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espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

That's what open markets are all about.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

Some people want a war. This is true in every government in every nation. Most people don't. Most people have grown war weary and are ready to move to the era beyond. Economic sanctions are an experiment toward that, an alternative to war that keeps the warhawks at bay and proves kinetic wars are obsolete.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

> Action speaks louder.

You're right. For economic sanctions to work, the Iranian people must choose to act. They are in a unique historical position with an opportunity to choose and prove kinetic wars obsolete.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

They're still free. I live in Texas, and most people are part-Native American here (including me).

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

Yes, PNAC's plan to dislodge the middle east was formed in the '90's. Their strategy and tactics included a series of kinetic wars that culminated with Syria, which they viewed as the most politically challenging situation. In contrast, Trump's strategy and tactics is based on economic force rather than kinetic wars. For economic force to work, the Iranian people must rise and act. Sanctions put the Iranian government into a weakened position and provide an opportunity for the people to act. The globalists don't believe in this strategy and will likely return to their strategy of kinetic war in the next administration if this doesn't work. The Iranian people are in a strong position to choose to act and prove the globalists wrong and kinetic wars are obsolete.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

It has to do with why Iranian IPs are being blocked by Google.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

The US people fought several wars to free itself and establish its nation. And then it went back to Europe and fought WWI and WWII to ensure it's free. Iran is one the few places on Earth remaining to be free. But freedom is a choice, and the Iranian people have to choose it.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

You're missing the point. The situation is much more nuanced than that.

The Iranian people are not the target, the West wants to see their potential released.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303107

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

The 80 million Iranians are currently held hostage by two entities. First, it is their own government (which is by far not the worse in the world, being in Iran feels more free than one would expect).

The Iranian people are not the target -- Persia is a rich ancient civilization that's being repressed -- the West knows this and wants to see the Iranian people's massive creative potential unleashed.

Sanctions are designed as a non-kinetic force applied to pressure the Iranian government into a weakened position. The Iranian people play a significant role in amplifying the pressure. The louder and more vocal their voice becomes, the more pressure their government will feel. If the Iranian people want a change, the change has to come from within.

At some point, when the people amplify the pressure beyond the point the government can withstand, the situation tips and the people force their government to release. This is the effect the sanctions are designed to create.

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

Google Safety & Security Blog: An update on state-sponsored activity (2018) ...

Detecting and terminating activity on Google properties

"Actors engaged in this type of influence operation violate our policies, and we swiftly remove such content from our services and terminate these actors’ accounts. Additionally, we use a number of robust methods, including IP blocking, to prevent individuals or entities in Iran from opening advertising accounts."

https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/update-st...

espeedon An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Iranian Entrepreneurs

Regardless what you think of the tactics, the sanctions are an economic vise -- a negotiating tactic to leverage a position -- it has nothing to do with race.

espeedon A general-purpose probabilistic programming system with programmable inference

MIT Probabilistic Computing Project http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/

The Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages (https://dippl.org) by Noah D. Goodman https://cocolab.stanford.edu/ndg.html

Stanford CS 228: Probabilistic Graphical Models https://cs228.stanford.edu and book by Daphne Koller http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...

ProbTorch: Library for deep generative models that extends PyTorch https://github.com/probtorch/probtorch

Anglican: Probabilistic programming language integrated with Clojure and ClojureScript https://probprog.github.io/anglican/index.html

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585465

espeedon A general-purpose probabilistic programming system with programmable inference

Julia is fast becoming one of the great programming languages of our era. Julia is not going away, its usage is only becoming more pervasive. Imagine if you had learned Python 20 years ago. Julia's founding sponsor is Dr. Jeremy Kepner [1] who is the founder of MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center [2] and the founder of GraphBLAS [3]. Kepner's got a good eye for things, he knows what's coming down the pipe and what will be important in a language of the future. Learning Julia now means you'll be ahead of the curve for years to come. Your time will not be wasted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)#S...

[2] http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/

[3] http://graphblas.org

espeedon Ask HN: US government funds a lot of tech research, why don't startups use it?

notkid...a green account 12 hours old. Who are you? Contact me from your .gov or .mil address and I'll reply. And following that, if you want a public reply, OK.

espeedon Fast key-value stores: An idea whose time has come and gone

Redis with GraphBLAS [1] gives you a "well thought out model", exteme performance, and all the goodness of a linear algebra relational model under the hood, which can easily run on CPUS/GPUS/TPUS or a combination thereof. Pairs well with tensor models too.

For more context and depth, see previous discussions...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=GraphBLAS&sort=byPopularity&pr...

[1] GraphBLAS http://graphblas.org

espeedon I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

"The power of the unaided mind is greatly exaggerated. It is 'things' that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning." - Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart

https://jnd.org/things_that_make_us_smart_forbes_article/

espeedon Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”

It really is winner take all ... There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft]. -- Bill Gates

Who'd have known in 2011 that by 2019, The Four Greatest Companies in the world (by cap) would be All-America [1], Microsoft would be back on top, and then combined together, they spell MAGA -- in almost perfect order too [2]...

     Symbol  Company      Cap         Rank 

  M  MSFT    Microsoft      1.05 T    1
  A  AMZN    Amazon.com   940.99 B    2
  G  GOOG    Alphabet     779.39 B    4
  A  AAPL    Apple        914.60 B    3

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-America

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#Socia...

espeedon Ask HN: How to get better at Data structures and Algorithm?

Hundreds of the best papers have been posted on Hacker News over the years. Some of the rare gems too. Look through people's posting history for inspiration. And use Google Scholar [1]. At some point you may discover you're searching Google Scholar more than you're searching Google Proper.

[1] https://scholar.google.com

espeedon Ask HN: How to get better at Data structures and Algorithm?

Focus on the structures, leave the algorithms for later. Seek out and study the papers, and build each data structure one by one. You'll know you understand it when you can build it, when you can see its structure. There's a master key hidden embedded within the structures too. Pieces of the key are distributed among them, waiting for its fragments to be connected. Its secrets revealed and retrieved by a select few. One of the secrets you'll discover on this quest is this: Once you get the structures, you get the algorithms for free.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047607

espeedon This Page Is Anonymous (2013)

Evidently 'adnam [1] (adnam@sdf) [2] is Adam Hayward [3].

The bike in the pic is a Dahon [4] folding bike.

Adam's freeshell site [5] contains a password-protected link to his CV (request sent).

Here's an archive of his Bristol University Information Technology Society (BITS) homepage from 2002 [6].

Adnam is "a nickname given to me by some mates in Cambridge" [7].

And here's the analog site stat logs for requests from Tue-08-Feb-2000 15:16 to Mon-08-Apr-2002 13:09 (789.91 days). [8]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639997

[2] https://sdf.org/tour/sdfers/gen.cgi?adnam@sdf

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/adnam/16677188/

[4] https://dahon.com/bike/

[5] http://adam.freeshell.org/

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20020201220147/http://bits.bris....

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20020211221929/http://www.bits.b...

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20031112001318/http://www.bits.b...

espeedon This Page Is Anonymous (2013)

Analyze voidnull's use of pronouns and do a sim search over other users' accounts on HN and the Web.

"Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints." [1] - Prof James W. Pennebaker

[1] https://www.secretlifeofpronouns.com

espeedon New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start (2014)

Cycloidal paths show up throughout the quantum world (hints of which I've posted about before [1]). This is the first time I've seen anyone pose a possible relationship between the cycloid, life and the helix. And in any case, sometimes there are gems buried in unknown papers. As Eric Weinstein states it, many things are "Pre-Correct, Currently Crazy" [2] -- the trick is to find them.

[1] Some interesting properties of cycloids and places they show up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586144

[2] MIT AI Podcast: Eric Weinstein - Revolutionary Ideas in Science, Math, and Society https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19458503

espeedon New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start (2014)

A few weeks ago when I was searching for signs of cycloids hiding in nature, I came across scanned images of this obscure 1997 paper by Harvey A Jetmore Jr: "An Hypothesis of Antinomy [0]" Parts [1] and [2]. One idea that jumped out at me is Jetmore's hypothesized possible relationship between the cycloid, life and the helix, which he summarizes in Part 1: 8 and 9...

  8. I can not ignore the possible relationship of the
  inorganic and organic rhelms suggested by the transition of
  cycloidal to helical motion, whether the vining of the
  morning glory or the DNA helix. Could it be that evolution is
  a function of the relative cycloidal curvature of space; 
  location in time on the brachistocrone, so to speak, 
  ie: that evolution is a sort of continuous creation?

  9. It is tempting to suggest that the material world is the
  rehlm of the curate cycloid from the limit of the common
  cycloid to the limit of the circle. and that; 
  energy (waves) is the rehlm of the prolate cycloid from the
  limit of the common cycloid to the limit of the line, and
  that; the limit of the point/center/axis is the rehlm of the
  V-oid and the black hole: and that; 
  the inorganic world of life is the rhelm of the helix.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomy

[1] "An Hypothesis of Antinomy I: The V-oid" http://www.harveysspace.us/an-hypothesis-of-antinomy---i---t...

[2] "An Hypothesis of Antinomy II: Playing Dice with the Universe" http://www.harveysspace.us/an-hypothesis-of-antinomy-ii--pla...

NB: The formatting of the text on the Web page is a little messed up (scroll down to see scanned images of the paper).

espeedon Envoy Mobile

Would this make WireGuard UDP tunneling over TCP easier?

espeedon How Fast can A Single Instance of Redis be?

To maximize reach, have you explored what would take for a first-class Redis wasm [1] implementation, maybe pairing it with Terra [2] for Lua scripting.

[1] http://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/exec/index.html

[2] https://github.com/zdevito/terra

espeedon Overton Window

"How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questoning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?" [1]

[1] What You Can't Say http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

espeedon Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in my mind? (2015)

See Holonomic brain theory (the brain as an antenna)

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

espeedon The CIA Spied on People Through Their Smart TVs, Leaked Documents Reveal (2017)

There's a microphone in the Samsung TV smart remote.

espeedon U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

Simplified view mode in Chrome on your phone (may require flag set to enable).

espeedon The New York Times course to teach its reporters data skills is now open-source

Consider working with journalists (evolve the pair-programming model [1] into something new ~> pair-journalism)...

"AI-enhanced journalism offers a glimpse of the next knowledge economy" https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/droidward-and-botstein-can...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming