Bryan Bishop

> The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes.

That is the crux of why this is a huge deal, and Linus changing the Linux scheduling algorithm is not a huge deal. People are afraid that Bitcoin is going to break, or meet an obstacle that prevents them from making massive ROI on their speculation, and they have a lot of stake in the game in protecting Bitcoin.

> It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach.

"It took me about 2 months from not knowing how cryptographic hashing worked to implementing my own hash with a novel sponge function."

The hard part is not making a cryptocurrency that works when people use it normally. The hard part is making a cryptocurrency that works when people around the world can profit tens of millions of dollars by breaking the cryptocurrency (either abusing the mining, spending coins that don't belong to them, DoS'ing competing miners, etc.)

I don't know which cryptocurrency you made (I tried to look it up via your HN profile, but didn't find anything), but if you get it peer reviewed I imagine that experts will quickly be able to find a reason or two for why it is either broken or uninteresting.

Anyone can make a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break. Bitcoin is among the most complex and cutting edge cryptosystem we have today. Even in the past few months, several important and severe flaws in Bitcoin have been discovered…

"For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence." This statement from the article is essentially correct, and is well backed up by comparative studies of mathematics education using different instructional methods in the United States, and especially by international comparisons in mathematics education.

My current work is teaching advanced mathematics classes to elementary-age learners in a supplemental program (year-round, locally) and advising parents on the education of precocious learners of mathematics (two weeks each summer, as part of an international summer program). So I try to keep up with the voluminous research on mathematics education. Learner attitudes are crucial. The job of a teacher is to help build successful learner attitudes.

For parents, I have posted online a set of FAQs on mathematics instruction,

"Problems versus Exercises"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php

"Repetition and Practice"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/RepetitionPractice.php

"Resources about Learning Mathematics"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php

"Courage in the Face of Stupidity"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php

with the FAQs intended to help parents impart to their children attitudes and study habits that will build more success in learning mathematics. The level of mathematics expected of learners in United States senior high schools is not particularly…

The book "The Connection Machine" by Danny Hillis is a fantastic account of the philosophy of the CM design. When I was in high school, I didn't have a computer, I only had computer books from the library, and TCM was a huge influence on me at that age.

This paper by Guy Steele and Danny Hillis is also a good introduction to the Lisp language they were developing (but from what I can tell never got off the ground) for the CM.

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot/25aa007a093cd69bbf070e6db9603c3a.pdf

In particular the language has two new operators, alpha and beta, that today we might consider flexible analogs to map (compute) and reduce (communicate). It's really fascinating how they made an algebraically closed language around this concept.

This lecture by Hillis is also fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua-swPZTeX4

Near the end he talks about how this room-sized machine had a syncronous clock, and how there were bits stored in the wires in transit because all the wire lengths were carefully cut multiples of the clock period.

Memory bus is just for speed. You don't want it doing stuff like that lol. See these two LISP machines for where my inspiration of putting it on memory bus came from:

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot/Design%20of%20a%20LISP-based%20microprocessor.pdf

(See section 7 for a radical... err realy old... way to do concurrent GC. Full paper available at ACM/IEEE or if you Google LISP processors Guy Steele enough.)

Scheme machine by Burger 1995

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=569B0A6FC0F670004BB323ADB5D75C9E?doi=10.1.1.73.590&rep=rep1&type=pdf

(See the main graphic and specifics in storage section later. Once again, GC-like stuff is handled in memory management part of the processor. This processor knows that, though, to assist GC a bit. Also different in that it was specified and then synthesized to heterogenous hardware with DDD "correct-by-construction" toolkit.)

So, have fun with those. Plus, Google hardware-assisted or hardware garbage collection to get lots of interesting results already done.

I think they probably haven't even sorted out their intentions at this point. But you know, these things just have a way of developing on their own just by tiny nudges at the beginning.

For an overview of the GP-write project, see the following:

1) Science article: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/The%20human%20genome%20project%20-%20write,%20hgp-write%20-%202016.pdf

2) timeline: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/Synthetic%20human%20genome%20project%20hgp-write%20draft%20timeline%20-%202016.pdf

3) fact sheet: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/HGP-write-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Really I'd like to somehow get EFF to ride to my rescue but I've sort of got myself into this mess on my own so it's not really on them. EFF doesn't focus on biological freedom issues like these, anyway. At least not yet.

Signed distance fields have been used in VFX since the mid-1990s. One of the first paper formalizing its editing techniques was by Ken Museth in 2002:

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/frey/applications/Museth%20K.,%20Level%20set%20surface%20editing%20operators.pdf

My contribution to the field (in collaboration with Ken, the author of the above) is making these scalar volumetric representations more scalable via using a recursive hierarchical sparse representation:

https://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/imager/tr/2006/Batty_HRLE/

Ken Museth is now the head of R&D at Dreamworks Animation and picked up a Sci Tech Oscar two years for his level set work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FwOc4OSOR0