jdowner

I guess the first reason is that I was providing an answer to question about why would you want to use a container. My answer comes from personal experience in New Hampshire. I mention New Hampshire specifically because I do not know how general that situation for the rest of the US or other countries. However, it seems reasonable that they may be equivalent restrictions in other place, thus providing a reason for why a container may be desirable.

Secondly, the project is not being marketed for specifically for under-developed countries. In the linked article they do mention their experience in Kenya and that one of their target markets are governments to support development projects or refugee camps. But they also state that they are targeting individuals in the US. Also their website makes it clear that under-developed countries are not the major focus.

Right, the governing body can make an exception for a particular private road. And in that case, you would be able to apply for a building permit. There are also provisions for exceptions in RSA 674:41 that would cause excessive hardship or practical difficulties. So it seems that the law has been made so that a local governing body has the discretion to made a pragmatic decision. However, this all assumes that the local governing body would indeed grant such an exception and that the land owner believes it is worth to effort. In the case of your hypothetical farmer, it is probably worth the effort. However, if you have a 2 acre lot and want to put a farm in a box on it, you might be happy to simply avoid dealing with the governing body and just plant your farm in a box on your lot and get to work.

One reason why you may want a container is because it is a movable structure. That means that you do not need a building permit. Acquiring a building permit requires at least a class 5 road. This is the case for New Hampshire. I don't know how representative it is though. Also this not uncommon when for larger lots, but I'm not really sure if there are differences from lots as small as 2 acres.

I wrote a little tool for working with github gists from the command line, https://github.com/jdowner/gist. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and pleased that a few people have found it useful :)

It also sounds like it was written by someone who was not actually there. Most of the content in the article is old news and there are no real personal insights that ring true. E.g. the notion that the team was ok with changing the name from "irrational games" is totally inaccurate; it was a source of tremendous tension between the dev team (at least in Boston) and 2K.

One direction I would like to see more focus on is AI providing a useful explanation of the decisions that are taken. AlphaGo made quite a few non-conventional moves. They turned out to be good moves. What I would find really interesting is if an AI like AlphaGo can not only excel at playing games (solving problems) but also be used as a tool to gain understanding. Perhaps, Lee Sedol will become even stronger now because his experience with AlphaGo. Perhaps, humans will be able to learn to view the game in a slightly different way that closes the gap between where we are and where AlphaGo appears to be? Maybe humans will once again regain supremacy over AlphaGo? I think that would be a much more interesting outcome than moving on to another problem space.

I could have written exactly the same comment.

This was my effort (in python) to solve this problem https://github.com/jdowner/cdhistory

No. Not at all.

-Burlington, MA USA -ONSITE

US – We are RIFT.io and we're looking for talented people. There are very few opportunities where you get to be a part of something ground breaking and on a global level; this is one of those moments. In less than one year of the company being founded, we built a product, acquired 5 customers (three of them on the Fortune 500), and finished out 2014 with 40 employees. 2015 has already turned into an exciting year; we've picked up another handful of customers, we're on track to double by the end of the year and we come out of stealth mode.

LIFE – Work life here at RIFT.io is everything you imagined it could be. We have every snack and beverage you can think of. Can't find what you're looking for? Ask our snacks committee and they'll make sure it's stocked by the end of the week. We have some intense ping pong, corn hole, and Smash Brothers matches. But above all that, we have passion. It's exuded by the amazing and talented people who work here. This isn't your typical punch in punch out job; our employees come in early and stay late. It's because of that dedication we cater dinners and make an effort to stop and eat with one another. This is a 'douche-bag free' zone. We respect all ideas and all people who come through our front doors who are here to learn, contribute, and inspire. The pedigree of our leadership is amazing; founded, IPO'd and sold a company. They believe in the employees that work here and give them every opportunity and tool needed to be successful in this venture.

WORK – We're still in stealth, so I can't say much. What I can tell you is that you will be working on is something that has global impact, has never been done to this degree, and has to happen for technology to progress the way it is. The work is challenging and intense.

http://riftio.mytribehr.com/careers/

That's really cool! But there is no way I could use that at work -- our merging is a mess :D

One alias that I find really useful is,

summary = !git log $(git log -1 --merges --pretty=format:%H)..HEAD --oneline

This prints the log summaries on one line up to the last merge commit. If you are working on a feature/topic branch (and you collaborators do too), this will just print out the commits you have add for the feature. I often use this to go back and rebase fixups or suggestions from a code review.

I like some of these. 'wip' and 'wipe' are two operations that I regularly used. However, as I entered them into my .gitconfig I couldn't help noticing that their similarity is something that would undoubtedly bite me on the arse at some time.

Alternatively, 'git commit -v' also provides a way to review the changes before you commit them. If you are not going to 'cherry-pick' the changes for the commit, this has the added benefit of showing all the whole diff at once.

Just a quick note that I have made few changes based on the feedback I have received. First you can install 'gist' using 'pip install python-gist', which should make it easier to install and alleviate some of the confusion with the existing package on pypi. Also, I have added fuzzy search to the tab-completion to make it easier to select gists.

I have just pushed the feature. I hope that works for you, but let me know if it doesn't and I will see what I can do :)

Sounds like a good idea. I'll add that as a feature request :)

That is a different package of the same name.

We have an image analysis pipeline at work and one part of it involves peak detection. The peak detection algorithm we were using worked for normal data. One day a scientist came to me with data that was abnormal in that it had peaks with a high dynamic range, which failed given the current algorithm.

I thought about it a bit and was able to come up with a non-parametric test of randomness that detected whether a sequence of data was probably random or structured and it was able to detect not only the usual, large peaks but also those that were very small.

The reason I was really please with the result is that it was a case of applying a little thought to the problem, getting a nice probabilistic theory in place, and the resulting code was so straight forward and performant that it looked like a simplistic hack!

Personally, I like simple things. Like my life; I like to keep that simple. I try not to lie or mislead people because I found that that leads to no end of complications and painful situations.

If I were in your place (from what you have said), I would not agree to misrepresent your relationship with this person and furthermore I would seriously reconsider whether I would want to continue to deal with someone who is willing to do this. It would be hard to believe that I was not being mislead by him. A reputation is easy to lose and hard to recover.

Hi, This is a small library I wrote this weekend to scratch an itch. Primarily it allows you to calculate a bounding box for an SVG path but it can also be used to determine the inflection points, so it can be useful for aligning SVG paths (something that is useful to me at the moment).

I decided to put it out on HN because I hope that some of you may find it useful, but I would also love to receive feedback on it (whether you think it is actually is useful and how it can be improved).

Thanks for taking a look!

Completely agree.

Also, some of the replies to the original article got me thinking about my own experiences as an interviewee. I realized that those engineers who have interviewed me in the past and did not ask much technically have been amongst the weakest engineers I have worked with. Really nice people, not really good engineers.

One of the differences with video game piracy (at least a few years ago) is that video games tend to have a short window after release when they make most of their sales. Everyone in the industry knows that a game will be pirated eventually so DRM is seen a way of delaying the availability of pirated version of games to maximize that window of sales.

Obviously, this varies with publisher, studio, and game, but that was the rationale I heard when I worked in the industry.

I did too. So I just wanted to mention that it was exactly the same for me. Just like you said: bullrush, rugby, flying foxes, the chance to run around and be kid. I went to a catholic school run by nuns at that age, so they would walk around and make sure that nothing got out of hand. And it never did.

Thing one thing I would say is that it was a different time and I think we have became more fearful of the potential dangers out there. We are presented with extreme events and begin to think that this is the way of the world. Parents (rightfully) become fearful for their children. But, for a lot of us, we are lucky and live in a very safe environments, and in such environments children should be aloud to explore, imagine, and enjoy their childhoods.

I think you may be reading more into that sentence than it says. While I don't doubt that there are programmers working 'late night, crazed, caffeine-fueled session' you're extrapolating well beyond what the author said. Do professionals work earlier or later to avoid disruptive times? Yes. My least productive period (for coding) is in the middle of the day (between 10am - 2pm). So, that is when I plan to do things that are not coding. I tend to come into work early for two reasons: (1) it makes my commute easier, and (2) I get most of my coding done before the majority of the people in the office come in. I don't think it is a controversial idea that software engineers tend to find they do their best work in quiet or low-distraction environments.

I have to confess, I do have the unusual habit of starting my day with a cup of coffee so maybe I am one of those caffiene-fueled crazies after all :)

If you want a job as a software engineer you will need to demonstrate that you can write software, regardless of your education. So I would recommend (as others have mentioned) that you put your work out there on github or (even better IMO) contribute to an open source project. Working on code with others can provide a tremendous education in itself.

There are a lot of people who will see your PhD as a black mark when it comes to software engineering. There is a belief that you are over-qualified (what ever that is supposed to mean). Whether it is a reasonable belief or not it exists so you will being trying to prove that you produce Quality Code and a Team Player (TM). Once you get your foot in the door, it should become easier.

There are also lots of places that are math PhD friendly :) Like the mathworks for example!

FTR, I have a PhD in applied math and have been a software engineer for about 8 years now. I got my foot in the door by working for free at a game company for a year. Not the way that I advise everyone to take ;) but I lucked out and learned a lot from the experience that it continues to influence my view on software, teams, and leadership to this day.

Good luck!

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned 'cryptonomicon' and detachment 2702 so far. Basically, Target are doing the same thing, i.e. planting information to mask statistically significant results.

I'm looking to join a team that love software and creating beautiful products. I know a bunch of languages but my top 3 are C++/python/javascript. Although I would consider working elsewhere, I am really focused on staying in Boston, MA. I've worked on a bunch of interesting projects, please take a look at my linkedin profile (http://goo.gl/5hTHi) for details.