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tjl

414 karma · joined February 19, 2014

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tjl··on Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It?
They're also pretty bad at rolling out their services to countries outside of the US. In Canada we've been told that we're getting Amazon's MP3 music store for years, but it still hasn't come, let alone any Amazon video. I'm actually somewhat surprised that we got Kindle books, although that was years after the US. You can forget things like the Echo at all.

Amazon Prime is just shipping in Canada. Where I live, I'd get shipments about a day sooner than free shipping so it's not worth it for me.

tjl··on Professors’ unprofessional programs have created a new profession
A former Ph.D. student of my supervisor(s) in grad school designed his linear algebra code in such a way that he was able to separate it out and create a business from it. I've seen the rest of the code and it's a bit of a tangled C++ code, but the linear algebra classes were really well designed.
tjl··on Water extraction on Mars for an expanding human colony
A space station at one of the Lagrange points is likely. If one wanted to do a space station near the moon, L1 and L2 would work. L1 is on the Earth side while L2 is on the dark side of the moon. L4 and L5 have long been proposed for long-term space stations.
tjl··on On asking job candidates to code
Considering that much of what's on people's Facebook pages is against the law to even ask about (in some jurisdictions) it's probably a wise choice. Stick to what's provided by the candidate. I provide a link to my LinkedIn page on my résumé, but nothing on it touches on areas I know would cause problems. Most of my coding is in private projects so I generally don't bother with listing my GitHub.

For example, I know that where I am it's against the law to ask if someone is married during the hiring process and that's pretty clear on many Facebook pages.

tjl··on The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games (2014)
When I was much younger, I used to play Dune 2 while listening to Smashing Pumpkins. Now, whenever I hear Smashing Pumpkins, I'm taken back to playing Dune 2 all over again.
tjl··on Julia: A Fast Language for Numerical Computing
Looking at it, I don't see anything dealing with sparse matrices or factorization (e.g., LU, QR, SVD). All the Java libraries for SVD are pretty bad. Plus, none of your examples mention double precision. Does the library support it?

I find it interesting in the Numpy comparison no mention of the BLAS Numpy is linked to is mentioned, but it is for Nd4j. Numpy is highly dependent on a good BLAS and the basic Netlib one isn't that great.

tjl··on Veil of secrecy lifted on Pentagon office planning micro-drone swarms
Dune hunter/killer drones? Although, those weren't actually autonomous.
tjl··on Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment
Hmm. It's been held up in court that companies are people in regards to other laws, so it's an interesting argument.
tjl··on Ghost in the Shell remains our most challenging film about technology
One thing I really liked in Arise is that they showed how Togusa joined the Major's team (and how they joined Section 9). We got some good back story on Togusa in Ghost Tears.

Unfortunately, Alternative Architecture (and the Arise OVAs) are all behind Funimation's subscriber paywall. I've seen the first three Arise OVAs on Netflix (although OVAs 1 and 2 come down today). The fourth OVA hasn't come to Netflix (at least here in Canada).

tjl··on Ghost in the Shell remains our most challenging film about technology
Dennou Coil has been licensed by Maiden Japan.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-02-23/maiden-japan...

It's coming out on Blu-Ray and DVD on June 28th. It's possible it might become available for streaming at some point after that.

tjl··on Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
Another problem with open access journals is that they generally have lower impact factors. The impact factors of the journals you publish in play a big role in tenure and promotion decisions for professors.
tjl··on Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
For my PhD thesis I used some papers from the 1800s along with many from the 1900s to 1950s because those were when the foundation papers were published in one area I was working in.
tjl··on Google Launches Fresh-Grocery Deliveries
In Kitchener-Waterloo there's two different online grocery stores, Grocery Gateway (which has been operating since the '90s) and Grocera (which is very new). I've been using the former for a long time. I checked out the latter (which is backed by Google) and the markup was too high on the items I checked over Grocery Gateway. Tofu was $4.99 vs. $2.49 and soy milk was over a dollar more (I have health-related dietary restrictions). Grocery Gateway is operated by a store chain, Grocera picks them up from local stores.
tjl··on After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns?
AirBnB might benefit the customer, but can negatively impact others in the area. For example, if someone is renting out an apartment in a secure building, just giving the keys to an arbitrary someone you're decreasing everybody else's security. Similarly for a house, if a house is being regularly rented by different people, it impacts the rest of the neighbourhood.

In my building, renting out with something like AirBnB is against their occupancy agreement. While I don't know everybody in my building, I certainly know everybody on my floor. I used to know everybody in the building, but a number of people have moved out and I haven't learnt all the new people yet. I'd be really pissed if I found out that someone was offering an AirBnB rental right next to me.

tjl··on How to Distribute Binaries for OS X Using Homebrew
This kind of stuff is why I abandoned MacPorts. In many cases, I can get by with the system software and I don't need MacPorts to install a duplicate of something. I found that it was taking up a lot of space on my drive. Given that my main drives are relatively small SSDs, I appreciate that Homebrew doesn't require that I switch to a different version of a system tool in many cases.

The worst offender for MacPorts was TeX. I had an official install the latest version from TeX Live and MacPorts wanted to install a second version of TeX. I think they fixed it so you can use a TeX Live version, but it was definitely an issue.

tjl··on How the Internet will disrupt higher education’s most valuable asset: Prestige
My university (at least the engineering department, but I think all the STEM departments) uses a weighting scheme to adjust grades. They look at the average that students from that school gets after the first year and adjusts the entrance grades down accordingly. So, if a student who had a 95% average coming out of high school went to a school where people generally had about a 75% after first year and an entrance average of 90%, you'd reduce that student's entrance average by 15% so they'd count as having an 80% for comparison to other students. It's not quite as simple as this as the calculations are more detailed (one needs to account for comparing courses and schools with no or few previous students), but it's roughly the idea.

With this scheme, if a school inflates their grades it will have a larger adjustment down. It's entirely based on past performance of people from the school, so there's no standardized tests to worry about. Theoretically, one could have an adjustment upwards, but I've never heard of it happening (I participated in department meetings where they discussed admissions in general). The adjustments are usually somewhere between 20 and mid to high 20s percent. Some are higher (not many), but a few are lower but not by much.

tjl··on Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software
Have you tried Bowtie or BeardedSpice?

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-users-heres-control-streami...

I use Bowtie for a few things, but haven't really tried it for this purpose as I pretty much just use iTunes as I have several decades worth of music I've bought in it.

http://bowtieapp.com

tjl··on Why expat Americans are giving up their passports
One of the supervisors for my Master's thesis was American but has lived in Canada since the '70s. He hasn't bothered to get Canadian citizenship. He's now retired living in BC. I'm wondering if he'll do it now.
tjl··on On Google's self-driving car acident rates
Is Google only testing in California? It seems that the data for accidents was given for the whole of the US, but it should be compared to California only. I don't know if it's noticeably different or not, but I'd think that snow and ice would increase the accident rate in some states.

Snow and ice I think would provide a challenge for self-driving cars.

tjl··on Amazon's customer service backdoor
Hover also has free whois privacy by default.
tjl··on How Target failed in Canada
That's not entirely true. I know that Target in Waterloo was in one of the major K-W malls that gets a lot of traffic. Even still, the few times I shopped at the Target, it was dead.
tjl··on Google Paid Apple $1B to Keep Search Bar on iPhone
Google owns Doubleclick.
tjl··on Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab
I'm not sure. I haven't looked at it in a very long time. The open source implementations I know reasonably well are: Maxima (and therefore Sage), SymPy, and Axiom. I did some work on a integration test suite for Sage before I had to put it on hold. It was based on a suite from Axiom.
tjl··on Refactorator: Xcode Plugin That Refactors Swift
There's a way to edit all instances of a variable name in Xcode already. I haven't tried it with constants, though as I usually take time to think of the names for my constants so I don't have to rename.
tjl··on Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab
The problem I have is that there is at least one Matlab toolbox I haven't been able to find an open source alternative. I use parts of the System Identification toolbox, but the parts I use aren't the parts that are implemented in the Octave one I found. There are tools in it that will do a transfer function estimate and various things with frequencies that I haven't found an alternative. I've bought the text that covers the toolbox and sometime when I have the time, I'll try and implement it.
tjl··on Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab
I don't think so. Last I checked, the most complete implementation (at least in open source) was Axiom.
tjl··on Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab
I use Maple 16 (I haven't bothered buying any of the newer versions) and it has the Java GUI. The GUI is pretty bad, but if you make sure you work in worksheet mode rather than document mode, you get the old style at least. I also turn off the sidebar. I don't find it to be too bad on my Macs.

I still use Maple mainly because of familiarity. I've been using it since the 90s. I'm a contributor to SymPy, but even then I can think through the problem quicker using Maple.

tjl··on I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier
It's not exactly proprietary since Apple open sourced the ALAC code in 2011.

https://alac.macosforge.org

Also, someone has wrapped it to build with different tool chains.

https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac

tjl··on You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs. DRM, Round Two
Tor has gone DRM-free for their e-books as well and Baen has been DRM-free from the start.
tjl··on You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs. DRM, Round Two
That's basically what happened. Apple wanted to go DRM-free (see Steve Job's Thoughts on Music letter) and did so as soon as they were able according to their contracts. But before they did, the publishers offered DRM-free music to Amazon first allowing them a head start on Apple.
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