jhbadger

47 ms·

871.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Not entirely true. The CIO was pretty open to Blacks, not so much the AFL. Which became an issue in 1955 when they merged to become the current AFL-CIO.
872.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Brunner in general is kind of proto-cyberpunk. Especially The Shockwave Rider .
873.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I wouldn't want it, but I can see both Apple and heads of a lot of IT departments loving the concept of a locked-down MacOS.
874.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Yes, the Hugo-Nebula 1993 CD-ROM. That included some of the earliest (some say the earliest) examples of ebooks based on current fiction (rather than on out-of-copyright classic books). I have it myself still somewhere.
875.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Butler also expanded this idea in his 1872 novel Erewhon, where he described a seemingly primitive island civilization that turned out to once had greater technology than the West, including mechanical AI, but they abandoned it when they be
876.
by jhbadger 3y ago
It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use t
877.
by jhbadger 3y ago
But you can't really dismiss criticism of her work as being from just a bitter rival. Whatever his personal motivation for doing it, Freeman and later anthropologists talked to Samoans themselves (some of whom were alive when Mead was
878.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I'm actually quite impressed with Mead's recollections of von Neumann and the early cybernetic movement here. She is generally remembered today for her perhaps too naive belief in the sexual utopia of 1920s Samoa, but it is clear
879.
by jhbadger 3y ago
True. People often think Logo is just turtle graphics, but it really is a complete programming language that is, despite the syntax, actually related to Lisp. Brian Harvey even wrote a series of intro CS texts using Logo that didn't us
880.
by jhbadger 3y ago
People got by using non-English languages in the 1980s when most computers only used ASCII due to their US/UK origins. Many languages already had such substitutions established, for example in German umlauts can be replaced with a foll
881.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I find the all uppercase version to be more or less readable when zoomed in -- although I don't think the Declaration of Independence was really referring to "Nature's DOD" (the D and G are nearly identical) but I find t
882.
by jhbadger 3y ago
That movie didn't do well, but in retrospect, it is amazingly good compared to the dead eyed CGI people of the Polar Express, made three years later!
883.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Well, it predates the deep-learning ML approaches to protein folding like Alphafold. But people have been applying ML methods to protein folding for decades -- that has long been the two camps in the protein-folding bioinformatics world -
884.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Speaking of which, Dewdney recently passed away on March 9th but I haven't seen any notice of it on HN or other CS-related sites. I know he alienated a lot of people with his unfortunate turn to conspiracy theory after 9/11, but h
885.
by jhbadger 3y ago
And is it a "problem" that Montreal has a mixture of architecture both traditional and modern? That is part of what makes it an interesting city! I understand that varying styles in the source code of programs may not be desirable
886.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I think you are missing what the Evo project is trying to do -- create a new prokaryotic genome through a generative model. How this would work would be like the earlier hand-made synthetic genomes like Synthia (Gibson et al, 2010). In such
887.
by jhbadger 3y ago
That's how life expectancy works. It's an average of everyone's life span in the sample. If you reach age X, you've already dodged the various causes of death that affect people predominately younger than X.
888.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I remember their Coherent UNIX-like OS for PCs that they were selling for $99 in the early 1990s which was mentioned in the article. It came with an excellent paper manual which was like a thousand pages. If it had come out five years earli
889.
by jhbadger 3y ago
It basically makes making characters you can chat with pretty easy. As in defining their motivations, personalities, etc. Obviously with good prompting you can do this with most LLM-based systems, but they've optimized for this use cas
890.
by jhbadger 3y ago
70% is not that high these days -- there are institutions (normally non-university-affiliated research institutions like the Salk Institute that still apply for NIH and NSF grants) have overheads of 90%! It's important to realize that
891.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Don't forget the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s. For three or four years it seemed anyone in academia who even just knew HTML was jumping ship to a dot-com and their insane salaries. A few years later many of them came crawlin
892.
by jhbadger 3y ago
It also turns out that you can make machines that fly without having them flap their wings like flying animals. But it would be absurd to claim that airplanes don't fly for that reason.
893.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Chess was a major topic of AI research for decades because playing a good game of chess was seen as a sign of intelligence. Until computers started playing better than people and we decided it didn't count for some reason. It reminds m
894.
by jhbadger 3y ago
That's traditionally how things worked prior to railroads in the second half of the 19th century. Every city and town would use the official time on a public clock (often on the town hall) based on solar noon. It's the railroads t
895.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Tell that to China, where there is one time zone for the country (when by geography there would probably be three or four for an east-west oriented country like it is). Yes, the official time is far closer to solar in Beijing than it is in
896.
by jhbadger 3y ago
I think it was more common in the 1980s for amateur programmers (including young people as I was then) to know assembly than it was in the 1990s and later for several reasons. First of all there was the need for it -- while there were compi
897.
by jhbadger 3y ago
AOL only started allowing access to the Internet at large in 1993 (thus leading to the "Eternal September" that greybeards complain about to this day). Before then, AOL users were limited to what AOL provided. And there were other
898.
by jhbadger 3y ago
If you have a library card, see if your library supports Hoopla. It has thousands of professionally-recorded audio books (most by Recorded Books) that you can check out for free. And there don't seem to be queues which are often the ca
899.
by jhbadger 3y ago
Yes, 1985 was really too late for CP/M. Even Kaypro (the last surviving major CP/M machine vendor) had seen the writing on the wall and began to sell MS-DOS machines by then. Still, I was still using CP/M occasionally on my A
900.
by jhbadger 3y ago
There were a lot of two player "picture book" (as opposed to the usual solo text-based) gamebooks published in the 1980s, ultimately inspired by Ace of Aces (which from 1980 was the first as far as I know). There were the "Lo

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