I doubt I can do the observation justice, my mind went there thinking 'a moment before the Unix Epoch' and the more... well-traveled meme: 'haha funny number [dropping the leading 19]'. Any number would've worked just as well, it's not significant. I really just wanted to express my participation in this, if at all, likely won't be in good faith.
That said... an option for 'I could have declared an age/birth date but chose not to' seems preferable. I was talking about poisoning but this could be more productive. Any attestation would reasonably fail, sure, but it sends a potentially-meaningful signal [to someone].
OK, "I am so old that already lived before the UNIX epoch even started" (or a year which breaks systems that cannot handle times before the UNIX epoch) sounds plausible. :-)
Fairly context dependent, however :) This attestation/verification topic (and 1969, presumably) keeps appearing in places where I doubt The Epoch is relevant!
Nobody in their right mind can explain how locking down operating systems will protect children. It does not make sense. This is just another way to sneak in more mass surveillance and kill anonymous online presence, with most ridiculous excuses.
It's all about: do you derive an appropriate value for yourself from being the product?
For example, when you use the Google search engine, you are the product (Google's customers are advertisers). I hope you derive sufficient (average) value from each Google search so that you consider this to be worth it.
For a lot of people I think it's increasingly not worth it. Not only do we never click on ads, but results are getting worse, and often a (local) LLM can answer a large percentage of our questions faster and more privately.
Eh, a think tank usually has some kind of minimum requirements, such as education or industry experience. The usefulness of hackernews lies in "farming the opinions of the kind of dork that hangs out on hackernews" -- this is useful data, but "crowd sourced think tank" is trumping it up a bit i think
Eh, a think tank usually has some kind of minimum requirements
When paid for, I agree that is absolutely true.
When nearly free, thanks to team Daniel it's an input that can be weighted against paid options. The free but large crowd may have thought of things that paid think tank members members holding doctorates may not have. Great ideas are missed all the time and most often until it is too late. There may only be a few golden eggs and many bad eggs but there are quicker ways to sort that out nowadays without an Eggdicator and Oompa Loompas though I do miss the songs. One golden egg could pay for the entire cost of the staff running HN for a decade.
> I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.
That comic is great I understand qubits a bit better now: it has 4 degrees of freedom but can be mapped onto the 2d surface of a sphere because of normalization (circle rule) and global phase symmetry which each take away one of the four DOF
I need a longer think on the interference/computation connection though
Don't let the terminology intimidate you. The interesting ideas in quantum computing are far more dependent upon a foundation in linear algebra rather than a foundation in mathematical analysis.
When I started out, I was under the assumption that I had to understand at least the undergraduate real analysis curriculum before I could grasp quantum algorithms. In reality, for the main QC algorithms you see discussed, you don't need to understand completeness; you can just treat a Hilbert space as a finite-dimensional vector space with a complex inner product.
For those unfamiliar with said concepts from linear algebra, there is a playlist [1] often recommended here which discusses them thoroughly.
Yeah all the names and terminology really do make it seem harder than it is. Took me a long time and I’m still learning. 2d Hilbert space is same as 2d Euclidean space but each dimension has 2 degrees of freedom (real + imaginary). Might even think of it as 4d space, for vector imagining purposes, but that would probably be wrong and someone would call you out
Better start with Simon's algorithm (solving Simon's problem) [0]; it already contains a lot of ideas that you need to understand Shor's algorithm, while not having a lot of technicalities. Then progress to Shor's algorithm, and then to Kitaev's algorithm [1] (link from [2]). The latter solves the Abelian stabilizer problem - this problem contains the more abstract mathematical essence of a lot of quantum algorithms.
> >I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
> -- Linus Torvalds
What about programmers
- for whom the code is a data structure?
- who formulate their data structures in a way (e.g. in a very powerful type system) such that all the data structures are code?
- who invent a completely novel way of thinking about computer programs such that in this paradigm both code and data structures are just trivial special cases of some mind-blowing concept ζ of which there exist other special cases that are useful to write powerful programs, but these special cases are completely alien from anything that could be called "code" or "data (structures)", i.e. these programmers don't think/worry about code or data structures, but about ζ?
Linus has the same problem as corporate America, but at a slightly different level.
He needs some group of really smart, self-selected programmers, where corporate America is looking for a larger group of somewhat less intelligent programmers.
You might be describing an even more intelligent programmer, but unless he can dumb down his programming to fit in, he's probably better off being a lone developer.
It is indeed scary is how compliant the open-source projects have become to the "governmental overlords". Where has the hacker spirit gone?
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