mojoe

There are pretty huge barriers to open sourcing work in certain large companies.

Cassini has completed its mission at Saturn. As predicted, the spacecraft lost contact with Earth Sept. 15 at 4:55 a.m. PDT (7:55 a.m. EDT): https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/saturn-tour/where-is-cas...

The analogy works even deeper -- I've seen articles talking about how large amounts of lane changing actually slows traffic overall.

I feel like there's some cognitive dissonance surrounding hedge funds in popular culture -- on the one hand you have people saying that any outsized short-term gains seen by hedge funds are the result of some selection/survivorship bias, and on the other hand you have people saying that any outsized returns are the result of illegal privileged information (see the TV show 'Billions').

I realize that there are enough hedge funds out there that both things can be happening. It's too bad that there's so little visibility into the industry, it would be fascinating to see some kind of hedge fund taxonomy.

This isn't really interesting unless we know the absolute value of all the money in circulation in each system.

Google Keep -- when I think of something that needs done, I write it down and set a reminder for the next available non-work time.

Not eating absolutely causes the body to repair itself -- there are many peer-reviewed journal articles covering animal and human clinical trials that demonstrate this (a google scholar search returns huge numbers of results, but here are just a couple examples: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413115..., https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...).

> Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

This was a pleasure to read, although it made me wonder what the optimal unit of labor is to still have a functioning competitive market. If all capital was controlled by one entity, no market could exist -- that's basically why the US has anti-trust laws. The same is true for labor. Seems like for each market there must be an optimal unit of labor (number of workers in a union, for example), to balance well-being of an individual worker with functioning of the market. Hard problem, though.

This emphasis on GitHub accounts is a sub-culture I hear about a lot, but am unfamiliar with. I know many people in tech who get paid ridiculous amounts of money, but none of them have GitHub accounts -- does anyone here have stories about how your GitHub account substantially helped you in your career? Very curious about this.

I was reading about the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_Massive_Ordnance_Air_...) that was used in Afghanistan yesterday, and remembered that lots of tactical nukes were developed during the cold war. The Davy Crockett was a nuclear gun that could fire a warhead with about the same yield as a MOAB. They manufactured about 2100 of these guns in the late 50s. It was a crazy time.

It'd be fascinating to see what ideas she gets sent. I'd love to know what a bunch of people think are reasonable $5000 projects.

I'm currently enrolled in Udacity's self-driving car nanodegree, I can certainly say that the program thus far has been very fun and good at conveying knowledge. They've developed a curriculum that has a great cadence that keeps you moving forward, and the content is super interesting.

It's certainly not editorializing -- it clearly states at the top of the page that "100% goes to charity." The list of games is also far greater in size than any other Humble Bundle I've seen, so 'huge' is also accurate. As for the link-bait accusation, it seems to me that the original title was more descriptive than the one you insisted on.

A simple "please use the original title" would have sufficed.

For others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio

Every software development position is going to have slightly different hiring criteria. In-person interviews allow you to focus on evaluating a candidate based on your own specific criteria, which may or may not stress generic algorithmic coding ability.

A lot of these types of articles are over-the-top in terms of "fuck you" sentiment. I have some experience moving around/negotiating higher salaries, and I think it's completely possible to do so without being an asshole. The key is to remember that it's just a business transaction -- you're providing a service, and the company is paying you for it. If you are polite and firm with your salary request, the company will take it if they think your service is worth it. If not, find another company that values your service more. Keep that in the back of your mind at all times, and don't let anyone obfuscate the situation, and you'll be fine.

I don't understand the desire of journalists to compare speeds to "the speed of sound." The speed of sound varies wildly depending on air density and sound frequency.

“Depending on the application, it may be a wonderful feature that a drunk person cannot authenticate into a system after they have had too many drinks,” Chuang says.

We won't be officially accepting stories until March 1, but if you send the story to my personal email (joe@compellingsciencefiction.com) I'll evaluate it.

I've certainly considered it -- I would like to write some blog posts on it at the very least. Many submitters ignore my existing guidelines (http://compellingsciencefiction.com/submit.html) already, though, so I question how much impact such a guide would have.

I pay by the word, so this author and I have complementary perspectives (I publish a small science fiction magazine, http://compellingsciencefiction.com).

First, I certainly don't think that paying for content decreases quality in any way. Every argument I've heard against paying authors is incredibly nebulous, and it's generally accepted that statistically you'll get better work (in any field of human endeavor) when you economically incentivize people.

Second, this quote was very interesting to me:

“So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge.”

After thinking about the entire ecosystem for a bit, my conclusion is that the above quote is probably completely wrong. The main issue is that there is SO MUCH bad writing produced compared to good writing. I receive 300-400 submissions a month for my magazine and most of them are not publishable (and my editor friends tell me that these numbers are low). Because of this hugely skewed ratio, it is very unlikely that "high-quality fiction" will "start to emerge", mainly because readers on the internet are unwilling to sift through all the chaff. For great writing to 'emerge', it requires both someone to read it, and for that someone to have enough influence over their friends for their friends to read it. I'm not sure that those two conditions will ever be satisfied well enough to be an effective screening system. It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves, though.

He's certainly right about the fact that people are not going to quit all at once -- it's an example of the tragedy of the commons. If someone can figure out how to grow a meat analog in a lab cheaply and efficiently it will probably be one of the most positively impactful technologies ever created.

Feather is awesome, and I really hope that Dask (http://dask.pydata.org/en/latest/) can eventually integrate it so that we have a lightweight way to write to/from disk in parallel.

Thanks, I haven't read 3-5, I'll definitely check those out! Dune is incredible, although it always felt a little too much like epic fantasy for my tastes.

It's not just you -- there was an issue there. Spanish got conflated with Latin, it should be "puto deus fio", "I fear I am becoming a god"

Ed is the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Thanks! I'd start at the beginning of the issue with "They Breed Like Flies". It's the longest of the stories but it feels quick and sets a good mood for the rest of the stories.

Thank you so much, that's gratifying to hear! At this point we're evaluating 300-400 submitted stories every month when our submission window is open, so creating a single issue takes a decent number of person-hours. I'm happy that you're enjoying the result.

The fact that there is so much concern over how to differentiate mined diamonds from grown diamonds seems like insanity to me. I understand that the diamond trade has a vested interest in differentiating, but why would end consumer care? They're the exact same product to the unaided eye. This is a purely emotional response. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that it's a misguided emotional response -- it seems clear that it would reduce human and environmental suffering to purchase the grown diamonds.

In case you were confused by the introduction of the acronym NPS, (as I was) it means "Net Promoter Score". It's a customer loyalty metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter