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?
The 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.
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.
This 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?
It'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.
I figured the author would show up but then later realized he is at stanford so is likely in contact with any number of people who would connect the two. By that point it was too late to delete.
this 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.
I 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.
I'm in the early stages of porting my decade old Flash Wireworld player ( http://rezmason.net/wireworld ) to HTML5 ( 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?