greenmountin

This is absurd. That's a comment on a blog post, proposing a bombastic title, "Better than Shor". I'm pretty sure if they could get anywhere near Shor using their architecture they'd get more than a sympathy Nature paper.

The truth is, D-Wave has done nothing to foster the coherence of their "qubits", and so they have built a very expensive, superconducting, classical computer. There is no quantum trick, actually. You have a system of buckets and you adjust the pipes and pumps between them so that in steady-state the water levels solve some problem you program in (with the pumps). Then you start in a random configuration, turn on the earthquake machine for a bit of randomness, and end up in the "ground state" solution.

The exponential speedup of quantum algorithms is sketchy enough: good luck performing an N-qubit logic gate, or in assuming that it's your favorite black-box that need only be executed a polynomial number of times (every quantum computing textbook uses their own set of universal gates). But these guys aren't even trying.

There's a theorist from ETH who also has been working with the D-Wave computers, and visited Scott at MIT last week. There should be a new post about it soon, I'm sure it will be mostly cold water.

There's a glut of these devices on the market right now, someone must have accidentally added a zero to the order (there was a similar rationale for the Android phones included in EW a while back). Amazon used to have the Overdrive Pro for $100-250, and it was new a couple years ago.

Recently[1], there have been promotions for 500MB/mo free data, if you buy the hotspot for $50. One catch is they tack on $1/mo if you don't use it at all. Apparently the hardware is horrible, with crazy overheating problems; best usage practice is just to remove the battery and run from USB. You can get them attached to all sorts of carriers, but this one is Sprint; I figured it was worth a try.

[1] http://www.freedompop.com -- beware affiliate links

It is kind of weird, especially because there's not even an appropriate label in the dropdown menu for a help ticket. But they deleted mine 5 hours after sending it, so maybe they have a macro set up.

One of the coolest things about superconductors is "kinetic inductance"[1]. There is no energy in a normal current. As you say, the electrons don't travel all that fast most of the time. They feel a field, accelerate until they bump into something and start all over again. That's resistance; the energy stored by an inductor or capacitor (a current or voltage) is in the magnetic or electric field nearby.

This isn't true for Cooper-pairs in superconductors. They go fast enough that there is true energy stored in their velocity; there's nothing to stop them, they're a superfluid. This is used for certain types of detectors (MKIDs), and means that there is a bit of extra L in superconducting transmission lines, above the geometric inductance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance

The more important specification is the MHash / Joule (also found in the link below). The video says this thing does 5 GHash/s @ 30W. That's 100x the efficiency of the best videocards (1000x if you count the power consumption of the rest of the PC).

Good point! But that's "1/f" (frequency) liquidity. If the true value of bitcoin is as an instantaneous transfer (and it is), then the chance of a shadow wallet emptying in between the time you received and when you cashed out is vanishingly small. The cost to insure against such fluctuations while it gets multiple confirmations is your "transaction fee".

Bitcoins shouldn't be considered an investment -- the business about hoarding them like taxi medallions because they only go up in value is nonsense. Their value is limited by the low transaction fee for another blockchain. But you're right, you'd have to factor that in if you were actually investing.

People keep referring to Scott Aaronson like he changed his mind, and it's pretty clear he didn't. He just didn't want to be the Chief Naysayer anymore; he has more important things to do and frankly that shouldn't be his calling card.

I think the only part of "general-purpose quantum computer" D-Wave can claim is the "computer" part. They have not proven that any part of their annealing is "quantum". They have pretty epic lithography/fabrication skills, and are barreling ahead without any regard for coherence. They also have just an insane number of control lines, so there's some innovation there.

But their net worth becomes negative if you count the bad press for quantum computing in having a charlatan claim they have 1024 qubits and are "500,000" times faster at solving Sudoku. Other fields are having this PR problem too, where even careful program reviews are getting brutalized by the PR news cycle (see recent dark-matter experiment: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/04/03/ams-presents-some-fi... -- forgive the typography)

I couldn't tell if he was serious either -- this is an incredibly boring manifesto. He definitely was ahead of the game on a bunch of things, so I hope he takes some more time to think deeply about what he wants to accomplish.

If you scroll down to the first entry it was posted April 1st, 2013 (from an article in November 2012). Just wanted to note that for anyone else confused.

Solutions exist, but no one uses them. You are getting spam because you are not requiring hashcash. They are reading your email because you are not encrypting it.

Government and law-enforcement, even if trust-worthy, function via intermediaries who may not be. This will just never improve and I think we have to address that with the tools we know will do the job.

My point is that they are missing the essence of what made Reader effective: RSS. Email for updates? Following on Tumblr instead of a prominent hyperlink with the cross-platform RSS feed? It's like they don't know anyone who ever used it.

When Prismatic came out with an opportunistic spiel, even though they had nothing anything like Reader, it really rubbed me the wrong way. This hype piece feels the same, almost like a car commercial (bare bones! ultra fast!) or an Onion piece about how every co-founder in the Valley is starting a social news sharing service.

I think the key ingredients to a GR replacement are an open API so it is not beholden and can be on all your devices -- as mindcrime notes -- a focus on RSS, basic and friendly sharing, and then surely a little curation magic that Digg must know already. It's probably fine if Digg gets there in a few months. But for example theoldreader is there already.

1) This article has no new information

2) The linked "Follow Our Progress" form is for email updates

3) Their tumblr blog has no rss link

That's not what I call serious. I use their site all the time, but it's no substitute for GR, and I don't want their curation to overpower my feeds. Reader was all about the RSS. At this rate they are sounding like a tardy Prismatic.

Earlier today they were closer together. Just check back?

This is false. I guarantee you, scientists would be very interested if they actually demonstrated entanglement. For example, in the slides of the linked talk, the presenter goes over a very general measure of entanglement which allows you to construct after-the-fact a "witness" of entanglement. It is respected theory, and a credible last-resort approach; no numbers. His latest preprint[1] doesn't have a clear claim either. The Newscientist section refers to a conference 2 weeks ago, without published abstracts, procedings, or video. I'll believe it when I see it (there's no indication Aram's quote is in context, but maybe he has).

The first thing any qc lab does when they get their second qubit is make an entangled state and measure Bell Inequality violation. D-wave's lack of interest in this or in running Shor[2] is very telling. Everybody wants to run Shor, it's where the money is.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.1739

[2] http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/computational-universa...

It actually looks pretty good, I was disappointed that there weren't any evangelists listing it in the other threads.

I signed up in two seconds by using a mailinator address. It looks like an exact clone + sharing/contacts. On revisiting though, the XML import failed. Too bad.

That's true for a negative filter, but not a positive one; although, an email that required the subaddress might be less universal.

What are the appropriately open / stripped down alternatives? I don't need a social network (or even 10s update rates), just a cloud that knows what I've already read.

I got mine in late September. Read the introduction and wasn't enthused [probably shouldn't have read the introduction]. It's on my todo list, but perhaps I failed to give him the compounding returns of the buzz he was going for.

I bought the Nexus 4 and couldn't believe how little runtime I was getting. Even paid $5 for juice defender to turn off wifi / automatic downloading. It's the screen. Went back to my iPhone 4. Sites should really do a better job of reporting battery life, although I guess I should have guessed from the Anandtech table [1]. Gave it to my brother to jailbreak and underclock, to see if it could be saved.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6425/google-nexus-4-and-nexus-...

Yes, that's correct. I have the ZCC55 Neurofuzzy. Cooking with "1" cup of rice (roughly for one person), I put in vegetables and eggs at roughly the 13 minute warning, when it knows how long it will take to finish. I have logged in a spreadsheet about 15 meals, where I weigh the eggs and veggies, note how cooked they are etc, but it's not quite presentable.

Basic recipe: 2 uncracked large eggs (130g), cut asparagus (130g). Both washed and placed in with minimal steam loss at 13m. Remove immediately at finish (move eggs directly to cold water, or they will scald you as you try to open them).

Eggs are cheap! You can afford to experiment with them like this. Open the first ones onto an empty plate; cook a little more in the skillet if you undercook. 2 Jumbos are just about at the limit of the 13m warning. I aim for liquid yellow and 85% "solid" white. Hard-boiled eggs aren't as fun. Scrape your meal out of the cooker, turn it off, and LEAVE THE LID OPEN. It dries out the remnants so they just slide off the teflon.

I have a Zojirushi that I use from time to time to make rice, and have been experimenting with more complete one-pot meals. I can steam several types of vegetables in the last 13 minutes of operation [snow peas, asparagus, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc] in addition to the easiest "sous vide"-style eggs you'll ever have [trick: cook it whole]. I think fish is possible too, but only have 13 minutes' warning is a little rough.

The kicker is that it's a breeze to clean up, I don't even have to use soap and water. It makes a great meal as long as you can go without meat for a day. It also cooks quinoa and can be programmed to have steel cut oats ready for you when you wake up. It would be fascinating to hack it to see if I could recover its cooking rules, or get an early signal about projected time remaining, and I am surprise no one has put this info on the web yet.

Is there a service out there that includes the generation of vocab review sheets (many words, defined in one viewspace)? I find duolingo (and Anki, other web services) unsuitably slow for learning vocab.

AFAICT there isn't anything special for high achievers except for a better "rank": 70+ = Prince, 80+ = King, 90+ = Legend, 100 = Master of the Universe

I played it through a couple times and then decompiled the flash using the free demo of Sothink. The secret word is (spoiler, use ROT13) "FABJ". Unfortunately, it's just a treasure not a substitute for getting all the parchments...

I bought a "silent" mouse just so I could do this at work, and borrowed the noisy one for home.

Yeah, it's blazing fast for me; I don't understand the hate in the other comments. Unlike Bing maps, getting directions is intuitive for me, and I couldn't care less about satellite imagery. If caching works at all, this will be a useful app. Guess I will have to give it a week or so for evaluation, though.

Recently, they were seem to have been floundering about with some last-ditch engagement attempts -- game-wide "feats". One of them was to invite as many people as possible to the game, and there was widespread backlash, very depressing now that I think about it.

They were fairly open, with an API that enabled several third-party iPhone / iPad apps -- but that were mostly passive inventory viewers, etc. I wonder how things would have gone with Facebook integration instead, with noble attempts at social networking and feed publishing. May have given them the edge they needed.

This may be true. I took a break for a while, but have been back at it with the primary motivation to... cheat and scheme. To start with, I've been scraping the auction house data, hoping to analyze the best pricing strategies and/or quick-pounce on cheap items. I used this to learn Python, SQL, and basic EC2. I scraped their encyclopedia, dumped the Wiki, and was matching up ingredient lists for crafts. Then I was also going to use screenscraping and image recognition to bot my herb farming... Guess I will have to find another flash game for that.

I didn't play (much) because I liked grinding and quests, but for a different challenge. I really appreciate that they set up the JSON auction house feed.

out of curiosity (not obsessed), does the losing page say "Sold Out" in red letters like mine does?