silentplummet

That's a pretty fast turnaround time. 6 minutes! I don't think the Air Force can even scramble jets that fast.

Would you care to point out exactly what part of the comment is "off-topic" pursuant to `the experience of women in tech`?

This is fair, but let's recognize that the discussion takes place in the context of a few well known individuals who have made an enviably successful career as freelance victims, who stridently prevaricate about the persecution they've experienced in the industry, but by all accounts don't actually do any work on technology at all.

One wrote a story for a mediocre video game and claims publicly to be a game developer. Is she a 'woman in tech'? It's like if I painted a mural on a house during construction this one time and went on claiming a career in carpentry. But don't you dare claim I'm not legitimately a carpenter, because hey, stop persecuting me!

The dichotomy isn't false, it's quite real and true, and it seems obvious to me that there are a handful of lamentably visible charlatans who are to blame for it. On the other hand, I could list dozens of women in the industry whose output I greatly respect and they seem to experience great success, but you never hear a peep out of them. It's almost like the more "tangentially involved" one is with tech, the more vocal one becomes about this supposed persecution...

OP doesn't go far enough, it's all he mentioned and an insider contract to move product manufactured by businesses owned by Bush's skull society buddies.

Research who Michael Chertoff is and his role in the Bush administration. Who do you suppose conveniently owns the corporations that manufacture the rapey scanners and other equipment that had to be procured for the security matinee?

>American's apathy and frankly ignorance is what gave scumbags a series of blank checks with immunity. Americans didn't do anything learning about Iraq WMD's, 2008 frauds, Snowden leaks, and so on. Largely nothing but griping.

Hold on, I think you're giving the average American way too much credit here. My mom has at various times said that the police state is a good thing, the FBI should be able to view anybody's data for any reason, and groups the state names as terrorists should be denied freedom of speech.

This is exactly correct. I flagged the submission.

The aviation community appreciates the importance of robust/utilitarian/minimal transmission of information. Look at the format of TAFs and METARs for instance, the raw format of how the weather data is actually transmitted.

It's incomprehensible to the layman because there is an extreme economy of transmitted data. To decode it you have to know a fairly large vocabulary of domain specific symbols and do some computations to retrieve the correct wind speed and direction, which are encoded.

This is so you can always get your weather, one byte at a time if needed.

KDEN 101353Z 33009KT 10SM FEW080 FEW180 FEW220 04/M09 A2985 RMK AO2 SLP079 T00441089

When we use a computer programming language, we are directing an abstract machine to interpret and manipulate data to get a result that we want. We have all the knowledge we need about the machine because we conceived and designed it ourselves.

DNA is like a programming language for a biological computer, a living cell. However, we don't know nearly everything there is to know about a living cell. We can't predict its mechanisms. There is no debugger. The compiler didn't come with an instruction manual. The code bootstraps itself into its own machine and runs in an environment we can't predict. And the syntax has been obfuscated and optimized by a genetic algorithm that's been running in parallel on quintillions of cores for a billion years.

Because the code executes on an unknown machine in an unpredictable physical environment, many features we might expect to see in a programming language are missing. This might be what he meant by "shallow".

A stain on the history of human civilization. A few men will become rich beyond imagination by a skillful appeal to base laziness and apathy. It's the renaissance of the disposable generation. Just toss the cup away. Toss the whole maker away when it breaks, too.

Make no attempt to contemplate where all of this trash ends up.

What's wrong with taking a few minutes to make the coffee and clean up after yourself? Did you know coffee grinds make a great nutritious supplement to household plants and gardens?

It's moot.

The train of the discussion, if you go and read the OP's link and inner links, is like this:

- Singletons are bad - Why are singletons bad? - They're not "real" OO, they're global state, they obfuscate dependency, etc, etc, etc - But what if I just legitimately have a ton of global state? - Use a database! Use a filesystem!

The last point in the chain admits that the first point is mistaken. "Use a database" is just saying "use someone else's code to solve your problem". What if the database is implemented using singletons? What if it uses code that isn't OO at all? All you've accomplished is to say "OO can't solve your problem, use something external". In fact, my problem is solved just fine by using a singleton.

And make 300,000 queries over TCP like getting the list of county names in a state, or getting the list of place names in a county, because my actual use case involves fuzzy matching an arbitrary subset determined by user input, of 18,000,000+ unsanitized data records against geographical place names so they can be assigned geometries?

I'd like the program to finish in 15 seconds or less, please.

Sometimes you really do legitimately have a lot of static, global state. For instance, consider a program that needs to reference local, national, and/or global geography and its metadata, on a wide scale, randomly. All the countries have subdivisions, and subdivisions of subdivisions, and so on all the way down, which are all inter-referential. You can easily hit 100 MB of state that is essentially constant, and needs to be indexed 50 different ways for millions of function calls per user action that would access it.

Why not manage access to such things in a singleton class?

Who cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view.

Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?

Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.

We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism.

Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.

Bit depth is not a measure of quantity, but of dynamic range. In other words, what matters is not only how many quantization steps you have, but how large of a space you are trying to map them over.

The examples in the article point to this obvious conclusion, but don't quite state it explicitly. The relationship between space and quantization effects is demonstrated for a physical dimension interpretation of space by the horizontal greyscale bar that stretches and contracts.

But what if you stretch and contract the dynamic range of your monitor itself? Each bit in the encoding space (naively) offers a doubling of dynamic range in the natural space, so even your 30 bit encoding can be stretched if you display it on a monitor that intends to output a contrast ratio many times greater than what we are used to.

For instance, imagine a monitor that could output light perceptually as bright as the afternoon sun, next to effectively infinite blackness. Will 30 bits be enough when 'stretched' across these new posts of dynamic range, or will banding (quantization) still be visually evident when examining a narrow slice of the space?

>Some positions are simply not worth discussing thoughtfully.

Who decides which is which? I guess you?

Why downvotes?

Sweden is almost 5,000 km away from Syria. What specifically relates these two countries in your comment?

What is Truth?

You're a smart guy who's thinking about the same kinds of things I am. How much do you like your day job?

>watching the news after dinner

Found your problem right here. The news no longer serves to inform. It's little more than a conduit for fear, terror, and doubt. Switch off the TV and go read some websites or books to find out what's happening in the world other than the latest development in a terrifying incident in which a handful of people out of nine billion died.

Better yet, take your daughter down to city hall or a county government meeting, and get involved with what is actually going to affect you tomorrow.

Something else those countries have (to varying extent) is strong public transportation and an ancient and coherent food culture, which has helped them resist the epidemic of obesity and diabetes we are suffering in the US. Does your book address this?

A mind is a fabulously diverse collection of parts, and each one of everyone's parts is shaped a little differently from everyone else's. It might be a little simplistic to assume that one strategy will work for anyone, sight unseen.

In my oughts and teens, I trained classical piano. Some days toward the end I was practicing for 4-6 hours during and after school, and I interviewed at the Boston conservatory. They told me they most likely would not accept me, but that's not really why I stopped. I knew I had to stop because despite over 15 years of serious intensive practice, I could still not make it through a 3 minute piece without my mind wandering off on some tangent of curiosity. At best my playing was distracted and unconvincing, and at worst (usual) I would screw up in the middle when my conscious attention came back to the present.

The only way I can stay task focused for longer than a few minutes at a time is by putting on headphones with a driving beat (EDM or similar) and stimulants. Caffeine is usually enough to get me through the workday. I'm a programmer now.

I made it through grade school and undergrad with respectable grades thanks to aptitude and quick learning, but I probably have an attention disorder that went undetected because of it.

>thinking and willing

One doesn't simply think away the structural defects in one's mind, any more than neurotypicals could transform themselves into genius IQs through force of will. A mind is shaped over time by internal and external influences, but plasticity drops off rapidly after the developmental years. Don't know your history of study, but why not browse through some videos of congenitally or traumatically brain-damaged individuals on youtube for some insight?

Can you put a baby or pet into a refrigerator? What about a freezer?

The child's inability to consent to sex is inherent to the attributes of the child, and derives in no way from the attributes of the child's partner. Therefore, any sex that a child participates in, regardless of any attributes of the partner, is non-consensual and therefore the child is being raped.

That's the argument you're up against.

Wouldn't it be relatively easy to have each citizen enter their passport number upon setting up the phone, and then do natural language processing so the phone would just block the transmission of any forbidden speech unless the owner held a diplomatic passport? Of course, technology can be circumvented but this would be a start.

Hey, don't knock Robin Hood. Watch the archery contest in reverse to see King John stuff the snake into his nether-parts.

It does have a 九 however.

Do the prices of industrial farm produce include the cost of cleaning up industrial farm pollution such as nitrate fertilizers, organophosphate biocide, and airborne products of fossil fuel combustion? What about the inefficiency caused by the entire massive pyramid of the attendant industries: transportation, chemical manufacture, distribution, marketing? And the cherry on top: the health care burden due to epidemic diabetes and obesity?

Think carefully before you decide what is cheaper.

Are you an expert?

In a 16-bit master, a noise shaping function is applied during down-conversion, by which quantization noise will be re-distributed so that most of the noise energy goes to the high frequencies (>15k) where it is completely inaudible.

For a good example of such a recording, see Ahn-Plugged (Ahn Trio, 2000, Sony BMG Masterworks). Fire up a good spectrum analyzer. You'll find the noise floor is well below <110 dB throughout most of the spectrum, even though it's 'just' a 16 bit CD.