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Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

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741–750 of 839 posts

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, it is pretty simple, it is just the same process of "a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right" when you are trying to hang a poster.

On the contrary, this is a problem that goes "complicated-easy-complicated" the more you think about it. You're at stage two, so here's the mindfuck: Why aren't we constantly stuck at local minima? Surely these problems we're throwing at ANNs aren't all convex.

How do you KNOW you are not a local minima? You are putting the cart before the horse.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#742
post #293

Crypto and practical security. I get tired of the circular “don’t roll your own crypto unless you’re qualified”. How does one become qualified? I don’t feel like I know how to evaluate many of the arguments people make for or against technologies people argue about on HN, such as Signal or different password managers. I feel like “security through obscurity” is a bad thing, and “layers of security” are a good thing,…

> I get tired of the circular “don’t roll your own crypto unless you’re qualified”. How does one become qualified?

Oh, by all means, roll your own crypto, break it, and roll it again. Just do not use it.

Also, break other people's crypto and study theory.

By the way, the advice is not "unless you are qualified". Nobody is qualified to just roll their own. Good crypto is a community project and can not happen without reviewers.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#743
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's no way to understand quantum computing without first understanding some linear algebra, specifically tensor products. How ten 2-dimensional spaces give rise to a 1024-dimensional space, how the Kronecker product of three 2x2 matrices is an 8x8 matrix, and so on. If you're comfortable with that, here's a simple and precise explanation of quantum computing: 1) The state of an n-qubit system is a 2^n dim…

What about some kind of interactive simulation, kind of like playing with a graphing calculator? People tend to relate to things better by tinkering and playing with parameters to observe the impact on results. Analog experimentation is how we learned most Newtonian physics.

Several years ago, I gave a presentation on quantum computing to the Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup. The slides are at https://jimgarrison.org/quantumcomputingexplained/ . Unfortunately, there is no video recording so they are currently lacking explanations.

My goal was to explain quantum computing in a way that is mathematically precise but doesn't require one to learn linear algebra first. To do this, I implemented a quantum computer simulator in Javascript that runs in the web browser. Conceptually (in mathematical language), in each simulation I present, I've started by enumerating the computational basis of the Hilbert space (all possible states the qubits could be in) and represented the computational state by putting an arrow beside each of them, which really is a complex number. (This similar to how Feynman explains things in his book QED.) The magnitude of the complex number is the length of the arrow, and its phase is the direction it points (encoded redundantly by its color). I've filled out the amplitude symbol with a square so that at any given point, its probability of a measurement resulting in that outcome is proportional to the area of that square. Essentially, in this language, making a measurement makes the experimenter color blind -- only the relative areas of the amplitudes matter and there is no way to learn directly phase information without doing a different experiment.

I could make a further document explaining along these lines if people are interested. The source is on github too: https://github.com/garrison/jsqis

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#744

Fourier Transforms. I'd wish I had a intuitive understanding of how they work. Until then I'm stuck with just believing that the magic works out.

The intuition of Fourier Transforms is that any continuous, repeating waveform can be recreated by the addition of harmonics of a sine waveform eg a square wave, IIRC, is the addition of the odd harmonics.

The cool thing about this insight is that the converse is true. You can disaggregate any waveform into its additive harmonics. This means you can jam multiple signals into a single channel (eg a fibre optic cable) and then apply a fourier transform at the other end to "untangle" them.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#745
post #356

How depression, autism and gender dysphoria work on a molecular level.

As for autism, it's related with a kind of general reduction of gene expression: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328734204_A_theory_...

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you might like this render better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR80Huxp4y8 here's the artistic director for the inner life of the cell (the worse one) going on and on about how "beautiful" the science of biology is: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_visualizing_the_won...

> artistic Yeah. One might for example reduce reinforcement of the big-empty-cell misconception by briefly showing more realistically dense packing, eg [1], before fading out most of it to what can be easily rendered and seen. But that would be less "pretty". Prioritizing "pretty" over learning outcomes... is perhaps a suboptimal for education content. > better But still painful. Consider those quiet molecules in pro…

david goodsell's pictures are fantastic. I used to work down the hall from him!

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#747

Macroeconomics. Central banks are "creating" a trillion here, a trillion there, like nobody's business. But what are the consequences? What is the thought process that central bankers have gone through to make these decisions? Also why, exactly, are they buying the exact assets that they are buying (govt. debt, high-yield bonds, etc..) and why not others (e.g. stocks or put money into startups)? And then, what happen…

I recommend the Planet Money podcast by NPR.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your goal as a scientist is to devise experiments that can disprove a claim about the natural world. If this claim was true, it would disallow science to make true claims, because no experiments can disprove such claims. Truth is a delicate matter and can't be handled by simple methods. Questions may not be settled, but they can be difficult to challenge.

> it would disallow science to make true claims Isn't that exactly how science work? It does not make true claims. It produces statements with disclaimers. If this and this then Y is true, as long as we don't observe Y. You cannot use the scientific method to definitely say: "X is true".

Yes, that's exactly how it works. Every scientist I've ever asked has stood by that. Science dispels untruth.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#749
post #119

I would like to understand how cellular biology processes actually work. Like, how do all the right modules and proteins line up in the right orientation every time? Every time I watch animations, it seems like the proteins and such just magically appear when needed and disappear when not needed [0]. Sometimes it's an ultra-complex looking protein and it just magically flys over to the DNA, attaches to the correct sp…

It's not so much "magic" as it is the sheer rate of molecular collisions in the cytosol. There are so many collisions happening that at least one of them will do what you want. Here's a back-of-the-napkin example, admittedly with many simplifications: A tRNA molecule at body temperature travels at roughly 10 m/s. Assuming a point-sized tRNA and stationary ribosome of radius 125 * 10^-10 m, the ray casted by the movin…

Fantastic answer. I don't know what I expected, but I find ~10 amino acid residues a second to be somewhat low.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#750

If I buy a stock, does the price at which I agreed to buy it become the new share price on the stock exchange? Every article on "Where do stock prices come from?" seems to just talk at a high level about supply and demand. But where does the price come from at a nitty-gritty level? Is it an average of all existing offers or something? Do different exchanges and stock-ticker websites have different formula for calcula…

That's not science.
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