And what about as the rock crumbles? Rocks are constantly eroding and re-amalgamating. What is it like to be sandstone? What is it like to be a magma flow?
Is there something it is like to be a severed limb? What about a clipped toenail? A pile of leaves? It is not obvious that just because we as humans identify something as “an object” that it must follow that that object has an internal experience.
This is so strange. You have been in HN long enough to know that this forum used to be very pro-crypto/coin. After a decade or more of failed promises, failed currencies, scam after scam, and billions of dollars in value squandered, HN is only just in the last year starting to take a more critical stance.
Also I remember people complaining about wash trading since forever.
Edit: I remember people posting literal ponzis a decade ago. Like sites titled “Bitcoin Ponzi” or similar. Or Satoshi Dice—can’t remember if that was posted here.
Huh? I've been on HN for a long time and I don't remember it ever being pro-crypto. People got excited about BTC and ETH in the old days but HN was one of the few places on the internet where people were always sceptical of the crypto hype.
Lunch can in fact be free if you skip it. I feel market forces will almost always prefer a centralized (I.e., marginally cheaper) solution so long as it is robust enough. I would have to imagine an entire economic and cultural shift to imagine S3 being usurped by a decentralized solution.
Sometimes centralization is a benefit because it gives you someone to invoice/sue if it breaks.
The current internet, with all its shortcomings, has created an impossible standard for alternative solutions that would be more secure / free to reach.
The problem is that the "freer" alternatives based on blockchains rely on network effects. In other words, they are incompatible with the freedom to choose something else.
A freer alternative that does not rely on blockchains would not have this problem.
I got pushed to a team that did this. I decided to try to extend the meetings for as long as possible with the goal of eating so much time nothing got done anyday. The daily stopped shortly after
If someone told me that they worked through a whole data structures and algorithms book I would be impressed but I would not be under the impression that they had 'mastered programming' in the sense that I would not be comfortable working with them. I would rather work with someone who has large gaps in their knowledge but is curious and motivated.
I 'mastered' programming by your definition by having a 2 year long internship at a hardware company where I was asked to make a website, write code that interfaced with non-standard networking protocols, and automate the company's garden. I had a whole lot of help from some graduate students that were there working on hardware design and were kind enough to answer the 1000 questions I had.
I have mentioned before that I worked as a bike mechanic in college. I came into it able to do my own repairs, and even build a few wheels. But there's a difference between being able to complete a task and being able to complete a task for money. I had to get a lot faster than I would have been at my own workbench, and even then I wasn't really fast enough to be the 'typical college student working in a bike shop'. What I was was thorough when I needed to be, so they put me on fixing returned repairs (nobody wants a customer to come back for a third time) and on Hail Mary wheel repairs, because I knew a few tricks that only the most senior folks knew, but the hourly rates didn't math out.
What I've learned from years of rubbing elbows with other skilled labor is that there's nothing special about bikes or software. It's all the same sort of problem all over. Intellectually understanding a problem is not knowing it in your bones. It's not acting on reflex and intuition without having to exhaust yourself thinking about what to do next.
I spent a few years cleaning hotel rooms and, in hindsight, I did some of the best programming work of my life during that time. In part because I would find insights into a problem by analogizing it to cleaning hotel rooms (many of the fundamental problems are the same, just in a different context), and in part because cleaning rooms is mostly automatic, physical, mindless work and it bought me 8-10 hours a day where I could just think about whatever I was working on at home. That taught me the value of letting your mind "wander" into solutions when you can't reason into one.
This is so weird. Someone self-studies a pretty challenging book on data structures and algorithms and you don't think that makes them curious and motivated to the point that you'd not feel comfortable working with them?
What do you consider to be curiosity and motivation if not someone taking the time and effort to work through something like on their own? The way someone smiles?
I feel like too many people in this profession put down the hard work and effort people go through to study this kind of stuff, as if there's some kind of insecurity towards those who know data structures and algorithms, are good at leetcode, have side projects.
It's like all that matters to people is whether someone comes across as a nice guy they'd like to have a beer with and talks nicely.
> Someone self-studies a pretty challenging book on data structures and algorithms and you don't think that makes them curious and motivated to the point that you'd not feel comfortable working with them?
What you learn in DS&A is nearly orthogonal to many tasks a programmer does in an enterprise setting including
- writing code and documentation optimized for readability by multiple audiences with varying degrees of familiarity
- learning and integrating and interfacing with other systems
- modeling business constraints
- working and tracking project completion in a team
It's not the passion regarding DS&A that raises yellow flags, it's the lack of awareness (though that may be OP's omission) that DS&A familiarity is only one aspect of programming.
Maybe he means rote memorization and studying the answers to the test rather than someone who is actually building and tinkering and wanting to understand how things work and apply that knowledge.
Exactly. When I hear that someone has done the same algorithms book three times, I think of the Brazilian physics students that Richard Feynman encountered [1]:
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had
memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they
heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t
know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the
“direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when
you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet
nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is
Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But
if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything
under “Look at the water”!
Someone who's ground through an algorithms textbook three times, but doesn't have significant project experience is like a physics student who can name every equation, but cannot calculate the polarization angle of light reflected off water.
Someone self-studies a pretty challenging book on data structures and
algorithms and you don't think that makes them curious and motivated to the
point that you'd not feel comfortable working with them?
Not really, no. There are plenty of grinders who will pick the most difficult book and study it, not because they think it will make them better at solving problems, but because they think it will elevate them above their peers. Why you study is as important as what you study.
Can you elaborate on what it is that causes you to judge someone as incurious and unmotivated?
The fact that I did not learn data structures & algorithms 101 well enough to pass a FAANG quiz means I would probably have self-identified as less motivated than many people.
The way that I understood it is that what you call an 'ordinary' black hole this paper claims is actually a 'naive' black hole, and that more nuanced solutions to general relativity allow for things that act like black holes that we know but that don't contain singularities.
I only point this out because we haven't been inside a black hole, so we don't really know what an 'ordinary' one looks like.
It’s kind of like that, starting from where we are, black holes have no “inside”, since it takes an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon.
No, if you fall into a black hole, it happens in a finite amount of time to you.
It is the observer at infinity that never sees you fall into the black hole, but real physics is local, you have to use the coordinate system of the person falling into the black hole to determine what happens to them.
> It is the observer at infinity that never sees you fall into the black hole
We don't even need an observer to be at infinity, thanks to the expansion of the universe. With some future telescope our descendants may observe something on a trajectory to enter a black hole in an early-universe galaxy that is just crossing that observer's (cosmological) horizon.
I think it's relevant to raise this since the article at the top is about embedding black-hole-like collapsed stars in an expanding universe and the research which directly discusses the observable consequences.
> real physics is local
Yes, absolutely. You still get spaghettified if you fly into a black hole which is the only other appreciable mass left in the far far future of our universe. Nobody needs to see your last moments.
> you have to use the coordinate system of the person falling into the black hole to determine what happens to them
No, you can use any coordinates you want (or no coordinates at all), but you have to be aware that there are quantities which are invariant under changes of coordinates (e.g. the curvature scalars) and quantities which are coordinate-dependent, and that some systems of coordinates make the latter difficult or even impossible to calculate.
Indeed the infaller can use any set of coordinates she or he wants. Some time coordinate (wristwatch? distant pulsars?) and spatial spherical coordinates with the infaller always at the spatial orgin, East-North-Up coordinates originating on the (spinning) black hole, etc. are all (pardon the pun) attractive in these circumstances.
Also, defining exactly where "falling in" happens is tricky, even for the infaller. Visser 2014 on horizons: <https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7295>, second sentence third paragraph of the Introduction section ("These distinctions even make a difference when precisely defining what a "black hole" is -- the usual definition in terms of an event horizon is mathematically clean, leading to many lovely theorems [20], but bears little to no resemblance to anything a physicist could actually measure.")
The crossing is not at a straightforward conception of "the end of time" in an expanding universe, since most possible observers are carried away from the final fall-in by the expansion of the universe, so there's nobody orbiting "at infinity" who could in principle see the infall take "an infinite time".
Horizons are part of the causal structure of the entire universe, black holes, planets, toads, warts, and all. The horizon is dominated by the central mass and spin, but not fully determined by it. The horizon in a close black hole binary (or triple) gets very complicated. ("The horizon" is not even necessarily physically measurable, and with black hole evaporation might not even exist, although there are other features which can be indicative of the point of no return for an infaller).
Preliminaries done, there is the "no drama" conjecture. Given a large enough black hole in a quiet enough setting a freely-falling infaller will not know she or he has passed the point of no return, perhaps for several minutes according to his or her wristwatch.
That's because the tidal curvature at the point of no return gets very small as we take the mass of a slowly-spinning black hole above millions of stellar masses, and that's the curvature that's relevant in spaghettification, the leading cause of death of astronauts entering isolated black holes.
Of course, most of the black holes we have found are far from isolated (otherwise we probably wouldn't see them with current equipment), so an infaller is likely to be blasted apart by hard X-rays and superhot gas instead of falling straight in.
The observables for something strongly accelerating into a black hole for a faraway orbiting observer can be quite different; unlike for speed there is no maximum acceleration in relativity. One would have to find a limit to acceleration in the behaviour of matter. An astronaut is not going to survive anything like the acceleration needed to make much difference to the distant orbiting observer though.
The distant observer in the not-really-our-universe Schwarzschild model and seeing the infinitely-prolonged final infall is at rest with respect to the central mass. Different observers, e.g. ones shooting themselves into the same black hole, or hovering just above a different black hole, can see qualitatively different things.
Generically, outside observers will see a dimming and shrinking of (practically) any infaller closer to the black hole than the observer. Many such observers will lose sight of the infaller before the infaller has truly hit a point of no return. Consequently some observers could find themselves seeing a presumed-lost astronaut grow brighter and bigger again, and leave the vincinity of the black hole. (Substitute gas, dust, and parts of stars for astronaut in the previous sentence, and that is what the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, among others, searches for.)
That sounds nice but is there a case when 'strong men' created good times? The example that I see people gravitate toward here is how soldiers coming back from WW2 in the US 'created' a society of unprecedented prosperity. But this of course ignores almost every single external factor that precipitated this prosperity, ignores that the prosperity was for a minority of people (both in the US and /especially/ globally), and the fact that war does not in fact make people stronger but tends to break them down. Ask your nearest vet.
This just sounds like a factoid upholding an antiquated ideal of masculinity.
Why is everyone here so worried about masculinity?
The "strong men" in that quote are those with strong will. Physical strength is secondary. The weak men are those with weak will. A successful enterprise, be it a company or an entire nation, always has a few of strong willed founders, with a vision and ability to inspire others. It creates prosperity for members of that enterprise. And every time such enterprises wither and die in the hands of weak willed risk-averse mediocrity.
The comment you replied to didn't say that masculinity is an antiquated idea. It said that an ideal of masculinity is antiquated; that is, one particular ideal of masculinity, not the idea in its entirety. You may disagree with that too, which is fine, but it's a different thing than you responded to. Different people see themselves in different ideals of masculinity.
I think it is individualism more than straight-up narcissism, but the two go closely hand-in-hand. But I do think there is a difference between people who have been enculturated to not need (or think they need) community and people who would only participate in community if they could be the leader.
Is there something it is like to be a severed limb? What about a clipped toenail? A pile of leaves? It is not obvious that just because we as humans identify something as “an object” that it must follow that that object has an internal experience.