The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes

Broken Bytes: A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64

Vector Quantization for audio compression: take a chunk of sample, use a clustering algorithm to get n clusters, replace the sample with cluster references.

How to Make Kelp and Dashi Stock

Tried to find a way to prepare kombu dashi without soaking the kombu overnight, failed.

The World of ‘Crime and Punishment’ | The Nation

How autism may stem from problems with prediction

Best Prata in Singapore: After Eating 72 Pratas! | Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow

Found this while researching Singapore prata. (aka roti canai)

BBC Food - Recipes - Pasta with courgette sauce and spinach balls

Carluccio's pasta w/ balls recipe via gvt

Category:Drivers - Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki

A skilled person could probably tell which NES audio driver was used just by listening to music from the game.

Rate vs. timing (XIII) Flavors of spike-based theories (3) Polychronization « The Brian spiking neural network simulator

It occurs in balanced excitatory-inhibitory networks with irregular activity and standard spike-timing-dependent plasticity, and in such conditions neurons are known to be highly sensitive to coincidences. In other words, it is a particular perspective on the dynamics of such networks.

Hackuarium

Swiss biolab

Mohammad Mosaddegh - Wikipedia

Mohammad Mosaddegh was the head of a democratically elected government from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in a coup d'état aided by the CIA and MI6.

suckless.org st - simple terminal

the fabled no-scrollback terminal. Works fine and got me to figure out how to enable mouse mode in tmux. For future reference, to enable mouse mode in tmux, echo "set -g mouse on" >>~/.tmux.conf

IRL black midi

Chicken vs singer

We don’t talk any more

randomascii.wordpress.com

Speculative execution of a prefetch instrn on ppc caused cache incoherence even if it wasn't retired

GitHub - jfdelnero/HxCModPlayer: A simple and lite MOD (music module) player.

Lightweight mod etc player, in case sdl_mixer sucks

The Neural Network Zoo - The Asimov Institute

architecture of many types of NN (circa 2016) with descriptions. via hn

Firefox is on a slippery slope | Drew DeVault’s Blog

Introducing the GoodWatch - A Good Watch

Dammit, this is just what I wanted to do with the F-91W

Pentti Saarikoski - Poetry & Biography of the Famous poet - All Poetry

He'd done that on purpose: so people would see how mad he was and buy more briskly.

Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem - Wikipedia

In systems which meet some self-consistency criteria, the appropriate action can be modeled using a utility function which assigns points to each possible action. In such a system the rational thing to do is to choose the action with the highest utility value.

Terrain rendering

oldschool terrain rendering

Headphone attenuation adapter | DIY-Audio-Heaven

This worked!

bunny - Wowhead Search

Most effects in WoW are generated by invisible bunnies.

DIY Human CRISPR Guide

Good intro to design (via bw)

Dask

Python distributed-task thing with API emulation for popular libraries such as numpy and pandas (via matt)

Haferman Carpet

Great into to string rewrite systems.

Motte and bailey - RationalWiki

E.g. "on average, women and men have marginally different performance at certain tasks" and "women aren't as good at programming as men, and the diversity program at Google is hurting the company." Via hacker news

How do you find the integer solutions to x/(y and z) and y/(x and z) and z/(x and y) = 4?

This was great.

Plant tissue culture - Wikipedia

might want to do this at biohackspace

X11: How does “the” clipboard work?

Even worse than I thought. 1. Clients retain the data, so must keep a window around to 'own' the selection, but not the primary one because that may close. 2. You can specify a data type to get the data in, but there's no guarantee it'll be specifiable as MIME so good luck figuring out how to request the type you want. 3. Even though the client retains the data you can't request more than about 256k at once and everything larger must be retrieved in chunks via the X server. 3. There are two common clipboards and it is basically a matter of trying one and then the other. 4. There are also more clipboards (by convention) and in fact unlimited clipboards (the identifier is just an X atom). 5. Working around this with a clipboard manager is humourously inefficient because to re-host the clip data the manager needs to retrieve it with all its target types, and there is no way to discover which ones don't require the client to do extra work (e.g. GIMP providing 50 mime types for image data)

The skeletal system is part of the brain, too | neuroecology

This bone-based signaling is a new finding and totally and completely surprising [...] substantial computations are performed all throughout the body that affect how we think. Animals that are hungry make decisions in a fundamentally different way

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Is “information is physical” contentful?

GitHub - hansemannn/iOS11-NFC-Example: 📱 Example showing how to use the Core NFC API in iOS 11.

Looks like it may be possible to write to RFID tags using Core NFC in iOS 11. Finally!

Gaussian elimination - Wikipedia

Solve system of linear equations. Actually invented by Newton, but in fact actually invented by a Chinese person at least 1500 years before Newton wrote it up.

Exploring LSTMs

Short LSTM intro

An intro to web components with otters – Monica Dinculescu

Can't beat otters

What Really Happened with Vista – Hacker Noon

1. MS neglected important hardware trends (mobile) because they were focused on software innovation; key features of successful devices in the 2000s (battery life, connectivity) were not really about software. 2. The focus on managed code as a response to security vulnerabilities was terribly overambitious and resulted in MS dropping the ambitious parts halfway through the development cycle.

Please, enough with the dead butterflies! – Emily S. Damstra

Living butterflies don't push their wings forward like that. hn

Everything that Works Works Because it's Bayesian: Why Deep Nets Generalize?

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

via benno

Crash course to Amiga assembly programming - Reaktor.com

via HN

RFID-Zapper(EN) - 22C3

"The RFID-Zapper might [...] lead to dangerous behavior, like speaking your mind, using freedom of speech, fighting for your rights, all of which are bound to ultimately lead to the communist world revolution ;-)" (via HN)

JSON Meta Application Protocol Specification (JMAP)

Seems okay -- no really good reason for JSON apart from "you have to use something", and some disadvantages (verbose, separate protocol for attachments since they're binary), but otherwise nothing sticks out as odd.

Stop Saying the Brain Learns By Rewiring Itself - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Not a compelling case. :( He criticises neuroscientists for not knowing the details of their own theory, but doesn't present any of his own.

Is Matter Conscious? - Issue 47: Consciousness - Nautilus

Chernoff face - Wikipedia

"Chernoff faces display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty."

Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Connected to the Hard Problem in Physics?

From my notes to M: not that convincing: Basically the argument is, as I understand it: 1. Science doesn’t tell us about “things in themselves”, but only about how they relate to other things. In other words we can accurately describe how a photon behaves, but we can’t say what exactly a photon fundamentally *is*. 2. It doesn’t make sense to have a universe of relationships between things but no actual things. 3. Consciousness is a way of describing things-in-themselves (the concept of “something being red” for example, which is something you understand as a thing even if you can’t really describe it) 4. So we posit that this set of things-in-themselves is the actual structure of the universe (the hardware) and everything we do is just describing interactions between those things (the software).

Consciousness is an Inevitable State of Matter – Evan Warfel – Medium

This claims to talk about consciousness, but actually ends up making the argument that to efficiently and dynamically make predictions one needs a) a rich variety of input categorisations and b) a locus of attention, neither of which require consciousness.

What is this colored fiber in my chicken? | Hacker News

Disgusting.