"the nature of dark matter and dark energy"

I don't know anything about "the nature" of things. That sounds very philosophical to me.

"What are [the properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy] aside from their effect on the large scale structure of the universe?"

I don't know. I also don't know why you're excluding (in the case of Dark Matter) its gravimetric effect on the large scale structure of the Universe. That seems like a pretty important property to me.

Proponents of all of the above are looking for a grand unifying cosmology. Dark matter and dark energy are confusing and unknown, so people want to just simplify them away. Flat earthers want to simplify away the existence of other planets. Antivaxers want to simplify away medicine.

Because it's complicated astrophysics and largely unknown it is normal to put dark matter and energy theories into a non-fantastical category. The very large majority of physicists think MOND and similar are defunct theories. Dark matter and energy are very different, separate phenomena that just share a name. It does not make sense for them to have a shared explanation. There are also so, so many ways we observe dark matter that make it clear there is matter involved. Every new observation has completely overturned the predictions of every MOND or modified gravity theory, and they just come back with a totally different explanation to fit the new data.

Ironically, you are positing a grand unifying theory here by stating that detractors from mainstream opinions just want simpler answers. But isn't it simpler to just go with the mainstream opinion and go with the flow? Alternative models of the earth are typically rooted in Biblical or ancient belief systems. Any specific argument based on physics come long after a person's acceptance of, e.g., the Bible. And I can't even imagine how you might think anti-vax beliefs are simpler so I can't speak to that. Homeopathy sounds pretty dumb to me, sure, but also there are tons of reasons to distrust the medical system in the USA, I'd be surprised if anyone seriously argued against that. I can understand why people suspicious of America's medical culture of prescribing 10 medications to someone instead of lifestyle changes might see a bottle of sugar pills at the store labeled with "natural remedy" and think it could be a better alternative.

> Every new observation has completely overturned the predictions of every MOND or modified gravity theory, and they just come back with a totally different explanation to fit the new data.

That's how science works. Scientists are not prophets, they do not have the luxury of starting with all the answers. It's really disheartening to see you make these theories into an "us vs them" ego contest.

I'm guess I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, but when I hear someone suggest an alternative theory I don't immediately feel the need to group them with everything I think is wrong with the world. Instead I think, "That's really cool they came up with a different model of the universe. I wonder how they account for everything we observe and how it will be refined over time and whether it will predict new discoveries." Even if your current theory never gets overturned, I think your attitude is a perfect example of why science is said to advance one funeral at a time. Just because they got it wrong in the past doesn't mean they can never get it right, and it doesn't mean there's a 100% certainty that you got it right.

"I think your attitude is a perfect example of why science is said to advance one funeral at a time"

Hey now, don't you think that's a little uncalled-for? It's difficult to determine the attitude of a stranger over the internet via text.

"just because they got it wrong in the past doesn't mean they can never get it right, and it doesn't mean there's a 100% certainty that you got it right."

Nobody said either of these things, but people are entitled to extend to or withhold trust from purported experts based on the successful or not-so-successful application of their claimed expertise. If the MOND people and the MOG people keep getting things wrong, they're still free to persevere just as we're free to ignore them.

I don't share your thoughts on the passage you're specifically referring to. It seems pretty anodyne to me.

"I think it's pretty uncalled for to lump them in with "flat or hollow earth, antivax and HIV deniers, homeopaths"

I don't share that view, either, but I also don't think they were lumping things together. They were giving examples to answer a specific question I had asked.

"From my perspective they're engaging in a theoretical pursuit and you're just taking a dump on them."

You're entitled to your perspective, just as I'm entitled to my perspective that yours is overblown.

"Are you ignoring them?"

Like many things, that's a matter of degree. I'm mostly ignoring, though not so much that I won't occasionally engage the subject on HN.

"I also don't feel the need to demonize them."

I'm not aware of anyone here who's doing that

"Couldn't you just say, "Interesting concept. I doubt it works out for cosmic background radiation, but would make for a cool Star Trek episode". Or just say nothing?"

I could, but I won't, because I don't consider MOND and MOG to be interesting concepts. Why do you want me to say that I do?

"Why do you have to accuse them of being small-minded, simplistic thinkers who are really just motivated by being too dumb to understand the current meta and not unlike harmful idiots that earnestly believe space is just government propaganda and viruses aren't real?"

I'm not.

"I don't think we were talking about what people should be penalized for by the government."

We're not talking about that at all. That's a non-sequitur. I was just emphasizing that what people can do and still be considered reasonable is a matter of personal judgement. It's a matter of personal judgement if I want to scorn the MOND and MOG people. I don't, but I could if I wanted to.

I DON'T scorn them, but I do largely ignore them. I'm ignoring them even now.

Modified theories of gravity are not new and there is nothing immediate about my feelings on them. I understand homeopathy, and I am very confident that the idea that water has a special memory for particular chemicals is very silly. In the same way I understand MOND theories, and they are mostly silly.

> That's how science works. Scientists are not prophets, they do not have the luxury of starting with all the answers.

You are unfamiliar with the history of these theories if you think that their changes have been in any way scientific. MOND originates when the first observations of dark matter were very simple: galactic rotation curves. It was a reasonable attempt to explain why stars at galactic edges rotate faster than you would expect.

Later, we got much more detailed observations which revealed that there was actual, complex structure to those orbital perturbations. Structure that is totally independent of the visible matter. We found the Bullet cluster, where 2 galaxy clusters are orbiting a third invisible cluster.

Rather than admit some of this structure could not be explained, MOND theories grew wildly more complicated, and starting adding in more and more terms with arbitrary constants attempting to fit each new piece of data. That is not scientific. It's not how we got from Newton to Einstein. It's Aether theory.

There are certainly physicists who do respectable work on MOND. They put that work out as a proposal, and recognize how good the evidence for dark matter is. They are a minority of the proponents, and I really mean that. There are a huge number of people publishing fringe time-cube types of theories about it. I am not lightly comparing it to homeopathy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

That's a fair point. It's just my perception that those things don't tend to be taken very seriously by people commenting on HN.

"America" doesn't underestimate or overestimate things. People do. So which American people underestimate the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back? Name names, or it didn't happen.

It's important to note that it doesn't have to be this way. This isn't the natural order of things. There IS no "natural order of things." This is a choice. You're free to like that choice if it suits you, but nobody is obliged to like it, and if you don't there is a tried-and-true program for forcing other choices: organize, unionize, and galvanize.

Meanwhile, on the subject of "state capacity" the author immediately cites "the Niskanen Center". What the heck is the Niskanen Center? Evidently, it's "the most interesting think tank in American politics" according to Time magazine's Molly Ball (Yale, 2025 tuition ~$65k/year), with "roots on the libertarian right". The Niskanen Center says of itself that it "promotes policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent." So, what does the most interesting think tank in American politics say about state capacity? Surprise surprise, it says both the traditional Right and the traditional Left are to blame for the decline in state capacity, the latter owing to what else but stifling and "sclerotic" over-regulation. Who exactly at the Center says that? That "research" comes from Brick Lindsey (Yale, Harvard), former senior vice president at the Cato institute where he focused on free trade. Who else is on the masthead for the Niskanen Center? It seems like it's mostly right-leaning Republicans, ex-military, and ex-Cato people.

Is all of this as clear to you as it is to me? To me, this is just the usual prep-school to Ivy League Acela Corridor and Silicon Valley wealthy neoliberal elite making yet another bipartisan "blame both sides" bid to roll back regulations that stand in the way of them making even more money. If that's what you want to read, go for it. It's a free country. Just please don't have any illusions that there's anything new here.

"Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books.

This is just the same concern-trolling anti-government neoliberalism that's been "eating state capacity" since at least the 1970s.

Assign the monolith to 5 of them then find something productive for the other 95 people to do.

You have turned 20 teams working on 20 different focuses into 1 team. The focuses are interconnected but 90% independent. One team is working on billing. Another team is working on admin. Another team is working on a feature that has blocked five deals this quarter totaling $800,000 dollars in potential contract. Another team is working on imports from other external systems. Another team is working on exports to CSV and Looker and other platforms.

Yet another team is working on a feature that is only connected because they are the same user base but otherwise has no relation. Another team is directly tied to all of the same data, but could be flying on their own with a reasonable set of CRUD APIs.

These all get mashed into the same codebase early on because everyone is going as fast as possible with 8 developers two funding rounds ago.

I am not excusing systems that are a microservice to a developer, or worse, but these patterns evolved because there was a need.

I have no idea, but I don't worry about it because I haven't been persuaded that will happen.

You have turned 20 teams working on 20 different focuses into 1 team. The focuses are interconnected but 90% independent.

I would explain that what was originally presented to me as a monolith was later explained to me to be something else: a family of interrelated services. Then I would say that's a different problem, invoke Conway's Law, and say that they can stay as 20 different teams. I would also say that doesn't necessarily mean 20 different network servers and 40 different tiers, which in my experience is how "micro-services" are typically envisioned.

these patterns evolved because there was a need

I'm also not persuaded there was a [single] need rather than a network of interrelated needs, just as I'm not persuaded anyone here (including me) has a complete understanding of what all those needs were.

In my world, monoliths are usually interrelated services that are in the same codebase and have poor boundary protection because they were started with teams that were later split along arbitrary boundaries. However, it's poorly factored because everyone has been rushing for so long that splitting it out is a giant cluster headache, and nobody can quite figure out where the bounded context is because it truly is different for each team.

So, nobody knows what all the needs are, because there's enough work for 100 people and 15 product managers, and only a handful of people in the organization have a mental model of the entire system because they were an early employee, engineer or otherwise.

So, can we agree on these architectural principals, except in edge cases:

1. A team must be in control of its own destiny. Team A releases must be independent of team B releases, and any interconnected development must be independently releasable (by feature flags by one example, but other patterns exist.) Otherwise, you get into release management hell.

2. Any communication between teams must be done by an API. That can be an HTTP API. That can be a library. That can be a stored procedure. But there must be a documented interface such that changes between teams are made obvious.

From there, I think there are options. You can have multiple teams that each contribute a library to a monolith that releases on every library change. You can have microservices. You can have WAR files in java. You can have a monorepo and each team has a directory. There are many options, some of which are distributed. However, without those two architectural principals all development comes to a halt after 30-40 developers come on board.

Microservices are used often because nobody managed to write a good set of books and blogs about how to keep 100 to 1000 developers humming along without the tests taking 4 hours to run and needing release managers to control the chaos. I don't dispute there are other ways to work, but the microservices crowd did the work to document good working patterns that keep humans in mind.

and it comes back to my original point: The architecture is the function of number of people in the system.

1. A team must be in control of its own destiny...

2. Any communication between teams must be done by... an interface such that changes between teams are made obvious."

Sure. You'll get no argument from me on these points...

"it comes back to my original point: The architecture is the function of number of people in the system."

...or on this one.

I will grant that a division of code along the same lines as the division of labor is both sensible and inevitable. I will also grant that 100 or 250 or 2500 or more people are sometimes needed for a firm to achieve its objectives. Will you grant that sometimes, they aren't? That sometimes, the tail wags the dog and the staff and its culture determine the architecture rather than the reverse? That sometimes, adding more people to a slow project just makes it slower? I ask these questions because in my world, micro-services have typically been narrowly defined as network servers in Java, Python, or Rust, each interacting with a database (sometimes, the same database) through an ORM, and a rigid adherence to this orthodoxy has padded resource budgets both in terms of compute and people and has sapped performance both in terms of compute and people.

It depends. Let's take a SaaS engineering department, for example.

If your customer base is tripling year over year based in the need of the market, you can end up with feature requests that would take decades even with an engineering team ten times the size. Those are often from sales on the backs of failed deals because the product didn't yet meet the client need.

If the goal is to keep the lights on and meet current customer need, you need a fraction of the total engineering team. However, we're on the message board of a venture capital site, so we can take an assumption of hypergrowth, as is the goal of a startup.

So, then, I'd argue that in growth scenarios, these people are required. That doesn't mean that they are being used the most efficiently, of course. I think this would be a main point of our disagreement.

That sometimes, the tail wags the dog and the staff and its culture determine the architecture rather than the reverse?

I agree. And some of that is the ZIRF culture as well. And I think we agree with the rest as well. However, I think I am sensing a separate point where I don't know if we agree or disagree.

Our field has not created the tools to scale from 10 to 100 or 100 to 250 well. The best tools that have been created to date have taken microservices as part of the orthodoxy. I don't think this is the only way to do it - Robert Martin has a good article here from a decade ago: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/09/19/MicroServic...

However, everyone escaped the java ecosystem (because Oracle and because Spring, more than the language itself IMO) and solutions such as rails plugins didn't develop the rest of the ecosystem around it like AWS did with microservices.

And don't get me wrong - I'm currently living in nanoservice hell. We agree more than we disagree. However, I think we are looking at different constraints.

Were I a director of engineering at a seed funding company that was starting to feel the pain of a monolith, I'd take one engineer and create a plugin architecture that enforces APIs, and build a pseudo-schema enforced by peer review and linting - and performance exceptions must go through views (or stored procedures for creates and updates). It's painful to rename a table, but much less than moving it to another microservice. Then, I'd keep things in a monorepo as long as possible, at least until 100 people, with the rule that all things in main must be behind feature flags first and any database migrations must be independent of code changes.

But I take for granted that growing projects will usually need more people and more quickly than the architecture can easily accommodate, and I think we disagree there.

Someday I will write that blog article about how the Apple II computer is responsible for ORMs and the gender imbalance in software.

"So yes—tongue firmly in cheek—the Apple II is responsible for the Vietnam of Computer Science. It set a generation on an imperative path, which led to a decade of trying to bend SQL to our will with ORMs, with mixed success and plenty of scars."

https://chatgpt.com/share/67e211b4-86a4-8013-9c09-1b8bf78787...

Let’s be clear: no single piece of hardware "caused" the gender gap in tech. But the Apple II symbolizes a turning point — when computing left institutions and entered homes, and when existing cultural biases about gender were quietly baked into the code of who got to belong. It's not about the machine itself — it’s about what we did with it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67e21390-ee58-8013-b760-86b1a2132f...