In my experience, 90% of the time the clerk will swipe their own loyalty card if you claim you don't have one, so you get the benefit of any available discounts while remaining anonymous.
This type of analysis is commonly used in tons of things, like communications systems, image processing, radar, etc. I used a similar technique when trying to identify an underutilized wifi channel in the vicinity of my apartment.
I was confused why the submission title specifically mentioned that the laptop belonged to an activist, but the end of the article indicates the persons life might be endangered as a result. I can't decide if this is sensationalized or not.
I'm wondering if they bound the fingerprint search to human audible frequencies. MP3 compression, as a lossy codec, works by discarding information in the input signal that corresponds to inaudible frequencies. I believe this could be mirrored in the implementation by running the frequency domain peak-pick algorithm only over specific bin ranges.
After using Shazam, I was kind of hoping there was more to it than just a time windowed frequency domain peak-pick algorithm. The algorithm itself is pretty basic from a signal processing perspective, but I think the key insight here was that the results are unique enough to store off and compare other samples against at some later point in time.
Correct, this matches my observations as well. I'd trade an increase in mean latency for a decrease in worst-case latency anytime. It makes it so much easier to reason about how many resources are needed for a given workload when your latency is bounded.
You only need a single bit to keep track of whether or not a door was blown open. I'd imagine the missiles worked the same way, and they just computed the total as the number of missile bits set times 5.
I'm skeptical anything will come from this. It's not like a Stack Exchange username is legitimate proof of identity. The professor called out the student for cheating but unless the guy actually turns in the form along with the exam, there's probably no way to legitimately link the student's identity with the stack exchange identity, unless the guy was stupid enough to sign up with his actual name.
That being said, this would be an effective way to screw over someone else, if you signed up with their name and plastered these types of questions all over the internet. The first thing that any HR rep is going to do when considering a job application is searching for the persons name. If this type of garbage comes up, that resume will probably be instantly tossed into the bit bucket.
This just strikes me as a case of "garbage in, garbage out." Of course the SNR of this new feature is going to be low if people don't answer it honestly.
Re: 2: A thousand times this. Stocking the pond with something easy for the first thing next morning is a great productivity hack. Usually I'll do the same sort of thing and leave a failing test case or a dangling compiler error to get my brain moving in the right direction the next morning.
I found the analogy to be pretty accurate. It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with both goto and inheritance, it's common to see both of them abused, and in either case there are alternatives that generally equivalent but result in cleaner code.
Of course, both of them can also come in handy if you are careful and know what you're doing.
This is true, and it isn't just holidays. They usually start surge pricing on weekends after the T (subway for non-Bostonians) shuts down for the evening (around 12:30-1AM) and it continues until demand drops. That being said, if you try to request a pickup during a surge pricing period, there's a pop-up on the app that warns you about it and it gives you the option to cancel. It isn't something they tack on at the end, so surge pricing shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.
I agree. The temptation to roll over existing changes when inheriting a new codebase can be overwhelming at times, and the only sensible way that I've found to deal with it is to consider the impact to the schedule and how that ties into the overarching business need for whatever it is that you're working on. Without a bit of discipline here, I've found that it's way too easy to start working on things that don't advance the project towards its overall goals.
Also by Marshall Brain, a somewhat-related thought-provoking short story about a theoretical future where robots displace the minimum wage workforce: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The injected code disables error logging and allows remote users to execute arbitrary code on the server by submitting the 'g' and 's' parameters as part of a GET query string. It then looks for a file called 'lic.log' and aborts if it exists. Otherwise it decodes and decompresses a CURL script embedded in base64 before generating the 'lic.log' file, which prevents it from occurring more than once.
The real mystery is how that code got onto the development server to begin with. They can fix the zip file but it won't do much good if the machine is still compromised.
My first thought at seeing the submission title was that YC was offering a program teaching people about how to be VCs. Then I realized that this was simultaneously awesome and nonsensical, since Joe Random probably isn't going to have the scratch necessary to fund much of anything. Still, it would probably be fascinating from an academic perspective.
You don't need a wizard for every task. There's nothing wrong with taking someone from the left side of the matrix. You just have to consider what they'll be working on and what resources are available to them (ie. mentors, etc.) Hiring decisions are comprised of tradeoffs, just like everything else in engineering.
Whoa now, ad hominem much? Let's keep the mudslinging to a minimum, please.
The point he's (admittedly somewhat poorly) attempting to make is that the article doesn't have enough context to draw conclusions about the greater state of factory workers across the entire Chinese industrial base. He never states that the workers shouldn't demand better working conditions, and never says that Foxconn offers a better work environment than other factories.
I've had a lot of success keeping my hands and wrists in shape by doing a couple of fingertip pushups every day. If you can't support your bodyweight on your fingers, do them against a wall or put your weight on your knees instead of your feet.
This actually made me laugh a little bit as it brought me back to my college days. The first week of February every year was when the yearly OS class covered fork(), and as a result the compute clusters all over campus were basically unusable due to people trying to run their homework. Ahh, memories.
> We’re not talking about a molecular computer that’s comparable to the CPU in your PC, though; rather, the scientists created a simple Turing machine-like finite state automaton.
This part made me laugh a little. The reporter knows what a Turing machine is, but doesn't know about the Church-Turing thesis. Not surprising.
In a typical real-time system you don't have to deal with random processes screwing things up. Resources are meticulously allocated to individual tasks, and the tasks aren't allowed to randomly grab resources in the scenario you describe. It all has to be planned out in advance.