qa_user: User interactions on Q&A websites (2016)
Networks of interactions among users from four online Q&A sites: Stack Overflow, Math Overflow, Super User, and Ask Ubuntu. A directed edge (i,j) indicates a user i responded to user j's post. Edges are timestamped. For each Q&A site, four differently defined networks are provided, based on the definition of an edge: (i) a user answered a question, (ii) a user commented on a question, (iii) a user commented on an answer…
Quite an interesting read on the HashMap implementation in #Rust
https://morestina.net/1843/the-stable-hashmap-trap
us_roads: United States roads (2000)
The road networks of the 50 US States and the District of Columbia based on UA Census 2000 TIGER/Line Files. Edges are stretches of road and vertices are intersections of roads. The data sets were assembled by Dominik Schultes. The 'merged' network contains all the states merged together.
This network has 497458 nodes and 629750 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Roads, Unweighted
Random thought that goes interesting places:
There are a lot of cheap ways to spend money to drastically improve the quality of life for lots of people (UBI, mosquito nets, digging wells, etc.). Those people almost invariably become way more economically productive in aggregate when this happens, far above the costs involved, if you measure from the perspective of the affected group. So for billionaires looking for outsized returns on investments, why not simply spend on some of these programs, then invest in a broad index of socks that are going to go up as a result?
The answer could be "billionaires by their nature are too evil to think of this," which, could be true....
But I think there's a deeper answer, which is that there *is no* bundle of stocks that goes up as humans flourish. This is directly contrary to neoliberal economic doctrine/propaganda, but it also has an explanation that's obvious from the neoliberal doctrine itself: the stock market is a gambling arena for bets on corporate profits. Corporate profits are money taken in in excess of costs. But the value of a corporation is not produced abstractly by the mere existence of the organization; it's produced by the labor of humans working for the organization, with raw materials that the organization purchases. So to make a profit, an organization has to do some combination of paying its workers less than the value the create, and/or paying less for it's raw materials than they are really worth. The more it does these two things, the more profit it can generate.
Notice that these two profit-generating activities directly and indirectly immiserate humans, *and* that reducing human misery by means other than reducing these activities makes them harder. People who have other means of income won't sell their labor for less than it's worth, nor will they sell their resources below their fair value. Only desperate people will agree to terms that corporations require to be profitable.
This is not a "Marxist analysis" by the way; it's the direct application of the basic principles taught in any neoliberal introductory macroeconomics class.
In any case, once we understand that the stock market is "gambling on how much corporations can exploit their employees/suppliers/customers", it's clear why you can't make money from stock investments in companies that profit from flourishing humans: profit is by construction made of human misery.
It also explains a lot of other things, like why private US employers who pay huge amounts of payroll towards health insurance for their employees would be *against* public health insurance that would offload those costs onto all taxpayers: the amount they're able to lower wages as a result of desperation for access to health care is more than worth the direct costs.
This is the central reason why capitalism (defined as: a system where money equals power) is inimical to human happiness: it allows profits built on suffering to be converted into the power to maintain the system of suffering and even extend and intensify it, creating a feedback loop of extractive domination.
Now I'm sure some people might read this and think: what about the good companies? The ones that pay their workers and suppliers a fair wage, and sell their products at fair prices? Even putting aside the fact that such a thing seems less believable than a unicorn these days, such a company by definition does not make a profit. The fair wage for its workers is the value they add to the raw materials it buys, and the fair price for those is the selling price of the finished product minus the value the company adds. The balance sheet will read exactly zero at the end of the day if compensation is actually fair. You can still run a company like this in theory, and even grow it, but of course under capitalism it will just get bought out by an unethical company that is profitable. Could you in some kind of utopian dream world run a tightly regulated series of markets where you have most of what people think capitalism is, without the bad parts? Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve actual capitalism, and it wouldn't have a stock market.
#anarchy #capitalism #econimics
Siri (Beta) is really interesting.
On one hand, I don't have to trust any new parties with my data. Apple already has it since they have my mobile devices, so if they were going to maliciously steal (e.g.) my email contents, they could already do that. This opens the door to a whole bunch of LLM data based interrogation that I wouldn't trust with other providers.
…on the other hand, the "on-device only" Siri falls over immediately when disabling the internet c…
Trump wants to encourage 401(k) plans to invest more in private equity, real estate and cryptocurrency,
which can be complex and risky.
To pave the way, the Department of Labor has proposed rules that would make it harder for employees to hold companies liable for how they oversee retirement plans.
Employers are required to serve the best interests of their employees when choosing investment options.
Under the proposed changes, a company that follows a certain process…
End of a Trip II ✈️
旅行结束 II ✈️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford FP4 Plus 125 (FF), expired 1994
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Wise
Dryas: A Reprogrammable Engine for High-Speed Interconnect Tracing and Analysis
Manuel Br\"ochin, Tom Kuchler, Michael Giardino, David Cock, Timothy Roscoe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12934 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12934 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12934
arXiv:2608.12934v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The proliferation of heterogeneous components in modern computing systems has been accompanied by new higher bandwidth and lower latency interconnects. These interfaces and protocols are enormously complex and the process of developing, debugging, and analyzing FPGA-based implementations requires significant engineering work. Moreover, once a functional implementation is completed, optimization of the controller and associated software requires processing potentially hundreds of gigabytes of trace data.
In this paper, we present Dryas, an open source tool for analyzing such an interconnect. We developed our tool, using minimal hardware resources, alongside an FPGA implementation of a very high speed, low latency (30~GiB/s, 200~ns) interconnect. With our run-time reprogrammable overlay engine we can inspect this interconnect to find rare, complex, or transient events even at full operation. This filtering engine is based on non-deterministic finite automata (NFAs), efficiently implemented using state transition elements (STEs), allowing us to trace events at a cache-line granularity. Moreover we can change the filters in less than a second, without reprogramming the FPGA or interfering with the running application. This data enables not only debugging the implementation of the interconnect itself, but analyzing the behavior of accelerated applications.
We examine the mathematical basis for using NFAs and describe their implementation on a real coherent CPU-FPGA research platform. We then evaluate the scalability of Dryas for various size NFAs, followed by two different use cases: debugging FPGA implementation of the interconnect and analyzing cache behavior.
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Cosmic Velocity Flows: from Theory to Observations
Saee Dhawalikar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03530 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.03530 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.03530
arXiv:2608.03530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Large-Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe forms a complex network of nodes, filaments, sheets, and voids known as the Cosmic Web. As current and upcoming galaxy surveys increasingly probe the quasi-linear and non-linear regimes of structure formation, understanding its geometry and dynamics is essential for precision cosmology. In particular, cosmic filaments, which channel matter across the web, are central to these dynamical processes.
This thesis develops numerical tools to study the non-linear cosmic web. First, the Sahyadri suite of high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulations is introduced, providing a framework for precision studies of LSS and its cosmological dependence. A calibration framework for filament reconstruction is then developed using controlled filament realizations, enabling systematic investigation of reconstruction biases. The effects of filament curvature and reconstruction noise on inferred filament properties are quantified, and a novel Fourier-space smoothing approach is introduced to improve profile recovery.
The thesis further presents Skeletor, a Voronoi-based filament finder that identifies filamentary structures directly from discrete tracers while explicitly incorporating the hierarchical nature of the cosmic web. A novel framework for classifying sub-filamentary structure is developed. Applying these tools to cosmological simulations reveals distinct properties of filament substructure and provides a detailed view of filament phase space, including coherent inflows, multistreaming, and caustic-like features.
Together, these developments provide a framework for studying the geometry, hierarchy, and dynamics of the non-linear cosmic web. More broadly, they contribute to the ongoing effort to build a physically motivated understanding of the non-linear cosmic web beyond traditional measures of clustering.
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