2
points
PaulHoule
Joined 102,798 karma
Software developer, community photographer and wanderer between worlds.
I live on a farm near Ithaca, NY. I've given talks on nuclear energy, chatbots, the semantic web and other topics and my publications have been cited in scientific and medical journals as well as Wired Magazine and Nintendo Power.
Some systems I've worked on: a voice chat service for the Brazilian market, the market leading open access e-Print server, e-business systems for car dealerships, wineries and a pallet recycling company, decision support systems for sales territory assignment, a collaborative visual editor for knowledge graphs, a social network for a secret society, a rich metadata database for the global performing arts with hundreds of Postgres tables that we should have built in RDF, a similarity metric for generic concepts (people, places, creative works, ...), a search engine for patents powered by a neural network, conversion of Freebase to an RDF graph with perfect referential integrity, an automatically curated collection of more than 1 million images of thousands of topics, a study of statistics of the sound of crumpling paper, and three efforts to commercialize foundation models before LLMs.
I served on a committee researching the application of OWL, RDF and other semantic web concepts to the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard which culminated in the publication of ISO/TR 22126-2:2025 "OWL representation of the ISO 20022 metamodel and e-repository"
My submissions to Hacker News are chosen by myself working together with YOShInOn, a smart RSS reader that couples a workflow engine with a BERT-based classification, clustering and recommendation engine.
Software-related side projects are going slow while I focus my effort on building up a large stock of photographs to post to my socials. These show up first here:
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/
Astronaut of science fiction and fantasy. North American Weeaboo. 狐系ケモノミミ
paul.houle@ontology2.com (607) 821 1243
- 1 point
- 2 points
- 2 points
- There is a lot of cosplay of Chinese copyrights, e.g. Genshin Impact, Azur Lane, Arknights, Super Cube [1] as well as mobile games for which I've collected 20+ photo sets that don't seem to have any documentation in the west. South Korean titles like Blue Archive are big.
[1] Not be confused with Super Cub
- I was a little steamed when my son came home from school with a pamphlet about winter festivals which listed all of them except for the astronomically correct one that us pagans celebrate.
On the other hand, the Christian (apocryphal) idea that hope came into the world on the (almost) darkest day of the year is beautiful to me. As well as the idea that some ancient Hebrews miraculously survived in a cave.
I also like the idea that the celebrations start with advent like they do in Germany or that there are “12 days of Christmas” ending with the epiphany, which is a real astronomical event which is part of the explanation of why Christians celebrate the day that they do. Tomorrow we’re just bumming around the house and getting ready for family to come on Dec 26 and might visit a friend who was born Dec 25 on Dec 25. Sometime in the 12 days we expect to organize a Hogswatch party to enjoy
- Notably China is the world center of cosplay so far as I can tell these days.
- 4 points
- 4 points
- Daytime TV was a backwater even 20 years ago.
When I was doing business development I would watch TV at the gym during the day and see ads aimed exclusively at a demographic that didn't have any money of it's own to spend so it was all medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers. That didn't reflect the diversity of the viewers but it was the economic equilibrium in that it was the most profitable group, personalized advertising changes that dramatically.
- I am definitely in to biofeedback these days but I think it's going to be a better HRV system than my Garmin watch.
I go out these days with a transformation that I greatly enjoy and learning how to embody it with a low cardiovascular load is part of making it sustainable instead of wearing me out.
- We've got a license for Teams that we don't use.
- It's funny, what he posts is similar to mine except I blend in some stuff which is "characteristic of the HN front page" (rust and it's discontents) and no sports and political science but the science and engineering themes are similar.
- Such a beautiful technique for shoehorning straight out of the 1970s! See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
It seems so un-FORTRAN that DEC had a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-11. that was based on a stack machine and then later built an FP accelerator specialized to accelerate the stack machine. It was a straggler but I'm still trying to track down a circa 1992 article from Dr. Dobb's Journal where someone used virtual machine techniques to unbreak the broken i860 and make a good FORTRAN compiler.
- A big research area, see "Turquoise Hydrogen"
https://www.aga.org/its-time-to-pay-attention-to-turquoise-h...
in contrast to "Grey Hydrogen" [1] made by steam reforming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
The self-taught ChemE in me worries a little about any process that makes a solid product since that product could plate out inside the machine and clog it up, but maybe that's not really a problem here.
[1] "Blue" if you capture the CO2
- Sounds like you should apply for a grant.
My hunch is you need very high information density to work, like the information density around the event horizon of a black hole.
- Mini-frameworks would be dangerous at a place like Google where smart people think they are smart. I think they're heaven sent for smart people who think they're stupid.
Distributed (multithreaded, concurrent, ...) systems are a counterexample that are highly vulnerable to snake oil. In normal software it makes sense to build up from a small set of intellectually coherent primitives. In those cases you inevitably end up with poor performance and usually reliability if you try that. Java started out with a snake oil approach to threading (synchronized!) and Doug Lea talked some sense into them and now we have java.util.concurrent which has a rich set of primitives which are pragmatic and meet the real requirements, not a vision of purity.
On the other hand, If it was a mini-framework to pound out numerous not-so-simple HTML form applications it could greatly enrich your life and your team's.
- Yeah, I used to say “… is nice but when … he turns into a werewolf”, but now I’d have to apologize to werewolves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avidin
which is the reason why you're not supposed to eat raw egg whites everyday. One of the few antinutrients in animal products whereas you find them all over vegan foods like spinach.