kregasaurusrex

Been working more on the Advent Of Code (AoC) problems in Python, almost halfway complete. https://adventofcode.com/

While this is a small dataset of tested individuals which may be proportionally representative to larger groups, it comes at odds with releasing PII with respect to individual privacy to see potential comorbities (old age, obesity, diabetes, lack of an auto-immune response, etc). We know that people with exposure to recycled airspace and live in close proximity are more likely to transmit covid to one another. Mask wearing and social distancing are actions that will have to be obeyed by everyone as a collective in order to work-- one may never know if they're an asymptomatic super-spreader without widespread testing. Cloth masks aren't for protecting yourself as much as they are everyone around you.

Within the data itself, it shows that quarantine and isolation are effective practices against spreading covid in a hotspot. This may be a good stop-gap measure while researchers are able to study it more, but government's responsibility at all levels of keeping people safe in returning to work has has greatly fallen short of expectations.

Oftentimes this is done to circumvent paying patent license fees- for example if a patented component in a BOM would cost 75 cents per unit from the manufacturer, and the in-house team found a way to perform the equivalent function for 15 cents then it would instantly allow your product to undercut the competition. In Amazon's case, all it takes is a query to find high margin items in which knockoffs can be made and self-promoted to eventually outrank sales of the original item.

From one of the article's citations[0]:

“They [Waffle House] have good risk management plans in place and are great examples of how their supply chains get affected in two different ways. On the one hand, your own supply chain is exposed,” he continued. “At the same time, your stores are supposed to be the first to react and provide the basic supplies. Your supply goes down, while your demand goes up.”

In the context of this pandemic, the essential components for treating patients (N95 masks, respirators, tests, other PPE) require supply chains that span across multiple countries; of which are dealing with their own responses and can't act as net exporters of these materials. The US response of tapping into its stockpile may give a faster immediate response, but there's practically zero domestic manufacturing capacity at a time when they're needed most. Governor Cuomo of New York said the federal government offered 400 ventilators, when the state needed nearly two orders of magnitude more than that [1]. Flattening the curve will take much longer if patients and providers don't have access to these tools.

[0] https://www.ehstoday.com/emergency-management/article/219068...

[1] https://twitter.com/MichaelSkolnik/status/124248080874252288...

Since the original HN post[0] is about 2.5 years old now, one would expect there to be more data released by LS regarding job placement/salaries before a potential student would sign a $30,000 ISA. I've been a fan of the idea of up-skilling at a bootcamp for those who either don't want to spend 4 years getting a CS degree or being unable to finance its associated costs which can be in excess of $75,000. In an increasingly tight labor market, there's fewer jobs available in the 'middle' where companies seem to be either wanting an experienced SME in a specific domain or less-experienced programmers to do testing rather than development.

I think the bundling and selling of student CDOs works for a company in its early stages, since the costs for recovering unpaid tuition can range from high to being declared a total loss. Some of the anecdotes make it seem like the company doesn't receive enough feedback from employers in order to strengthen parts of their curriculum that make interviewees fail at some stages during the interview process. Creating a complete curriculum takes more than bundling together Leetcode and Hackerrank problems, where the actual teaching reflects that bootcamps and a CS education aren't in direct parity with one another. [1]

Regarding the finances, student loan debt through an established institution can't be removed through filing for bankruptcy. This allows access to federal loans and underwriters that give better rates and agreements for all the business parties invloved. I've been denied refinancing my loans from multiple companies for a combination of those effects including not graduating and having too low of an income. The business seems like a good idea but too fixated on higher short-term valuations in order to attract VC capital; rather than fixing its underlying structural problems.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011033

[1] https://hackernoon.com/bootcamps-vs-college-11dd76a4d127

It's great that the representatives from the company sent him the relevant parts of the schematic to help him connect his arm to the interface board. Products aren't often built with accessibility with mind and seeing DIY projects like this inspire better solutions for these groups.

Lidar becomes much less effective within rain/snow conditions, because it causes the infrared time-of-flight sensors to not be able to see past the weather conditions. An example video by Waymo[0] shows a silhouette of oncoming cars, but I don't believe lidar alone would be able to provide a quick enough detection mechanism. Comma.ai by George Hotz[1] was started to create a relatively inexpensive OTS solution that's vendor independent and crowdsource video to aid in development and training of self-driving algorithms.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNUHjb5fbqs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3XHXL9rzQM

Previously, AMD shipped out free processors to fix an issue with Ryzen boards having firmware too old to boot the CPU: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/264097-amd-shipping-fr...

What I had found showed less reliability over time because economics of scale reduced manufacturing costs and thus price of 3.5" and 5.25" ones, where some said that 8" disks were extremely reliable. My thoughts were that well-made disks could have a lifetime comparable to that of LTO storage.

The article isn't specific on what the floppy disks have been replaced with other than "a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution". Would this meet milspecs for reliability and redundancy in an event where either the reader or storage medium are damaged, possibly to radioactive decay?

I'd been under the impression that magnetic storage was less sensitive to bit-flips or data degradation more than modern storage technologies like flash drives.

Time to reference my favorite Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

From a logarithmic standpoint, around 1 billion years is when geologically interesting things happen to the earth as it's no longer to sustain life an have the oceans boil over as well.

As a Franklin county resident, I see multiple groups of volunteers who have a big push around August-October to concentrate efforts around the the Ohio State campus and downtown areas to register voters. This includes groups affiliated with campus political organizations, the League of Women Voters, and groups who seek signatures to bring issues to a ballot vote. The extent to which the article describes purging 40,000 Franklin County voters is much more than what I'd expect than people being ineligible to vote for reasons like leaving student voters leaving the state/county (and not updatign their address), becoming deceased, or the recent case regarding the "use it or lose it" rule. In my opinion there should be a formal audit that includes other state data to correct the discrepancies in the spreadsheet of voters to be purged.

Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.

Thanks for sharing. Between your salary, stock options, 8% matching 401k, and being in the Midwest you can probably accomplish FIRE even faster than by age 40.

The first one I'd seen was implemented in a Ruby book, and I agree it's a good yet moderately challenging problem to do. Once you're done solving the base case, making improvements like implementing a more efficient backtracking algorithm or drawing a board within a GUI can be added as well.

Edit: The book was 'The Ruby Programming Language' by O'Reilly Publishing, not 'Programming Python' as I originally thought, also published by O'Reilly.

I think nanomachines are still purpose-built for solving small problems, and haven't been particularly useful outside the medical field yet because 'scaling is hard', in this case being enough to have noticeable effects. Seeing a household similar to The Jetsons' is still a ways off in my eyes.

A lot of people talk about how wide-reaching the technologies spun out from NASA in the Apollo Era were; whereas I see the research that goes into making chips smaller has an equal if not greater reach. Considering how widespread the modern IC is these incremental improvements need to become more and more novel, to the point where entirely new approaches need to be designed to combat the limits of physics itself.

Knowledge that compounds in such a way becomes useful in the long term. The Y and Z mentioned may be tangential in a current situation, yet as a technology stack evolves they can become integral parts to more complete and better fitting solution.

It's not by accident that Juul adopted similar marketing styles of big tobacco, the marketing and design of the products should speak for themselves [0]. WSJ also made a video exploring this business relationship a couple months back [1].

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3u7m6nXoAA628x?format=jpg&name=...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/video/how-juul-took-a-page-from-big-toba...

I was about to suggest this, because anonymised data is often not-so-anonymous in aggregate. AT&T's recent disclosure of selling this information to bounty hunters[0] shows that sharing across companies isn't always done with the end goal of user privacy. Examples of over sharing can set precedents in court cases showing that such sensitive data can be treated as a liability rather than an appreciating asset in the wrong hands.

[0] https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-att-data-aggrega...

Sorry I can't seem to find the name, it was a panel at Origins Game Fair about how to be a better Game Master through storytelling.

I'd only found about this project a month ago when an author gave a presentation and mentioned how she was using Space Engine to generate fictional universes to test how realistic her story settings could be- things like multi-sun (3+) solar systems, establishing what a habitable zone could be, and planets with permanently dark spots to name a few. Great that it's made accessible for people to customize it far enough to be limited only by their imagination.

The Jetson Nano provides a very fair amount of computing power for AI applications like this- I've been following JetsonHacks[0] for a while and there's some neat projects posted on the site. The site owner's Youtube channel[1] also goes into detail on interoperability across the TX series such as cameras, code libraries, and assembling a car based on MIT's open-sourced Racecar[2] built with a TX2.

[0] https://www.jetsonhacks.com/2019/03/25/nvidia-jetson-nano-de...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQs0lwV6E4p7LQaGJ6fgy5Q

[2] https://racecar.mit.edu/platform

>“We will painlessly laser-drill the holes into the skull, place the threads, plug the hole with the sensor, and then you go home,” he says. “It’ll basically be an experience like getting Lasik.”

Maybe I've read a bit too much cyberpunk lore in my day, but this sounds incredibly ambitious. Can't wait for the livestream to start!

SpaceX's StarHopper engine looks like it caught fire, which is livestreaming at the same time[0].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACYW4RDCS90

That's incredible to see: AMD's CEO Lisa Su talked about how getting the 'halo spot' of processor speed was important to the company during the Computex conference and they sure delivered. At nearly 1/20th of the price!

While this may only be the result of a single benchmark, Phoronix covered how the 3900X handles multiple separate ones[0]. The geometric mean of all given tests placed the Ryzen 3900X narrowly at the 3rd spot but within 1% of the Threadripper 2990WX and i9 7960X.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-37...

The idea of pegging a currency's value to a basket of existing fiat currencies has already been done by the IMF as Special Drawing Rights[0], where Libra's goal is to extend a similar functionality into a living digital payment system. Transfers of XDR are restricted by its issuing bodies only to nations due to the large amount of risk bourn by having the ability to print an unlimited amount of currency, and a continued guarantee for the currency to remain solvent against its allocation baskets. Governments are right to see this as a competitor to central banking as the network operates outside their jurisdiction (including the IMF'S), avoiding payment monitoring networks like SWIFT, and Libra doesn't seem to have a well-defined plan in the case of a major liquidation event.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights

Having watched the livestream from January[0], the AlphaStar agent was able to create its own individual agents to play against and then learn from in the same way AlphaZero learned from chess & baduk/go historic games. In AlphaStar's case this learning period was described as experiencing the equivalent of hundreds of years of aggregate gameplay.

This allows an agent to adjust to novel strategies not seen before because Starcraft II's number of possible game states exponentially increases as the game progresses; compared with chess and go that have large albeit fixed board states. There's also a competition for individuals who build their own AI engines[1] for Starcraft II much like how Stockfish and LeelaZero compete against one another in their own respective AI chess leagues.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs

[1] http://wiki.sc2ai.net/Main_Page

Not only limited to amateur radio novices who are new to the hobby; during emergency/disaster relief, the 2m VHF amateur bands are the among the most used bands due to how inexpensive the radios are. By creating an ad-hoc network used as a failsafe when cell towers and internet services could be offline for an indefinite period of time, civilians are able to save lives when police and and EMS are allocated at their capacity. I also personally enjoy using these bands because it's able to travel well throughout a medium-large city fairly well on a clear night.

Grubhub's official statement appears to not understand what cybersquatting actually means, and "created the websites for them" with the ordering process still occurring through Grubhub's platform oftentimes by simply changing the TLD of a company's existing website. Since these orders would directly feed into Grubhub's service, the business could be on the hook for a percentage fee that can be as high as 35% of the order's cost. This definitely seems to fall under extortion and cybersquatting to me.

Comparing the shipping prices across the official retailers, Chicago Electronic Distributors was the cheapest at ~$6 whereas CanaKit and Element14 were both more than $10. Also bought a USB-C charger for it since the various old phone chargers I have don't supply enough amperage to the board.