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I would argue that you don’t need to learn string theory as it currently does not predict anything we can realistically observe (as you need energies that occurred only at the big bang). If string theory is correct we could observe a “supersymmetric” twin of all known particles, however we haven’t seen these, and they could exist even if string theory is false.

String theory aims to explain all physics as manifestations of a mathematical concept best understood as a vibrating string.

Initially, the hope was that string theory could predict the particle masses we observe, but that hasn’t worked as it turns out there were many different predictions possible. String theory has also struggled to develop a version of the theory that does not contradict known properties of our actual universe.

Loop quantum gravity is not equivalent to string theory, except that it also tries to unify gravity and quantum physics.

As things stand, string theory is not falsifiable, while that is the case, you could argue it does not count as physics.

But, by multiple accounts, it is interesting math, which can be worth doing for its own sake, and it’s happened often enough that interesting math turned out to be useful somewhere. Just not for explaining physics.


Maybe the following helps: if you have a an analog signal where there are no frequencies above 22.05 khz, it is in principle possible to sample it at 44.1 khz and then perfectly reconstruct the original signal from those samples. You could also represent the same analog signal using 48 khz samples. The key to resampling is not finding a nice looking interpolation, but rather one that corresponds to the original analog signal.

This is a story about a unique 1947 Chinese typewriter prototype that never got built. It could type thousands of characters by combining keystrokes. The prototype was presumed lost, found this year and it is now at Stanford.

This is not news, but I read about it here today in a Dutch newspaper article (paywalled, untranslated): https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/27/lang-verloren-gewaande-...


It”s worthwhile to mention that in the US and EU EMRs are generally not considered Medical Devices and are therefore not subject to a lot of regulations.

https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/what-if-emrs-were-clas...


That is disturbing, but it does explain a lot.


Leaves the space decently open to interruption at least, and from my understanding it kind of needs it.


It’s probably more phonetic than Chinese but significantly less phonetic than Dutch.


The term that would cover what you mean here is regular. And that is only in regards to correct spelling. Is obviously complicated when considering that we don't have official pronunciation across all dialects for the same word. Even if we do agree on a spelling.

But it is a complete non-sequitur to lead to the modern idea that English isn't phonetic.


This is not about regular VS irregular, there are aspects of English spelling that are highly non-phonetic. It's not uncommon to have letters in words that are entirely irrelevant to the pronunciation. For example the spellings "programme" and "program" would be read the same by any English reader, and yet both persist in certain places. The s in island is completely unnecessary.

Also, the same English word can be read in very different ways by the same speaker, but in different contexts. This is most proeminent with some of the most common words in English - a, the, there, and many other connective words can be pronounced very differently by the same speaker in the same speech, depending on stress (for example "a" can be pronounced as either ə if unstressed or eɪ if stressed). And yet, there is no version of written English that differentiates these - another sign that English is not a phonetic spelling.

Of course, on the other hand, you can't say that there is no correlation between spelling and pronunciation, like you can in Mandarin and other Chinese languages.


That is what is typically meant by a regular orthography. Wikipedia also calls it deep and shallow. These are legit terms that pre-exist to this odd debate that English isn't phonetic.

Nobody that knows how to read English at a level to be on an internet forum is surprised that English has odd spelling. Many people would be deeply confused to be told that written English doesn't follow a phonetic system. Rightfully so.


i have wasted several weeks worth of evenings on vectorizing heaps (4ary heaps: with SIMD, you’re not limited to binary heaps). It did not provide any speedup. I’d expect that halving heap depth would help but no. Still don’t know why.


Arithmetic coding decodes 1 bit at a time, usually in such a way that you can’t do two bits or more with SIMD instructions. So it will be slow and energy inefficient.


Deompression is limited by memory bandwidth IME, which means that more efficient compression is (almost) always more power-efficient too.

(I don't have numbers for this, but it was generally agreed by the x264 team at one point.)


this isn't necessarily true. zstd uses an ans which is a type of arithmetic coding which is very efficient to decode


Nice to learn about. It’s good to know the field has progressed, however the context focused on JPEG, where my point does apply.


There are very few people visible in the demo’s. I suppose that is harder?


I want to flip coins so randomly that I never see the same face twice in a row.


This is an interesting insight. The OP's constraint that no two adjacent squares are the same color ensures non-randomness. (Which reminds us why people are so bad at producing "random" sequences.)


Yeah, it’s a funny coincidence that all those constraints to make it look random produces exactly one solution. I guess the OP knows this is not ‘random’ in the mathematical sense.


Yes, or when a character moves across the screen. They are quite fine grained. However, when the decoder reads the motion vectors from the bitstream, it is typically not supposed to attach meaning to them: they could point to a patch that is not the same patch in the previous scene, but looks similar enough to serve as a starting point.


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