tassl

Even though I live in the US I am not really sure how the royalties system works here. In Spain there is a society, called SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores Espanyoles) that collects the money from the artist that they represent. This society is really related with the current political party in power (PSOE) and since the judicial power has been consistently saying what the current links says (linking to copyright infringing material is no infringement) they are pursuing a law to evade the judges and close websites without any requirement from the judge.

If a hair salon (for example) in the US plays music of an artist, do they have to pay a canon/fee for playing this music? I am asking because I am still shocked than in Spain they have to pay the SGAE...

Investment in Spain has been (traditionally) far away from technology. Starting a company in Spain is not easy and people are generally looking for a stable job, they don't want to take the risk of starting a new company.

In my opinion, Spain doesn't have (in general) the culture of the entrepreneur even though some cities (like Barcelona) are trying to change it (22@, for example: http://www.22barcelona.com/index.php?lang=en).

In some sense, I had this feeling when I came to the US for the first time. I was used to study in Universities were the failure % could be easily below 10% for some courses (Calculus, Algebra being an example). In most of the courses the best grades were below a 7 out of 10. And no, there were no A+ to anybody if the grade was not 9+ out of 10.

In the US, though, it is difficult is to fail a course. I really think that failing a course requires big amount of effort.

I think that neither of both systems are really effective. The spanish version can be depressing and the students are not willing to study for the sake of learning but to pass (the average number of years for a engineering undergrad is 7 years back when the engineering was 5 years of study). On the other hand, most students in the US lack passion and are not going to study since most of the time they don't need to study to pass the courses.

The only way I have been able to watch Netflix in Linux was with a VM running Windows XP (max RAM and Graphic card power). In my first trial I tried it with 1GB of RAM and the sound was not working fine.

Of course, this is not a real Linux experience but... at least it worked.

In the original link there are useful problems for a web developer, but they are far from being science problems.

You can't compare stealing $5000 with streaming $5000 worth of music/video; they are completely different concepts. By streaming you are not stealing material from anybody nor it can be proven that it affects negatively on sales.

disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct have a felony versions when weapons or drugs are present.

I think that this is a big "if".

Unless they have changed the definition, back when I studied it the mole was defined as the number of particles found in 12 grams of C (C-12), 6.022*10^23.

So the mole depended on the gram.

a) You're still talking about physical copies, which is not the case. b) He is not selling anything.

He was not selling nor streaming (copying) anything, he was directing you to the "store" where you could watch streaming video.

You don't need to have the best engineers/doctors teaching. Being an expert on something doesn't make a person a good teacher, which is a more important factor than the knowledge of that person.

But a person can be a good teacher without being the best in his area.

I am not arguing the utility of having a Spanish HN nor I want to criticize the utility of knowing English. But for some Spanish /Latin American Hackers time is also a constrain and they might not have time to be fluent at a foreign language. Read it, understand it... sure, but fluently writing/talking requires time.

I have been lucky to be born in a region with 2 official languages and more lucky to have a 3rd language in my family and being able to learn English and French in school. But... this is not normal in the rest of Europe.

In any case, I am not sure if I have understood correctly your last sentence. Did you mean "pay maybe more"? I am not sure of what you are implying...

This might be a little bit off-topic, but has somebody played with the tools that blind cs programmers use to program? Read/write/navigate,...

What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?

The problem here is that you were comparing yourself with the rest of the people.

I have trained track and field for some years now and if I would try to compare myself with Michael Johnson, I would always be a failure. But in every sport you are (at the end) just trying to improve yourself and competing against yourself. My point is that you could have been doing a good game (for you) even without being anything similar to Pele, and maybe they were praising you for that.

It depends on what are you referring to with the real world. Are you talking about money? Yeah, sure, you can even have 200x accomplishment with .1x effort.

The message is the culture of effort, and I could not agree more. If you "teach" your kids to optimize their time, for them a test score of 8/10 would be enough if they need to dedicate 5 times less time that they would have to get a 10/10. Eventually this will derive into decreasing more and more the effort and, with it, the results. Knowing when to optimize is also a learned lesson, which comes (again) from effort, failures and success.

I have felt what they describe in the text, and... I wish somebody would have praised my effort back then. If we check most people that have accomplish something in their lives, they have done through effort. Yeah, sure, more variables are needed (you can't run like Usain Bolt or think like Gauss only by effort) but if there is a common characteristic, this is effort.

Yes, I agree with you that the Spanish housing bubble was (and still is) insane. I don't have current numbers, but in this website you can check the number of houses started in Spain and compare them with other countries: http://www.casastristes.org/files/viviendaNuevaEuropa/vivien... (link in spanish, but numbers are universal). Since 1999 building more houses than France and Italy together; while in other countries there is a lot of investment in technology, in Spain they invest on houses.

I was not talking about myself. I worked in Barcelona for a while and moved to the US on 2009. Usually engineers don't have a 8-6 working schedule; in the company where I worked it was more normal a 8AM-9PM. 1h for lunch. And during deadlines it was "normal" to stay until 1-2AM. And back at 8, of course. All that for 15K. Sounds great, doesn't it? I left the job after 6 months because I considered that it was not a "good deal". It is true that I could be close to 30K in 1-2 years but...

I can't talk for all american engineers, but people that I know are close to the 100-120K without working 50+ hours. The difference on holidays is one of the biggest differences, that's true. And social benefits. As for your last comment, foreign engineers should definitely consider that!! Spain universities are pretty good (our engineering undergrads were 5 years until the current Bologna system) and engineering programs are considered really tough.

Born and raised, but currently not living in Barcelona; I moved to California for Graduate studies.

As you probably should know by now it's a really beautiful city. And probably the city with more entrepreneurs on the country, which unfortunately doesn't say much (given the country that we are talking about).

Being born in a foreign country, I have to smile when I see a blog entry like this one. I agree that the salary is relative to where people are living and I get the point of the writer. To specify an example, let's say that some Silicon Valley engineer wants to buy a $1M house. With $100K salary, it will make 10 years of salary.

Now, let's move to another country: Spain in this case. A normal salary for a junior engineer is around 15K/year (euro) up to 30K for a senior developer. A big house (for europeans, 950sq ft) in a normal neighbor in Barcelona costs around 400K (euro), which would be like... 26 years of salary?

And I have compared different houses, for what I have seen, in general the price $/sq.ft. is pretty similar between both cities.

As I said, I understand that the engineers might not get back what they produce (and I agree) but I just wanted to give another point of view.

There were 2 projects back in the university that made me improve my programming skills: building an OS (multithreading based on a DOS system) and building a compiler (using JavaCC).

In a different way, learning Lisp and Prolog, which basically widen your perspective.

Also, I have a question; most people say that they learn by reading good code, which I agree. Do you have any recommendation of a piece of code that you consider it has "something to teach"?

The function diverges for x>2, converges to 1 if x=1 and converges to 0 if x<1.

For the described problem, the incorrect assumption is that you can find a x st b = x^(x^(x^(x...

Where b>=4.

Edit: as RiderOfGiraffes pointed, the series does converge for x=sqrt(2)

From the technological point of view I can just say wow! Congratulations, this is a great app.

Aside from that, and as a Spanish native speaker, the translated text sounds really weird to me. Even without knowing English I would be able to understand the translated text (at least the example that you gave) but it can be improved. But this is the only con that I see to your application. Probably you're already working on that, but I thought that you might like this input.

Great idea!!

There is only one global optima with the defined fitness function, and is the one with f=0. There are different local minimum when there is no mutation (for example, if all chromosomes on the initial population don't have the letter W, it will be impossible to create the target unless mutation is used).

The other answers that you are thinking on have different fitness (the comparison is target[i] ?= guess[i]).

In any case, I like this examples because they currently show the process that the GA has to converge in a way easy to see/understand. Of course, in real life it is more used when there is no information of the function to minimize (optimize), or the function is not convex in our search domain, which can lead to getting stuck in a local minimum using other search methods.

I have always felt that the fancy name increased the interest on the topic.

It was also way more efficient to drive a horse than any of the first cars.

The key here is not this precise application but the technology that it implies.

Even though the global idea sounds great, according to the sensors that they have I don't think that such precision is possible. I am based only in guesses, but with a normal camera, and CMOS sensor (for depth sense using a infrared projector) that have not been calibrated, the software can be able to determine different shapes (bodies) that are moving (background subtraction to detect the velocity, for example) but is not able to have enough precision to even distinguish the different fingers of a hand.

As I said I haven't played or used Kinetic, nor I know the software that is running, but it seems to me that they are parameterizing estimated movements and mapping them into the space of allowed movements of your "avatar".

I have always thought that GA have won lot of acceptance for its name. Don't get me wrong, they are great to solve some problems, and even though they don't assure us to converge into a global minimum on our space, they are more robust than other methods to search in the whole space.

We can see a relation with the humans, I am pretty sure that we are not a global minimum in evolutionary terms, but... certainly we are at least close to be a local minimum.

I started eating paleo around 10 months ago, so I guess my opinion can be a little bit biased regarding this topic.

In any case, after reading the article, I am not sure about the conclusions done by most of the newspapers that I have read.

1. Most of the flour that they are talking about is referred to roots, which in most cases are encouraged in the paleo diet. 2. I miss a more detailed study about the grains that they found: amount of phytates, lectins, gluten... 3. I am also curious about the methods that they used to cook/processing the grains to avoid poisoning. In the study they talk about the process prior to eating as: "The flour would have undergone a multistep processing involving root peeling, drying, and finally grinding using specific tools".

A couple of questions... How do you get rid of the signal rebound due metallic presence in the robot?

provides an object a unique ID with extremely small uncertainty, whose location is inferred by lowerlevel sensory processing

How precise is your method to locate the object? Are you using an array of antennas to calculate the position of every RFID?

Even though it doesn't use any learning process, I think that you might find this video interesting:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3757897210640719617#

The control uses the dynamics of the robot to optimize a trajectory to increase the weight that the robot can lift.

For your last sentence, I think that you have never trained track and field. While 30-40 minutes of jogging is usually done by athletes, the core training is done by series of shorter distances that you have to compete with.

As an example, I have been training for 400m the last years. Being a short distance (although when you reach 300m you feel that is way too long) it is basically trained by repetitions of shorter distances (150/300). And by basically I mean that sometimes there will be longer distances (specially off-season) and tempo.

In general, people that train for 5000, 10000m don't run 1h to train their endurance. They will do, for example, 25x400m r:30", or shorter distances like 3000, 2000 or 1000.

There is no secret on that, you are using your body to run a higher pace that is used to, while running 1h will make your body be used to this slower pace and thus you will not improve your endurance.

If you ask me, I would say that endurance training is not worth it, and that training high intensity is better for your body.

Although the price is excessive, I think that we can't forget the target of the device: students. If this tool can improve the student experience, reduce the costs of the books during the year and enable them to do some homework (I haven't tested the system and I have no idea of all the gadgets available)... it might be a good idea for them.

I look back at my Middle School years when I had to carry a bag full of books every day and... 5.5lb doesn't sound that heavy.

Also, this technology has been developed for students. If the device ends up being successful, I am more than sure that other tablets will appear with a broader target.

A human has a really good vision system. We can easily differentiate the window (for example) from the rest of the environment without problem. Also, we have a pretty good 3D system, and with practice we can process the relative position of objects and use this processed information to control the helicopter/quadrotor.

In this project they are using Vicon to determine the position of the quadrotor and the window. Once that information is processed, the quadrotor is properly controlled and has good enough "feedback", the human control can no longer be a match for the precision of a computer.