kdelok

Agreed - I think the key to owning a house in Cambridge is to already own a house in Cambridge. That and work in the City or buy-to-let.

On the other hand, buying in conjunction with the local housing associations is more feasible, so it's not all doom and gloom.

Is there any reason not to use snprintf for almost every application of string manipulation (aside from strduping)?

I think the person above was maybe being too imprecise with their language. Obviously it doesn't affect the frequency of portscans and the like, but whitelisting ports is a reasonable approach to further mitigating your risks.

It's because most of the randomness used by software is actually pseudorandom. What that means is that you actually use a defined sequence. The sequence has behaviour that's close enough to what you'd get if you were picking random samples from a distribution for the desired application.

The key difference is that it's reproducible and that if you have insight into the parameters of the sequence (e.g. the seed and the current position in the sequence), you can predict the results. That's why people often get upset when people use these pseudorandom number generators for security purposes.

The seed is a value that is used to generate the sequence. If you use the same seed, you get the same sequence.

They do strain selection twice a year (once for northern, once for southern hemisphere). The years where they get it wrong are usually the years where the strain jumps between different clusters.

It's really interesting stuff. Take a look at https://www.whocc.infectiousdisease.cam.ac.uk/antigenic-cart... for a bit of an overview on that stuff.

Yeah, I didn't look particularly critically at it, but this is where I got the figure from: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaccineeffect.htm

Flu vaccines aren't useless, but they also aren't 100% effective. The CDC reckoned they reduce the risk by about 40-60%.

Flu is a variable pathogen, which means that it evolves to look different from an immune perspective over time. It follows clustered patterns, where the flu strain will look pretty similar (and vaccines will be more effective), then it "jumps" to a new cluster every few years or so (and the vaccines will likely be less effective). There's a whole bunch of work goes into predicting what flu strains make most sense to use for the vaccine in a given flu season.

I'm not sure it's very confusing. Context suggests that you're not going to be told how many metres you are away from London.

I went to uni with the guy who didn't share his stuff with Cambridge Analytica (Kosinski). He presented the likes -> OCEAN analysis and it was pretty compelling (and frightening) stuff.

In particular, with enough likes, it could deduce things such as gender, race and sexual orientation. Obviously in the wrong contexts, this information is extremely sensitive.

I'd still argue that there's a lot of value in some form of teaching (via book or video or whatever). If left to their own devices, novices will often come up with messy, non-idiomatic ways to do things.

(not for me, so I'm not sure how much I could respond to questions)

Is Leap for people who are i) female, ii) identify as a woman, or iii) both?

I ask because I have a few friends who are biologically female, but genderqueer (by which they mean that they don't prescribe to the cultural stuff that is usually attached to gender). Would this be suitable for them?

As a more general note, since this looks to be a community that's about inclusion and addressing discrimination, it might be worth taking care not to conflate "female" and "woman".

Not involved with Leap at all, but I've always felt like this sort of thing depends on how much discrimination your group is subjected to. Self-segregation like this provides a forum for constructive discussion, particularly if your group is still subject to discrimination (e.g. being undermined by the dominant group, intentionally targeted by trolls, threatened or cajoled).

I don't know if it's a useful analogy, but I consider it akin to global warming being discussed by climate scientists in a totally public forum. The volume of anti-global warming sentiment and media coverage (both for and against) would completely disrupt such attempts.

I couldn't see what their data sources were, but I wonder if this is just tracking when people make most use of work-tracking software?

This looks nice. I also really like: http://tnerual.eriogerg.free.fr/vim.html

It's a pared down cheat sheet that covers most of what I need day-to-day.

The first author of this also developed tools that allow you to analyse all sorts of personality traits (including sexual orientation) via FB likes. He was aware and publicised of the potential consequences and risks here, but I seem to remember thinking his reasons for publishing were justified at the time. As he was part of the psychology department during his PhD, I think his papers will have been extensively scrutinised by ethics boards and the like.

Mini disclaimer: I vaguely knew him from university and didn't get on with him. However, I don't think he was the type of person to put people at risk for personal glory.

The Khan Academy people wrote a JS script called tota11y that will let you inspect your site: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/

I don't know if it's the actual reason, but they break really easily and they cost a lot more.

I'm actually worried that one of the main things in favour of cryptocurrencies is that they can act as an effective currency for illegal activities, i.e. they'll stay profitable for as long as regulations struggle to keep up with them.

I can't really comment on non-technical managers, as all of the management at my company are former (and current) developers.

However, this list itself doesn't seem like a bad set of questions for a developer to ask themselves, let alone a manager ask the developer. We all know that it's all too tempting to fix the problem we want to fix, rather than the one that needs t obe fixed.

In general the performance of C vs Fortran is a moot point. However, for numerical performance, Fortran has (at least) two major advantages that I can see, both of which are about usability:

- In-built support for multi-dimensional arrays and operations on arrays. This makes it so much easier to work with numerical datasets than in C.

- BLAS and LAPACK are the two foremost packages used for linear algebra. They're written in Fortran, so it's just a bit easier to use them, rather than their C APIs. I've had unpleasant experiences debugging things across the boundary between C and Fortran.

We've been doing outreach work teaching 11-13 year olds to program microbits with Python. It's been a great tool and allowing the kids to see their code running on such a simple device turns out to be a great motivator.

I also think a shout out to https://create.withcode.uk/ is worthwhile. They've got a nice little microbit emulator for trying things out before downloading onto the microbit.

Historically, the D->G mutation around 222 (numbering schemes vary) in 1918 Spanish flu caused a significant increase in pathogenicity. That's a single bit-flip.

I think the CU constabulary are largely ceremonial nowadays. The Proctors are still responsible for a bunch of disciplinary things, but probably not legal matters (more like exam rules, plagiarism and keeping a vehicle in Cambridge).

This really depends on what the hyperparameter landscape looks like. In general, global optimisation is a very hard problem and doing it by random sampling might take longer than the lifetime of the universe (cf Levinthal's paradox for proteins).

You might be interested to speak with David Wales (http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/person/dw34). He has recently been looking into properties of the landscapes of neural networks and has considerable experience in energy landscapes.