At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine
A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statistical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.
Hasnain says:
This is really really interesting; a new distribution that seems to be appearing everywhere.
Posted on 2014-10-16T16:43:37+0000
From 60 Frames per Second to 500 in Haskell | Keera Studios
Haskell is fast, easy to parallelize and to optimize. In this post we explain how we increased a game's speed by 700% and reduced memory consumption to 3MB.
Hasnain says:
Kinda disappointing that it's just a breakout clone, but it's impressive that they managed to get it working and performant in Haskell.
Posted on 2014-10-16T16:43:07+0000
Chinatown’s Kitchen Network
Lauren Hilgers on employment agencies that can get Chinese immigrants kitchen jobs across the country in a few hours.
Hasnain says:
Rain’s cousin had worked in restaurants when he arrived in the U.S., but he got out of the business as soon as he could. “It’s too hard!” he said, pantomiming a cook’s frantic routine: shaking a wok, grabbing things off shelves, tossing them in. “All day, for twelve hours, you’re like this!” Rain sat at the table, grinning. He sympathized with his cousin’s restaurant fatigue. “Americans, when they want to rest and enjoy themselves, they rest and they enjoy themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all depends on your boss.”
Posted on 2014-10-14T20:56:39+0000
Disney’s new Production Renderer ‘Hyperion’ – Yes, Disney!
With Disney as the owner of Pixar & thus RenderMan, it may surprise some to know that Disney Animation has developed a completely new production renderer: Hyperion - with some very cool tech & clocking a million render hours a day on Big Hero 6.
Hasnain says:
This is a really cool article on state of the art rendering.
Posted on 2014-10-14T04:48:16+0000
No Smoke, No Mirrors: The Dutch Pension Plan
In the Netherlands, a system rests on the idea that each generation should pay its own costs — and that those costs must be measured accurately.
Hasnain says:
"But something else happened: Dutch young people found their voice. No matter their employment sector, they could see that their pension money was commingled with retirees’ money, then invested that way by the outside asset management firms. In the wake of the financial crisis, they realized that they and the retirees had fundamentally opposing interests. The young people were eager to keep taking investment risk, to take advantage of their long time horizon. But the retirees now wanted absolute safety, which meant investing in risk-free, cashlike assets. If all the money remained pooled, young people said, the aggressive investment returns they wanted would be diluted by the pittance that cashlike assets pay."
Posted on 2014-10-13T22:39:31+0000
Hungry Planet: What The World Eats
Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors -- what we eat. Their project, "Hungry Planet," depicts everything…
Rise and Shine
What do kids around the world eat for breakfast? It’s as likely to be coffee or kimchi as it is a sugary cereal.
Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket
07 Oct 2014 Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket One of the coolest features of Rust is how it automatically manages resources for you, while still guaranteeing both safety (no segfaults) and high performance. Because Rust is a different kind of programming language, it might be difficult to un…
Cox–Zucker machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cox–Zucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines if a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S where S is isomorphic to the projective line.
Hasnain says:
I'm not sure why these two people decided to work together...
Posted on 2014-10-13T00:27:47+0000
Microsoft’s Strange Quest for the Topological Qubit | MIT Technology Review
Can an aging corporation’s adventures in fundamental physics research open a new era of unimaginably powerful computers?