bholdr's comments

bholdr | 10 years ago | on: When will librarians start to throw offline literature away?

Vernor Vinge envisioned such future in his science fiction (for now) novel Rainbows End :)

"The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before." -- Review by teleread http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-end/

bholdr | 10 years ago | on: Introducing OpenAI

This is really great, I think. At least, I admire the motivation behind it as it was outlined by Sam.

However, it seems, YC Research started by bringing in accomplished and well-known academics in the field. I wonder whether it would've been more appropriate to focus on providing PhD Scholarship and postdoc fellowship. Though, I understand and somewhat appreciate the motivation behind bring the "top-guns" of research into this, I wonder whether bringing passionate and hungry for knowledge early career researchers could've been a better bet. I am bias on this, but overall think it would be great to diversify the group and level the field -- let the randomness of ideas play its role :) Just my 5c.

bholdr | 10 years ago

Just an app to ask Yes-or-No and also poll questions.

Your feedback would be appreciate.

The app is published as an alpha-version on Google store, so you would need to join the testers group. In any case, you can use it as a web app, however you misroute on some of the functionalities, such as sharing and photo taking.

bholdr | 10 years ago | on: Uber Using Driver Phones as a Backup Datacenter

This looks like the prime example of FOG computing [1]:

"A network architecture that uses one or more end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers), communication (rather than routed over backbone networks), and control, configuration, measurement and management (rather than controlled primarily by network gateways such as those in the LTE core)."

[1] http://fognetworks.org

bholdr | 10 years ago | on: Soviet PCs

I wrote a blog post about a soviet start-up from 1989 that used SM-4, mainframe type computer.

http://yansh.github.io/articles/rhythm/

A lot of the architecture was cloned from Western or nearby countries.

In any case, it was a fascinating period that in my mind produced some of the best programmers in the world. They did amazing things with little resources they had.

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