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IAmA
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Hi Reddit! I'm Nathaniel Johnston, a mathematics professor at Mount Allison University in Canada. My co-author, Dave Greene (/u/dvgrn0), is also here. Together, we wrote the first introductory textbook on Conway's Game of Life -- a mathematical game in which 2D lifeforms follow very simple rules and yet can do spectacularly complex things.
The book is available for download for free as a PDF at conwaylife.com/book.
Conway's Game of Life was introduced by a mathematician named John Conway in 1970, and people have been finding and building increasingly complex and improbable lifeforms ever since, for more than half a century now. Early discoveries included lifeforms that travel through the plane. Then people started building lifeforms that are capable of doing things like computing prime numbers.
Today's Life pattern engineers can make Life do intricate things like print out the decimal digits of pi, or construct copies of themselves and behave much like real-world "cells" do, right down to having helices of DNA at their core.
So please, ask us anything! We're eager to tell you about Conway's Game of Life.
Edit (10:26am ADT): Sorry everyone, something has come up and I have to step out for a moment. I'll be back to answer more questions shortly (within an hour), and Dave should be joining us soon too.
Edit (11:20am ADT): Back! Answering questions again.
Edit (4:40pm ADT): Thanks for all of your questions, folks! Dave and I will pop in and out over the next couple of days to answer some more questions as time permits, but we won't be as quick from now on (i.e., the AMA is in a "mostly done" state, but we'll come back to it when we can).
3
I squatted in London for about 8 years and from 2015-2017 I was part of the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians. In 2017 we occupied a mansion in Belgravia belonging to the obscure oligarch Andrey Goncharenko and turned it into a homeless shelter for just over a week.
Given the recent attempted liberation of properties in both London and France I thought it'd be cool to share my own experiences of occupying an oligarchs mansion, squatting, and life in general so for the next few hours AMA!
Edit: It's getting fairly late and I've been answering questions for 4 hours, I could do with a break and some dinner. Feel free to continue asking questions for now and I'll come back sporadically throughout the rest of the evening and tomorrow and answer some more. Thanks for the questions everyone!
****Update at 12:35pm
Folks -- It's been a blast hanging out with everyone and answering your questions. Darin and I need to jump back to writing code -- we will catch up on this AMA in a few hours and make a sweep. Again, thanks for the thoughtful questions.
=Vivek & Darin
****
Hi Reddit,
I am Vivek Raghunathan, co-founder of Neeva (ad-free, private search) and former head of monetization at YouTube, and I am Darin Fisher, overseeing Neeva’s browser development and formerly ran the Google Chrome engineering team.
At Neeva, we have been busy trying to reimagine search and the browser with you, the end user, at the center of the experience. Neeva has no ads, is private, and is built completely for you. We offer a free basic version and a paid premium version. We only make money (and succeed) if you love the product enough that you’ll pay for it. It’s that simple.
Putting you at the center of information discovery lets us innovate in ways that existing ads-supported search engines (or as we refer to it at Neeva, “the other search engine in Mountain View”) can’t or won’t do (because it hurts the bottomline). For example, Fast Tap search gets you directly to your search results inside of our browser. The cookie cutter extension eliminates (GDPR) cookie consent pop-ups by letting you set your preferences once for all sites. NeevaScope uses our search engine to make discovery in the browser smarter.
Of course, building a search engine and a browser are no easy tasks for a small team up against a player with 80%+ market share, thousands of engineers, and billions of dollars to spend (that pesky upstart in Mountain View, CA again!). Offering a new information discovery experience for consumers across search and the browser is one of the most complicated challenges in technology, and we’d love to share our learnings.
We are happy to talk about all things search and browsers, both the product and the technology. And give you a behind the scenes look at the ads ecosystem. As well as lessons/stories from our days at Google and how those translated (or didn’t) to building a startup from scratch. And whatever else you ask us.
Hey everyone! I have a few hours to kill and thought this might be good to do. I currently am sponsored by VolunteerForUkraine (501c in NY) to be in Poland and Ukraine to support the refugees. I work with FolkoWisko (fol-ko Vis-co) which provides medical aid, humanitarian supplies, and a lot of good humor.
About me: I was a former airborne infantryman who served 6 years. I never deployed, but had a strong sense of duty due to being in NY for 9/11. I felt that I couldn't let someone else live out my nightmare and not help. So, over the course of a week I worked my full time job, plus an extra, roughly, 60 hours to coordinate getting myself and a small team including an amazing Polish translator, Anna, who is currently passed out cold next to me from working 30 hour shifts with minimal sleep. I am also an EMT, and speak some Russian/Ukrainian.
You can hear more about me and my team from my CNN interview here:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1503834276302929922?t=PLXP4lUWrStW-4XSkffDqg&s=19
Feel free to ask about whatever you'd like. I'm happy to talk about chief complaints of refugees we've seen, or my favorite type of ice cream (no one ever seems to ask that!), or my favorite photo I've taken since I've been here. I'll try to hit everyone's questions when I can, but may avoid OPSEC questions.
EDIT 3pm ET: alright kids i have to go do some work, but i'll swing by before st patrick's day drunk time to hit whatever questions i miss :') thanks for so many great questions!
Hey y'all! I'm Rax King a James Beard Award-nominated writer, author of Tacky, and host of the Low Culture Boil podcast. Last week, I attempted to cook a three-course meal that matched the 1980s excess and grandeur of the food described in American Psycho, both that of the book and featured in the movie. You can find pictures and the writeup on MEL Magazine linked here.
Feel free to ask me anything about recreating this three-course Very Romantic and Totally Normal American Psycho dinner for yourself or a loved one -- or about food, food culture, or writing about food in general!
Lots of people hate to negotiate. No surprise. It can bring out the worst in people as they try to take advantage of the other side. I’ve got a better way. It’s the approach I used in selling my company to Coca-Cola. It’s a simple, practical approach based on ideas from game theory. The key insight is to identify what’s really at stake in a negotiation—what I call “the pie.” The negotiation pie is the additional value created through an agreement to work together. Once you see the pie, you’ll change how you think about fairness and power in negotiation. Learn more at www.splitthepiebook.com and AMA.
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