jwuphysics

I study astrophysics, so I won't be able to say much about SUSY or string theories or conformal field theories. I do agree that we're living in a golden age of physics! But your second and third points, inflation and SUSY-- those are definitely not confirmed. In fact, the primordial gravitational waves from BICEP2 are almost certainly dust contamination signal (e.g., http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5857). The discovery of supersymmetric particles would also be extremely shocking to me, since my institution is heavily involved in CERN LHC experiments, and I haven't heard any hints of a discovery yet. Perhaps you know something that I don't!

The URL is https://github.com/microg, so I'd have to guess "micro g".

Although a tetraquark particle is possible, the Z(3900) might also be explained by two weakly bound mesons (two-quark particles)--which would be less interesting and more likely, in my humble opinion.

You spelled "hackathon" wrong in the title.

EDIT: unless it's meant to convey that you "hack a ton" but I'm really not so sure...

The boldface isn't showing up correctly for me. Viewing on Chromium.

It isn't Hunt Library in CMU campus by any chance, is it?

I've gotten locked into strange sleep cycles simply out of necessity (I am an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon). I've found that, while my body will accept a psuedo-equilibrium of somehow getting ~ 20 hours of sleep a week, it will almost always become unsustainable after 2 weeks... in which I'll need another day or two to recover. But after that (usually I take an entire week off, where I get at least 30 hours of sleep) I go back into my regular routine (note that I have a 105 minute sleep cycle, which is a little longer than most people's:

M3:30 T0:20 W3:30 R0:20 F3:30 S7:00 U3:30

Is it snowing organic compounds? Probably. Is it snowing complex organic compounds? Let's go see. Is it snowing microbes? At this point, we're leaving the realm of scientific evidence and throwing out sensational headlines. I'm not saying that it's a particularly poor speculation, but I personally think the article name could have been more accurate.

Congrats to PittPatt! I work for one of their competitors, also from CMU.

>> 6. On that note, move +1’d sites into a users main Google+ activity stream. Again - networks are all about the Social Objects and +1 is Google’s method for sharing. Why hide it away in a separate tab?

Please do not do this. There are already options to share sites on Google. Also, everytime I +1 a site on the main search page, I don't want to have to specify which circles can see it--nor do I want everyone to see it.

I suppose this will be MeeGo's flagship device? Honestly, I don't know if the mobile OS market has room for another...

> CMU spin-offs represent 34 percent of the total companies created in Pennsylvania based on university technologies in the past five years.

CMU has helped Pittsburgh rebrand itself from a coal-mining, steel-working town to a technological hub. I'm glad to hear that they want to continue the trend.

Having done many of the ones listed in the article, I would like to throw in my two cents:

Drugs, like LSD or DMT, are not at all like seeing things from a helicopter. Sure, they are from a "new perspective", but unfortunately it's all in your head. My closest analogy is to dreaming--it seems to make perfect sense when you're dreaming, but when you wake up, you realize that all your thoughts were nonsense. I've had high ideas before. The feeling of revelation is unparalleled... even if it's all in my head. Once I sober up, though, I suddenly realize that they're a load of crap.

Rather being a helicopter to check out what's up there, drugs more so resemble staring out the window and pretending to visualize things past the horizon. You don't come to your senses until you realize it's all in your head.

I've quit them all now and honestly I only miss acid from time to time. But the fact that it's just eight hours of false epiphanies makes sure that I don't care to ever trip again.

If you were holding onto a chunk of antimatter you would probably be missing a hand.

I actually don't think I was ever "naturally intelligent". My current grades prove that. But the reason I could cruise through high school was because my parents drilled me with algebra, vocabulary quizzes, geography, and Montessori school when I was 4-9 years old. That undeniably put me ahead for the next ten or so years.

I'm making strides but it's still a far cry from high school, where I was easily one of the smartest kids without ever trying. Coming to CMU definitely humbled me quite a bit!

But that aside, I'm still not content with being normal. When I sold out my intelligence, it meant years of hard work on socializing and stuff (seriously. It's hard work). Now that I'm stepping back into academics, I'm aiming for the top again. But it's so much harder the second time around :(

I wish that people had told me earlier that it's possible to be both smart and not awkward. Circa sixth grade, I gave up my academic life for my social life. Now I'm in CMU desperately trying to get above 50th percentile.

I agree that this idea seems intuitively true, but I don't think there is a problem articulating it. It's simply that many will find it offensive that a scientist can be better than an MBA student at managing a company.

Then again, Musk majored in both physics and business.

That's amazing. I'm surprised Asia hasn't even reached twenty million downloads, though.

Sounds very similar to the Information Systems program, too. My girlfriend is pursuing a Business Administration heavy Information Systems program, whereas one of my roommates is about to graduate in a web-dev oriented Human-Computer Interactions and Information Systems double major. Yes, software engineering is a big and distinct field from Computer Science. But I'd say CMU gives plenty of options to make use of your CS or IS major.

I was once a huge contributor at deals.woot! After awhile, though, I started to notice the decline in the quality of posts, as more and more users filtered in. I remember being extremely annoyed by corporate accounts that spammed the "fresh" page with worthless "deals". It seemed like deals.woot! was reaching it's eternal September...

But new users might have also blamed the crappy atmosphere on me--that bitching old guy with the superiority complex is everything that's wrong with deals.woot! We need to get rid of people like him!

We know which side we're on. Deals.woot! went one way and I went the other. HN is heading in one direction... and if you don't like it, I'm sorry to say that you may not be able to change it.

Disclaimer: I just want to clarify that I am one of those stupid HN noobs.

Carnegie Mellon University offers a Software Engineering minor as part of their Bachelors in CS undergraduate program. As for the Master's degree, they already have one.

I think students have enough freedom to mold their own strengths and passions into the CS program here.

This has also bothered me for quite awhile. I think what nails the ridiculousness of graphical calculators is illustrated in this comic: http://xkcd.com/768/

Seriously, though, as a student in CMU, and as a astrophysics major, I can attest to how unnecessary these calculators are. As long as it can perform trigonometry and logarithms, it satisfies the need.

I like the author's idea of using "locked-down" netbooks instead. After all, a netbook installed with Mathematica or MATLAB will be much more similar to academia/industry level calculators.