I was disappointed to see the launch aborted but also impressed to see that they could abort the launch after ignition and not lose the vehicle ("safe'ing the vehicle" as they said a number of times).
Oh they made one factual error in the Webcast too (or one is on their site). A pre-launch question came up about what they look for in hiring. A representative said they must be US citizens. According to the site, you can be a US citizen or permanent resident.
It seems that in many ways, this launch is a make or break point in the private Space sector. For the sake of shifting our attention to truly great, ambitious endeavors, and for the sake of many great engineers who have chosen to devote their lives to a now-unsexy craft (and the many who may follow in their footsteps in the future as a result of these projects), I truly hope that this mission ends in a resounding success.
I personally haven't been this excited about a technological milestone in years.
Video from the aborted start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI31ibLRCm8
Detect an anomaly in your system? Just shut down the engine after ignition and abort the launch. Fuck yeah!
Good luck on the next attempt! You guys are heroes!
https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs#L36...
Nota Bene: I wrote this ages ago back when people first talked about Hacker Typer.
CodeTyper (a fork that added sounds) was posted a few days later. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2499883
Where does this get it's source? can we set it?
--EDIT-- seems it might be a fork of: http://hackertyper.net/ but that is a guess. and that is the linux kernel I was typing...
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-typer/id435837770?mt=8
(requires the Wolfram CDF player)
The problem with mutable defaults is that they are evaluated once only when the function is defined. Each time the function is called you'll be using the same mutable variable that was created during function definition.
1). For the most part, "c = collections.Counter()" is almost always better than "c = defaultdict(int)"
* Counter only supplies missing values rather than automatically inserting them upon lookup.
* The Counter version is much clearer about what it is trying to do. The defaultdict version is cryptic to the uninitiated (understanding it entails knowing that it has a __missing__ method to insert values computed by a factory function and that int() with no arguments returns zero).
* The Counter version provides helpful methods such as "most_common(n)".
2). An ellipsis in Python is normally used in a much different way than shown in the article (it's used for an extended slice notation in NumPy).
freqs = {}
for c in "abracadabra":
try:
freqs[c] += 1
except:
freqs[c] = 1
Some may say a better solution would be:
freqs = {}
for c in "abracadabra":
freqs[c] = freqs.get(c, 0) + 1
Rather go for the collection type defaultdict
from collections import defaultdict
freqs = defaultdict(int)
for c in "abracadabra":
freqs[c] += 1
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3995185
As a programmer, one's most valuable resource is brainpower. Supposedly, a programmer's most important goal is writing clear code. Look around at what goes on in our industry. There's a lot of our most valuable resource spent on showing off our cleverness, not directed towards the clearest code. To me this is like spending money to show one can spend money or playing an instrument to show off dexterity instead of producing gorgeous sounds.
(I think this starts in school and other environments where one is motivated to show off one's coding chops.)
Most of the complexity in our field accrues like litter: a bit here and a bit there. I think it says something about the culture of the folks who live there.
The recommendation on `iteritems` had better be generalized to include `iterkeys`, `itervalues`, and other opportunities for using iterators rather than building lists. A note that the 'iter...' versions are removed in Python 3 (because iterator behaviour becomes the default) would be appropriate here.
In relation to collections, itertools is a great module to get familiarized with. I import * from this module. I consider functions there as if they were builtins.
"Conditional assignment" is a weak and misleading name. "Conditional expressions" is more descriptive. There is no assignment in
print "yes" if some_condition else "no"
Using Ellipsis for getting all items is a violation of the Only One Way To Do It principle. The standard notation is [:].
I commend the good intentions of the writer, but I'm surprised that this article got 144 upvotes in HN.
halve_evens_only = lambda nums: map(lambda i: i/2, filter(lambda i: not i%2, nums))
nums.filter(lambda i: i%2 == 0).map(lambda i: i/2)
These arbitrary break-away from OO method style into module+data style (len(L) is another!) are one of the things I hate most about Python. There are some reasons for doing so, but a pure-OO (like Scala) or pure-method+data (like F#) would have saved me many a runtime error.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118370/how-do-you-use-the...
In my own opinion, Apple products are probably about 30% better than competitors, but probably have 20% less features, however because they're simply better, they can charge probably 70% more than competitors simply because a lot people want and are willing to pay for the quality.
(Please dont read into the figures i've just used, i pulled them out my arse, they're for illustration purposes only.)
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/a-kickstarter-project-a...
Does anyone know of a good disassembly of 'MiniDisplay_Port/Thunderbolt -> VGA/HDMI/DVI/...', or 'iPad Smart Cover' (like this one) that justifies their premium price?
I've seen at least 2 iPhones breaking beyond repair just by falling.
My SGSII flew around 4 or 5 times, not a scratch. It does look and feel cheap though. So do Lenovo ribcage plastics as opposed to aluminium shells.
And the sound is really annoying.
PS: I'm not an electronics engineer so please educate me, on why this "filtered" and "cleaner" power supply is necessary to charge a phone?
The blue "Y" capacitor reminded me of
http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Flux_capacitor
Kind of adds to the magic of those charges :).
I am not saying only Apple could do this. Amazon has even bigger trust from me. I would still buy books from them even it is a little more expensive just because I have very few trouble over the years with them.
Brief summary: Morgan oversells the offering. Facebook gives Morgan the right (but not the obligation) to cover its short position by buying shares at the offering price. This is a defensive maneuver.
If the stock pops, Morgan buys the shares from Facebook at the offering price in order to cover its short. Otherwise they'd have to purchase at the market price (which would cause them to lose money). This is the hoped for scenario.
In the unexpected case, where the stock's price trends below the offering price, Morgan covers its short by buying shares directly from the market (instead of from Facebook). This stabilizes the price of the stock at the offering price and ensures that public investors don't go underwater soon after the offering.
It sounds like there are some complicated maneuvers that the underwriter can pull to make some money off the greenshoe (it's not all flowers and sunshine: http://dealbreaker.com/2012/05/facebook-ipo-goes-nowhere-in-...) but this particular implementation seems relatively good to Facebook and the public investors.
It's really simple: The IPO sells X+Y shares, where X is the big IPO number of shares and Y is the "over-allotment".
If the stock trades above the IPO price, the money from selling Y shares is given to the IPO company along with the rest of the money from selling X shares.
If the stock drops below the IPO price, the underwriters start buying back (up to Y shares * IPOprice) using the money from the initial over-allotment.
It is one of the few times outright price manipulation is allowed (which should be a completely different discussion, and likely why MS declined comment.)
The title of your post is inaccurate. No one knows for sure how many shares MS bought during the initial day of trading.
For a full breakdown of the first day of trading, check out Zerohedge's analysis:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/facebook-complete-forensic-pos...
What a disaster this IPO was (for the banks, not for facebook). Though, I'm sure the people at Facebook aren't exactly happy with the way things went and all the (unfair?) negative press / scrutiny that they will receive now.
I imagine Assange's lawyers have done their homework and have established that from being on house arrest in the UK he could run for the Senate (contrary to what 1-2 commenters here have said).
There's probably few better elections to run in than the next one. It looks like the current Labor government will be decimated in the next election (in some ways history is repeating itself from the Hawke-Keating years, which is interesting).
Yet the population seems disillusioned with the opposition too. My biggest problem with the opposition is their pointless continued opposition to the NBN.
Anyway, the big potential headache for the Australian government here is Assange would go from being a citizen possibly being extradited to the Sweden (and potentially the US) to being a sitting Senator being extradited. While he wouldn't be a head of state and enjoy those protections, I'm not sure if there's any real precedent for extradition of someone in the government like this.
Australia should be standing up to the US over this however so it's a headache I would invite and welcome upon our government.
That all being said, I'm not sure I buy the theory that Assange's extradition to Sweden is to get his extradited to the US. I seem to remember reading something saying it was just as easy to extradite him from Britain so who knows.
* how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3?
* is this the new "upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"? https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734...
* whoever put together this newsletter is clearly doing a great job for that community
Time was Google providing "unlimited" gmail storage and fuse gmail-fs was just released. I looked for another fuse fs like a hotmail-fs but did not push hard on it. I could not find and let my idea die.
It was hard to do and time consuming, but marginal gain would be small. Also I'm a f lazy system administrator. I hate coding :)
My idea for backup would use something like DIBS ( http://www.mit.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/) but instead of peers, use many free salami slice sizes of storage from cloud/hosting platforms.
Impressive, to put it mildly.
What you've made is interesting, but what is even more interesting is how you managed to do all this in such a terribly short time, I think there will be plenty of people interested in the 'making of' of this neat little website.
Anyway, you might want to make the "team" thing stand out in a different way, if you're hoping to capture people interested in group features.
Project management / todos / time tracking / and so on are often chided as being oversaturated markets. The fact is: lots and lots of people need these things, they can help increase people's income and happiness, and there's no "right" way to do it. Todo list apps are one of those arena's that can do very well financially if you target the right kind of user.
(Even if this really never makes you any money, and considering this is what you've been able to do without much real world experience, you will have no issue finding work.)
I love being able to drag around the notes on the "future" tab, it makes it easy to cluster tasks without lots of UI overhead. However I don't see why I can't do the same thing with today's tasks. I also can't send a task to the future tab and vice versa.
1.Firstly i would suggest move the task-input field to top instead of bottom. It would be much more intuitive .
2.Take the logo out of whole task window if possible. It's kind of distracting as of now.
3.Kill color from background and make it neutral. Give attention to task area as much as possible.
Only one suggestion for usability -- autofocus the "Add a task" input on page load, so the user can begin typing without an extra click upon arrival (think Google.) I think this convention works well with any app which expects text input as its immediate feature
I have used many to-do lists and liked the way you stated that this is not a to-do list, but a do-it list. This gives a feel that the task won't remain undone. And of all the to-do apps I used, I realized later that the ones I have stayed with for longer times are comparatively better looking than the ones I never cared to give a second visit. So, good looking site is a definite plus.
Good luck.
In the UI, it would be helpful if a user's email address is shown in the top right or somehow otherwise provide (obvious) confirmation that the registration worked.
Of course reduction in infant mortality is good, but it can be coupled with problems later if family planning is not also brought into families at the exact same time.
If family planning is delayed by one generation compared with the reduction in infant mortality, a country's population can rise exponentially very quickly which is highly destabilizing.
The Vatican and others stand in the way to realizing family planning everywhere...
The world is definitely improving - from a health perspective. Of course you could talk about overpopulation as a chronic global problem as well, but in my opinion education on birth control will improve enough over the next few decades to help combat that.
http://mark.reid.name/iem/warning-high-dimensions.html
Thanks to the comments, I learned this is a common warning, used in at least three textbooks.
Consider two populations, A and B, with N real-valued traits. Suppose each trait in group A is normally distributed with mean 0 and stdev=10, while group B is distributed with mean 1 and stdev=10. (This is true for trait 1, trait 2, etc.)
Each individual trait in these groups overlaps quite drastically. Imagining that all the mass of the normal distribution is contained in a ball of radius 20, then for any single trait A lives on the ball of radius 20 about 0 (namely [-20,20]) while B lives on [-19, 21]. Barely different, right?
On the other hand, in the N-dimensional space, the point (0,0,...,0) has a distance sqrt(N) from the point (1,1,...,1). So in 401-dimensional space, the ball of radius 20 around (0,0,...,0) and the ball of radius 20 around (1,1,...,1) don't overlap at all and the discriminant f(traits)=sign(trait[1] + trait[2] + ... + trait[N]) works fantastically.
This is one reason why "big data" can work well - chaining together many weak predictors gets you a strong predictor.
See Lewontin's Fallacy for a biological example of this.
If you are interested in these things, this survey is amazing: http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~deloera/MISC/BIBLIOTECA/trunk/B...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Doing-Science-Engineering-ebook/dp...
Even if I'm just misunderstanding it, I don't see how it's surprising. The author writes “with a true high-dimensional sphere, every point on the surface is ‘an extremity'”"isn't the same true by definition of a sphere of any dimension? For an n-sphere, you have an infinite number of “spikes” whose tips constitute an (n ' 1)-dimensional surface.
I have created something called Schemas Theory which is the next level of abstraction up from Systems Theory but contains all the schemas like Facet, Monad, Pattern, Form, System, OpenScape (meta-system), Domain, World, Kosmos, Pluriverse. Then to kick things off I created a hypothesis that Schemas were related to dimensions by a rule that there were two scheams per dimension and two dimensions per schema. And so there are ten schemas ranging from -1 dimension to 9 dimensions. It just so happens that String theory starts at the tenth dimension, but is unschematized, in other words we have no natural organizing template of understanding to relate to it. Schemas are projected organizations by which we understand the things in a given dimension. They are the way that we project Spacetime and find things in it intelligible given Kant's idea of a priori synthesis.
Then the question comes why are there only ten schemas and why do they stop at the ninth dimension, and I use the fact that bounded spheres as in the example given overflow the surrounding spheres at that point which is something that goes beyond our intuitions of how space itself works. I think it works as an explanation as to why we don't have natural models of intuition beyond the pluriverse (i.e. the multiverse). The point in my dissertation is that we use schemas as the basis of all our design activites.
So I think this fact of the overflowing of the hyperspheres of their surrounding spheres is quite important for our understanding of how we project spacetime templates of understanding as a framework for understanding dimensional phenomena.
The other point that I make in my dissertation that is related is that hyperspheres get bigger in terms of surface and volume and then they get much smaller and the dimensions where they are the biggest are at 5 throug 7 dimensions. I make the point that when we say that we can hold 7+/-2 things in short term memory those are independent things, and that means that conceptually we can do design up to the ninth dimension but that the optima is in the fifth through seventh dimensions where the space of possibilities is largest. So we actually hold in our minds higher dimensional objects and we design in spaces of higher dimensions but not too high, but the optimal height is 7+/2 dimensions which is where we have the most room to maneuver the possible schemas. However in terms of manipulation it is the fourth dimension that is best because in that dimension movement has perfect laminar flow without singularities. And it is interesting that this is the dimension where the middle sphere is the same size as the surrounding spheres.
Anyway, I just thought I would mention this because it is a theoretical use of this fact about higher dimensions that we do not see referenced very often which I think has lots of implications for how we think and how we design especially in Software Engineering.
As the developer behind one of the ad network SDKs included in countless iOS apps, I struggled finding a good solution to this problem. Spoiler: there isn't one.
The good news is, while there were often collisions on SBJson; pretty much all versions of the version are compatible. For a while, we would compile our static library without the SBJson objects, and ship the library and SBJson separately.
Recently we decided to create our own fork of SBJson, and switch to using our own prefix, which allowed us to embed it in our library, and not worry about what other libraries were doing.
Note: another tricky gotcha with static libraries for iOS: There is a bug in the linker, in that it will not import Objective-C categories from `.o` files unless there is another another symbol that is recognized, such as a class of C function. This has caused crashers and much headache.
Both jetpacks and baby mammoth share a common problem. They're both things we have already theorized as possible. So we do know we can do it, any research on them could be legit. But there are way too many little technical details in the way to actually make them happen. In the case of cloning mammoths, there are just thousands of little things that could go wrong. From your DNA sample not being as good as you thought, or the womb condition of the elephant not being as appropriate for a mammoth as you thought. To the big elephant in the room (sorry) that is, even if you perfect the technique (we didn't), and happen to successfully give birth to a new baby from mammoth DNA. That new baby is actually not a mammoth. But a mammoth-elephant hybrid. That would be like mating a German Shepard with a Poodle, getting a short dog with curly hair, but with a hair color that resembles the Shepard. And saying "here's a German Shepard". Well, not really. If you really want an actual mammoth that is, at least, very close to a mammoth with little elephant DNA in it. You'll need to reclone that new baby with more mammoth DNA. Even if you assume perfect cloning technique and infinite samples of perfect mammoth DNA. Considering the pregnancy time for elephants. It could take centuries to have an actual mammoth.
So yea, it's exciting research, we love to see it, and it's sure something viable that may become true in the future. But don't get too excited just yet. The correct skeptic stance would be to assume they might succeed, but their chances are very slim to at best, move forward some baby steps in technology. But since that's probably not the best stance to get your research funded, we'll keep hearing about exciting new breakthroughs in baby mammoths flying on jetpacks on the media every other year.
[1] http://www.skepticalrobot.com/products/Jetpack-Mammoth-Tee.h...
I'm also pretty sure this was previously posted on HN. The news is from a few months back: http://www.wibc.com/news/Story.aspx?ID=1689899
We should be using on-animal harvested human organs for transplants, or we should be using stem-cells for regeneration, wound curing and so many other things in the wild.
Science should be more agile. Like the story of "one sloc change takes 3 days" science nowadays takes too too long.
- We believe that GS Collections offers a significant advantage over existing solutions. We hope others will benefit from it.
- We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.
- Technology is a huge part of what we do at Goldman Sachs. GS Collections exemplifies our commitment to technology.
- We use open source software in many of our operations. We have benefited from the work of others and we'd like to give something back.
- Yes, we use GS Collections in many of our internal applications.
I also read another article (no way I can find it again now) saying how big investment banks are hiring more and more software engineers.
Disclaimer: I work in IT for a large investment bank which's gradually outsourcing all its IT department to south asian countries.
It's a PR and recruiting tool.
Gees, I feel sorry for people still stuck using Java.
https://github.com/walmartlabs
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/walmartlabs_kosmix.php
https://github.com/amazonwebservices
I can imagine Goldmans are using Github to acquire talent and new ideas. I am sure they have some complex problems and technology that needs fixing.
Stack Exchange had a discussion on this last year:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/61062/why-sho...
Note because of politics. Not because of any financial action they've done.
Because they hired that despicable fuck Ulrich Drepper. Seriously, the amount of nice, young people who were forever turned away from GNU/open source with a bad taste in their mouths because of that scumbag dipshit.
I don't care if he was right % percentage of the time. The point of a project is to welcome users, and if you can't do that, why the fuck are you maintaining it?
I mean fuck, how many projects switched their libc implementation because of that fuck? Fuck. Fuck that guy.
The worst part? I didn't even get something rejected by him. I've just read enough of the communications with that guy to have his name seared into my brain next to the part that produces bile.