mbenjaminsmith

> Do you sincerely believe it?

Do I believe in myself? Yes. I'm a genius (by I.Q. score) and work hard every day. That's why I own a software company and have a beautiful family, money, a passport full of stamps, etc.

Do I think I just solved one of the biggest mysteries physics? No. I think you'd have to be a moron to have read it that way as I went out of my way to say I wasn't qualified, that it was just an idea, etc. If I were a physicist and working on the idea in earnest I wouldn't have presented it here.

I don't want to make this too much of a personal attack because it's less about you and more about HN (and the internet) in general:

People like you really (actually, as in for real) make me sad. I'm 100% confident that you're not bold enough to call me an idiot in person but you're happy to do it via a textarea on a web page. That's cowardice. That's a lack of character.

Why are you like this? Because you're a loser. You don't have the courage to carve out a real life for yourself so you attack anyone you can -- especially people who seem to have the qualities you lack. That's what losers do.

Let's turn this around:

You're obviously lacking something. I'm 40 and successful and violently independent but I have had some help along the way -- people who were willing to give me advice, insight into the life of a successful person. If I can help you by way of advice or mentoring to turn your life in a positive direction, reach out to me [email protected]. I'm 100% serious.

Having said that, this will be my last contribution to Hacker News. This used to be a great place for intellectual discussion. Not so anymore. Leaving has nothing to do with someone not liking my waterbed analogy -- I've been thinking about leaving for a long time. I waste too much time here and get nothing in return.

Yeah, I understand that the trampoline analogy is inadequate but I believe that we don't consider empty regions of space to have any type of "opposite" curvature or to exhibit negative gravity. I believe curvature is thought to be [0, black hole], not [-black hole, black hole].

Happy to be corrected on that, IANAP.

The disparity between what GR predicts and what we observe has led to the cosmological constant / dark energy / dark matter. Of course, those aren't really things in themselves, they're just a measure of that disparity, a fudge factor.

I'm suggesting that the disparity could be explained by spacetime "responding" to regions of curvature by mass with an opposite curvature.

Unfortunately I'm not qualified to do anything with that idea. I just wanted to throw it out there. It's something that's been bothering me for a long time.

Maybe a physicist can tell me why I'm wrong here:

We often visualize the effect of mass on spacetime by using a trampoline and a bowling ball. The outer edges are flat and the closer you get to the bowling ball the more spacetime is warped downward.

On the outer edges, the effect is almost nonexistent and the trampoline's surface is nearly flat. What this suggests is that spacetime without mass is flat and that mass warps spacetime in a downward direction. So no mass = flat, mass = curved downward. So the effect is in the range of [0, black hole].

Obviously this is an very loose analogy but bear with me.

What if spacetime acts more like a waterbed? Not only does mass warp spacetime "downward" but something (in our analogy the displaced water) pushes the rest of spacetime upward.

To use a signal processing analogy, a filter will (nearly?) always affect the passband to some degree, with very high Q filters creating a knee where amplitude is increased significantly before the filter rolls off. That seems counterintuitive (at least to me) but it's nonetheless true.

Using another analogy, curved spacetime creates regions of "downhill-ness". What if the space between masses get a little bit of uphill curve as well? That could explain e.g., the Pioneer anomaly and possibly at much larger scales the effect in the article.

I think it's generally agreed upon that the Space Shuttle program was needlessly wasteful and more PR- than science-driven. A heavy space plane has zero advantages over a capsule for most work done in LEO. It's good to see this renewed focus on more practical designs.

(If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)

Having said that, the name Starliner writes a check that a manned capsule won't ever be able to cash. This is the first time I've heard of Boeing's Starliner and it got me really, really excited until I pulled up a picture of it. They really should have picked a less grandiose name.

> I prefer to teach 3D graphics without matrices because it's really not anything more complicated than a compact notation.

From a programming perspective it's much less verbose. Also the 1:1 mapping of "spaces" (camera space, world space) makes it very clean to manage transformations between them.

> and isn't easily separable because it steals the "w=1" constant for depth remap and also adjusts the "w" afterwards

I'm sure you already know this but x,y,z,w == x/w,y/w,z/w. It's easy enough to move between a 3D rep and a 4D rep of the same coordinates.

Using 4D coordinates may be somewhat awkward as they're not necessary for representations of points in 3D space but it is a very elegant solution for lighting where it is necessary to represent infinity.

[Edit]

Sorry, the point I was making is that I was also bummed to not see matrices in the article. They are a little bit to wrap you head around but they've a very elegant solution to a lot of stuff in 3D.

"[T]he obvious solution is to compel Apple to let people shop for applications wherever they want, which would open the market and help lower prices"

Is that a joke?

I'd love to be able to sell iOS software directly to users. Even if there were no viable channels outside of the App Store having the choice would make me rest a lot easier.

But to state that "Apple's monopoly" has driven the price of software up is to be laughably out of touch with reality. Maybe this has to be argued from the point of view of the consumer and they thought "monopoly driving prices down" wouldn't be a very good case?

What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.

> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.

I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.

Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.

You mean variety. A varietal is a wine made from a single variety of grape and labeled as such.

I'm working on a project where I'm doing boolean ops on 3D meshes that need a lot of tests.

I do a mixture of traditional unit tests w/asserts along with visual feedback. I have a rig set up that will dump final (or intermediate) results of operations to the screen with several tests being presented at the same time.

If I'm actively developing something and am going to be spending a lot of time in the debugger I can solo a test. Having the additional visual feedback makes everything go a lot faster.

For higher level stuff having a number of tests on screen at once gives visual feedback about regressions, which again speeds things up a lot.

This combined approach is the most useful I've found so far.

Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.

"Deconstructed essence of cuisine"?

I couldn't agree more. Food is one of the most accessible luxuries. The most expensive meals, with fine wine, cost less than most business class tickets (to wherever). On the other hand, a soft cooked egg on a piece of toasted bread after a workout can be just as delicious and costs pennies, available to all.

Next they're going to tell us they've found a way to eliminate that pesky sexual reproduction that's been plaguing us...

What's more bothersome: If you withdraw access (after they've already scanned your contacts) they'll disable the app. That's why I deleted the app and won't use it again.

If a privacy-focused app makes you nervous about privacy they've already lost the war, haven't they?