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    9. What are you reading these days? #18

      ~books Ask (survey)
      What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it. Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 ·...

      What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

      Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12 · Week #13 · Week #14 · Week #15 · Week #16 · Week #17

      15 votes

    12. I have a basic and possibly uninformed question about the event horizon of a black hole

      ~space Ask
      It is my understanding that if you are looking at an object falling into a black hole from a remote viewpoint, then the object will appear to take “forever” to complete the fall into the black...

      It is my understanding that if you are looking at an object falling into a black hole from a remote viewpoint, then the object will appear to take “forever” to complete the fall into the black hole. The object is effectively frozen in time at the black hole’s event horizon, from the remote viewer’s POV.

      Is this the correct interpretation so far? If so, let’s remember that.

      It is also my understanding that a black hole can increase in mass as it captures new objects. The mass does increase from an external viewpoint. Is this accurate?

      If I understand known science on the above points, then the paradox I see here is that while the visual information is frozen in time from the external POV, the mass of the black hole does increase from the external POV. So is this where the Holographic Principle comes in? Or is there another explanation here, or am I off-base entirely?

      Or is it just that the accretion disk gains mass and black holes never increase in mass from an external POV, after they are initially formed?

      Is this known?

      Please either attempt to answer my tortured question, or point me to material that might lead me ask a better question.

      Thanks!

      13 votes

    19. Feature suggestion: Suggest related tags

      ~tildes Text 148 words
      The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me. What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your...

      The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me.

      What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your topic, and then Tildes suggests other tags to add to your topic, sourced from tags which have been commonly used in association with that tag you've selected.

      For example:

      • You tag a topic with "facebook", and Tildes suggests "social media" and "privacy" to add.

      • You tag a topic with "world war ii", and Tildes suggests "history", "nazis", and "military" to add.

      • You tag a topic with "avengers", and Tildes suggests "marvel" and "superheroes" to add.

      The data could be obtained by monitoring the frequency of associations between various tags: if tag B is frequently used in association with tag A, then tag B would be suggested as an additional option whenever tag A is used.

      6 votes

    37. Autocomplete for topic tagging is now available

      ~tildes.official Text 267 words
      This is something that's been requested and worked on for a very long time, and should help a lot with the consistency of tags that people use on topics. It's also another significant feature...

      This is something that's been requested and worked on for a very long time, and should help a lot with the consistency of tags that people use on topics. It's also another significant feature that's been added by an open-source contributor: Shane Moore (whose Tildes username I actually don't even know) has been working on this on and off since last July, and has put up with me being slow to review and requesting some major changes to it over that time.

      It applies to both the tagging field for new topics as well as the one for editing existing topics' tags, and the list of tags that show up for autocompletion are the 100 most commonly-used tags in each individual group (so the suggestions are different between ~tech and ~music and so on). This is just based on pure frequency at the moment (as in, the 100 tags that are on the most topics in that group), but in the future we could probably improve this to specifically include tags that have been getting used more recently, instead of looking at all time.

      The interface can probably still use some work, and it's likely that there are some bugs and other issues with it, but as I've said before, Tildes is supposed to be in alpha! I haven't been adding nearly enough frustrating issues or breaking things, and we're all getting complacent with having a site where most things work!

      Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any issues. And thanks again for all the work and patience, Shane!

      69 votes