Bookmarked and will be sharing this with my friends.
Separately, glad to see you, @ctbergstrom and (now Prof) Jevin West still collaborating :). You gave me the opportunity to spend a few days as an undergraduate in your lab 15yrs ago when Jevin was a grad student. It was during the H5N1 scare and I remember you being called up. I was just star struck then and honestly overwhelmed. I think I helped fix some perl code for the eigenfactor project, iirc. Will never forget you and Prof Ben Kerr. Anyways, just want to say thanks after all these years.
A trip down memory lane for sure! I can't help but feel that a list for 2020 has to include the Macbooks with the M1 chip. Personally, the difference between my mid-2017 Macbook Pro and my M1 Macbook Air has been astronomical. The battery life alone will "save" Apple.
Thanks for sharing! Are there any good resources describing query planning algorithms (other than the excellent SQLite one that was shared by another comment)?
As much as I'd like to be on the cutting edge of science/math, I (suspect most of us here) don't have the tools to understand, let alone evaluate this preprint. So before we make a tweet storm and start blowing our horns, let's try to hold our horses and wait for peer review. That could take well over a year.
Well, in the meanwhile, I have a question: what's a good intro resource to quantum computing? For general complexity intro, I like Michael Sipser's Theory Of Computation
Here's Scott Aaronson's answer to a similar question on his blog a couple of weeks ago:
Yes, Nielsen and Chuang is the standard textbook for quantum computing; it’s excellent (even though 16 years old by now). If you wanted to start with something shorter and more introductory, you could try David Mermin’s “Introduction to Quantum Computer Science.”
Lipton wrote a pretty decent and short intro to QC that builds the theory a little differently from usual. It is aimed more towards Mathematicians and Computer Scientists than Physicists, I believe, but I think it is pretty understandable in general.
I think Sipser is probably the best introduction to Computation if you do not have a background in Computability and Complexity. Arora and Barak's text has a much larger breadth and is much more detailed as far as Complexity goes. It is the more appropriate of the two if you are just interested in Computational Complexity.
I don't think it will take long to get a verdict, the construction is really pretty simple. Maybe if there is a really subtle error this could cause some debate but as far as I can tell there is nothing exotic in there. The only thing that struck me as a bit odd is that they just add a couple of dummy qubits to increase the probability of one measurement.
That statement is intellectually lazy at best. It is factually correct, but it wholly misses the context of the fact. And that is the centuries of slavery, the decades of Jim Crow, and other policies that have systematically deprived opportunity and framed/define crime to be an African-American tendency. I'd really recommend you read a couple of pieces by Ta-Nehisi Coates [0] before you make up your mind either way. Regrettably, I've argued your point of view before, but it simply shifts the burden of proof and contextualization to the under-privileged and oppressed.
Yes, only 1/5 of the prisons, but it could still be that they wield a lot more influence than that figure suggests. There aren't very many lobbying for the imprisoned, so an organized private lobby of even a small number of private prisons might be enough to shift the scales significantly.
This. Before we can fix anything that requires a majority of the nation's participation, we need awareness and acknowledgement that racial inequality is deep rooted in the American psyche. A lot of posters even here on HN seem to think race is irrelevant or a minor point.
Flexbox has made our life much better. But we still run into a bunch of implementation bugs, meaning that it will take a few more years for the promise to become reality: https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs
Separately, glad to see you, @ctbergstrom and (now Prof) Jevin West still collaborating :). You gave me the opportunity to spend a few days as an undergraduate in your lab 15yrs ago when Jevin was a grad student. It was during the H5N1 scare and I remember you being called up. I was just star struck then and honestly overwhelmed. I think I helped fix some perl code for the eigenfactor project, iirc. Will never forget you and Prof Ben Kerr. Anyways, just want to say thanks after all these years.