graders would agree on the quality of any piece of code unless they agree on exactly what the code test is designed to ascertain. In my experience, code test graders are just told to "give an opinion" on the code.
3) There doesn't seem to exist much research showing that code tests result in better employees. Please post them if you are familiar with some work I would like to give them a read.
4) It is easy to cheat on code tests - online code test taking services or having a buddy that already took the test are real threats to test subversion.
5) The question "How many good candidates am I also eliminating with my test?" is a legit question. <comment><USER2> My team uses a coding test with a bit of a twist. We provide the candidate with a simple application such as an address book or Todo list. We then ask them to either implement a feature or fix a bug that we point out.

The example uses current industry standards and practices and is built in a language that the candidate is applying for. Complexity varies depending on candidate, if it's a junior role we ask they implement a simple feature or fix a simple bug, more senior devs may be asked to implement something more complex or fix a harder bug.

We usually have one of our engineer that is interviewing them pair with them for about an hour on the issue during which time they can use all tools at their disposal.

Our process puts the candidate in a place where they can really show their skill, a real-world (or as close as we could get) problem with all the tools they would normally have. Additionally having just the one engineer pair with them for an hour or so usually gives us pretty good feedback as to not just coding skill but also as a general fit on our team.

It takes a bit more time in preparation and the interview but it's been a good ROI for us.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm going for a week to Silicon Valley, how to get most of it? - <AUTHOR>

Hi! My name is Kamil, co-founder of TimeCamp, I'm from Poland, Europe. I'm planning to visit Silicon Valley for one week.
How to get most of my time there?
* What is best days to be there? * Where can I find meet ups? * How could I arrange meetings with interesting people? :) <comment><USER2> You can check Meetup.com and StartupDigest for Events happening in the area. If you're somewhat social, you can meet quite a few interesting people there. Also, I'd recommend stopping by Hacker Dojo. It's a great place to meet like minded hackers and get info on what to do and where to go. Will you be driving or using public transportation? SF is actually a good 30-45 minutes from the Valley, but a must visit place, totally different feel! There are quite a few interesting startups and hang out spots there as well. For me I think the events based and angle has worked the best. I went to a couple of hot spots last time, pulled out my laptop and worked, as was everybody else. But quite frankly, I can do that at home too :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are you travelling half way around the world? (funding, hiring, vacations, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Vacations to Canada to visit my family (3 weeks). I think I could learn and feel startups culture there.

I have a friend that was visiting silicon valley, and I was amazed by his stories.

But funding will be probably the topic on the plate that time. We are starting getting some traction, and want to sell scale it. Polish enterprise market is not big enough probably.

<comment><USER4> Since you're in Europe, check out <http://www.seedcamp.com/> if you haven't already.

Realistically, you're unlikely to get an investment on this trip (if you do, hi5s all around...just don't expect it). The thing you can do is start building a relationship with smart people.

There's a lot of work if you want to do this right.

Find VCs (or people who publicize themselves as angel investors). Read their LinkedIn pages, blog posts, etc. The first 10-20 may take an hour each. Eventually you'll be able to get this down to 15 minutes each.

There are two goals here, one more important than the other.

Most importantly, find out which VCs have something _really fucking smart_ to say about what you're doing. This almost always comes from a specific background in an area. Ideally, if they personally ran a company in that particular industry.

Secondarily, LinkedIn (and sometimes other methods) will tell you who you might know in common. Good VCs are really overwhelmed by the number of people that want to talk to them. Their schedules can be busy beyond anything you typically see in business. It's hard to explain the value of a mutual friend who says to the VC "you should really talk to Kamil, he's onto something here..."

And really, you don't need to physically be here to start those relationships. You can get a message to basically any professional investor. The trick is making the most of it.

Use what you learned from researching the investor to write an email that they'll reply to. One way is to make it a deep question, and not "what should a pitch deck contain?" or "how much do you normally invest?". These are superficial questions that will get ignored. A better question is something that undeniably proves you know about your industry.

Hi Investor Person. I saw that you have a background in the business-travel booking space, and I'd like your opinion on something.

There's been a rise of booking sites that are able to offer hotel and airline reservations at below-market rates thanks to the loophole that's in typical contracts allowing unrestricted pricing of bundled vacation deals.

Large businesses aren't taking advantage of these savings. They could easily buy these package deals and throw away the parts they don't want while still saving money 25% on their total travel costs.

Other than cost, what are the unspoken motivation of the people working in travel departments at Fortune 500 companies?

Those first two points are basically true (ignoring the fact that I'm just making up questions here). But I obviously know something about the industry, I'm not someone that used to be a dentist, and decided to quit and work on a business travel company (or if I am, I'm knowledgable about it). This type of question is good, because even if you're not a suitable investment, you might at least be able to tell the VC information they don't know, and that's valuable to them.

BTW I'm in SF, and I love meeting international visitors. Hit me up before you get into the city. tim at cloudspace. com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Get the most out of it? In-n-out Burger.

<comment><USER4> From an effort/reward perspective, this is the correct answer.

That or Super Duper. ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: (again): how would you interview senior developer candidates? - <AUTHOR> (this is a repost as my first post went unanswered)
Hello HN,
I'm the CTO of a just-launched start-up and looking to hire a senior/lead developer. Although I used to write code for a living, I haven't done so, or hired developers, in a while. So I'm looking for advice on which questions / interview practices are relevant from the candidate's perspective -e.g. not off-putting or off-topic- and from my perspective -i.e. that will give me useful insights on a candidate's skills. Specifically, I want to evaluate coding skills (both actual code practice and the ability to reason about complexity, algorithms, etc.); development practices (architecture design, unit testing, deployment automation, etc.); devops or sysadmin experience; and last but not least, the ability to get things done and deliver projects in an uncertain or shifting context.
Things that I'm considering asking, besides the usual discussion on the candidate's previous experience:
- discussing 2 or 3 "real-world" programming problems to see how the candidate would tackle them
- contribution to open-source projects
- code example (e.g. GitHub profile, or StackOverflow contributions)
Things that are out of the question:
- whiteboard programming and/or academic questions on BST or Dijkstra's algorithm
- pair programming (it will most probably be too early in the development phase to have any meaningful code to work on)
- paid work on an actual project (ditto + complex to organize given France's legislation)
What else should I be asking? What should I avoid? In your experience, what works and what doesn't?
Thanks for your insights.
Note: the job is in Paris, France in case anyone's interested :D <comment><USER2> Random advice from the internet.

To me, the things that have been ruled out are probably more informative than the one's under consideration for any candidate that really requires interviewing. I mean that if a person puts a opensource project or StackOverflow profile on their resume, those things will mostly speak for themselves and the conversation will mostly be pleasantries. Chatting about real world problems might also be an interesting passtime, but it will not measure how a person generates a cohesive bag of lines ending with semicolons into a problem solution.

The last of the ruled out options looks like a tell to me. Interviewing is hard work and what is easy and comfortable is in and what is difficult and uncomfortable is out. Evaluating programming skills is difficult. Evaluating programming skills is uncomfortable because a nice likable candidate might have to hear bad news from a interviewer who themselves wants to be liked.

Circling back, the best way for a small company to hire senior people is to hire people that don't need to be interviewed because current staff have worked with them for years.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> A senior developer is here to write good code but also to help younger developer. Thus attitude is key aspect of the candidate to consider and would ask :

\- How do you handle a young developer who is making mistakes ? Do you take time to help him ? A concrete example would to give him/her a bad piece of code and ask him/her to peer-review it.

\- Are you ready to give some talks about whatever your are good/expert at ?

\- What is your attitude toward optimization (I would expect something like : don't optimize until it is correct and needed, but don't write the original code without performances in mind).

\- Check if the candidate is stubborn. A senior grumpy stubborn developer can be a pain to work with.

Bonus: what is the job ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice, I hadn't thought about the mentoring aspect.

Regarding the job: we're a small team and I'm the only tech on board so far, so the job is kind of a one-man orchestra: some front-end development (building the website with a basic sales funnel), some back-end (integration with external modules, exposing our own APIs, some business logic), some automation/tooling (setting up CI/CD). The exact perimeter will depend on the complementarity with my own skill set. In terms of attitude: team player, problem-solving and getting things done.</comment></comment>


My month as a vegetarian - <AUTHOR> http://sebastianmarr.de/2012/02/03/my-vegetarian-month.html <comment><USER2> I've been a vegetarian for about 20 years now. I was a vegie from birth until about 2 years old, then ate meat until I was about four, then went back to being a vegie when I was force fed Liver and Onion at my parents hotel.

I don't think there is any real social pressure on me to eat meat. Once in a while I get a jerk who isn't one of my friends trying to explain to me the "error of my ways". But it's pretty easy to shrug that off, with an equally obscene response of something like "animals are my friends, and you don't eat your friends do you?". Ha.

But the real reason is I can get by fine without eating meat and would be viciously sick I'm sure if I ever attempted to eat meat now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the social pressure. I think it's only the transition phase that can get annoying with your friends. I guess once you are known as 'the vegetarian' amongst your friends everything's fine.

</comment></comment><comment> g-garron When I was following Atkins (because I like to lift weights and we need lots of protein) I read that the Inuit are really healthy people and they only eat meat.

Maybe meat is understimate and it's our western life style that cause the illnesses.

Meat + bad carbs + no exercise = health problems

But for sure being a vegetarian or something in the middle is healthy. As long as you continue biking and avoid fast absorbing carbs

Good luck

<comment><USER3> The reason the Inuit can eat an diet consisting only of meat while remaining healthy is that it matches their lifestyle. A big problem for health in western society is the mismatch between those two, I don't think you can blame either one in isolation. We don't do a whole lot, but we eat a load of sugary stuff. This is a big part of Michael Pollan's critique on our diet, it is a very interesting read.

Besides, there are the obvious other health-related reasons to not eat factory-farmed meat, which most of our meat is. For that I can only recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer. It was what pushed me over the line into becoming a vegetarian.

<comment> g-garron Thanks I'll try to read those.

I'm now trying to eat a more equilibrated diet, lentils, beans but still meat in the diet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm 25 now and I'd never ate any meat in my life (first try to eat some was at 18 or something but it just didn't fit into my stomach D:) - feels pretty much fine actually :D

</comment><comment><USER5> Good for you, sebastianmarr. As a vegan for 8 years now, I can tell you that there are plenty of good recipes for vegetarians, if you consciously look for them.

Also, watch out for this phenomenon: after not eating meat for some time (a month should suffice), other food (especially vegetables) start to taste differently - start to taste better. It's quite possible you might never go back to eating meat again.

<comment><USER6> I ate way too much meat when I ate meat (I still occasionally indulge in fish but rarely). It was inconceivable to me that other kinds of food would ever taste good. I forced myself to be nearly vegan for a while. I allow dairy in moderation now but regardless, veggies and fruits and spices are so much more vivid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been a veggie all my life - I just can't imagine eating the flesh of an animal; i have no desire to even try it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a red meat eating Texan, and I've been a vegetarian for almost a month now. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I stopped eating my friends about eight years ago. I don't really consciously think about not eating meat now (it has become natural for me not to), but I really miss fish.</comment>


Growing By Shrinking - <AUTHOR> http://hackertourism.com/post/44454709336/growing-by-shrinking <comment><USER3> I identify with, and am seeking for myself, a lot of things described here.

That said, the author is speaking from an intensely privileged point of view. Referring to selling one's time as a programmer as 'whoring' caused me to cringe.

I have strong aversion to growth for growth's sake now that I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley and the startups that go with it (I was CTO at a nutrition startup).

Things I've done recently:

1\. Quit my job and went back to being an independent consultant. Looking to start a product company in the gap time between contracts.

2\. Exercising more, in my case, 6 times a week minimum as well.

The real question is whether or not I'll be able to make something that bears revenue fruit or not. I've had small bits of success here and there before but nothing substantial or lasting. Current side project is just me scratching an itch, no real revenue potential.

I've been reading a lot in an attempt to learn as much as I can and prepare myself to be able to make something profitable. Mostly marketing and sales books, about to do another read-through of Patio11's stuff again.

Can anyone tell me what the aspiring micro-ISV/self-employed entrepreneur _really_ needs to know in order to get ramen profitable? I know I need to build and experiment quickly - what else?

Edit:

My book log: <http://bitemyapp.com/post/book-log-1/>

I agree with orangethirty's "start selling". I just need to hoof it and do it. Not about to stop reading though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point re: whoring, so far as we might have to agree to disagree.

Let me explain differently by saying that when I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get paid to program. I loved to code, and I needed to get paid — professional coding was the obvious answer.

The problem was that by my mid-20s I was really sad all of the time, and my work was at the root of it. I was programming and getting paid, yet the more work I did the worse I felt. I thought I had fallen out of love with coding.

One day it hit me like a lightning bolt: the reason you do something directly impacts whether you enjoy doing it.

Being a prostitute seems like it would be awesome. You get laid constantly and people throw money at you, right? Well, only if you ignore that you don't have any control of who, when, how, why or where in many cases. Awesome becomes terrible.

I get the same joy from coding that a painter gets from painting. A painter that can paint what, when, how, why and where they want is likely happy. A painter that has to paint what other people want on a schedule is often just struggling to pay the rent. They develop a toxic relationship with their art, and that's sad.

So yeah, I have had some great programming clients and worked on some really interesting code projects for money, but in the end it wasn't worth the sadness that my body was literally fighting back against. I was fat and sick all of the time, everything seemed like it was getting worse. I was disconnected from the chi.

However you want to describe it, everything started getting better as soon as I stopped doing it for other people.

<comment><USER4> So, instead of whoring your developer skills, you're whoring your technical knowledge?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not whoring my technical knowledge. I discovered that I really enjoy sharing it, and it's a happy coincidence that people are excited to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with you. A small team of founders that are just developers who can design will outbeat ANYTHING that might have some VC money behind it.

You don't need business monkeys, or "UX experts" who can't code their JS/CSS. I hate it when iOS positions already have a lead designer who can't do Cocoa. It's such stupid notion. It's like saying we're looking for a CSS developer, we already have a lead HTML developer.

iOS products are logic + design. And a developer who can design is far more useful, cheaper and faster than a developer + ux monkey.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181963>

"I like programming a lot. If I'm away from it for more than a couple weeks, I start to miss it.

The software industry deserves to choke on a dick and die, however. Fuck bad code, micromanagers, dopey "startups" that expect 14-hour days on the assumption that 0.0x equity slices represent real "ownership", closed allocation, and regimes in which programmers don't choose their tools. All of that can go to hell.

As software engineers, we're a defeated tribe. We work for businessmen, get little respect in comparison to the value we add, and often are pigeonholed into roles that are 3 levels below our creative and intellectual ability. We do most of our work for managers and investors who think we're losers because we don't have their jobs. To me, quitting programming is just running away. Programming was never the problem. We need to take control of this game. We need to take it back and make it good-- and fast."

Let the downvotes commence.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to deceive you but when I see the truth, I can only upvote it.

There is a lot of cruft in many businesses - so much inefficiency, that it can hardly be removed by joining in their ride. The software industry is not immune to that.

Therefore it just is more logical to do something by yourself.

After all, there are only 2 possibles outcomes - you do bring value, which will be rewarded by the market, or you don't - and at least, it won't last too long. Unefficiency is a pain.

Create your business. Sink or swim, with the added advantage (schadenfreude ?) of watching the inefficient ones drown while you swim around.

There no personal hate involved- I don't hate them, and in fact I may even feel sorry. It's the inefficiency that I hate.

<comment><USER7> It's not that simple. My forever project (started in 2004) needs another month or so of polish, but after stripping out many features to ship a version one, is pretty much ready.

Build it and they will come doesn't work. I need paying customers, and being the type that works best when writing code (alone!), I'm about to start exploring options to find someone to market this thing for me, and turn my spare time over the last 9 years into something that makes real money.

<comment><AUTHOR> But did you enjoy building your project? Did you learn from it or benefit in other ways?

It's most likely that you won't recoup on your investment if you only see this in financial terms. If you expand your definition of success it is possible that you have already succeeded.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I've already succeeded. And whether I've learnt from it or not (I have) is secondary to the fun I've had with it.

The money, any money is just a logical next step to a project that will never die, regardless of it's commercial success or failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ditto. I gave up lucrative, decently sized consultancy to go solo.

Before: Long commute to my office from the suburbs, 10+ hour workdays, lots of stress, kids would be asleep when I get home. After: 30 second commute upstairs, work out daily, lots of sunshine and bike rides to the park, etc.

I wrote about it here: [http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar- consulta...](http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused first he says, "I'M DONE WITH WRITING CODE FOR OTHER PEOPLE.", but two paragraphs later he says, "All of my work comes by referral now, and I have an agent". So what exactly is he saying? That he just does other kinds of work besides software development now?

If that is the case then why is one 'whoring one self out' and the other is not?

<comment><USER10> Well of course it sounds bad when you put it that way (using all caps when quoting him)

<comment><USER11> What? In the original it was written in all caps as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I'm not a type expert.

It's technically not _written_ in all caps, the font that my blog theme uses for bolding renders as capital letters.

My personal jury is out on whether this is okay or not. Your comment leans me towards "no".

<comment><USER11> It does seem a bit more forceful than bold to me; maybe you could have a separate 'bold' font and a 'really really bold' font?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds great, but let's be realistic here: it's the N years of consultancy that allow this fantastic lifestyle, because it is the network built then that is being leveraged now. In other words, as fantastic as this lifestyle sounds (and it really does sound fantastic!) it's not something you can just jump into.

<comment><USER13> Yep. He calls coding for other ppl "whoring".. but he seems to forget that people pay you to do EXACTLY what others won't or can't do. If other people enjoy it as much as they enjoy sex, you wouldn't get paid a ton

<comment><AUTHOR> If you enjoy coding for other people as much as you enjoy coding your own projects, then we are wired very differently - and that's just fine.

However, I have found that many of the things I used to think everyone could do are in fact skills that I now get paid to use because they can't do them. Go figure.

<comment> shawn-butler What can you tell me about the "agent". Are you paying him or her or is it a commission basis? How did you find someone you could trust?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ted Pearlman (<http://usistwo.com/>) approached me, and I listened because he had an interesting opportunity that was relevant to my interests. He was also referred directly by Hampton Catlin, who I used to run a company with. After jumping on Skype with Ted, it was clear that we would be friends.

I'd prefer to let Ted discuss how he is paid, but I will point you to his Pudding Manifesto:

<http://puddingmanifesto.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This quote spoke to me:

> "Unspace was a convenient umbrella; an excuse for three friends with > complimentary skill sets to share a small office"

In a lot of ways my company right now is just an excuse for me and my best friend to build cool software together and have our own office. It just turns out the money is coming with it and we are able to build a real business out of it.

We've had chances to raise money and grow but we know deep in our hearts it's not what we want. It was hard to be "okay" with this because everyone throws the VC stuff at you and makes you think you should be "going big" and killing yourself at 25. Understanding and being confident that we could still be a "big", important, and profitable company in our space by doing it "our way" has been a really big milestone of our personal and professional growth.

Great post.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a really amazing moment in "An Evening With Kevin Smith" (highly recommended!) where he recounts meeting some dick producer who admonished him over concerns of practicality.

"Kevin, making movies isn't about getting together with your friends and having a good time!"

[Pauses] "It isn't?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. Congrats on your move. I wrote a similar post exactly 2 years earlier when i decided to downshift from my job of about 10 years and go live in the mountains doing photography <http://www.kettik.com/go/articles/16>. Reading your post made me go down the memory lane and examine my own journey.

Fast forward 2 years and i have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Monetarily its been a complete flop, failing to earn even a single paise in the past 2 years. But spiritually, the memories and experiences gathered along the way have been priceless. Sounds like a classic Mastercard ad, doesn't it :D

All this experience did motivate me to create my startup. I have to say that i totally resonate with your "the only code I write will be for my personal projects" line. It feels more fulfilling this way. But ofcourse there is no guarantee that this would arrest the rapid depletion of my bank balance (as opposed to taking up parttime consulting gigs). Only time will tell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Coincidentally, I also love photography.

What I'm not sure about from your comment is whether you intended to do photography for money or because you loved doing it (or both!)

I made a decision a long time ago that I would never allow myself to be hired to take photographs, for all of the reasons around what we're discussing. I want to keep photography as something I do out of love.

It was a very smart decision to make.

<comment><USER15> I intended to do photography so that i could make a living doing something i loved. It seemed a great idea at that time.

But while i loved the process of taking the photos (i do mostly landscapes, which basically involves patiently waiting for something magical to happen <http://saravk.kettik.com/go/photos>), i didn't quite enjoy the process of turning that hobby into an income generating endeavour. So i guess i finally came to the same realization as you did. To keep my passion and profession separate.

I also realised that i didn't lose my love for coding, especially when working on my own projects. So i'am now working on a solution for my original problem. To find a way to help travellers create, share and monetize their content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Best thing I have read in months. Bravo!

I've done similar stuff, and I'm in a similar situation to yours - <USER2> I'm only at ~8 years and not 15. I also get all of my work from referrals, although I participate in (paying) startups too - on my own terms - and drop it if it moves away from what I'm interested in doing.

Never been happier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - if it took you 8 years instead of 15, that's a good thing! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't the point of quick growth to work hard in your early years and retire early? Sell, IPO, or just plain bank.

Yes, you could have a happier life if you worked at a more relaxed pace (there's a guy on HN who works 3, holidays 9), but you'll most likely be working for longer. Wanting to work for longer assumes you will remain fit to work for all those years, mentally and physically. That's not as guaranteed as you'd probably like to think at 25.

My advice: Push yourself, but keep a sharp eye on life balance.

<comment><USER18> That assumes working extra hard in your younger years makes you rich before 30, which in a vast majority of cases does not happen, no matter if you work for a startup, bigco or on your own.

<comment><USER17> Rich or comfortable wealth or your own personal limits?

You can retire to a lifetime of minimum wage and no more work ever for just $200k. A good software engineer could back that up in under 5 years. Play video games all day stress free till death if that's your thing. (not recommended).

<comment><USER6> Indeed, not recommended - I'd call that just waiting for death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Best phrase "optimize for happiness instead of money" !!!</comment>


Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over' - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-game-over-global-warming-climate-sensitivity-seven-degrees-a7407881.html <comment><USER2> >In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100,

Median age of voter in the west is something like 45 years. Almost all voters living today have experienced personal 'game over' by then.

The pace of escalating is too slow to put people into emergency mode. We are like frogs in the hot water. It's so warm and nice here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just so I understand this right - from my reading of the article, the researcher is saying that the Earth is currently in a warm interglacial phase and the warm temperatures make it more sensitive to green house gases.

From what I can find the article didn't define what it meant by "more sensitive"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Changed "may be escalating" to "escalating" in the title to meet character limit. In any case, the 'could' part upholds the overall conditional aspect of the original.

<comment><USER4> That's a grotesque misrepresentation of the article to change the title in that manner.

<comment><USER5> There's already a "could be" in the title, it seems redundant to put two may/could be's. You don't need to say that something "may be X so much that it could be Y", when you can either say "may be X so much that Y", or "is X so much that it could be Y".

<comment><AUTHOR> This "may" and "could be" was in the _original title_.

I was just (attempting) to simplify it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists reveal the most extensive genetic map of cancers ever made - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/02/05/scientists-reveal-the-most-extensive-genetic-map-of-cancers-ever-made <comment><USER2> similar at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250733)</comment>


The Founders (TechStars video series) Launches  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techstars.org/2009/06/02/the-founders-launches/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking out the show everyone. We will be uploading an episode every Tuesday at noon MST.

RSS: <http://vimeo.com/channels/45987/videos/rss> iTunes: [http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=313743712)

Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER2> Retel looks pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since I am not a programmer, I am going to apply for YC as a TV show producer and cover YC startups in the making. The name "In Search of the Next Big Thing." or "Founders at work. The Beginning"..</comment>


On The Perl Origins Of "&&" And "||" Versus "and" And "or" - <AUTHOR> http://www.prestonlee.com/2010/08/04/ruby-on-the-perl-origins-of-and-versus-and-and-or/

<comment><AUTHOR> The author says that English doesn't have an explicit way of expressing xor, but I'd disagree. I'd say that the default behaviour of "or" in English _is_ xor. If you say "I'm going to go to the fair or the mall", you're saying you'll go to one or the other, but not both.

Expressing the || operator in english requires extra qualification, like "I'm going to go to the fair or the mall or both".</comment>


For HN: Polls chart bookmarklet (and GreaseMonkey script) - <AUTHOR>

I made a bookmarklet that embeds pie charts into Hacker News poll pages. It scrapes data from a poll page and creates a chart using Google Charts API.
Just copy & paste following code into url field of newly created bookmark:
<comment>---
javascript:(function(){var%20tables=document.getElementsByTagName("table");var%20poll_table=tables[3];var%20labels=poll_table.getElementsByTagName("font");var%20values=poll_table.getElementsByTagName("span");var%20lab=[];for(var%20i=0;i<labels.length;i++)lab.push(labels[i].innerHTML);var%20num=[];for(var%20i=0;i<values.length;i++){if(values[i].parentNode.className=="comhead")num.push(/\d+/.exec(values[i].innerHTML))}var%20chl=lab.join("|");var%20chd=num.join(",");var%20chdmax=Math.max.apply(Math,num);var%20img=document.createElement('IMG');img.src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=500x200&chd=t:"+chd+"&chds=0,"+chdmax+"&cht=p&chl="+chl+"&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00";img.style.padding="1em";poll_table.parentNode.insertBefore(img,poll_table);})()
</comment><comment>---
Or, if you want to change something more easily, you can also use a version that loads a script from an external source:
</comment><comment>---
javascript:function%20loadScript(scriptURL){var%20s=document.createElement('SCRIPT');s.setAttribute('language','JavaScript');%20s.setAttribute('src',scriptURL);document.body.appendChild(s);}loadScript('http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hn_poll_graph.js');
</comment><comment>---
Note: Scraping is pretty fragile, it can break with any change of HN's html formatting. </comment><comment><AUTHOR> When you are on some HN poll page, clicking on this bookmark should create a pie chart just above the poll options.

For example, here is how it should look like:

<http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpoll.png>

For this poll:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681>

</comment><comment><USER2> That's pretty cool. Any chance of making it a GreaseMonkey script so it will be done automatically on HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here it is:

[http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollchart.user.j...](http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollchart.user.js)

And here some are some polls:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:ycombinator.co...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:ycombinator.com+poll)

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Thanks!

I did notice a little bug, though. If you've started a poll, it thinks the * marker of your own vote is a poll option. I didn't happen to me on other polls, just on the one I started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing. I never started a poll, so I don't have a test case. I made a fix based on how the * marker is rendered elsewhere.

Please try if it works for you:

[http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollchart.user.j...](http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnpollchart.user.js) (GreaseMonkey)

<http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hn_poll_graph.js> (bookmarklet include)

<comment><USER2> Both work beautifully! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> cool</comment>


Customer Interview:IRC for new web:Comments and advice - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/1feixi102wfwcuz/Screenshot.png?v=0mcn

<comment><AUTHOR> Our beloved IRC can at-least start looking better. Would you like to use this for IRC? I have been thinking hard on what can be the best design - And this room based design makes the most sense to me. I am a noobie looking for ideas and advice- with open ears. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER2> I mostly hangout on Mozilla. Don't know if ssl is absolute requirement but an IRC with history (searchable) would be welcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tbh colourful irc clients that do not run in a terminal and prolly dont support blowfish and ssl are preety useless...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that bit: But would you also suggest - What can be done to a web based IRC to give the same kind of confidence to users.(as that of a terminal)

Also a follow up question is : What do you use IRC for?( Which channels etc.) and why do you think having ssl and blow fish to be absolute requirements. What else would you like to see in general in an Web based IRC.

Thanks in advance.(for guiding a noobie :) )</comment></comment>


"Create so much they can't ignore you" for coders - <AUTHOR> Just finished reading this post
https://artplusmarketing.com/create-so-much-they-cant-ignore-you-230012615efe#
It sparked something in me, and made a serious point.
I'm mostly a frontend dev. I'm looking for ideas that will allow me to code and release content on a weekly basis.
-video tutorials? -codepens? -design to code?
Any other ideas? <comment><USER2> Clickable: [https://artplusmarketing.com/create-so-much-they-cant- ignore...](https://artplusmarketing.com/create-so-much-they-cant-ignore- you-230012615efe#)

</comment><comment><USER3> Entirely up to you.

Get a portfolio to link to all of this stuff, and then make whatever will help you improve. Create + sell themes/designs, release free libraries, write tutorials (Envato used to pay me $200 or something per Objective-C tutorial back in the days before Swift).

</comment><comment><USER4> Tympanus is the first thing that comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER5> Blog?</comment>


Multi-Line Padded Text with the CSS Box-Decoration-Break - <AUTHOR> http://callmenick.com/post/multi-line-padded-text-css-box-decoration-break <comment><USER2> To extend support to IE9+, you can use a double _box-shadow_ , one going left and one going right, to imperfectly _simulate_ the effect.

A noteworthy instance of this trick in the real world is Bloomberg[0], for their article headers.

They achieve the effect like so:

        .lede-text-only__highlight {
          background-color: #FFF;
          box-shadow: 7px 0 0 #FFF, -7px 0 0 #FFF;
          box-decoration-break: clone;
        }

Intriguingly they don't bother to use the _-webkit-_ vendor prefixed property, despite _box-decoration-break_ not having unprefixed support in Blink[1] yet. Perhaps their intention is to avoid delivering more bytes of CSS than necessary, based on user-agent sniffing.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/](https://www.bloomberg.com/) (pick an article).

[1] As of build 537.36 (at least on my machine).</comment>


Inferring your mobile phone password via wifi signals - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/11/10/when-csi-meets-public-wifi-inferring-your-mobile-phone-password-via-wifi-signals/ <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to research: [http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2980000/2978397/p1068-li.pdf](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2980000/2978397/p1068-li.pdf)</comment>