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aerlinger

80 karma · joined February 6, 2011

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aerlinger··on Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?
> But really, Java is miserable without an IDE

Very true. It's also miserable with an IDE.

aerlinger··on How Transistors Work [video]
This video covers a particular type of transistor known as the Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs). These are more commonly used in analog applications like amplification and signal processing rather than digital logic (though they can be used in specialized digital logic circuits).

Today, field effect transistors (FETs) reign supreme for most IC applications such as CPUs and digital logic as they're more scalable and efficient than BJTs and have a very different structural design.

aerlinger··on Writing New System Software
> Also, their "no exceptions" rule only applied to work involving their legacy code.

That's not the case, the no exceptions rule applies to legacy and non-legacy code: https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions.

aerlinger··on Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
It sounds like you're describing a Readme file -- which by convention can exist as documentation for any folder and not just the project root. It's not adopted by all codebases but is becoming more common as source browsers like Github will render the readme as rich text when navigating to the folder.
aerlinger··on What is the Boeing 737 Max Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System?
Minor correction: I believe that was Air France flight 447, not 333, which involved an Airbus A330.
aerlinger··on Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
> This is on a couple of billion flights

You sure about that number? Seems incredibly high to me.

aerlinger··on Why Does the Neocortex Have Layers and Columns, Learning the World's 3D Structure
The short answer is no, the architectures don't transfer. At least not today. Biological neurons are much more complex, and therefore behave quite differently from neurons in neural networks.

To put things in perspective, we've fully mapped the connectome (map of neuron connections) of the simplest animal, C. Elegans, which has only about 300 neurons, yet we still can't simulate this organism's behavior computationally.

aerlinger··on Facebook admits rogue employees may have shown bias against conservatives
You can't give employees the power to filter content then label them as "rogue" when a bias inevitably emerges. Obviously any innate biases (overt or not) will influence what gets filtered.
aerlinger··on AWS Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
If you're running an application that runs on more than one server it's definitely worth checking out AWS OpsWorks. It's a huge time saver and extremely useful in integrating and managing setup, configuration, and deployment across a server/db/cache etc without any loss of control or customization.
aerlinger··on The Marriage of Figaro… and Rails 4.1 👰
I've used Figaro for a few projects and I've found myself very happy with it. It does one thing well without adding unnecessary complexity or overhead to my app. I feel that figaro-like capability in Rails is a win for the community and for figaro/laserlemon as well.
aerlinger··on Users complain their Dell 6430u laptops smell like cat piss
Hopefully this is an issue that can easily be resolved with one of their "critical updates"

(funny enough I went to their driver page (http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx) and it shows an error. Maybe they forgot to install the driver that drives their driver page?)

aerlinger··on Cursive Clojure: A Clojure IntelliJ plugin
Any chance you will roll this out to other JetBrains IDEs (RubyMine, Webstorm, PyCharm, etc...)?
aerlinger··on How To Take Exceptional Notes and Be Productive with Paper
It's funny that I read the title and immediately thought "Paper" was some new app or project on Github.
aerlinger··on The Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 4.0 (beta)
Great stuff. The Rails Tutorial was my top resource when learning Rails and I still use it as a reference (along with RailsSpace and Railscasts). I'm using Rails 4 on a few projects, so if I can lend any feedback on the future release let me know.
aerlinger··on FPGA x86 Processor
Awesome, that's a lot of connections to manage. Do you have any problems with memory or IO constraints on the Xilinx?