Hacker News: frevd

New comment by frevd in "An Amoeba-Based Computer Found Solutions to 8-City Traveling Salesman Problem"

frevd — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:48:03 +0000

Yeah I guess in order to make this into a simulation, one would effectively add all the exponential time back, since it requires all that to "run" an amoeba on a classical computer. In that article they mention the organism communicating across its body, i.e. reacting to stimuli in all parts in a correlated fashion, that is the bit referring to a quantum system. Of course all physical systems are quantum systems (if I actually had a phone that one too yes, although the operating system does not make use of its nature). So there is no question whether we can simulate that algorithm, it cannot be possible without calculating all the parts, and that is no longer linear time.

New comment by frevd in "An Amoeba-Based Computer Found Solutions to 8-City Traveling Salesman Problem"

frevd — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:38:42 +0000

Right, it is not guaranteed to find _the_ best solution possible, but at least it does find _some_ solution to NP-complete problems in linear time, which no classical algorithm is expected to be able to do. Now they claim in that article to have made a simulation of this running on a classical computer exhibiting the same characteristics, which frankly should not be possible. so where is the catch?

New comment by frevd in "An Amoeba-Based Computer Found Solutions to 8-City Traveling Salesman Problem"

frevd — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 20:42:45 +0000

No, if I understood right, this thing is a quantum computer solving NP-complete problems in linear time. And the article claims to have a simulation doing the same, but they are not sure whether this is actually only a special case scenario.

New comment by frevd in "Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”"

frevd — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 17:06:25 +0000

It's not Intel's issue, it's a design flaw per se, affecting _all_ CPUs that use predictive branch execution that has effects on the processor cache, which are pretty much all processors produced in this millenium.

That said, there _might_ be a solution to this problem in a way that predictive branch execution does not need to be removed completely from future architecture, which would be a thing we don't really want to loose, even if it increases safety. During that time, it makes sense to disable it, but not by default. The only implication is that older systems must be patched, which is every admin's responsibility.

New comment by frevd in "Efficient Air-Conditioning Beams Heat into Space"

frevd — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 22:12:29 +0000

Ah, sorry, duplicate question (see below). Well, even if it does not do much, it's a start, and it shouldn't require putting in extra energy from power plants.

New comment by frevd in "Efficient Air-Conditioning Beams Heat into Space"

frevd — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 22:10:28 +0000

Does that mean we can cover the deserts with these plates that run purely on solar energy and release energy as infrared radiation to combat Global Heating?

New comment by frevd in "Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards"

frevd — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:39:08 +0000

Yes, but there is the major problem that charging electrical car batteries today still requires burning of fossils to create the energy in the first place.

Beside, that's controversial, Musk has got both electrical cars and space rockets.

Germany afaik wants to have predominantly electrical cars driving around in the next decade. Forcing a ban on exhaust cars might create some incentive on producing renewable energies due to the demand, so companies can invest in that. Of course, banning exhaust cars should go hand in hand with banning coal power plants (by way of regulating CO2 limits by law/tax, so that it is expensive to create CO2). Then the demand has to be covered by solar+wind and mainly nuclear energy (the latter not being very popular and the former too space-needy), way to go for clever businesses to come up with solutions (one of them might even be to develop ways to convert created CO2 to solids).

New comment by frevd in "Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards"

frevd — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:01:34 +0000

Nobody seems to mention cars, they run on burning fossils and they are a large factor due to the amount of cars in use (ever increasing worldwide). Forcing the industry to replace the exhaust by whatever thing which does not consume fossils to create energy (directly or indirectly e.g. by electrical power that needs to be generated by burning coal) is what might contribute a lot to a better atmosphere (at least in the cities), and could even be good for the economy (as opposed to cost). Renewable energy production without burning fossils should be invested in. The only candidate for now to cover the consumption is nuclear (solar or wind power requires too much space and looks bad, so here you go with your efforts).

New comment by frevd in "Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars"

frevd — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 21:11:46 +0000

Why only 4, 8 or 12 rotors? Can a group of much smaller rotors replace the thrust a single bigger one produces? Would add a lot more redundancy and limit the costs.

New comment by frevd in "Bitfinex Interim Update"

frevd — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 07:59:33 +0000

I wonder if this was actually a sophisticated trade to profit from shaking up the market - claiming a substantial hack to make the market panic, then buy back the "lost" coins for way lower prices. If you control this kind of assets you can easily corner the market and participate from the emotional reactions. The lost coins can either not be lost at all or sold off way before that in small chunks, netting a profit after all is over.

New comment by frevd in "A programming language for living cells"

frevd — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:10:19 +0000

Given that you can run the same program on a billion bacteria should quite improve the odds of getting the job done.

Surely, also one has to account for possible other "jobs" that get done due to interference.

However, if your goal is to automate processes rather than develop cures to "run" in the human body then this is a very interesting alternative to using silicon, the parallel pipeline potential is enormous.

EDIT: Would it be possible to develop a biological CPU this way? I.e. having "instruction sensors" and a touring-machine-like DNA-robot that can execute externally supplied instructions? Putting that into a bacteria that can clone itself would surely cut down on costs of computing.

New comment by frevd in "How the Bitcoin Community Turned to War"

frevd — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 20:26:17 +0000

Two remarks:

- There are a lot of exchanges that don't involve direct transactions on the blockchain (buying and selling BTC is nonlimited in terms of quantity or time).

- There are many altcoins, claiming to do certain things better such as proof of work or block size etc., however, the most convincing argument for using BTC seems to be the current market capitalization. As such, it is understandable that the Core wants to introduce the least amount of distraction possible, i.e. go against improvements whatsoever.

Can anybody please explain why increasing block size would mean more centralization?

New comment by frevd in "Colorizing black and white photos with deep learning"

frevd — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 10:38:26 +0000

Great idea. Google should pick it up to colorize black/white movies and historical footage. Can easily be extended to feeding desaturated movies for proper training data, can maybe even remaster the quality.

New comment by frevd in "Mealworms can eat and biodegrade styrofoam"

frevd — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 20:00:37 +0000

Instead of putting them into nature we should put them into our food, to digest all that plastic that will be in our food chain soon.

New comment by frevd in "Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement"

frevd — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 10:00:22 +0000

If you are redistributing, hosting or using it commercially you have to have the agreement of the author of the content. RSS just gives you access in another way than HTML, but it does not circumvent copyright.

New comment by frevd in "MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]"

frevd — Fri, 29 May 2015 12:56:35 +0000

Terminator, the humble beginnings - looks and feels like rats!

New comment by frevd in "Ricochet: An encrypted, anonymous IM client built on Tor hidden services"

frevd — Mon, 25 May 2015 08:49:31 +0000

Hm true, although everybody knows the identity, nobody can peek into the chats. Good point. That would then allow for generating addresses from speaking aliases, so we don't have to remember GUIDs. Wondering what the current base for the address is, hopefully just some random number persisted on the computer.

New comment by frevd in "Ricochet: An encrypted, anonymous IM client built on Tor hidden services"

frevd — Mon, 25 May 2015 08:24:10 +0000

Now that you associated this address publicly with your profile on HN you compromised anonymity already.

New comment by frevd in "8^8 – Find another you"

frevd — Sat, 16 May 2015 09:12:18 +0000

Lol, fail - I don't understand the question:

#2 "REMOVING WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON?"

I'm not a native speaker -- what am I supposed to do here?

New comment by frevd in "Microsoft to stop producing Windows versions"

frevd — Sun, 10 May 2015 21:02:34 +0000

WindOwS X Snowelephant then Mountainelephant. There will most certainly be some kind of internal sub versioning for the kernel part. Let's see which animals they will take for that, cats are already taken by OS X.