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myfficalon Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem

Some DeepMind researchers used mechanistic interpretability techniques to find concepts in AlphaZero and teach them to human chess Grandmasters: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2406675122

myfficalon Lena by qntm (2021)

Another appropriate analogy would be be HeLa / Henrietta Lacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

myfficalon Bitcoin is over $100k

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2024-economic-we...

> When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 63 percent of all adults in 2023 said they would have covered it exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement [...] 37 percent of adults [...] would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent

myfficalon Facebook: You're temporarily restricted from posting until December 4, 219250468

Thanks for link; this post is indeed a dupe of that one.

myfficalon Facebook: You're temporarily restricted from posting until December 4, 219250468

Note that OP of the tweet has since successfully got their Facebook profile unblocked: https://twitter.com/KikiDoodleTweet/status/14064498487699415...

myfficalon Double Fine raises $1m in less than 24hrs on Kickstarter

Add musician Jonathan Coulton to that list: makes ~$500,000 a year without having ever signed on to a major label.

myfficalon My Name Is Me - Supporting your freedom to choose the name you use online

This is a good lesson for everyone who builds online communities: Some design decisions that are acceptable to the majority, like the real-name policy, harm groups of people who are already marginalized.

myfficalon Terence Tao: Evidence for mathematical conjectures short of proof

The Kelvin problem: what is the optimum way to partition 3D space into identical cells, such that the surface area between them is minimized? Lord Kelvin conjectured that the Kelvin cell gave this optimum partitioning. This conjecture stood for 100 years until Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan found a better cell in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaire%E2%80%93Phelan_structure

myfficalon Is TED the new Harvard?

Maybe.

One of TED's purposes is to bring together people with ideas and people with the capital and influence to make them happen.

myfficalon Word Frequencies in Front Page HN Titles

You need to massage your data to get more meaningful results.

It might be interesting to compare your word counts with the word counts from a general-purpose word corpus, then pick out words that appear more frequently by a statistically-significant amount. Something like Amazon's statistically improbable phrases algorithm.

myfficalon Machinarium suffers 90% piracy rate, offers $5 amnesty sale

World of Goo, another excellent indie game, also reported a 90% piracy rate two years ago. The developers calculated that percentage from the number of users on their high score board, which were much more than the number of actual online sales. They were very gracious about it, deliberately choosing not to put any DRM on their software.

Sad as it may be, putting DRM might not increase sales numbers significantly. It just makes crackers more determined. Such was World of Goo's reasoning against DRM.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-wor...

myfficalon What you say about others says a lot about you

My hunch says that this is a culture-specific study. The findings might break down in some Asian cultures, especially those in which it is polite to speak highly of everyone, regardless of one's true feelings.

myfficalon If Y Combinator put ads on HN they can fund 8-10 more startups every year

Given the nature of this community, if HN runs ads, I'd expect to see links to user-made alternate front-ends and ad-blocking extensions, right on the same page.

myfficalon Ask HN: How do I get involved in open source projects?

Start by helping software projects that you already use. You will have personal insight as to where the bugs are.

myfficalon Ask HN: How to get started contributing to open source?

Start with projects that you personally use and enjoy! You'll have more insight in the project, and you'll feel more motivated. (e.g."I'll write a patch for feature X becuause I want to see it in the next release.")

Look for projects that are in the middle stages of maturity. A project that is too mature will require technically difficult work; one too young will require lots of discussion on design and specification.

Work on easy tasks first, such as minor bugs or gaps in documentation. These tasks tend to finish faster, and they'll encourage you to go on to tougher stuff.

Get familiar with the tracker (e.g. Trac, Bugzilla) and repository (e.g. SVN, Git, Mercurial). In particular, know how to create and submit a patch. Most projects rely on these tools for collaboration, so you should cater to their workflow processes.

Good luck!

myfficalon Ask HN: Who is your preferred web host?

http://www.asmallorange.com/ Friendly, starts small and scales up, run by smart guys who answer tech support within minutes (literally).