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ClayFerguson

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Friday February 10, 2017 @10:29PM (#13620806)
Just to keep score: You called me a troll, because I called someone an a-hole, for calling me a liar. That's what just happened. What a totally PC Snowflake Soap-Opera. Of course that's based on the assumption that the 'Sock Puppet' burner accounts aren't BOTH YOURS to begin with. hahahahaha. omfg that would be hilarious. In case it doesn't even matter, i'm using my REAL identity.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Friday February 10, 2017 @08:59PM (#13620500)
Most people consider the 4 fundamental forces to be 'part of' the Standard Model, even if the field equations are not complete. But like I said, i did understand what you meant by 'silent on gravity' after your first clarification.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:49PM (#13617821)
You can google the phrase "Standard Model" or look it up in any physics book you want, and there will always be a table labeled "Standard Model" that shows all the particles, which relate to the 4 fundamental forces (carriers), charges, spins, masses, etc. I'm sure you're familiar with this chart. The graviton is on that chart and is specifically describing gravity based on each mass value of each particle (hardly "silence" there). I mean literally every particle type has a mass value (even when zero) right? Is that silence? The general laymans meaning of "Standard Model" means everything in physics that is referenced on that chart (including gravity), and that's how I meant it.

However, what YOU apparently mean by "silent on gravity" is referencing the fact that the Standard Model is incomplete for gravity, because General Relativity is not yet accounted for. I should've realized you might be referring to the lack of any unified field theory, but I didn't. If you had said "doesn't fully explain" rather than "is silent on", it would've sounded perfectly fine to me.

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:59PM (#13612715)
Nice dissertation on 2+2=4. I've known relativity for 30years. The point i was making (as i'm sure you genuinely DO actually know, despite pretending once again to need to correct me), is that even physics professors in the middle of physics lectures will say "space" or "time", depending on context. Learn the fact that English and all languages have syntactical nuances. Oh,and thanks for the warning that you are a Troll, but I don't mind. I'm biting the hook. Nothing thrills me more than debating physics. Thus the 30yrs.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Thursday February 09, 2017 @07:08PM (#13612227)
So much of what you said is hilariously wrong. Probably the most acute example is your claim "Standard Model is mute on gravity". Are you kidding me? Page one of any book of the Standard Model discusses the 4 fundamental forces. Guess what one of them is: GRAVITY.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Thursday February 09, 2017 @06:59PM (#13612170)
Oh, I can prove it with evidence. The only thing that can change the direction of motion of a particle is a force. Photons have zero mass and zero charge, therefore no force (including gravity) can act on light (strong and weak interactions are not applicable here). Therefore light will always travel in a straight line. When light appears to 'bend' it is not because the light itself changed direction in its reference frame, but because the space the light is traveling thru in is warped. Any physics professor will understand precisely what i'm saying, and all agree. Someone who has only read a few articles online will not. I've understood this since 1986. I'm very old and wise you little child.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Thursday February 09, 2017 @02:50PM (#13610249)
I do understand why you think what you do. Most physics articles (and even the Wikipedia page on Gravitational Lensing) are explaining it wrong. They are saying that the light bent. That's not what's really happening. The light doesn't bend relative to the space it's flowing thru. It flows in a perfectly straight line. Gravity has no direct effect whatsoever on light, because light is massless. Gravity only can effect the SHAPE of the spacetime density field. The fact that the spacetime is bent makes it look to us, as if the light changed direction. It didn't. Light passing thru an ordinary optical glass lense DOES bend, but light passing by a massive object in space absolutely does not bend. It merely "looks" like it did.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:53PM (#13604544)
read the rest of my comments. I clarify why "dark stuff" is all the same.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:51PM (#13604535)
Your statement that there's "an expanding space-time that has a constant energy-density", gets to the nub of it for sure, but in reality no one knows if any of the fundamental field strengths are indeed constant. To me the need for "dark" stuff to be postulated, is more likely to indicate that gravity strength, or light speed, are more likely to NOT be constant over large space-time ranges, than the likelihood that there is a whole class of 'dark' particles and waves that currently don't interfere with any other matter in a provable way.

So if someone asked me what's my 'evidence' that gravity or light-speed are not universally constant, my answer is simply: "The evidence for dark-energy/matter, is that exact same evidence". There should be some wave-function (possibly resulting from what we call a big bang), in terms of G and C, that once integrated out over the current life of the universe, will yield precisely that positions and velocities of the galaxies that we currently observe. To me it seems far less likely that there's an entirely new set of particles we cannot see, despite the Standard Model of particles being proven correct out to 40 decimal places.

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:15PM (#13604360)
I also use the words "space" and "time" independently as if they were separate things, when I know full well every last detail about SR/GR (being an engineer myself). So yes, only in the context of discussing "dark stuff" I will lazily interchange matter and energy. Only on HackerNews do I ever encounter the type of ass-holes who will parse sentences intentionally wrong as to yield the incorrect conclusion. You are one such person.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @10:00PM (#13604276)
The light is traveling in a straight line ALWAYS, but merely appears (to us) to bend, because the space it's traveling thru (in a straight line) is itself bent. The space itself is bent. The light goes straight.

That's the distinction i was attempting to point out, when I said if mankind had visually noticed star-induced 'lensing' (before Einstein explaining what to expect) we would have ASSUMED the light itself was bending, and that space was 'flat' (unbent). Thinking space is flat and light is bent (the opposite of what is true), would have been the same kind of blunder we are making today believing that Dark matter/energy is actually real.

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @04:53PM (#13602514)
If man had discovered Gravitational Lensing BEFORE Einstein had formulated General Relativity we would have given some name to the effect, and perhaps even considered it a characteristic relationship between stars and light. The relationship happens to be an INDIRECT one. Star mass bends space, and the light merely "appears" to bend, when it traverses that space. It doesn't actually bend.

What I'm saying about Dark energy/matter, is that there is also an INDIRECT relationship there. It's not just a special invisible mass and invisible energy. It's a fundamental misunderstanding about what spacetime is. I think the "dark" quantities are every bit as much an illusion as the "light bending" illusion created by stars.

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @02:20PM (#13601151)
I should have been clear that I'm not making a distinction between energy and matter. I'm referring to the postulated "dark" forms of both. Both of them are pure speculation, and is nothing but the equivalent of taking whatever observable "error" there is in our formulas and labeling it "dark". The only reason there's two kinds of "dark" is because both the space aspect (matter) of our math is wrong AND the time aspect (energy) is wrong. GR and SR are correct but incomplete, for representing spacetime. Just like Newtonian rules are correct but incomplete.

And as for your last sentence, trust me I understand the scientific method, and how proof, evidence, and fact interrelate with knowledge. Nice philosophical observations, but having nothing to do with this discussion.

Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @02:02PM (#13601004)
No one knows why space is expanding. The dark energy is just the 'label' they give to whatever is causing it to expand. Both dark matter and dark energy are postulated to be whatever shape of puzzle piece fits into the puzzle slot where the error in our formulas exists. What i'm saying is that it's more likely that the formula itself is wrong than it is that something magically exists to conveniently fit that slot.
Re:Will We Ever Know What Dark Matter Is? on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @12:11PM (#13599950)
There is no evidence that dark matter even exists other than the fact that our universe is not expanding at the rate we think it should, based on our current theory of gravity and how much mass we can account for based on the radiation currently reaching us (light). I think it's far more likely that our theory is incomplete rather than some whole new class of invisible matter/energy being conjured into existence just to counter-balance our 1) wrong equations and/or 2) wrong observations. So many non-scientists think dark matter is proven. It isn't. It's nothing but pure conjecture.
Re:MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3 on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @08:55PM (#13594996)
Yeah, you are taking that sentence too literally. What I mean is we don't need a new language created every week. Java is already perfectly fine, and IF somebody finds something Java can't do, they shouldn't start from scratch and create a new language, but instead build and improve on what already exists: Java. It's like you can either stand on the shoulders of giants or you can start out at dirt level. I don't like starting back in the dirt. Not to mention the fact that every time somebody reinvents an already existing wheel, they just fragment the industry, because half the script-kiddies out there (not knowing any better) will simply jump on the bandwagon of whatever language most recently went viral. The Sisyphus approach to technological advancement.
Re:MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3 on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @06:55PM (#13594286)
I haven't seen the codebase of MySQL, but it's open source and not "owned" by Oracle. The only reason anyone should want to start over is if that codebase itself was crappy code. I bet it isn't. Implementations of a robust RDBMS takes decades. MySQL is very mature. That doesn't act against it, it acts in favor of it. The better analogy is Linux. I'd be more likely to say "Linux is bad because of age" long before I'd ever say "MySQL is bad only due to age."

There are plenty of examples in the Language world also: Go, Rust, etc. All those new languages SHOULD have built on top of Java, for the same reason Mongo should have built on top of MySQL. BTW, Java DID leverage C++. The Java compiler IS written in C. Mongo didn't use any part of MySQL, but Java uses EVERY part of C.

Re:MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3 on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @06:48PM (#13594222)
The point is that MongoDB writes/reads directly to File system. It could have been (and still could be retro-fitted) to ride on top of an RDBMS for all it's actual IO, and create a hybrid. I'm aware of all the orthogonal points you raised which have nothing to do with ruling out RDBMS as I/O
Re:MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3 on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @06:44PM (#13594193)
I don't know Postgres, and I just consider MySQL to be the leading best-in-class open source DB engine available. I realize that's debatable. But personally my mind is made up on that.

I think relational-type queries are so common that any significant app will need them. For my own side project (meta64.com) I'm using JCR-SQL2, on Apache Oak jackrabbit, so I get to do lookups fairly easily, but it sure would be nice to have a full-blown ACID RDBMS engine sitting right there to use also, in the same engine.

Re:MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3 on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @04:37PM (#13593062)
These 'from the ground up' totally all-new-code approaches to DBs are just a scary proposition. Think of the thousands of man-years of effort that went into building MySQL, testing its codebase, and perfecting it's robustness (fail-proof-ness). What does MongoDB bring that couldn't have 'built on top' of MySQL codebase, and used MySQL transational layer as it's underpinnings. Sure, MongoDB gets all its performance gains from delaying writes to the DB (eventually consistent), caching in memory, and dispensing with ACID, however there is nothing about MongoDB that couldn't have been written to use the DB layer of MySQL at the point where it actually does its writes to disk. In this way, MongoDB would have revolutionized the world rather than mostly "fragmenting" the storage space.

I guess there are those who will say that even using batch-commits, that MongoDB could never have achieved the performance it currently does (by bypassing any ACID) if it was built on top of MySQL. But regardless, why not focus efforts on improving MySQL batch processing performance rather than throwing it all out, starting from scratch, and writing directly to disk. I know MongoDB became a success, but I think that is 'in spite of' their decision to start from scratch and not 'because of' it. Also think of the power that would be available if there were some relational table capability (true real MySQL ACID) right inside MongoDB whenever it was needed, if they were the 'same animal', rather than having to use two totally and completely separate DBs if you need NoSQL and also ACID in an app, which 99% of apps DO NEED, at some point, once an app grows beyond the round-one funding startup-toy phase and MongoDB falls flat in it's RDB capabilities.

Re:React Native at Instagram on Monday February 06, 2017 @11:08PM (#13586927)
I don't know anything about ReactNative. Nor did I claim I did. I am simply stating that React itself is a dead-end technology. I would think no one would want to use ReactNative unless they buy into the prospect of React itself having a long life ahead. But doesn't. It's a dead end. WebComponents are the future and react will be unnecessary.
TypeScript won the language game already on the browser. Is the only language on the browser that matters any more. For those of you who disagree, trust me, it won't be long before you change your mind. Aside from backing that up with fact, i'll mention what's relevant here: It's bundling compiler. It has the ability to compile all your code in to a single file bundle OR compile separately as ES5/ES6 modules. Since I don't bundle 3rd party stuff, TypeScript compiler is the only bundler I need. See meta64 on GitHub if you're interested in my hyjinks.
Re:React Native at Instagram on Monday February 06, 2017 @08:15PM (#13586068)
React Native uses React. React is still in the core of it.
Re:Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014) on Monday February 06, 2017 @07:32PM (#13585817)
To me it's shocking that there's nothing for editing XML that equates to an editable tree GUI interface where nodes and properties can be rendered onto something resembling a document but yet browsable (by expanding and collapsing node) with the same paradigm of a file-system browser gui. I'm working on this myself actually, in meta64.com (see it on github, because the site is not always live, and is experimental). I am using JCR as the back end data storage but seriously considering adding a feature so support direct XML editing. XML and also REST are highly structural, and yet everyone seems to just use syntax-highlighting text editors to edit them rather than something more akin to a tree-based browser, that would render something more friendly looking (with expand/collapse capability). Think of it like this, you have seen RSS XML before right? You have also seen web sites that RENDER the RSS feed into a document-looking thing. That's what i'm getting at. Going from editing this stuff as a text file, to something much more advanced, like a tree-browser. Maybe there are some things i'm not aware of, like perhaps even an Atom Editor plugin or whatever, but I don't think there's anything in wide use or i'd know about it, having been a web developer for 25yrs now.
Re:React Native at Instagram on Monday February 06, 2017 @07:27PM (#13585786)
The dirty little secret about React is that it tries to 'reinvent' the DOM tree, and Web Components will be out soon making it all obsolete. Why not just move to Web Components NOW, and not have to rewrite your view logic in 3 or 4 years. Polymer wins easily. React got a head start, sure, but the W3C standards and native browser support for WebComponents makes React redundant and unnecessary, in the very near future.
My main point was this: Before creating a NEW language, a person or organization should have a firm reason that no existing language will fit their needs. I think creating new languages has become a bit of a hobby for a lot of developers, and whenever a new one gains any traction, it damages the entire industry by fragmenting it. Sorry, not interested in the rest of your interrogation.
Well if you jump from language to language, you'll never build a strong resume. Keep that in mind. I'm nearly 50yrs old now and have stayed on course with either C++ or Java, and never needed or wanted any of the "Flavor of the Week" crap the script kiddies love piddling in. Personally I think not being able to stick to something is a form of A.D.D. but that's just me. Deal with that. And no I didn't give a shit about nor claim I knew when Dart was invented.
The absolute LAST thing the world needed in 2016 was another programming language. Google did with Dart precisely what Microsoft tried to do when they (MSFT) created a proprietary JavaScript back in 1997(ish). Big tech companies just have a lot of hubris and want to "own" everything they touch. Any large software company, given enough time and success, will eventually create it's own programming language. It's just in their nature. It's the natural progression of market domination.

They COULD contribute their efforts to improving EXISTING languages (like MSFT finally did to their credit with TypeScript, building on non-Proprietary JS, which is great) but there is a seemingly irresistible allure to the thought of owning the design and molding a language to perfectly fit your own company's desires. You never have to deal with standards, when you're just making it up as you go along. PLUS the massive benefit of the anti-competitive foot-hold (monopolistic foot-hold) that having its own language gives to a company, is just too tempting. They cannot resist.

However most developers are sick of the lanuage-Thrash. 99% of it is not innovative in the slightest, but just somebody reinventing and resolving problems that have already been invented and solved countless times before. I really really hope dart dies (and GO can also go). In my opinion there are three languages that need to still exist: Java, JavaScript/TypesScript, and C++. Those fill EVERY need, and if the innovators would ADD TO THOSE rather than starting from scratch and pushing the reset button the software world would be a MUCH better place, and so would overall software quality.

Re:Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @11:26PM (#13371743)
Right, and if it was called what it is: "Online Polyester Underwear" their sales would be precisely zero units so far.
Re:Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @03:28PM (#13368663)
It speaks volumes about human psychology. The fact that sometimes all it takes is a catchy name to build a company from nothing that has not one single innovation.

Just look at one of the most hilarious examples: "meundies.com" It has a cute little name that people like, so it's gaining traction. Is there anything innovative or good about the product or business model? Nope. The catchy name is all.

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