oostevo

Similarly, I've been impressed by Duo's mobile applications.[1]

They offer a push authentication capability, so you only have to click "accept" or "deny" in the app on your phone. They've also got code generation and a hardware token as backups. In practice, I can usually authenticate through the phone in 2ish seconds.

Clef does look like an awfully nice user experience, though.

[1] https://www.duosecurity.com/product/methods/duo-mobile

In case it helps:

I've been a subscriber for several years, and this is the first I've seen the Education Guide. It might just be because I'm oblivious, but perhaps you might want to make it more prominent on the "New to ExpertFlyer" page?

I've learned everything in there by osmosis at this point, but the strategies would have been a cool thing to know when I was getting started.

Yeah, it's definitely confined to certain demographics. It's especially popular among government/defense types in Virginia. There are a couple of benefits that make it popular with them -- namely that it's free and the system is primarily designed to take you to the far-flung suburbs (where the cheap housing and good schools are).

Given that, I doubt Lyft (marketed towards urban millennials who have smartphones and are cool with riding around in cars with mustaches) and Slugging (mostly used by staid, middle-aged, middle-income workers) are going to compete with each other.

(Still kicking myself for not finishing that app for Slugline-like ridesharing 6 or so years ago :) )

It's extremely popular between DC/North Arlington and the southern and western suburbs.

I used to work in Crystal City, and on my commute home I would see dozens of people -- probably more than 30 most days -- lined up at the designated slug line stop.

I don't have personal experience with it, but this just launched: http://driveshift.com/

It seems to only be available in San Francisco right now, though.

For people on OS X who want to give tiling window managers a try but don't want to switch to Linux/Xmonad: I've been using Amethyst[1] and throughly enjoying it.

It's pretty clearly still early on in its development, but I've been enjoying pretty substantial productivity gains from using it.

[1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

I should preface this by saying that I know very little about batteries and consumer electronics, but a little about watches.

The problem of how to keep a mostly or completely analog watch wound throughout the day was solved a very long time ago. I wonder how feasible it would be to use something like the rotor weight from an automatic mechanical[1] or automatic quartz[2] watch as a trickle charger.

Would that just be too little added energy for the added complexity?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz

I can't think of any place that I've lived in the US which has consistently worse broadband performance than DC and Northern Virginia. This is especially sad given Northern Virginia's density of large tech companies and history as 'internet alley'[1].

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/internet-alley

This was at an organization that I don't work for anymore, and my recollection is a bit fuzzy. I think it was Computer Vision, Signal Processing, Wavelet, and Image Processing.

There were also some convoluted, non-technical reasons that we went with MATLAB.

Do you know a place to find more examples like these?

When I was re-learning Vim a few years ago, I found things like VimCasts to be incredibly useful -- reading documentation is one thing, but seeing how experts use the tools made a big difference in understanding for me. I suspect something similar would be helpful in moving beyond using Alfred as an application launcher and file explorer.

For what it's worth, I tried and failed to convert my team of scientists/programmers (heavy on the science; not so much on the programming) to Julia from MATLAB/IDL/C++ for a project we were kicking off ca. 1 year ago.

It's a really, really nice language that I find more consistent and easier to grok than MATLAB, but the deciding factor was the lack of the equivalent of MATLB toolboxes with all of their pre-rolled code that made our development as fast as it was.

Edit: I should have mentioned: the Julia add-on packages are multiplying quickly, and are starting to look mature! http://pkg.julialang.org/ I'm looking forward to them overtaking Mathworks on this front too.

The point of it is that the US government finds it politically inexpedient and costly having to pay Russia or United Launch Alliance[1] (who sometimes use Russian engines anyway[2]) in order to get people and equipment to space. SpaceX is an obvious path away from the Russia Space Agency / ULA.

For things that the government wants to launch from the US, having a second US-based option for space launch will get the US out of the bilateral monopoly that exists with ULA.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance [2] http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1408/20rd180delivery/

Nice!

When I was playing with convolutional neural networks a while ago, I found the following tutorial to be a good introduction to the topic: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/lenet.html

From my experience, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have horrifying traffic behavior, but at least everyone follows the same unofficial rules of the road. Eventually, you can somewhat reliably predict how someone on the road will behave.

Different areas in the US have very different driving cultures, and the transient nature of the DC area means that drivers bring their habits from wherever they came from, and so everyone is obeying slightly different driving cultural norms. It's a mess.

It's fairly commonplace in the federal government to have 'use it or lose it' leave. Only a certain amount of vacation hours can roll over from one year to the next, so those which you don't use and don't roll over are lost.

While it's not mandatory to take that leave, it's a very good excuse for why you want to take several days off.

See more here: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-adm...

I believe the ground station is optional. It's for organizations who want their data _really_ fast, before it would be available on the web interface.

It sounds like they might:

"We are testing this type of messaging across the U.S. with multiple providers" [end of 1st paragraph]

and

"The current transparency test ... is scheduled to end June 16 and we are evaluating rolling it out more broadly. Regardless of this specific test, we will continue to work on ways to communicate network conditions to our customers." [last paragraph]

Key quotes from the article:

"In the cease and desist letters, DMV Commissioner Richard Holcomb told representatives for both companies that he is “once again making clear” that they must stop operating in Virginia until they get the proper authority."

"Lyft will continue to operate in Virginia. From a spokesperson: 'We've reviewed state transportation codes and believe we are following the applicable rules. We'll continue normal operations as we work to make policy progress.'"

"The current name قلب means Heart, but is actually a recursive acronym for قلب: لغة برمجة pronounced ‘alb: lughat barmajeh meaning Heart: A Programming Language"

My Arabic ability has degraded badly, but I'm fairly sure the name of the language (قلب) can also mean things like 'inversion' or 'reverse.' That's fitting, of course, given the right-to-left character set.

That sounds awesome, but I'm a little skeptical. The app would have run a huge optimization problem over your schedule and preferences (how would it know that you had a friend that could drive you?) and the airline reservation systems (which don't exactly have a well documented API, even internally).

For now, at least, this sounds like a problem where human involvement is really useful.

Cranky Concierge, as someone mentioned below, is one great option.

Another is paying the ~$50 for lounge access for the day, to talk to the reservations agent at the desk inside the lounge. They're usually much more experienced, much more likely to spend the time to do creative routings, and haven't just had to deal with possibly several hundred angry passengers. In one case with United, I stepped out of line to speak to the gate agent after my flight was delayed several hours and paid to go in the lounge. I wound up getting the last confirmed seat on the next flight, whereas the person just in front of me in line had to go on the standby list (which she didn't clear). That $50 was _well_ worth it.

I used them for an award flight that got severely messed up.

I was pretty impressed with the service.

An example of an exceptional driver:

I once took a longer Uber Black ride to pick up my wife a few towns away, who was quite sick. Once I mentioned this to the driver, he drove noticeably more 'efficiently', offered me his phone to call to check on her once mine had died, and waited outside the building briefly to make sure everything was ok.

Also, I've got a bit of prior race driving experience, and this guy clearly grokked car control. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd spent a good bit of time on a track. He also, without drawing any attention to it in any way, adjusted the suspension settings from 'firm' when we were going around on- and off-ramps to comfort on the highway, to keep the ride comfortable and level.

I gave him a five-star rating and sent Uber customer support an email raving about him. Wish I could have done more.

From my (limited) experience in (not even close to F1-level) racing, the physical sensations of the tires being near the limits of grip are fairly obvious. The reason why traction control helps so much is that a computer can adjust power accordingly vastly faster than a human ever could.

The drivers are extraordinarily focused professionals during races. I can't imagine adding some signaling system that would let the driver react any faster than he already was.

I've also found the book "From Bash to Z Shell - Conquering the Command Line" very, very useful.[1] It's written as a beginner text, but even after ~15 years of *nix usage, I've learned a huge amount of new information, as well as learning the reasoning behind a number of the cargo-cult command line tricks that I had.

[1] http://www.bash2zsh.com/

The military isn't as conservative as many people think -- it's actually a pretty good representation of the voting preferences of the public at large.

"It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right," but "only 32 percent of the Army’s enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates." [1]

For reference, the officer corps of the military only makes up ~16% of the total number of service members.[2]

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2009/05/05/how_soldiers_re/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Pers...

They're under an affiliate rather than franchise model. I don't know enough about the differences to describe the differences other than to say that it seems to make Headquarters think they're unable to enforce standards once someone opens a gym.

I haven't done it myself, but to open an affiliate you need to:

(1) Write an essay.

(2) Pass their Level 1 certification class

(3) Have a website with a link to the Crossfit Journal

(4) Pay them $3000 (annually)

From: http://www.crossfit.com/how-to-affiliate

Not ensuring affiliate quality isn't really a dirty secret. They're pretty open about it.

From conversations I've had with higher-ups at Crossfit Headquarters, they're _terrified_ of a court finding them to have a franchise model, because that would open them up to all sorts of liability each time one of their affiliates does something dumb.

Per their legal interpretation, they become a franchisor if they do things like ensure quality or consistency.

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the soundness of their legal reasoning, but the negative effects for the clients are pretty obvious.

I get your larger point about reducing dependence on foreign oil, but ...

We actually get more oil from Canada than from the Middle East[1]. We do import the most from all of OPEC combined, but OPEC includes places like Venezuela, from where we get an awful lot of oil, Ecuador, Nigeria, and other countries that aren't in the Middle East.

Sorry for being a pedant.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=727&t=6

If you're willing to spend $14 for a more detailed tutorial, I'd strongly recommend _ tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development_ from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

It goes through common use cases, common customizations, and pair programming.

http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux

Likewise, many -- if not the vast majority of -- airline mile optimization blogs are basically credit card affiliate machines now. (See pretty much all of boardingarea.com)

They provide a useful service for some (here's how to use your frequent flier miles), but the affiliate links in nearly every post are rumored to be worth up to several hundred dollars per credit card signup.