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π Zachtronics
Zachtronics LLC is an American indie video game studio, best known for their engineering puzzle games and programming games. Zachtronics was founded by Zach Barth in 2000, who serves as its lead designer. Some of their products include SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O.
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- "Zachtronics" | 2023-06-01 | 29 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Wikipedia: Vector 2022
Vector 2022 is a desktop skin developed between 2019 and 2023 by the Wikimedia Foundation Web team with the goal of making the interface more welcoming and usable for readers and maintaining utility for existing editors.
It introduces changes to the navigation and layout of the site, adds persistent elements such as a sticky header and Table of Contents, and makes changes to the overall styling of the page. Currently (early January 2023), the skin is the default on more than 300 projects of various sizes, accounting for about 1.5 billion page views per month. Before the deployment, on English Wikipedia, it was the most popular non-default skin, with more active editors using it than any other non-default skin (Monobook, Timeless, etc).
The skin was ready for deployment to English Wikipedia after completing the changes specified by the consensus of the Request for Comment. Today (January 18, 2023), the skin was turned on as the default on the desktop site. Users of non-default skins (Monobook, Timeless, etc.) will not see any changes.
If you decide to try it out, we, the Web team, suggest trying it for at least one week prior to deciding whether to switch to one of our older skins. It usually takes a few days to begin feeling comfortable with the new interface. That said, if you are unsatisfied, you can switch to any of our other skins at any time.
π Mental poker
Mental poker is the common name for a set of cryptographic problems that concerns playing a fair game over distance without the need for a trusted third party. The term is also applied to the theories surrounding these problems and their possible solutions. The name comes from the card game poker which is one of the games to which this kind of problem applies. Similar problems described as two party games are Blum's flipping a coin over a distance, Yao's Millionaires' Problem, and Rabin's oblivious transfer.
The problem can be described thus: "How can one allow only authorized actors to have access to certain information while not using a trusted arbiter?" (Eliminating the trusted third-party avoids the problem of trying to determine whether the third party can be trusted or not, and may also reduce the resources required.)
In poker, this could translate to: "How can we make sure no player is stacking the deck or peeking at other players' cards when we are shuffling the deck ourselves?". In a physical card game, this would be relatively simple if the players were sitting face to face and observing each other, at least if the possibility of conventional cheating can be ruled out. However, if the players are not sitting at the same location but instead are at widely separate locations and pass the entire deck between them (using the postal mail, for instance), this suddenly becomes very difficult. And for electronic card games, such as online poker, where the mechanics of the game are hidden from the user, this is impossible unless the method used is such that it cannot allow any party to cheat by manipulating or inappropriately observing the electronic "deck".
Several protocols for doing this have been suggested, the first by Adi Shamir, Ron Rivest and Len Adleman (the creators of the RSA-encryption protocol). This protocol was the first example of two parties conducting secure computation rather than secure message transmission, employing cryptography; later on due to leaking partial information in the original protocol, this led to the definition of semantic security by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali. The concept of multi-player mental poker was introduced in Moti Yung's 1984 book Cryptoprotocols. The area has later evolved into what is known as secure multi-party computation protocols (for two parties, and multi parties as well).
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- "Mental poker" | 2010-01-11 | 26 Upvotes 9 Comments
π List of U.S. states and territories by net migration
This is a list of U.S. states and the District of Columbia by annual net migration. The first table lists U.S. states and the District of Columbia by annual net domestic migration, while the second table lists U.S. states and the District of Columbia by annual net international migration. There is a separate table for the U.S. territories. The term net domestic migration describes the total number of people moving to a state from another state minus people moving to another state from that state. The term net international migration describes the total number of people moving to a state from another country minus people moving to another country from that state.
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- "List of U.S. states and territories by net migration" | 2022-02-22 | 26 Upvotes 8 Comments
π Symmetry Minute
The symmetry minute is a significant time point in the clock face timetables used by many public transport operators. At this point in the cycle, a train in a clock-face timetable meets its counterpart travelling in the opposite direction on the same line. If this crossing time is constant across a network, connecting times between lines are kept consistent in both directions.
At the symmetry time, the timetable is mirrored in both directions. At the ends of the line, the center of the turnaround time coincides with the symmetry minute. The distance between two consecutive symmetry times is equal to half the cycle time, so on an hourly schedule, opposite trains on the same line cross every 30 minutes. On a two-hour cycle, there is a symmetry time every hour.
In principle, a train-encounter can be set at any time. However, at the transition between two networks or lines, it is expedient to set uniform symmetry minutes, to create a symmetrical connection relation. For the long-distance cycle systems of ΓBB and SBB, the Forschungsgesellschaft fΓΌr StraΓen- und Verkehrswesen fΓΌr Deutschland (Research Association for Roads and Traffic for Germany) recommends minute 58, so a four-minute minimum connecting time results in a departure at minute 0. Meanwhile, most railways in Central Europe and a number of other transport operators have established the symmetry minute 58Β½, for a three-minute hold time before a departure at minute 0. Shorter cycles have additional symmetry minutes, shifted by half the cycle time. So an hourly cycle has symmetries at minutes 28Β½ and 58Β½, a 30-minute cycle has symmetries at minutes 13Β½, 28Β½, 43Β½ and 58Β½, and so on.
The following table shows the departure times in opposite directions for an hourly cycle, using the 58Β½ symmetry minute (the most common in Central Europe). The other departure times for shorter cycles can be calculated from it. The last line gives the meeting times.
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- "Symmetry Minute" | 2019-07-18 | 84 Upvotes 18 Comments
π Induced Demand Is Real
Induced demand β related to latent demand and generated demand β is the phenomenon that after supply increases, price declines and more of a good is consumed. This is entirely consistent with the economic theory of supply and demand; however, this idea has become important in the debate over the expansion of transportation systems, and is often used as an argument against increasing roadway traffic capacity as a cure for congestion. This phenomenon, more correctly called "induced traffic" or consumption of road capacity, may be a contributing factor to urban sprawl. City planner Jeff Speck has called induced demand "the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."
The inverse effect, or reduced demand, is also observed (see Β§Β Reduced demand).
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- "Induced Demand Is Real" | 2022-04-07 | 31 Upvotes 60 Comments
π October Suprise
In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event deliberately created or timed to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the U.S. presidency, or sometimes an event occurring spontaneously that has the same effect. Because the date for national elections (as well as many state and local elections) is in early November, events that take place in October have greater potential to influence the decisions of prospective voters. Thus these relatively last-minute news stories could either completely change the entire course of an election or strongly reinforce the inevitable.
The term "October surprise" was coined by William Casey when he served as campaign manager of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. However, there were October election-upending events that predated the coining of the term.
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- "October Suprise" | 2020-10-02 | 17 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Von Neumann-Landauer limit
Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment".
Another way of phrasing Landauer's principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, the observer loses the ability to extract work from that system.
A so-called logically-reversible computation, in which no information is erased, may in principle be carried out without releasing any heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study of reversible computing. Indeed, without reversible computing, increases in the number of computations-per-joule-of-energy-dissipated must come to a halt by about 2050: because the limit implied by Landauer's principle will be reached by then, according to Koomey's law.
At 20Β Β°C (room temperature, or 293.15Β K), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0175Β eV, or 2.805Β zJ. Theoretically, roomβtemperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second (1Gbps) with energy being converted to heat in the memory media at the rate of only 2.805 trillionths of a watt (that is, at a rate of only 2.805 pJ/s). Modern computers use millions of times as much energy per second.
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- "Landauer's Principle" | 2023-05-27 | 80 Upvotes 32 Comments
- "Von Neumann-Landauer limit" | 2017-09-30 | 183 Upvotes 36 Comments
π Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)
JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs) is an open-source, Emacs-like text editor, primarily intended for Unix-like operating systems. It also supports MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. JOVE was inspired by Gosling Emacs but is much smaller and simpler, lacking Mocklisp. It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, United States on a PDP-11 minicomputer. JOVE was distributed with several releases of BSD Unix, including 2.9BSD, 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD-Lite2.
As of 2022, the latest development release of JOVE is version 4.17.4.4; the stable version is 4.16. Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.
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- "Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)" | 2025-07-17 | 72 Upvotes 46 Comments
π Frank Rosenblatt
Frank Rosenblatt (July 11, 1928Β β July 11, 1971) was an American psychologist notable in the field of artificial intelligence. He is sometimes called the father of deep learning for his pioneering work on neural networks.
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- "Frank Rosenblatt" | 2023-04-07 | 70 Upvotes 39 Comments