fcbrooklyn

Weird. I'm a 6 foot tall male, and I also get asked for directions a lot. The most recent absurdity was in Paris Now, I have spent a total of maybe two weeks in Paris in twenty years, I can get by in french, but it must sound like nails on a chalkboard to a native speaker, and I'm pretty obviously american once I open my mouth. Even so, the lady who asked my advice stayed right there while I looked up the address on my phone and attempted (with limited success) to work it out.

I wonder if it really is the height.

The article claims that the animals were not exposed to selection based on their domesticity, but it includes this line "These animals are regularly provided with food and water, and investigated by the researchers."

It strikes me that that situation represents a selection pressure, because mice that are more afraid of humans, are likely to avoid a place where they are regularly present, and thus lose the advantage of the risk-free meal ticket these particular humans are providing.

I wonder if it wasn't the miner at all. Maybe the guy had an (illegal) cellphone jammer as well, and somehow managed to convince the feds that it was his antminer causing the trouble.

Sasa Juric, and the folks at pusher wrote a couple of blog posts on this: http://theerlangelist.com/article/reducing_maximum_latency

Yes, effectively.

It means it "looks bad".

I'm a hiring manager, and I've been dying for someone to ask me a question like that. I'm proud of the mentoring I've done, and I have a whole bunch of folks I'd love to have candidates talk to to see how I am to work for. But noone ever asks (understandably), and it feels pretentious to force the issue.

My first task in the industry, in the early 90's, involved writing to excel files. At the time I worked at microsoft, so you'd have thought they'd have given me the super secret documentation to the excel format. Instead, they gave me a book published by microsoft press, describing the BIFF format which is what they'd called the format, apparently dreaming that it might one day become a semi-open standard for spreadsheets. (there was no danger of that ever happening, the format was distilled madness, based on a million performance optimizations)

Later they made the format a lot saner, but either way I'm pretty sure google would be fine.

"Hugh looked at me with an almost earnest stare. “What would happen if we mixed Irish whiskey and cream?” he said. “That might be interesting.” He sat back and waited for a response.

“Let’s try it,” I replied. Where Hugh was more likely to intellectualise and think through the appalling consequences of dropping cream into Ireland’s beloved whiskey, I was all for doing it there and then."

Now, I ain't no lawyer, but to me this sounds like Hugh invented it, no?

I was in lower manhattan during the huge northeast blackout 14(?) years ago. I can confidently report that turning off all the traffic lights in the city did not lead to improved traffic flow.

I rarely take antibiotics (can think of once in the last 25 years), and it's at least partly because I always push back. I do this partly because I know they're overprescribed, and partly because in my youth I had a bad reaction to one.

And this is easily testable. We just house a population of animals who sleep in a hermetically sealed environment that provides all that they need, but is never in darkness. After a couple of hundred million years we open the door and see if anyone is napping.

I'd be interested to know how their prescreening works. Sometimes those things are timed, and I can imagine a really short timeframe, say 30 minutes or so, might make the specific editor more relevant. For example, I absolutely hate Eclipse. Back when I was writing Java, I reached into my own pocket to buy IntelliJ because I was at least 50% more productive with it. I know there are people out there who dig Eclipse, but even if it's your editor of choice, it's more appropriate for dealing with a big, long-lived project. Similarly, if they had some existing project you are required to work with, full on IDEs like Eclipse might require a lot more fiddling to work properly, compared to straight up editors like vim/emacs/etc.

They take five days to clear, however.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine needed to repay me for a loan of about $1000. Since we both banked at HSBC, we figured walking into the bank together might be a simple way to do that. Nope. I had opened my hsbc account online, he had opened his account in person. Therefore we may as well have been two separate banks, apparently. After debating the sanity of this system with a bank manager (whose fault it clearly was not), I noticed a big sign on their ATM. It said "Now accepting cash deposits!". I asked the guy if there was a limit on the size of those deposits. There was. I can't remember how much, but it was in the neighborhood of five grand I think.

My friend took a withdrawal in cash. He handed me the money. I walked over to the machine and deposited it.

Makes sense if you look at it sideways.

Well said. I share your suspicions about 40 turning out to be the magic number. I also notice that these articles never seem to allow for differences between people, which flies in the face of my 25 years of experience. I've always felt most comfortable working seven days a week, at a manageable pace each day. Other people need those weekends, and are happy to put in long hours in the week. One of the most productive people I ever worked with seemed to work literally all the time.

As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.

That sounds about right. I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to decode baseball signs. To me it has always looked like signs from the dugout are far more complex, but catchers' signs not so much.

Yeah, back when Mo was pitching, this app would be pretty pointless.

Some batters do, yes. That's less to do with stealing signs though, and more to do with the strategic effect the runner has on the infield (and centerfield, actually). If the bases are empty, the whole defense can focus on getting the batter out. If there's a man on second, especially if there's less than two outs, it's much more important to keep the man on second from scoring.

A couple of things about sign stealing, from someone who is not an expert, but has watched a great deal of baseball:

1) The signs are usually not complex, you can easily read them yourself when you see them on TV. One finger might mean a fastball, two fingers some kind of breaking ball, three fingers might be the pitcher's least favorite pitch. Often, the sign is accompanied by a second sign indicating where the catcher wants it. So one finger followed by a hand lifting up-up, means he wants a high fastball. The players will know what the signs mean after one batter at most.

2) The only time the batting team can actually see the signs is when there's a runner on second. In this case, frequently, the catcher will go to the mound and he and the pitcher will come up with some simple obfuscation. Normally this looks like 3-4 signs indicated in quick succession. I assume they've agreed that number 3 is the meaningful one or something.

3) The communication doesn't have to be perfect. In a lot of cases, a batter is waiting for a specific pitch. It would be enough to signal "Yeah, it's gonna be a fastball outside".

The article suggests that a specific camera crew was the original source of the signs, but it's not clear how that worked. It happened in Boston, so perhaps the camera was manned by local people who turned out to be red sox fans. If such a person was watching a continuous feed, and a specific redsox player asked to be alerted when a high fastball was coming, the apple watch would seem to be a practical solution.

The catcher throws the sign after the batter has taken his stance. No more looking at the dugout.

I imagine it might be quite dangerous to transfer people from one ship to the other in heavy seas, and in the article they were talking about seas of 30 feet.

When I read the title, my first thought was "Indians wake up and drink a pint of beer?"

I think it depends on you, to some extent, so without knowing you it's harder to say. The big question is "why?".

1) Are you learning to program because you have something specific you're dying to build? Depending on what it is you dream of building, there may be a language that's more appropriate than others. If you want to build a mobile app, you pretty much have to learn either swift (iOS) or Java (android). If you want to build a web app you could reasonably choose Ruby, Python, Javascript, Elixir, or probably a dozen others I'm forgetting. If you have a lot of data you want to analyze, you might want to learn R. If you want to write games, then Lua is a great choice. etc.

2) But maybe you don't have a project in mind, you're just interested in how it all works. In that case, you should know that it works a lot of different ways, and different languages will teach you different things. Learning C will give you a great understanding of how computers actually work at a low level. Learning Ruby will teach you a lot about object oriented programming, which is currently the most popular paradigm. Learning Haskell, Elm, Elixir, or Erlang will teach you about functional programming, which is quite a different paradigm but one that's getting a lot more popular lately. If this is what's driving you then I'd say you should learn 2-3 languages that are sufficiently different: something low level, something high level and object oriented, something functional.

3) But maybe you want to learn to program because you hope to get a well paying job asap. I'm not sure that's such a great idea, but if that's the plan, then I suggest something where there are a lot of jobs right now. Javascript, Ruby, or Swift, most likely. Learn one of them sufficiently to be useful, and get yourself in a position where you're getting paid to do this. Then, if you want to have a happier life, follow the advice in section 2.

I'm the author. I actually think it may be awhile before we actually start to see jobs posted, unfortunately. I think the pattern is largely:

1) Let's try it out internally 2) Hey, this is cool. Let's go to the meetup. 3) Wow, this meetup is full of fired up devs. 4) Let's hire someone we met there .... time passes .... 5) Ok, now we seem to have become at least partly an Elixir shop. Let's post an ad.

Ironically, because it's so easy to find great devs who want to work with new technologies like this, you don't actually have to go to the trouble to post an ad, leading to the (incorrect) impression, that there are no jobs at all.

"better chance to stand out to the teacher"

On reflection, this might make me stop and think about it. It's supposedly anonymous, but it can't be anonymous to the professor, can it, or how would the points be awarded? This professor believes he's simulating the tragedy of the commons, so to act rationally and take the 6 points might cast you in a negative light in his eyes, which might not be worth the 6 points after all.

Exactly. Curve or no curve it doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter if there's a curve. Your grades are still only meaningful compared to your classmates. (ok, assuming you're not in danger of actually failing the class)

Yes, it's true that it sort of benefits everyone in the class vs people who did not take the class, but some classes are easy A's and some aren't, and everyone knows that. If the class becomes a slightly easier A because we all picked 2 points, then the effect will be relatively small. It would be a better experiment if he was handing out cash, even small amounts of cash.

Actually, I think in this case the only rational choice is to ask for the 6 points. One of two things will happen:

1) Less than 10% will follow suit, in which case you'll get a 6 point boost, and you'll have secured an advantage over 90% of your classmates.

2) More than 10% will follow suit, and noone will get anything, in which case you will have no advantage over your classmates, and neither will any classmate have an advantage over you.

If you select 2 points, then either:

1) Less than 10% will opt for 6, in which case you'll have no advantage over at least 90% of the class, but some members of class may have a 4 point advantage over you, or

2) More than 10% will opt for 6, in which case the outcome is identical to choosing 6 in the first place.

Because the "points" have no intrinsic value except in comparison to your classmates (unlike a true tragedy of the commons, where the scarce resource such as food, etc, has real value), there is no reason not to roll the dice.

EDIT: Many people think the fact that the course is "not graded on a curve" makes a difference. It does not, at least considering the class in isolation. I took courses in college where an A was pretty much a dead certainty, and other courses where getting a B was actually quite an achievement. In all cases my performance within a course had to be judged based on my performance against the other students within that same class.