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sidww2

227 karma · joined June 4, 2010

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sidww2··on Don’t Blame Malaysia Airlines
But with no legal power of enforcement I'm guessing? I mean an airlines can always choose to follow the directives of agencies from other countries that have more stringent standards.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there should be definitely increased public pressure on airlines to include flight safety in their calculations. Or atleast not fly over active war zones..

sidww2··on Don’t Blame Malaysia Airlines
While it's nice to think that airlines can just rely on regulators to tell them which flight paths might be unsafe, the reality is that there's no international regulatory agency governing acceptable flight paths. There's a regulatory agency for every country and while one country might have stringent safety measures, another might not.

In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.

sidww2··on Random Solutions are Often Good Enough
"only" NP-hard? You know that NP-hard problems are equal to order harder than NP-complete ones, right?
sidww2··on More than half the Thiel Fellows plan on returning to school
Bill Gates and Zuckerberg didn't leave Harvard permanently though. They took a leave of absence which means they'd the option to come back if things went south. Also both (and Gates especially) were from quite well off families.
sidww2··on The Art of Computer Programming: Random Numbers
Your definition relies on the notion of probability though. So I'm not sure why you seemingly view Knuth's work as more fundamental than Kolmogorov's, etc.
sidww2··on The Art of Computer Programming: Random Numbers
I skimmed through the extract presented (didn't have time to go into detail) but I don't see a formal definition of any kind presented in the extract. Could you point me to where it is? And if it's not in the extract, then could you quote it here?

Pseudorandomness is not the same thing as randomness but most algorithms today work on pseudorandom numbers so the concept is important. My impression was that that's what you were referring to.

PS :- FYI I didn't downvote your comment. Actually upvoted as your post made me discover some new math (various notions of randomness by kolmogorov, von mises, martin-lof) :)

sidww2··on The Art of Computer Programming: Random Numbers
What? The modern definition of pseudorandomness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness#Pseudorandomn...) was figured out in the 80s through the works of Blum, Goldwasser, Micali, Goldreich, etc. and is not hand-wavy at all. It's pretty rigorous and reliable.
sidww2··on Fixing the Ph.D.
Becoming a professor is hardly the only reason to do a PhD in the sciences.
sidww2··on Performance comparison of Functional C++ 11, Java 8, JavaScript and Wolfram
In my experience Java is usually at most 50% worse than C++. This is only the case though when I write Java with minimal use of objects (so no generics for instance). Also this is in comparison to C++ code that's not too micro-optimized (so mostly idiomatic) and that is not compiled via profile-guided optimization for instance.
sidww2··on Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer
ACARS is what the article seems to be saying is how they know. Last ACARS transmission was 1:07 am. Any pilots here who know whether ACARS actually transmits FMS information?

Edit: And if the report is correct and ACARS sent the information all along, why in the world did it take them 10 DAYS to find this out?

sidww2··on MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection, says paper
Unless you're trying to commit suicide. But then why would fly northwards instead of southwards if you want to commit suicide? I've a hard time believing the 5000 ft statement. But if it's true, then well, damn.
sidww2··on MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection, says paper
That's only for the Andaman and Nicobar islands though which are very far from the mainland. I'd be surprised if there's no 24/7 radar for the mainland.
sidww2··on Helsinki’s personalized bus service is like Uber for public transit
This is called the Dial-a-ride problem or pickup and delivery problem with time windows in optimization literature in case anyone is interested.
sidww2··on IMF strongly suggests countries tax the rich to fix deficit
Wealth is not income though. Higher wealth taxes would go a long way but then you again have the problem of the wealthy simply moving their wealth out or not bringing it to the high-tax country in the first place.
sidww2··on The Ph.D.-Industry Gap
It seems to me that their must be more to this situation -- I'm doing a PhD in CS and I don't know of a single PhD I knew in undergrad (top 20 program) or grad (top tier program) who wasn't able to find a job right after graduation -- and by that I mean a job that payed more than what an undergrad straight out of college would get (though it may not involve any research). This was irrespective of the subfield in which the PhD in CS was.

It sounds very weird that someone coming from a Stanford CS PhD -- a top tier PhD program in the heart of the Silicon Valley would not be able to find a job quickly...

At any rate, whatever the circumstances, from anecdotal experience, such a case is almost unheard of for a PhD in CS coming from a good program.

sidww2··on Microsoft’s best hope after Ballmer? A break up
Xbox/Bing/Hotmail might have a hard time staying afloat w/o the profits from Windows/Enterprise/Office.
sidww2··on Nimrod: C + Macros + GC
I don't think forcing potential users to compile a program is going lower the barrier much. A lot of the users could be biologists and they would likely not know how to compile the source. I do agree that the software should be open source.
sidww2··on Nimrod: C + Macros + GC
I'm in CompBio and the sense I get is that it's a lot easier to get someone to try your tool if all you have to do is provide them the jar which they just have to click on and it runs. Whereas with compilation, you first have to make sure you have all the platforms covered and then force the potential user to select the right executable for the platform.
sidww2··on Nimrod: C + Macros + GC
What would be really killer is if it could have bindings to Java. Then one could take advantage of the JVM being present everywhere w/o having to do a separate compilation for every platform.
sidww2··on [dead]
Pittsburgh down for the past 5-10 minutes though I was able to access it twice in that time frame.

EDIT: Seems to be backup. Wonder what caused the hiccup.

sidww2··on I cannot afford to go back to engineering school
Maybe you were just a more distinguished candidate during graduate admissions? Also, if you're international, PhD admissions are a lot less biased against internationals compared to undergrad admissions (most top universities have 8-10% internationals for undergrads vs. ~50% for PhDs)
sidww2··on Why are most browsers developed in C++?
According to the programming language shootout it seems it's close to the right range -- The median speed of Java 7 is twice as slow as C++. It also meshes well with my experience -- though I can only get "close" to C++ performance if I use mostly primitive types.
sidww2··on How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
By good, do you mean faculty positions elsewhere or is it hard in general to even get say senior jobs in the industry after being denied tenure?
sidww2··on Foreign Student Dependence
In the sciences, almost everyone - domestic or international is paid a stipend. It's more accurate to think of PhDs are paid researchers rather than students. Taking classes is not the point of doing a PhD so it's not education in the sense that doing a Bachelors or Masters is education

For Masters, everyone pays tuition - unless one can find a research assistanship where the professor is willing to fund part or all of the cost, scholarship, etc.

sidww2··on In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
If the product you're working on is a long term project of the company, it's likely you'll leave before it's over in which case there will be a future person who'll have to figure out your code. In such a case, documentation is essential as otherwise this person would have to contact you after you've moved onto other projects and may have forgotten the intimate details of the code making things tricky.
sidww2··on In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
Usually though that product code will be worked on by many other people. The same is often not true of academic projects.
sidww2··on In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
To be fair, the job of the academia is to do research. Coding is just a means to an end. If on the other hand, you're distributing your code or it's intended as an ongoing project, then good comments and architecture are important (Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student).
sidww2··on Poll: Do you have a 3d printer?
Maybe you want to have another option for people who don't own a 3d printer but have access to one?
sidww2··on John C. Reynolds, Eminent Programming Language Researcher, has Died
I go to CMU (where he was professor) and we got an email about this yesterday evening.
sidww2··on JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE
It wasn't an April Fools joke http://blog.jetbrains.com/objc/2013/04/c-ide-an-april-fools-...
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