flashingleds's comments

I confess to trying this myself after reading the Srivastava story. If you step back from the fact that it's a lottery, there's plenty of money involved, "what are you a gambling idiot?" etc it's actually a really fun problem to tackle. I picked out a similar style of ticket and for $20 I kept myself entertained doing analysis and testing hypotheses for the better part of a weekend. Sadly I was defeated on this occasion having found no obvious weaknesses. The main thing I learned from it all was that while a single scratch ticket is fun and exciting, 5 or more get very boring very fast. I was groaning every time a 'free ticket' showed up.

(Also: in Australia you usually see the next 4 tickets on the roll behind a clear display, so if you ended up with a good trick, even if it required running a script on your smartphone, you could have fun with it)

Regarding the point: "Just-in-time learning is the future. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any argument you might have to the contrary is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong."

I don't think I agree with you there (or perhaps I just didn't interpret the point correctly). In certain fields of study - and perhaps software engineering is one - this might be true, but it does not hold generally. If tomorrow I find myself needing to write a good zero-finding algorithm in a new language, then yes, I can probably absorb that material quickly. If I find myself needing to model the temperature dependence of something using an esoteric branch of quantum mechanics, then good luck to me without 3 years of prior study in topics that didn't seem relevant to anything at the time.

There was a great line in the old TV show Pretender along the lines of "It's my observation that anybody who begins a sentence "with all due respect" typically doesn't have it"

I've always interpreted prefaces like that (along with its relatives "with all due respect" or the suffix "I'm just saying") as a way of turning the sentence into "This is an objective observation that should be made; don't blame the messenger". Used well it's a good way to strip subjectivity from some objective facts, used poorly it's a good way to project a subjective interpretation onto objective facts.

Quite aside from any of the main points being made here, the guy is dead on about Strogatz's book. I had the same reaction to that book as I did to Lipovača's Learn You A Haskell - it's a great accessible resource to learn something new and interesting (if perhaps not immediately useful). Would appeal to the HN crowd I imagine.

I have spoken to a guy who was at one point closely involved with the D-wave people. He suggested that the actual story with the Lockheed purchase was that LM sells an awful lot of gear to Canada, and as part of the contract they are expected to buy some number of million worth of Canadian tech in return. The D-wave purchase was one of these obligated purchases.

Just a comment given in unofficial conversation, take it how you will.

Actually the same people have essentially already worked that one out: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6064/64.full?rss=1

But as has already been mentioned, the biggest practical hurdle is temperature. This single atom device is measured at milliKelvin temperatures, and fundamentally could not operate at room temperature. It still has important consequences, but building computer chips is not an immediate one.

It's an issue of definitions. Of course you cannot build an electronic device using only a single atom, because you need leads, interconnects, power supplies, measurement equipment etc. So when you talk about a single atom transistor, what's meant is that the critical, behaviour determining region of the device is a single atom. If you took that single atom away, you would not have a transistor any more.

In much the same way we talk about 32nm transistors in computer chips for example - it's understood that this number refers to the gate length, not your whole processor.

Unlikely to happen, but in any case also unlikely to be all that effective. Google scholar is getting good, but when looking for papers I will usually use scopus/sciencedirect (Elsevier) or ISI (Thompson Reuters). Sowing the seeds of my own destruction and so forth.

I think it's difficult to refute that if the funding was public, the results should be public. But the scientists have to publish in big journals to win public funding grants, and the big journals aren't motivated to go open access and surrender their cash cow.

So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals.

Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.

It does seem odd. What you're talking about is not even particular to big user facilities. If I don't have the (physics) facilities to do something, I just track down someone who does and ask them (which is not hard using google or looking at the relevant literature). The majority of the time they're happy to collaborate on the basis that they're on the paper. I think I'm missing some detail about this.

A few months ago I posted a writeup about displaying a Gameboy video signal on an oscilloscope (http://www.flashingleds.wordpress.com). It did the rounds for a few days (kotaku, HN, hackaday, slashdot etc.), and I was slightly surprised at which sites generated the biggest numbers. Reddit was at the top by far, something like 25k in 24 hours without having even made their front page, followed by slashdot (7k) then HN (3k). For a site that usually ambles along at ~80 hits a day it was pretty crazy.

I completely see your point, and in many cases I agree with you. But there is sometimes a tendency for evolutionary biologists to assign deeper reasons to things that are just a consequence of physics. Occam's razor and all that.

In this particular case that fact that the phenomenon is not present when the nerves are severed does present a pretty relevant argument against simple biomechanics.

The LPC1768 is quite popular and you should never have problems with stock. I got started with a $30 development board from NGX (google "1768 blueboard") paired with a $30 USB jtag programmer from the same store. The older LPC2148 was also quite popular for hobbyists, but it's ARM7 not CM3.

Since I was more interested in learning the micro then screwing around with toolchains, I just spent the money and got a personal license for Rowley Crossworks ($150). It took me under an hour to go from software installation to flashing an LED, so I'm pretty happy with that decision.

"PIC vs. AVR" means two different things depending on your context. The intelligent context is discussing which family best suits somebody new to microcontrollers (which thankfully is what this link is about). The moronic context is entrenched hobbyists arguing about why the family they chose is superior.

Anybody who reads this headline and already understands what the acronyms mean is probably going to assume it's the latter.

Since this has attracted the attention of some very knowledgeable people, can anyone suggest a good textbook/site/paper discussing password security and encryption? Obviously I can google 'computer security' and find something, I just wondered if there was a well regarded standard reference (ala K&R or Art of Electronics). I don't understand the majority of the techniques being discussed here but would quite like to.

I'm actually pretty excited about this. I think anybody whose heart stirs a little when they see a calculator watch can understand the appeal. It's a gap in the market (if you can call it a market...) and an area the DIY community can't really tackle, since to get a practical form factor you need some pretty serious manufacturing capability.

An ipod nano on a watchstrap is not really any kind of competition; yes it has better specs but you're not intended to be able to reprogram it. TI's previous watch offering caught my attention, but the display on it was quite limited. There's really a lot of scope for imaginative projects on this thing.

That graph is screaming out for a log scale.

Quantum optics is outside my realm of expertise; to be honest my eyes kind of glaze over whenever these guys give a talk. The real life applications of this are not really teleportation in the "beam me up sense" but more along the lines of encryption.

If your transmission is based on quantum entangled photon states, it is physically impossible to eavesdrop without giving yourself away, since the act of eavesdropping 'collapses the quantum superposition' (like when you open the box with Schrodingers cat). They've actually already rolled out systems based on this technology in various places in the world, but there is a lot of work to improve bandwidth and so forth.

I won't say too much more as I'm well outside the field and will probably garble it.

Good work on skipping the forms; if you make me fill out a form before allowing me to download something I'm going to be mashing the keyboard with my palm.

Emailing people to solicit feedback seems a little bit weird. Just put a note somewhere (where it will be seen) reiterating that this is version one and you would really like any kind of feedback.

If that's not working, figure out some specific aspect you want feedback on and put the question out to a forum. For example I've seen some amazing UI design feedback come from cold-call requests on HN.

Some vertical error bars would have been helpful on that plot, but having read the original article (from behind the pay wall) I'm pretty satisfied that they thought about all the obvious problems being discussed in these comments. I am a practicing experimental scientist but with minimal knowledge of statistics, so factor that into whatever I say here.

They point out that a negative ruling ("no" or "almost - come back next time") is much easier to deliver. There is less thought involved, nobody will raise eyebrows and the paperwork is much lighter. So the trend is more about mental energy than grumpiness. They note the significance of the breaks, but do not attempt to disentangle the role of mood improvement / a blood sugar boost / rest.

They explicitly discuss the possibility of hidden variables: "A key aspect for interpreting the association ... is whether an unobserved factor determines case order in such a way that yields the pattern of results we obtain" The dip and spike patterns in the rulings are quite pronounced, and similar graphs in the article for parameters such as the gravity of the offense, presence of a rehabilitation plan and the number of previous incarcerations do not show any such trends. This addresses questions about case scheduling by the clerks. Besides which - even if the clerks did organize easier cases for later in the day, this would manifest as one long trend over the entire day, not the spike/decay sequence shown.

So I didn't see any gaping holes, and more importantly it seems quite a plausible conclusion to me. Surely you must have had a similar experience going Christmas shopping - you start out thinking very carefully about getting the perfect gift for every person, but after 3 hours trudging around in a mall you'll just buy any old shit so you can go home. As you get tired you just start taking the easiest options.