4 ms·
Get a Life
- zabzonk 6y agoHere's one by me at exactly the opposite end of the performance spectrum: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-computer/ https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
- gumby 6y agoHave you discussed this with Bill Gosper?
- kragen 6y agoWhat the fuck is wrong with HN that this question, coming from a personal friend of Gosper's, gets downvoted into negative territory? Fuck this place.
- qzw 6y agoTake it easy there. It's only internet points, and it looks like gumby has plenty to spare. I didn't downvote, but to be fair to those who did, this item wasn't submitted by the blog author, so the question could come across as misdirected.
- gumby 6y agoIt’s interesting that HN discourages discussion of this topic. On one hand i suppose it can lead to whining by people whose posts didn’t do well (but does that ever actually happen on other fora?) OTOH this kind of meta discussion (in any context, online and real space) helps direct conversation in a coherent fashion.
- dang 6y agoIt's just stochastic. A few raindrops always fall in weird places. Short comments in particular admit many (mis)interpretations simply because they contain less information and leave more degrees of freedom for the interpreter to fill in. For a sufficiently wide spectrum of readers, lots of these different (mis)interpretations will get activated as the same comment lands with different receivers. Some will lead to downvotes. Some of those downvotes will seem perverse and inexplicable. Different readers have completely different priors. You happened to know that gumby is a friend of Gosper—that naturally collapsed the space of meanings down to a narrow and obvious range of interpretation. But it's not hard to see how a totally different range might (wrongly) occur to someone with different priors. For all we know they thought the comment was putting down Gosper while they were trying to defend him...one thing I've learned from moderating is that it's impossible to predict all interpretations. It's astonishing how unpredictably the same comment can land with different readers. Yet all of this is exactly what one would expect from a stochastic process and enough datapoints. Usually, fair-minded users see that a comment has been unfairly downvoted and give a corrective upvote (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corrective%20upvote https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and it is is usually enough to fix the problem. That happened here.
- gfody 6y agothis reminds me of the drama around when Bitcoin forked into BTC and BCH - I recall there was some optimization that allowed miners to land at digests equivalent to some huge hash rate without actually computing that many hashes and since it was baked into ASICs that would be rendered useless after the optimization was nullified they had no choice but hard fork.
- px43 6y agoI think you're talking about ASICBOOST, more importantly the "Covert ASICBOOST" drama, which was almost entirely fabricated as a political ploy to turn the /r/bitcoin community against the mining community. It was used to justify the soft fork inclusion of SegWit (Segregated Witness) but in reality had zero impact on the actual ASICBOOST capability, which was an overly complicated and incredibly mild hashing optimization which no one really actually used. The risk of orphaning blocks was likely higher than and potential profits from the extra advantage.
- gfody 6y agooh nice I couldn't find any details earlier but googling "asicboost" turned up the whole scandal - I had no idea it was all disinformation campaign!
- rezmason 6y agoOh, excellent timing! I've got a question for Ben Lynn, who will hopefully show up here to answer questions. I'm in the early stages of porting my decade old Flash Wireworld player ( http://rezmason.net/wireworld http://rezmason.net/wireworld ) to HTML5 ( http://rezmason.github.io/wireworld-player http://rezmason.github.io/wireworld-player ), and I was planning on finally tackling a HashLife based implementation down the road. May I use or adapt your Wireworld HashLife implementation for my project? Also, can I brainstorm with you the likely characteristics of other types of optimizations?
- baby 6y agoA more descriptive title would help
- whoisburbansky 6y agoThe title is part of the charm here, no?
- ganafagol 6y agoCharm, yes. But it's very non-functional. We're all here to get news and discuss them. A title gives an indication about whether reading the article is of interest to me so that I can decide whether to read it. Some clever word play may be funny but it goes totally against its purpose. Imagine all titles at Hacker News being like that. We could just replace them with "Article 1", "Article 2" etc. which would be terrible but would not lose any further information.
- oblio 6y agoAgreed. At first I thought it was about work-life balance (!).
- orhmeh09 6y agoThis is true. I still haven’t clicked on it nor do I know what it’s about based on the comments. Would alt-text descriptions of submissions be useful to add?
- baby 6y agoYeah I guess that’s what subtitles are for after all.
- jjice 6y agoThe lambda calculus section of this site helped me so much in my Language Theory course last semester. I highly recommend a look through if you're interested in the basic of computation and types. https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/lambda/ https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/lambda/
- 7800 6y agoThis doesn’t seem to be linear time for exponential changes. It’s much slower.
- bitsen 6y agoThis doesn’t seem to solve in linear time.
- alisonkisk 6y agoArticle is a Haskell implementation of Gosper's Hashlife algorithm for computing the nth iteration of Conway's Game of Life in O(log(n)) time.