alf

Which begs the question... If they don't know enough about rockets to build them, how can they possibly know how to safely repair them?

MediaCrossing, Inc. is hiring a full time Senior Data Engineer/Data Architect.

The position is in Stamford, CT, or full-time remote. Several members of the engineering team are working remotely in Boston, MA, others are based in Europe.

MediaCrossing is a leading independent digital media trading company based in the world’s alternative trading capital, Fairfield County, Connecticut. The company is an important innovator in a new global tradable asset class, Digital Media Advertising. We combine a world-class engineering team with deeply experienced, productive delivery and business development teams.

A full description is available here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/51642/senior-software-...

If you have questions, email me <allen.lee at mediacrossing.com>

Are you referring to skiing? Tribes is an interesting example of a "hack" that completely re-invents the game (in most people's opinions, for the better).

For those not familiar, a bit of gaming history: Tribes is a FPS where the players have jetpacks and can fly around in the air. The jetpacks have limited energy, so players ended up having to spend a lot of time on the ground too. One particularly innovative aspects of Tribes was it's expansive maps. It was like a Battlefield game, but 5 years earlier. By only running and jetting, it could take minutes to get across a map, which is important considering the primary objective of the game was to move the opposing team's flag from side of the map to your team's side.

The hack was: players discovered that jumping at the instant the player lands on downhill surface caused them to accelerate in the downhill direction. Mashing repeatedly on the jump key going down a large hill would cause the player to accelerate all the way down the hill, as if there was no friction with the ground (hence "skiing"). Someone wrote a script that automated this act so all a player had to do was hold down the jump button instead of pressing it repeatedly.

This bug completely re-invented the game into something no one imagined it would be. Many players embraced it, I am sure some did not. It added a layer of complexity and made the game addictively fast paced (with skill you could now get across a map in seconds). The competitive community embraced the new style of play and the developers had no choice but to not patch the bug. This bug arguably became the defining gameplay aspect of Tribes.

The lesson? As mentioned here many times, the users are what make your product special. Sometimes they will invent uses for it you never imagined :)

I fell into this trap too. I got a stress fracture on my shin from a tendon pulling on that area much more than the bone was used to. It took months to heal.

The feet are a complex tangle of muscle, bones, tendons, and nerves. They doesn't respond to increases in stress as well a muscle would. Bones and tendons can need months or even years to build up the strength to handle the stress of serious running barefoot. People who try this should ease into it slowly. Like over weeks or preferably, months.

It looks like the GoPro and the remnants of the balloon helped it. The extra mass of the GroPro body allowed it to fall flat with the camera and ballon allowing it to spin on it's way down, like a maple seed. Also it looks like it landed on the aluminum side facing down with GroPro body hitting the ground first.

Still pretty cool though.

The page mentions "This is an experimental course that will probably have some bugs and kinks. It may or may not be related to the plenary talk I'm giving at PyCon'2012 (wink ;-)". So there are hopefully going to be slides at some point.

Coincidentally, preparing for my compilers class this semester, I was just wondering if it would be easier to write in Python instead of SML, which the class uses. I was just looking into PLY while googling around. Really cool that Beazley would do this, although for purely selfish reasons I wish he would release the material sooner :p

As a programmer, would I choose to be a member of a community based on open and free information, one where contributions are open to all of humanity, or a community built to feed the bottom line of a large corporation? Especially considering large profits are possible with with both, why would I choose the latter?

I couldn't finish reading this either. It was too disturbing.

Before anyone jumps to vilify the China or the Chinese for this, remember that these kinds of evils have historically been perpetuated by all people in the past or presently. This story is a chilling reminder: people are still belligerent, tribal animals, no matter how advanced our culture or technology.

Direct link to HTML5 version. http://www.baroque.me/

Beautiful.

I like Louis C.K., was made aware of his new video through this posting, and just bought the video, but I don't think this belongs on HN.

I think I first read it here on HN actually :)

I think this trick is so great because it's so counter intuitive to a person in the mindset of getting something done. Stopping when you still have momentum seems counter productive, and it is in the short term, but you get more done in the long run.

The Hemingway Trick: Stop in the middle. Never stop working at the natural barriers. They next time you start working, the barrier will be the first thing you encounter, and you won't have the momentum to overcome it. Try to stop writing mid-chapter, or mid-sentence (or mid function). Know how to finish, but stop working. The next time you start, you know exactly what needs to be done. There will even be the urge to start working to finish the unfinished.

Nearing the end of a unproductive day, accept that the day was not productive, start on what you will work on tomorrow, do a little, and stop in the middle.

I do mostly C and Python in Emacs, but have recently switched to using Emacs in a full screen terminal (iTerm). It works pretty well, and is the only environment I can make consistent across every platform that I use. All I need is an terminal and an SSH client :)

I have a '10 MBA 13. It's really an almost ideal laptop.

Pros:

-It runs a Unix based OS, but one that I don't have to install and configure myself.

-It's thin and light

-Battery lasts 7 hours (although recently I've been getting ~5:30, which is not quite enough for "all day usage")

-The display is high res. Has the same res as many 15" displays.

Cons:

Limited storage and RAM with huge markups for upgrades.

edit: love is probably too strong a word for any machine, esp. one you didn't design & build yourself.

What incentive would hardware venders have to provide open source drivers for a tiny enthusiast operating system? No other OSs have had that requirement. It's hard enough to get working binary drivers.

I don't think that all the Linux driver issues would be solved with the release of source code. Driver code already makes up a large majority of the kernel. The sheer amount of code contained in binary drivers would dilute the already relatively small number of volunteers available. The best way to increase the quality of Linux drivers is to get venders to invest more in Linux driver development. The only way to do that is to vote with your wallets by supporting Linux friendly hardware, and increasing the size of the Linux market.

Really interesting question. I wonder if there are any small countries willing to give it a try.

I bet there are more countries without a military than ones without military secrets.

This is really more AMD throwing in the towel vs. Intel. It's really disappointing to see a competitor leave such an important market. I'm much more disappointed to see the X86 market go from 2 to 1, than I am happy to see the ARM market go from 4 to 5.

Agreed. Societal norms are needed to build the trust required for all large enough groups to function efficiently. This is why there is less crime in mono-cultures: everyone is a member of the same social order. The danger is that agents outside of the particular social order (hackers in this case) aren't bound to the rules within that social order.

Visual proofs are uniquely beautiful.

See the 2 & 3 proofs of Pythagorean Theorem: http://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/index.shtml

It hardly matters to these birds. http://animal.discovery.com/birds/ocean-gyre-birds/albatross...

The argument that the ocean is so vast that you can dump anything in it without ill effects was proven wrong decades ago. That's why there are laws against it. If you looked, you can find hundreds of sources to back this up.

I think this was a cool experiment. But people and animals live in these environments, and certainly matters to them when someone tosses non-degradable material in their backyard. How would you like it if people started dumping plastic garbage in your backyard? What about in your house? Surely it's only effects your aesthetic enjoyment, so it doesn't matter right?

What if it's your drinking water?

What if a million people throw one bottle?

People have been about the same intelligence for a long time. Steve, Dennis, and John were no smarter than their predecessors, they were just applying their intelligence in an area other smart people weren't looking at. Woz was designing calculators before he designed the Apple II. So what's the next area a smart person can make a big difference in?

So did I. It's odd that something that can't be found in 10 minutes is now considered "hard to find".

Having used Amazon Cloud Player quite a bit, as well as other similar web services (lala, grooveshark), I can say that Cloud Player is the worst web based music player I've used. Can anyone comment on Google Music, or iCloud?

They that comment is really one sided too, because only keeping a master copy cuts both ways. If you have a high quality rip, using the master copy will "downgrade" the song quality.

Official announcement from Google, written by Larry Page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/supercharging-android...

He mentions patents specifically as one of the reasons for the acquisition.

"Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies."

>A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.

The problem with this study is they measure learning using test. Of course the groups that had taken tests while memorizing scored better, they got practice.

The problem is that test taking is only minimally useful outside of school, and by choosing tests as the only measurement, you end up optimizing for the wrong skill. (I know because I was a pretty good test taker as a student, but the laziness and procrastination that it fosters is really starting to bite me in the ass right now) I think tests are useful because they're an easy metric, but if you're goal is to teach or learn a skill, tests are a really poor tool. As a thought experiment, if you wanted to teach yourself something what would you do? You probably wouldn't do it by giving yourself written tests.

I would have never written any code for class if given that option.

In the real world, you do get punished if you need to program something, but don't know how to. College CS classes aren't meant to teach you how to get stuff done using software, they're meant to teach you how to program. Handing in someone else's code is not going to accomplish that.