GreyZephyr

Battlezone and battlezone 2 [0] were great for this. Many hours lost, even if bz2 was a buggy mess on release. It was also one of the first faves to really have a missing community.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)

The web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.

Merry Christmas!

I really want people to crowdsource the DMT prime factorisation project. I know at least one person tried but lost interest before they met an elf. It just seems like such a fun experiment to run. Is it possible to recall numbers at all while taking DMT? Can you memorise new ones? If not why not etc, and maybe the machine God factorises numbers for you!

I was also in Kyoto right before the lockdowns for the first time in a decade and it was magical and like it was in my childhood. When I went back a few years ago, I nearly cried; the lovely quiet city of books was so noisy and everyone was so angry. I don’t really have a point I don’t think you should stop people from travelling but still it make’s me sad.

You're missing the bit where he has never studied under a Buddhist master and actively refuses to. Both Chan and Zen are traditions that are characterised by the belief that written works are always flawed and can't contain the actual teachings and if you want to learn you should find someone who already knows.

For the exploratory stuff I tend to use R in code blocks as I’m familiar with it. Sadly I’ve never really done much with Clojure, though its data capabilities always look very cool, especially datatomic. It’s just always been a bit of a poor fit for what I’ve been doing so I’ve never quite got round to it. Maybe this will give me the push I need!

Sadly the things where the extra tooling is missed is more in larger databases where I’m either rebuilding or restructuring an existing database or writing more complex queries to help with this and I want to do it all in the database. Hence autocomplete and general knowledge of the schema being built in is nice.

The main thing that I like is that it gives you nice table autocomplete as well as some nice metadata. As well as some connection management stuff. And it drives me mad because I am sure there must be a way to get the psql autocomplete to work in a buffer, but I have never managed it.

Do you have any resources for your sql workflow in emacs? I use eMacs for everything else, but keep going back to dbeaver whenever I write SQL or interact with PostgreSQL. All the tutorials I’ve turned up seem to be doing simple things with small tables, rather than a more complex workflow. I’m sure there are ways to use emacs effectively for SQL but I just can’t find out how.

Did you ever try extending it out to other methods of probability estimation other than the forms of regression? I have only skimmed your excellent article, but I think you are first calculating the average probabilities from a regression model and then minimizing the loss to calculate Harville corrections for place and show markets? Is that correct or am I missing something here? I guess I am curious if there has been any improvement on using regressions for combining the various initial odds as I don't really follow the literature anymore.

This is used by a number of betting syndicates. Notable by David Walsh[0] and Zjelko [1]. They knew of and worked with Benter in HK and adapted his system. One of the things that they did was pay large numbers of experts to watch and evaluate each horse and give it a standardised rating which they then used as an extra parameter along with the public odds. Another gambler who also extended that system out was Alan Woods [2], but I don't think he did anything as sophisticated in terms of modeling, concentrating more on the execution side. Regarding the yearly turnover, I have no idea, but billions would be on the low end. From the ATO filings we David Walsh alone was generating 100's of millions of dollars a year in profits, let alone turnover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Woods_(gambler)

Happy new year from Sydney HN. Thanks for all the lessons and cool discussions over the years.

Is anyone actively organising against this bill? I feel that ever since the Iraq war protests failed ever time some thing like this happens, people complain a little bit, but don't actually manage to change anything. I was wondering if there are any groups out there that are actively protesting this that I could join, or if not, if any one is interested in forming one? It seems to be an issue that will affect the majority of the readers of HN in a negative way, regardless of your usual political affiliation.

Piggybacking of this post, if anyone has any similar resources for best practices in modern C I'd be interested. There don't seem to be any moocs that go beyond introductory material and K&R obviously doesn't cover modern tools and methods.

Yes, MotoGP allows traction control. Like all technical innovations it has led to a change in riders priorities and skills. Some people dislike it, but overall it's not accepted I'd say. Personally I've found it interesting to watch riders adapt there riding style to the new technology.

Counter steering tips the bike into a corner. Some form of lateral force from the front tire and gravity from the lean angle are responsible for the bike turning. In modern racing the limit on the speed you can carry through a corner is the force between the tire and the road surface. This is proportional to the size of the contact patch between the tire and the road.

Modern traction control systems have recently surpassed humans in being able to maintain a maximum amount of power to the rear wheel without making it spin out. Previously more lean usually ment a shorter line through a corner but was balanced by the need for accurate throttle control, leading to the rider being tucked in close to the bike with one knee down. With the new systems the aim has become to stand the bike up again as quickly as possible to maximize the contact patch allowing the traction control to put more power through the back wheel and accelerate the bike faster. This has changed the entire style of riding for professional racers, leading them to hang further out from the bike often touching both elbow and knee to the ground, to try and maintain the same center of gravity of the bike and rider but with the bike in a more upright position creating a larger contact patch and allowing the traction control to accelerate harder.

To stop consuming and start creating. Also to actually interact with people online. I haven't really commented online or been social online since the late 90's and I want to try and change that and actually create and interact again.

Wondering if anyone has any experience using lisp for machine learning? I'm aware of mgl[0], but it seems to be abandoned. The lack any wrappers for tensor flow or caffe is also a bit surprising to me. The cliki page [1] is also unhelpful and out of date. Is machine learning on lisp dead or are there projects out there that I'm just not aware of?

[0] https://github.com/melisgl/mgl

[1] http://www.cliki.net/machine%20learning

Feynman nano (unnamed Infection-resistant materials) definitely ticks both the ambition, problem and market boxes. There is currently a ~$30 billion market for catheters, production at scale of nano-structures is currently unsolved. Combined with the current growth of antibiotic resistant golden staph infections, they would seem to be poised for market dominance if successful.

You don't need to even use the ACC, people for get that the 2005 counter-terrorism act[0][1] has provision for preventative detention without charge, and notably, made it a criminal act to tell anyone that you had been detained. Combined with a rather broad definition on what was terrorism and the ability of police to request information, documents and emails, this act seems to cover all of the functional aspects of the National security letters with even less oversight.

[0]http://www.ag.gov.au/NationalSecurity/Counterterrorismlaw/Pa... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Terrorism_Act_2005

Tangentially related to the article, but for many years I struggled with understanding what algebra was an more importantly why it was of interest. On one hand you had groups and rings that sort of seemed related, but they weren't algebra's. Then there were special techniques like linear algebra and I could see that they were all sort of similar but why they were of interest and all considered to be part of the same subject escaped me. Sure they were interesting in a way and group theory was sort of cool but what was the point? Analysis on the other hand made sense, it was the study of how continuous things changed. As a result I though of algebra as a sort of collection of things that you got when you discretized continuous objects. Lie algebra's and groups came as a bit of a shock, but they were basically still thought of algebra as discrete.

Many of my friends raved about its beauty, but I still had no intuition as to why it was interesting. I went on a bit of a reading binge, and eventually ended up bumping into some papers of Shafarevich[0] which in turn lead me to his delightful book on algebra [1]. In it he defines algebra as the construction and study of systems of measurement. For example counting is the simplest such system and gives the natural numbers. Attempts to describe and measure the diagonal of the unit square gave irrational numbers. As we explored the world we needed to construct new systems. A more recent example is provided by quantum mechanics, where numbers are insufficient to describe our observations, however Hilbert space provides a natural setting. Attempts to describe what a simultaneous measurement of two quantities is find a natural description as commuting operators. He provides many other examples in his very readable book. For whatever reason this definition of algebra resonated with me and if this was a Zen koan I would say I was enlightened.

This is really just a very long winded way of saying that I think Shafarevich's book in which he defines algebra as the study of measurement is lovely. You should read it if such things interest you.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Shafarevich [1] https://encrypted.google.com/books/about/Basic_Notions_of_Al...

I love the idea. Yours is the first social network style site that I have joined. I do however, have a couple of comments and thoughts about the site.

Firstly, when I sign up and am filling out the form, I didn't see any warning that my profile and request were immediately going to be published on the front page with no apparent way to edit the request. I spent some time clicking around trying to find out how to edit my advice request with no luck. In my case this was not an issue (except for those who were subject to my whimsical filler posting), but I can imagine that it could come as a nasty shock to some. The distinction I am trying to make here is the fine line between making available and broadcasting to all. There may be no practical difference, but there is a world of emotional difference between the two.

This leads me to my second point; I note that the stream of requests is awfully repetitive. I would think you either need to encourage people to put more thought into there requests for help, or have awfully good analytics for those who are looking to be mentors, otherwise you are going to quickly run into the bane of dating sites everywhere. The race to the funniest/quirkiest profile as the myriads of potential proteges compete for the few mentors, leading to a situation where the only way to win is to already know the person, or to be highly manipulative and socially astute, which sort of defeats the purpose of the site to my mind.

Lastly, the site was very slow to load, worse it had appeared to load but the bar with advice requests, browse people etc. had not loaded, making navigation initially very confusing. Once this bar loaded things became much clearer, though why this element failed to load is not clear to me as other assets from the same source seemed to load? Mysteries.

Lastly congratulations on building and shipping such a cool idea and getting so many awesome people to sign up. Best of luck.

I presume you are acquainted with Buddhist thought on this matter? One of the central tenants of Buddhist philosophy is the idea that there is no such thing as the self, but rather a linked series of experiences. The Chan and Zen traditions make something of a big deal about this; the main goal of the religious and esoteric practices associated with them is to come to the realisation that you do not in some sense exist and are 'selfless' at this point you are said to be enlightened. (As an aside one of the core rules for Buddhist monastic communities is that you can't claim to be enlightened as if you have achieved enlightenment there is no self to make the claim.) The European philosophers came to the idea much later on, historically this would seem to be a side effect of the notion of a soul, and in particular its indivisible nature.

Thanks again for a great post. Not sure this really adds anything to the conversation, but felt that I should thank you again. For what its worth, I never thought you were dismissive of OOP; your original post seemed rather clear, if rather alpha in tone, that you thought the important thing was to use the tools at hand.

Funnily enough I was asking for the same reason that you had in mind: I have a child with an interest in robotics who recently hit the the limits of Mindstorms. Alas it has been 15 years since I last did any embedded programming so I am rather out of touch. (Indeed it has been a while since I have done any programming.) The silabs dev board seems to be an amazing deal in terms of the amount of peripherals and documentation available, thanks for pointing that out. I think I shall get one and have a fool around, it looks like great fun!

Thank you for this, it's really helpful. I couldn't find the C8051C020 at silabs and wondered if you meant the C8051F020 [0] instead. While this was already a long and helpful post I was wondering if you had any plans to elaborate further (maybe somewhere else) on programming for micro-controllers and RTOS programming.

[0] http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/mixed-signalmcu/Pages/C80...

This is already true and has been for years. Cereal farmers were some of the earliest adopters of GPS and autonomous vehicles. I remember being at a rural show in the early 90's and CASE had a combine harvester for sale that recorded the grain yield per 10 square meters of the field via GPS, and if you bought radio beacons for the corners of the field, it was capable of resolution of about a square meter and semi-autonomous operation (though I wouldn't have wanted to stand in front of it). By this point the software if a major part of what differentiates the various models [0]. These days farming, especially crops is incredible technologically focussed. If you are not tracking crop yield and soil nutrients, you have no way of knowing how much fertiliser, pesticide or seed to spread at each point, which equates to massive waste. Given the margins for farming are incredible slim, and you are often over 5 million in debt, just to finance that years crop, the relative cost of investing in the latest technology is small. By comparison to the integrated systems that tie in everything from soil quality, to transport, to current grain spot prices, this is a toy.

It's not that Watson is not impressive, it's more that I get irritated when journalists talk about farming as if it is merely getting up each morning and riding around on a tractor idea before heading home to the wireless as they haven't yet got anything as new fangled as television. My apologies.

[0] http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_INT/products/equipment/comb...

The author, Steven Hsu, is a physics professor at the university of Oregon. He has a rather informative blog [1] about physics, and lately genetics. In particular he has recently been doing a lot of work with BGI, currently the largest human genome sequencing company in the world.

[1] http://infoproc.blogspot.com

Dear csomar,

Having been in your situation, the things I found helpful for a quick fix were exercise and food. It doesn't matter how much or what. If I am in a slump and feeling like it is all too much I force myself to do some exercise. A chin-up, a push-up, go for a run or a swim. If I am feeling really bad I will make myself do one push-up, on my knees. or just kneel on the floor and do a negative repetition. That's usually enough to get me started on doing something. Then I will go and eat some food. Or more likely, go to the shops and buy some food to cook. Then eat something. For me doing a little bit of exercise and then eating often makes enough of a difference that my misery is manageable.

There is some evidence that exercise is helpful for others in dealing with depression, e.g. [1] (A review paper) Anecdotally, this seems particularly the case if you are at all ADHD.

Long term I agree with all the other posts pointing out that seeking professional treatment is the best option. The pride factor was a huge problem for me and still is. I treat it like research. Psychiatrists and Psychologists, are experts in there field who I pay to explain options for treatment an methods for assessment and monitoring. Thankfully this has only happened once, but if they can't explain the different options and why the course of action they recommend is the best I find a different doctor.

1. http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/13