phee

Is it really Apple's font? I believe WhatsApp on Android uses the same. I guess everyone identifies them as Apple's because WhatsApp is not popular in US. I find it way uglier than Google's, too much detail makes them unusable at small sizes.

Anyway I find emoji worsen the communication. There was a time where I could just use :) when I was smiling and :D when really laughing. Now there's so much different smiling variants that you have to use at least 3 laughing-with-tears to convey even a little amount of joy so the other side doesn't think you're just dismissing them with a normal non-laughing smile.

PS what's going on with scrolling in the second link?

Well, not sure where you read I drive close to anyone. What I'm trying to say is that erratic drivers are dangerous because you learn to predict what a normal driver would do in a typical situation (e.g. jogger too close to the lane => slow down to a safe speed and navigate towards the center).

If a self driving car doesn't reproduce the most common driving style the other drivers should be extra careful around it, some kind of mark on the outside could help.

I agree, legal or not, I very much rely on other drivers "signals" when driving. Over the years you learn to predict what the driver in front of you would do in a normal situation and adjust your driving in advance. I'm still able to break on emergency but when you can clearly see way ahead of the car in front there is no obstacle and yet they still brake it's extremely risky and frustrating. Young drivers here usually mark the car some way to warn you to be super aware of their unexpected behavior, I'd expect self driving cars would to the same.

As others have said, I would go with simulated annealing, or any non convex optimization algorithm you're more comfortable with.

But first I'd investigate what's really the gain of closely packing the candies. Would shipment costs increase with a bigger non completely filled box? wouldn't a non rigid bag be better? Do non closely packed candies get damaged with shipment? Do customers prefer closely packed candies?

I mean, let's say you get good enough local optimum configurations, then you have to exactly follow them packing the candies one by one... wouldn't it be easier to throw everything in a bigger bag and ship that?

> but in Italy they do expire

They do expire but you don't have to take a new drive test. It's more about periodically checking you're still physically fit to drive (e.g. you need to take a mandatory eyesight test every few years).

No idea, I don't use ubuntu. According to OP it's pulled by default in 12.04 and 14.04 as long as you choose to enable multimedia codecs at install time.

GStreamer is highly modular, so it makes totally sense to ship a set of plugins with subpar code, unclear patent/licensing, barely maintained in a dedicated package. They called it "bad", what do you expect?

The issue here is that distributions should offer more granularity with on demand codec installation. Does it make sense that to play an mp3 (not that sure this is the case) I get also the NSF decoder?

> Where there is no ground pin, North American power supplies must meet UL1310/CSA No.223

So, as far as I can tell, with a brief skim of the standard, a class 2 device should have no more than 0.5 mA leakage current, right?

I just measured the leakage from my macbookpro through my body to ground and it's about 50 μA. Well within the limits.

So I guess that's why they never did anything about it. Still amazing that you can clearly feel this current: if you lightly brush your wrist around the sharp edges it actually hurts. I wonder how 500 μA would feel.

right, it's so powerful it's also interfering with your sarchasm detector, apparently.

About reversed hot/neutral. We have these[1] symmetrical adapters in Europe. How are you supposed to know the proper orientation? You are not. Because you either have an earthed metal case or you have a double insulated device.

My magsafe adapters have a "double insulation" symbol, a tiny tiny one near "UL Japan", but still need a earthed prong to not feel any shock from the laptop metal case.

1. http://images.apple.com/support/assets/images/products/ac-wa...

The point is, how did Apple manage to get away with it for all these years? why weren't they enforced to ship only the properly grounded adapter?

connect the two prong adapter, take your shoes and socks off, feet on the ground... feel the vibe! the best shocks you get at the edges or at the pointy edges in that groove to lift the display up.

I definitely experience it a lot with math. I think the way we learn and "write" math is somewhat different from how our brain does it. So you need to give it a bit of time to translate everything to its language and back to the formalism we use.

Sometimes I feel like a problem is way easier in unconscious space, like I'm sure solution is there, I can almost see it but it needs time to encode it in the much slower conscious form.

About questions not being great, do they match what you could expect in a real world interview for a strategy quant position?

Guess like all engineering jobs, sometimes your job is so far from practice and so involved in regulations, meetings, standards, bureaucracy, reports, a little refcard with the most basic things can help to quickly reset your brain for the rare occasion where you need to actually do something.

"That - he said - nobody knows". It's kind of different from "we live in a sea of energy". I honestly think inertia is a lot easier to grasp than energy. It's a phenomenon you can experiment, describe and name, energy is more abstract.

Definitely too much, mostly by a vocal minority of the userbase. I guess design is not enough, you need good charismatic leaders to be able to sell it to the community, and you need to be strong enough to not care about the criticism.

That said, not all design is made equal, sometimes a little dose of reality check from the community can be helpful.

GNOME development has been mostly design driven since maybe 2008, the whole 3 era had professional designers on board since the beginning.

brew install mactex

And consider ditching natbib for biblatex/biber

> I got tired of having to fiddle with the system

Never understood this argument... I use both Linux and OSX, I spend the very same amount of time to get from a fresh install to a friendly dev environment. Install bunch of extra stuff (either with brew on OSX or with dnf on Linux), import my config files (git clone my-dotfiles-repo), done.

The only extra quirk on Linux is that I have to use a network cable until broadcom wifi drivers are installed.

The rest is a matter of personal tastes... I believe GNOME provides an optimal user experience and I like it way more than OSX, but both stay out of my way enough to not care that much.

Actually I believe this particular example is basic and pretty understandable C.

I was talking about the more broad idea of knowingly writing clever code to raise the entry barrier for new devs. Or just writing clever code for whatever the reason. It's almost guaranteed to backfire, to new devs who will have to maintain it or to yourself, when you will have to read it in a less smart moment.

>In quite a few cases non-trivial code doubles as filter for less skilled devs

Right, until the less skilled dev it's you, months later after you moved on to other stuff, and have to get back and fix some clever shit you wrote but don't understand anymore.

Unless you're doing numeric or performance critical work, code should be optimized for readability and maintainability.

Sure, but you'll agree that's not the common acceptation. Anyway, I guess it was a typo for costumes. I found interesting the implication that you need to "consume" to have fun.

Fun use of words given the context, consumers.

IIRC git was already a huge success, i.e. most big freesoftware projects (Linux, GNOME, xorg, gstreamer and many more) ditched other VCS for it, when github was still in its early stages.

As far as I can tell looking at Youtube videos, any Chinese chef able to hand pull noodles would learn how to do it in 5 minutes. It's an amazingly similar technique. I'd say it's more an issue of finding local people willing to learn it.

> Can you rather easily read Latin texts (assuming you haven't studied Latin, and are proficient in Sardo).

I guess the statement about "closeness" comes from the study (Pei, Mario 1949) referenced in the Wikipedia page about Sardinian language that somehow developed a metric and tested several languages against their parent one. Apparently Sardo has the lowest distance from Latin among Romance languages.

On a more practical side, I speak Sardo and studied Latin in high school. I cannot easily read Latin texts without a dictionary at hand and a little grammar review. I guess their similarity arises when you compare the written languages but most of us experience Sardo as a spoken-only language and many find it difficult to follow in written form. On the contrary we experience Latin as a written only language. Who knows, probably it would be a lot easier for us to understand spoken Latin.

The analogy is with anything with a brain, not just animals. Take a poorly trained human and put him in a decision-making position, he will probably make bad decisions. But no amount of training will guarantee you that he won't make any. The learning data set is just too big to be sure you won't have any bias.

As far as I can understand DB troubles aren't that urgent, but this way Germans believe they're the ones needing bailout so Merkel can get away with saving MPS without losing much consent.

Add slow loading... not really bad by itself but terrible when the partially loaded pages constantly move and rearrange as new elements are ready.