hughlomas
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
117
Submissions
58
Member since
Oct 13
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 months ago
The only state preventing free commerce through the strait is Iran.
Comment · 10 months ago
People seem to forget that China is a fully authoritarian state. The fact is that China is an adversary and blocks virtually every western social network, including YouTube, Instagram, and Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
The CCP has absolute authority over internal companies to bend them to their will, and regularly disappears political dissidents including tech leaders like Jack Ma.
TikTok has over 150 million users in the United States, skewing young. We have seen the massive misinformation campaigns from other adversaries like Russia, with the goal of sowing dissent and malcontent.
All it takes is leaning on the algorithmic levers. Today the controversy may be over the issue you are passionate about, tomorrow it will a different issue, the only thing that matters is that TikTok is an open door to unduly influence public opinion in America.
The immense scale of data collection, from personal information to location tracking data, is also a clear concern.
Anyone that thinks it is reasonable for a geopolitical rival to control this company, especially a country known to reach its hand deep into company policy, is incredibly naive and self-sabotaging.
TikTok must be banned or fully controlled by a US based company.
Comment · 1 year ago
When a parent tells their child not to touch the hot stove, they want the best for the child. When the child does it anyway, the parent hopes that the lesson will be instructive for the future.
Comment · 1 year ago
With respect, allowing political posts that clearly violate the HN guidelines will normalize such posts, incentivize them in the future due to karma, and attract the type of people that want to soapbox to the community.
Comment · 3 years ago
Perhaps they use some form of steganography.
Comment · 11 years ago
I think Amazon's Echo device is doing this the proper way, which "uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud". It seems like a technical or design failure on Samsung's part to not feature similar functionality.
Comment · 12 years ago
A World War 2 training video for evading flak cannon fire is one of the best examples of graphical information presentation that I've seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP_-WUMi-nw
It features smoothly animated and highly functional designs as well as overlaying graphics on real footage to achieve a fashion of "augmented reality". The production quality is astounding and it is amazing to think that it was produced in the 40s. The entire video is an inspiring example of conveying information.
Comment · 12 years ago
Ah, my apologies, that was my first time uploading to youtube, haha. It is public now I believe.
Comment · 12 years ago
I loved reading this because I made something exceedingly similar a few years ago, and I'm similarly fascinated with how complex behavior can emerge from such simple rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsHc91IhzdI
My ants also had no conception of where their home was located, their behavior is entirely pheromone driven. They can "read" pheromones from any adjacent cell.
They leave a pheromone every movement depending on which state they are in, either "find food" or "return food".
In my system, the pheromones have a strength. Whenever an ant touches the nest, his "nest pheromone" is at full strength (255). Each movement decreases the strength by 1. This sets up a natural gradient of nest strength for ants to follow. They also "deteriorate" each round as yours do.
A similar setup is used with food, such that a high food scent is created when they pick up food, and decreases in strength as they return to the nest.
So to find food, they try to move up a food gradient or down the nest gradient (away from the nest), while to return food they move up the nest gradient (towards the nest).
Their searching consists of a random walking into cells that have no nest scent, or following a food trail.
They have an energy cost for moving, and if it's too low they have to eat a piece of food. Returning a piece of food to the hill spawns a new ant. The lines on the right side show the population of each colony and the total food on the board.
From these extremely basic rules, they are very efficient at clearing the "world" of food.
Comment · 12 years ago
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/guinea/index.html
Current outbreak appears to be around 50-55% mortality.
Comment · 12 years ago
Similarly, I've heard that the cockpit voice recording only keeps the last two hours. While that deals with 99% of the cases, here it will miss out on all conversation near the point that the flight began to go off course, and indeed hours after that.
What would be the cost to simply bump the recording time up closer to the maximum flight time possible on a full tank?
Comment · 12 years ago
The organism is a vessel to propagate the genes. Germ cells such as embryos usually have additional defenses and repair mechanisms, such as for DNA damage, that the somatic cells lack. Since the soma are merely there to help the replication of the germ line, they receive less investment.
No creature we know of has successfully evolved the capability to permanently stave off aging. Besides the inevitable issues with fighting entropy in a complex system, how would an ageless organism compete in the shifting landscape of an ecosystem as other creatures evolve around it? How would a non-aging organism adapt? It seems likely that continually creating new generations is the best strategy for genetic replication.
Now we are at the amusing point that genes may have unwittingly experienced their own skynet event. Modern science has given us the ability to not only gaze upon our creators, but manipulate them to do the bidding of ideas.
Comment · 12 years ago
Can anyone please explain why it is necessary to identify the precise remains of the dead, especially those that died so long ago? It seems like a waste of time and resources, driven by a compulsive over-expression of sentiment. In the case of the article, the man died over fifty years ago, and they even have the luxury of knowing where and how he died, shouldn't that be closure enough? Should taxpayers really be funding a staff of 500 for this? I can think of many better allocations for $100,000,000.
Comment · 12 years ago
This looks intriguing and I will likely try it out.
As an aside, half of the links under "Features" are not actually links, and half of ones that are links go to the same page without any anchors. It is confusing from a design perspective. Please at least consider changing the ones that are not links to not appear the exact same as links.
Comment · 12 years ago
"Natural" has more than one definition, dependent on its context. In some definitions of the word "natural", yes, twinkies are technically natural. In the more colloquial senses they are not. I prefer the more technical sense: since humans are derived from nature, they are natural, hence anything they do is natural. Unless you subscribe to some sort of man/nature metaphysical duality I don't see how you can argue that humans are not natural.
Twinkies are made from the same atoms as everything else. A glucose molecule assembled by a hypothetical atom arranger is indistinguishable from one synthesized in an organism. Twinkies are ultimately derived from nature, just as humans are ultimately derived from nature. Twinkies are a result of the congruence of multiple ideas that have evolved by natural selection. Among others, the ideas of refining and processing the chemical products of plants and animals, and how to make a twinkie-like baked good. Twinkies did not spontaneously appear in a vacuum.
Regardless of the words we use, the core idea of what we term "artificial selection" is a subset of the core idea of what we term "natural selection".