Quantum computing for everyone (11)
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Michael Nielsen (6)
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Michael Nielsen (4)
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“Can you give me a simple, concrete explanation of how quantum computers work?” I’ve been asked this question a lot. I worked on quantum computing full time for 12 years, wrote 60 or so papers, and co-authored the standard text. But for many years the question stumped me. I had several pat answers, but none really satisfied me or my questioners. It turns out, though, that there is a satisfying answer to the question, which ...
Six Rules for Rewriting (6)
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The only way I know to write well is to first allow myself to write freely, and then to rewrite. The trick to rewriting is to recognize which bits of my writing are good, and leave those be, while improving or eliminating the bad bits. Here is a list of six rules that help me recognize the bad bits in my own writing. Until these criteria have been met, or the exceptions identified and understood, ...
Michael Nielsen » Shirky’s Law and why (most) social software fails (29)
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Shirky’s Law states that the social software most likely to succeed has “a brutally simple mental model … that’s shared by all users”. If you use social software like Flickr or Digg, you know what this means. You can give friends a simple and compelling explanation of these sites in seconds: “it’s a website that lets you upload photos so your friends can also see them”; “it’s a community website that lets you suggest interesting ...
The tension between information creators and information organizers (1)
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7 months, 2 weeks
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In 2006, a group of Belgian newspapers sued Google, ostensibly to get snippets of their news stories removed from Google News (full story). In fact, the newspapers were well aware that this could be easily achieved by putting a suitable file on their webservers, instructing Google’s web crawler to ignore their webservers. What then was the real purpose of the lawsuit? It’s difficult to know for sure, but it seems likely that it was part ...
NetBeans 6 - my first 24 hours (1)
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java.net Weblogs (4)
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My first 24 hours with NetBeans6.0 (final). I'm going to color a little outside the lines here, and also talk about "tools I use" (in NetBeans). Specifically: Spring 2.5, "vim", and Maven2.
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