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I'm sorry. My intent is not to insult, but to express a thought that only recently occurred to me: democratic societies need a basic legal "literacy" class in the education of every citizen as much as people who may need to save money for retirement or borrow for a home purchase need basic financial "literacy" classes.

In my public schooling, I had two year-long classes about the structure and function of the United States government. One was in middle school and one was in high school; I was not required to take any course on the subject as part of undergrad. Neither course taught me much more about courts than that the Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal and interprets the Constitutionality of laws.

Courts are complicated and laws and regulations are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but there are some fundamental, low-level principles that apply to proceedings across most (possibly all?) courts in the US. An educated citizenry in the US would, ideally, have at least some exposure to these fundamentals; these basic principles (which would include at least a little on contracts) are too important for the vast majority of the population (i.e. almost all non-lawyers) to not understand.

I told a lawyer friend about this idea and she strongly agreed. She said that her sister had taken an undergrad class which roughly fit my description-- "pre-pre-law" was how she described it. Her sister's evaluation of the course was that it's description of legal principles and their operation in courts helped explain a lot of the mechanics of how government, private institutions, and society function.

So IANAL but "an emergent pattern" (which doesn't sound as bad as, e.g., internal memos to the effect of "let's pay the gurls less hahaha") may be more than enough for the government to categorize Google's behavior as gender-based wage discrimination.

If/when the government does that, I think 2 things happen:

1. the government announces some punitive action against Google; things they must do, things they must pay, etc;

2. the probability of every Jane, Jill, and Hillary who worked for Google winning a wage discrimination case skyrockets, at least some workers file such cases or enter negotiations to settle such discrimination.

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 means (pardon my rough summarization) that a worker can sue over discriminatory pay even if the discrimination / 'lost' wages occurred a while ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_o...

Educated adults should understand: just because it's written in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable. The viewpoint of "contracts uber alles" (which I hope nobody holds as anything other than a tactic to pursue their own self interest) may have cheerleaders, but is just incorrect as far as the legal system goes.

On the meta-discourse level: is it appropriate to make fun of a belief that one honestly believes is Bad if I don't say that person X holds that belief and hence is bad?

Sure. And they have enough money to hire a firm that specializes in e-discovery and/or assign clever employees who have experience doing good, challenging work to put together data sets from disparate sources.

Being difficult is indeed pretty normal in our adversarial system of law. Being difficult about something that should actually be pretty easy is a good way to make your judge ornery and, unless your resistance earns you the opportunity to give up less/different information or some sort of other concession, seems like poor legal tactics.

Nah, if gender-based wage discrimination is 'proven' in court, the people who got shorted are going be awarded some multiple of the amount of wages that can be attributed, according to whatever calculation gets used to determine the existence or non-existence and magnitude of any such discrimination. (Not a lawyer, but I've listened to Lilly Ledbetter give a speech.)

Please tell me that your focus on "contracts" doesn't mean you are a sincere, "omg the right to contracts" libertarian?

I used PhantomJS as part of a report generation pipeline which served no HTTP requests and contacted no outside servers. We made PDFs and ready-to-email, single-file HTML reports with some minimal interactive features. (Ready-to-email, single file == all images turned into data URIs, styles inlined, for HTML files sent as attachments)

PhantomJS loaded up an HTML file written earlier in the pipeline. The HTML consisted of a big slug of JSON containing all the relevant data (which would vary from one run to another) and a bunch of scripts and templates (which were fixed for any given report type). The scripts built into the HTML file would chew up the JSON slug and build up the DOM required for the report. Then the PhantomJS script would identify all the images in the DOM and replace all of them with data URIs, strip out the JSON slug to prevent giving away more data than contained in the DOM, and strip out all of the templating JavaScript, leaving behind only the JavaScript needed for the interactive features, which was inlined.

We went with PrinceXML for PDF generation. I was briefly nervous because I saw people praising PhantomJS' pdf generation capabilities... but then I saw the people saying, "we used PhantomJS for pdf generation, we used wkhtmltopdf, then we just paid some money to get something that wouldn't produce weird output some of the time." CSS Paged Media Module FTW, y'all.

The public release of the report (where the bounty hunter talks extensively about the right and wrong ways to fix the issue) is a nice feather to put in your cap, even if the cash is not a lot.

People who have memorized the "marketmaking is essential" arguments for HFT may disagree with you. People who dislike arguments from "does this serve its stated purpose for society" may reject your argumentation style. I think you've got a hell of a point on both sides.

If a teeny-tiny fraction of a percentage or a penny flat tax would cause a trade to not be profitable in expectation, then that trade probably never had anything to do with the real economy in the first place.

Huh, under your logic, is there any amount of misconduct that Holmes could commit (which might harm others, including harm through being misled) that would make you feel more compassion for those harmed or potentially harmed?

If you want to apply Buddhist ethics to influential people misusing their power, uh, I guess I follow what you're trying to do, but it seems cray-cray to me.

The discussion in the article makes it seem like they are considering an adjustment for the fact that many users only view the front page, creating a somewhat artifactual disparity in votes received between front page and non-front page submissions.

Sounds like a plausible explanation, good intuition, and a good idea.

Publishing non-replications really should be part of research culture.

Hypervelocity is very high velocity, approximately over 3,000 meters per second (6,700 mph, 11,000 km/h, 10,000 ft/s, or Mach 8.8). In particular, hypervelocity is velocity so high that the strength of materials upon impact is very small compared to inertial stresses. Thus, even metals behave like fluids under hypervelocity impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervelocity

The orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s, but reduces with increased orbital altitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit

Practically every form of debris removal is also a pretty good anti-satellite weapon.

Additionally, a not-too-unreasonable interpretation of current international treaties would lead one to conclude that piece of junk, inoperable satellite X (or a piece of debris that comes off of it) is still owned by country Y, interfering with it is a violation of Y's sovereignty, etc. This is to be contrasted with the seas where there are some kind of established norms about the wreckage of ships, abandoned ships, etc.

I kinda want to bone up on the relevant treaties and/or agreements about Earth orbit and other planets.

On what browser or browsers does a double line break in HTML turn into a linebreak for otherwise unstyled text?

(cf. data:text/html,<body>hi%0d%0a%0d%0athere</body> )

Does it have to have a different domain or would a `src`-less iframe also work? You'd have to write the ad code into the iframe from the outer page, but that's not hard.

Meyer is trying to move up one level of abstraction; the `programs` he is talking about are synonymous with `specifications` so right away those words are being used in an atypical fashion.

Calling them `progspecs` would be gross and newspeak-y and calling them `program specifications` would be verbose. Regardless, the theory of these `programs` may indeed be useful.

Also, he's not saying that all relations are progspecs, but defining that progspecs are pairs of (relation, set).

If subject X is fundamentally about underlying subject Y, then reasoning using the tools of subject Y might help you to have powerful (fundamental) insights into subject X.

I take your point, nonetheless.

Anyone find the definition of `functional` a little bit odd?

Is there a reason why a "no-op" or identity function should be considered imperative? Or why a program must be imperative if at least one post-execution state is also a valid pre-execution state?

I read, greatly enjoyed, and would recommend The Last Ringbearer. Only one weak part; when you get to the section of heavy, multi-layered intelligence intrigue, let yourself skip ahead if you find yourself wanting to.

From the article:

> There was also strong incentive for us to promptly pay him, so he’d keep playing.

I loved that line, because it's the converse of a casino player in a hole, thinking maybe they can make it back if they keep on playing.

The alternatives:

Using http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#Select to build what you need;

Or building something specific to your use case without the above, which seems likely to be... goofy and unmanageable. Creating objects that create new channels to do `select`s over some fixed number of cases and composing those.

Do you have any experience using `reflect.Select`? While not exactly ergonomic, it seemed a... pretty okay tradeoff, inconvenience for power, and at the very least more power for approximately the same amount of pain as the rest of the `reflect` package.

Hah. I went to TJ and, at a gathering with a few other high school classmates, I bemoaned how unhealthy I thought the atmosphere was there. I'm not saying it was disastrous when we went there, but it was a divorced-from-reality, barely-visible-high-pressure environment. Going to a prestigious, competitive state school was seen by several of my classmates as "failing" because it wasn't as good as going to an Ivy or another high profile institution.

An environment made up entirely of kids who are accustomed to being the smartest student in the class is going to produce some very unpleasant results under high pressure. I wonder how the counseling team approaches the problem.

Almost skipped it due to the playful paragraph clearly written with thesaurus close at hand, but this is interesting.

Hate to be the guy complaining about design, but the fixed, vector-art background doesn't really play well with reading while scrolling.

The parts I can digest:

Query complexity is about how much of the input needs to be read? Possibly about how many times each bit of the input needs to be read?

There are different models of computation being compared: the familiar deterministic algo on classical computer, random algo (with zero error or with bounded error) on classical computer, and bounded error algo on quantum computer.

They went looking for functions whose query complexity on different models of computation would have Interesting And Unexpected relationships.

The (1) item basically means they found a function for which the gap in query complexity (between running a bounded-error algorithm on a quantum computer and a deterministic algorithm on a classical computer) is larger than previously conjectured; "there exists at least one problem for which the advantage a bounded-error quantum algorithm has over a deterministic algorithm is even bigger than previously thought."

Another option / the "traditional WSJ paywall sidestep" is to google the headline (copy and paste it from the paywalled article, e.g.) and then visit it from the google results.

Trigger warning: imminent rate hikes. Sentiment analysis bots, you might want to avert your eyes.

Love it!

Running it on Chrome and switching to another tab causes a great effect. Not sure whether it's built in to the site or a consequence of some kind of throttling.

> It has generics, too, though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages.

Is it wrong to read this sentence as snarky?

Too computationally intensive for what?

The Lagrangian approach is kinda great. If you can describe the potential energy and the kinetic energy of a system as two functions of whatever variables, Lagrangian mechanics allows you to derive the differential equations that govern the evolution of that system for free.

There's absolutely zero fucking around with forces, torques, etc. to get yourself a set of equations with which to model system behavior. You do have to add one constraint equation for every constraint on the system, but this is way easier than trying to formulate a set of differential equations that just happens to satisfy an arbitrary set of constraints.

I don't know of a reason why Lagrangian mechanics would tie one to a particular algorithm or class of algorithm; pretty much no matter how you do it, if you're modeling a mechanical system, you're solving some differential equations in one way or another.

TL:DR; can't confirm at this time