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dhson Microsoft Dumps MS Money: Yes, Web Apps Had Something to do With It

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, summarized the philosophy as follows:

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

dhson Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters

Here it is: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7cedl/dear_reddi...

dhson Clojure Links To Get You Up To Speed

Thanks for bringing altlaw.org to my attention; lately I've been looking for examples of Clojure being used to do lots of string processing. I've found a presentation of the altlaw project here: http://files.meetup.com/1228907/altlaw-hadoop-meetup-2009-02...

dhson Bing Is Live

I didn't understand your comment until I enabled Javascript for the occasion and found that they use photos. And corny ones, too; I'm looking at "Hot air ballons over Cappadocia" (I still don't get the "panther thingy"; maybe because I'm in Germany). Makes no sense at all to me - why would they want to do that?

dhson Bing

[P]eople's [...] first association with Microsoft will never be search.

Not only is this not about Microsoft, it's not about Search either. It's all about Decision now, in a sort of semantic landgrab.

dhson Why journalists deserve low pay

One of the things I appreciate about HN is that once or twice a week, I come across a submission which is a journalistic piece that has truth and beauty in it. Whoever claims that journalists "produce only instrumental" and not intrinsic value lives in a universe different from mine.

dhson Saudi files for 'killer' tracking chip patent

That paragraph lists exceptions to patentability - inventions that infringe on "public order" or "moral conventions". In particular listed are human cloning, methods to modify the human germline, industrial use of human embryos and modification of animal germlines which cause suffering to the animals without providing any medical benefits for animals or humans. So every invention that can be used to breed a master race is explicitly non-patentable, plus there's a blanket formulation that can be extended to mean "anything the Nazis would have liked to have invented to make their job easier". An implant that poisons you when you don't follow the Führer would arguably fit right in there.

dhson Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)

In the preview Wolfram gave a couple weeks ago at Harvard [1], he mentioned two sources of income:

1. sponsors (in the sidebars)

2. subscriptions (the main benefit being that you get to upload and run your own data)

[1] video: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram

dhson Other Worlds and Wasted Talents

There are no 'unknown unknowns' in a gaming environment

Tom, meet Leeroy: http://www.spike.com/video/world-of-warcraft/2671154

dhson The American Press on Suicide Watch

The traditional way of financing print media was to have the advertisers pay for the paper, printing and administration, whereas the purchasing price went to pay for the actual journalism, the researchers, writers, editors. That way, at least the good, investigative journalism was independent of the advertisers, and could even criticize them. The web made the paper/printing costs vanish, but also the purchasing price, so now the news-consuming public does not pay the journalists any more. Web advertising and ambitious news gathering (which is not afraid to investigate the behavior of the advertising companies if there's a good story to be found) are mutually exclusive.

And it's a cheap shot to tell the journalists: "Go find yourself a better business nodel, you old-media turkeys hahaha." People who used to pay for content stop doing so, advertisers will not pay for content that they can't control and that might investigate their own companies, and we're loosing independent journalism that way. There's a bit too much joking about this for my liking.

dhson Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google

Google asks its employees to spend 20 percent of their work time to basically design stuff that doesn't have to be accounted for by any data. I assume that they get a steady input of raw design that way, and that they are not dangerously impoverished there, or in danger to become so.

dhson EU Wants Developers to be Liable for Code; Provide Guarantees That Software will Work

Formal verification works for algorithms, but not for interactions.

dhson Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction

I did, and he didn't.

I think Crawford has two problems:

1. He's not a good storyteller.

2. Stories you tell using a computer need to be rule-based if the computation is expected to have a (controlled/authored) effect on the story's meaning (i.e. if the computer acts as more than a "projector").

What I find ironic is that he ended up making "Balance of Power - 21st Century" [1], posted lots of progress reports to his forums detailing all his experiments with numerical calculations to affect the play state, and then the finished game was all about voting for or against countries and tallying up. No storytelling to speak of, no characters you'd care about whatsoever. I believe that Crawford is an obsessed man who tragically misunderstood what a story is.

[1] http://storytron.com/play-bop2k.php

dhson The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 9.04

Last I heard, the real-time kernel is not part of the current version of Ubuntu Studio.

I tried it about a year ago, and it was unstable/crashed frequently. Switched to Ubuntu regular; been happy ever after.

I like the Dust desktop theme.

dhson PinkTweet: Twitter for porn (nsfw)

Whoever downvoted me has definitely not taken the time to figure it out.

dhson PinkTweet: Twitter for porn (nsfw)

Thanks, you two. You made my day. Baby?

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

It's naming, plus some more: Turing never named his idealized entity a "Turing machine" - that was done by others. He claimed universality for the algorithmic "Universal Computing Machine" he defined, and proved it - for algorithms. Now Akl comes along and says the "Turing machine" is not universal, but he uses interaction, not algorithm, to base his definition of computation on. So it seems to me that he's not only renaming "the Universal Computing Machine" to "the Universal Computer" by ways of "the Turing Machine", but that he is also moving the goalposts in this process.

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

Right, oracle machines are - or can be interpreted as - interactive. However, whatever it is that oracles do - it's often called "hypercomputation" - they're not doing computation, in the sense that Turing used the term in "On computable numbers...", which is why Turing couldn't prove that they are more powerful. The apparent - to me - problem here is that people use a definition of "computation" which is different from Turing's (which is alright), and then say that Turing was "wrong" in what he said about "computation" (which is not alright).

I actually think that operating systems are a good example of how interaction can be less powerful than algorithm - the "oracle" in this case might be a user, and the user might be new to computers, so that in this case the result of the interaction might be worse than if the "oracle" were another (non-human) computer, the interaction with which might in turn give a worse result than if you were the "oracle".

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

Just to make sure, I searched for "interaction" in "On computable numbers...", and it's not in there. And, like I said, in the general case, interaction is "more powerful" than algorithm as often as it is "less powerful".

Edit - Example: You're on "'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" You're in "algorithm mode" for most of the questions, but you're granted one "interaction", via a phone call. On the show, you're allowed to call anybody you want, and if you know to call somebody who's really clever, chances are that interaction will be more powerful than computation. But that's not the general case: the general case would be for you to call a random phone number, and chances are that won't help you - so, in that case, not more powerful.

dhson Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail

Not in Germany. Seat reservation costs extra.

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

Yes, interactive computation is proven to be - statistically - more powerful than algorithmic computation - sometimes. It's also "less powerful" some other times, and since it's not computable at which times interaction is "better", it's not a general advantage. But Turing never considered the case of interaction in his definition of computation, so Wegner is talking about something else.

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

It is quite unreasonable to talk about variables that change with time in the context of a Turing machine. If a "Universal Computer" is one that deals with variables which change during the computation due to interaction, then it is not what Turing was talking about. And if he wasn't talking about it, he can't be wrong about it.

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

Turing's computer was an idealized human - to him, computers were humans who did computations for a living - who were granted infinite time and tape - that's the idealization - to solve exactly one problem. Anything that talks about "x problems per hour" has nothing to do with what he said.

dhson Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer

Turing was simply describing what people do: in a math test, I give you a problem, you solve it - without cheating, that is, interacting with your environment - using an algorithm, you hand it back to me. He idealized what a human does - infinite time and memory -, and then, as a final step, he said: "A machine - also idealized - can do that." The important thing is that in the definition of what was later to be called "Turing computability", interaction during the computation is verboten.

dhson 4chan hacker discusses the manipulation of the Time poll

I believe that "luck" alludes to one of them finding out that voters using an IPv6 address wouldn't be blocked (IPv4 sites got blocked if they voted for the same candidate more often than once every 13 seconds).

dhson Conversation with Arthur Whitney, programming language designer

It's a bit hard to read in the web format, so you might want to download it as a PDF: http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203/templates/download_offlin...

dhson Why Vote? Freakonomics' take on voting

To me, the primary value of my individual vote is its role in keeping the democratic process running. If I wouldn't vote, I would contribute to undermining the system I support. Contrastingly, the less other people vote, the more important my own vote becomes; if I were a democracy's last voter, I would make all the difference. What's not to like?

dhson Complexity and Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I think I do understand most of the technicalities, using Gregory Chaitin's ideas about the properties of self-delimiting programs as a bridge. What I don't get is what I percieve of as the insistence on "surprises" in the "universe of interest" that can't be seen "from outside". Zooming through a Mandelbrot set visualization, while it can be a great experience, ultimately offers you few surprises, and because there are few surprises, you know that the complexity - represented by the original equation - must be low. And Eliezer seems to be saying the opposite, namely that the are lots of surprises in a particular universe that cannot be known from the system as a whole, because the system as a whole only contains 400 bits of information. If you would write this multiverse program as self-delimiting, the way Chaitin does, where would all the extra complexity/information/surprises found in the "universe of interest" come from?

dhson Complexity and Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I don't understand this. If the multiverse is a system of a certain (appearantly low) complexity, it should not be allowed to have sub-systems like the "universe of interest" which have a higher complexity. Also, I don't see why the information which identifies a certain subsystem/universe should only be available from the point of view of that subsystem, increasing its complexity, but not the complexity of the system it's a part of.