trentlott

He passed away a few decades ago, but was important in building the Connection Machine[1], and had an astute analysis of computer addiction[2].

One of the really impressive and astounding contributions of his, despite have no formal training on computer engineering:

Heavily edited excerpt:

"The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

"Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

"By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange.

"Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

"The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

"Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life."

1.http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

2.https://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-fe...

He put in bank information, assuming that he would be getting +$$$, which looks like and uses the same system (or similar enough if you're 12) as the method for -$$$.

I'm not shocked a 12 year old, dreaming of easy internet monetization, didn't pore over the fine print.

> [family says] the company (Google) only asked for a bank account number and a name, without any more requisites. . .The account was already in red numbers when the bank called the parents to alert them.

It would just be considered a mating ritual, with some reference to the fact that numerical artifacts in uncommunicative life aren't uncommon (sunflower spirals and Fibonacci).

Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.

Ant 1: "Man, how do we get all these strange food deposits without plants?"

Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is."

Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without matter?"

Do we value art? It seems to be hard to make a life that way unless you find some corporate niche.

I think automated/algorithmic music and art will happen quite quickly, if it hasn't already.

I initially thought the same thingabout happiness, but the problem isn't in their 20s while they're relatively healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them.

Will they still be happy and fulfilled bagging groceries for half a day and going home to play GTA12 on their MagicLeap...rather than going to the doctor for that weird shooting pain or the cough they couldn't shake after being sick half the summer?

Will they simply opt not to get married? What about having kids? Both would be hard to reconcile with such a life -not saying anyone must or should do those things, but some might feel differently at 35 or 40 and find it hard to switch gears.

So why does the reciver need the two bits?

I'm not prone to study too deeply because I've learned (apparently) very bad analogies or schemes for entanglement.

But you probably wouldn't have bought it, then! They need to get rid of stock, obviously in whatever fashion they can.

Austerity is rough, I suppose.

Considering the weekend content of HN, I'd bet that there's been a conversation over that segment at some point.

Well at least Watson will pick players who have complimentary PR firms...

Fruit/berry are biological distinctions, I think, whereas vegetable-ness is mostly culinary.

I recall reading an argument refuting this, but it didn't alter my way of differentiating.

Why not make some argument about 1. Symbosis between fungi and other life forms, and 2. The fact the some parasites are known to alter the behavior of many creatures (specifically the one that influences a flea to climb grass to be eaten by cows for reproduction).

Our society is at a point where it can debate having robot butlers for our cats.

What a wasteful time to be alive.

I'm surprised that Cars holds ~75% on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatos, while Inside Out and Toy Story and others have >95%.

I see Cars as a film that appeals to children primarily, while the others are "family" movies in the best sense.

It always seemed to me that Cars was intended to be a more child-oriented movie, but I don't know that it should suffer for that critically.

Maybe it w as hoped to be a film on the same level as those others, but I can't imagine anybody read the script and thought it would be.

Also, humans prioritize and are sensitive to visual input more than sound to a large degree.

I'm sure dogmen would have excellent audio systems and have perfected HD smell-o-vision alongside black and white VGA monitors.

Why not make your real service on-site repair? That's less outsourceable than consulting, even.

That's debateable. We may simply have evolved without photon sensors.

Other wavelengths may have issues with detection or the information provided; if something can cut through obstructions in the atmosphere it may be hard to grow cells which interact with it or the rays may also ignore whatever is present locally at most scales.

The eye might be reduced in detail to the same domain as hearing or smell.

So then someone should create a dynamic hybrid console-browser.

Take, Chrome, flip it such that the input bar is on the bottom, and allow it to display console output as HTML.

Or, hell, keep it the way it is and just run the console HTML downward; why maintain the current terminal layout at all...

That would be incredible, and incredibly popular

Because we have sampled all states of the hypothetical quarter, and are constricting many, many values concerned with flipping.

The same can't be said for the atoms in the sun.

Build a database, randomly assemble.

Recurse.

Use whatever language generator deemed appropriate* to assign proper titles for the newly-evolved art movement.

*this may be delegated to a meat-computer, in pity.

I have used Tor occasionally on a lark and ran into these CAPCHAs. There is a version which is impossible to read or answer.

Ocassionally I get the "If you're a human, click this box" version which is an absolute godsend. Without that Cloudfare was a brick wall that prevented me to go any further.

Do it using scholar.google.com and you will get quite a bit of primary research regarding it.

Remember that space is expanding, so a photon which has traveled one billion light years originated less than one billion years ago.

Can you give more details of this, or is it some sort of joke/meme?

I'm actually pretty intrigued.

I love this, and did something similar.

If you haven't thought of it already, some estimations are probably worth considering - electricity and water can be more or less stable, and you might benefit from taking those baseline costs out of your calculation.

Also, it might be useful to add metadata in the form of tags or tag-groups in your spreadsheet; this will give you a bigger/more nuanced dataset if/when you have a hankering to analyze your behavior.

Less usefully, it would be cool if it looked like Civ.

You'd probably enjoy Nick Reboot or Toonami Aftermath, which are both community-generated channels that show that old content.

T.A. has a regular schedule, and have even managed to dig up old commercials and promos for the channel. It's pretty magical.

So which party or candidate has made dismantling the DoJ their key issue? Because a president really only gets one or two Big Things plausibly accomplished.

The Democrats clearly won't do it, and we can rest assured the Republicans will busy themselves with abortion and warmongering with Iran.

Many of us use toxic chemicals to ensure that our loved ones look alive, and then preserve them by burying their body in dirt with the rest of our family.

This is based on the idea that a long-dead Palestinian malcontent will be floating down from heaven and ruling the Earth, and we'll need our bodies for the after-party.