adamgravitis

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
408
Submissions
88
Member since
Feb 22
CTO at TodaQ. Our blockchain scales.

Formerly: VP Engineering at Upverter in Toronto. Formerly: Founder at algoanywhere / CTO @ 500px

Background: - Engineering Science via UToronto - Not-so-amateur computational economist, mathematical physicist, bioinformatician.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?
Comment · 3 years ago
I'd rather they be able to run mail servers. SMTP lends itself to intermittent delivery.
Comment · 3 years ago
Orig article has lowercase ‘n’ in ‘next’, which makes more sense…
Comment · 3 years ago
Because it was perfect…
Comment · 3 years ago
The author is displeased with the sort of discussions present on networks built on a couple different technologies. Unclear how the third technology magically makes them “happy.”
Comment · 5 years ago
I concur. The term obviously refers to another sort of thing entirely.
Comment · 6 years ago
"In short: this author is endorsing a funding model focused on low initial investment and faster profitability."

-> so basically, Canadian "venture" capital. They don't even want to talk to you unless profitability is there or within a few months. So, basically, it distills to a barely riskier than usual bank loan, except you pay the loan with equity.

Comment · 6 years ago
This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly understood, encodes that capability, at all.

A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.

Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.

It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....

There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?

We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.

Comment · 8 years ago
I would just point out that HN does this in the title of every link posted, and has been doing this for years.
Comment · 8 years ago
Toronto’s tech talent is keen... but relatively green. Since few companies have had to deal with scaling networks, users and data to the same magnitude as is common with Valley companies, it’s almost impossible to find senior engineers worthy of the title. Plenty of options for junior and intermediate, though.
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Are you guys going to release something describing your concept of "category oriented programming" any time soon?
Comment · 9 years ago
To be fair, I do insist on calling Deloitte "Deloitte Dot".
Comment · 10 years ago
Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years:

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus

Comment · 10 years ago
The main computationally intractable problems around drug discovery surround protein folding and identifying macromolecule shapes. This is necessary to infer receptor sites for potential drug targets.

The problem is massively intractable. QC could revolutionize the space.

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