morpher

It doesn't work for me in firefox on linux. But, works fine on chromium (although it requires more vertical real-estate than my 13" laptop screen has).

Maybe something like the following would be more explicit:

        for i,x := range xs {
		go func(x) {
			fmt.Println(x)
		}(x)
	}

I would argue that if one is unable to do the back of the envelope estimate, then they would have a difficult time doing the rigorous calculation / determination. The main difference between the two is the quality of the numbers that go into them, right?

I agree though, that overconfidence in one's ballpark estimate is not to be desired. But, that's more useful information gained from the question, not less.

How do you account for the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect when asking your "How do you rate yourself?" question? I would guess that answers in the range "6 or 7" could span a really wide range of actual knowledge. Does that agree with your experience?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

As I said, relevant to an SDE position at Google. Those are not.

I personally think that "estimation" questions (sometimes called "Fermi problems" since Enrico Fermi was famous for asking them) are a great way of gauging an individuals thought process.

They aren't about getting the right answer, but rather about seeing how one breaks down a seemingly difficult question into simpler pieces and determines what can be reasonably estimated. They really don't fall into the category of "brain teasers" which involve some sort of trick.

However, the statement that software developers are not asked these types of question is not universally true, nor should it be. In and SDE interview, I was asked an estimation question that was both interesting and relevant to the position (although I signed an NDA, so I'm not going to give specifics).

In my case, there were several pieces of required information that I realized I couldn't reasonably estimate on the spot, so I gave a description of how I could ballpark them from quick measurements.

Can't you just separately report the number of non-confidential-law-enforcement requests (as an exact number), and let the reader take the difference?

Interesting. The original Am. J. Phys. paper[1] is from 2011.

[1] http://ajp.aapt.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/resource/1/...

Exactly. So, the technological issue really is one of making assymmetric keys easier to use / keep track of.

Additionally, as point (18) on the page you linked to states:

    Mandatory. Enable/Disable Secure Boot.
      On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the
      ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A
      physically present user must be allowed to disable 
      Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of 
      PKpriv.

Doesn't this mean that (definitely on certified non-ARM systems, and possibly on some ARM systems) you can just enter the UEFI, disable secure boot, and boot your OS of choice?

The way it reads is the way it works, which is why it is a nice syntax. Although,it is actually: if (!(x==5)) return;

This is entirely the wrong take-away message from this article. The point is that strings are not sequences of numbers, but are, rather sequences of characters. Characters are abstracted from the underlying byte representation which is unimportant when dealing with strings.

For situations where a concrete byte representation is needed, you can get one by encoding the string.

Interesting that this is PEP 435 and the prior attempt was PEP 354.

With a mobile keyboard, it is simple to allow multiple, easily-switchable layouts. So, although QWERTY probably won't go away soon on account of familiarity this is no reason not to introduce an alternative.

This article (and the UW press release they quote) state that the estimated 228,000 tons of lithium present at the site is "enough to meet annual U.S. demand". I'm not sure what this last statement means since it isn't qualified by "for XXX years assuming no increase in consumption".

According to the USGS[1], US consumption for 2011 was estimated at ~2000 tons. So, this source is, indeed, significant. According to the article, it is also twice as large as the other known US source (in Nevada), so combined, the US has ~150 years worth of domestic Li at its current consumption rates.

[1] https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mc...

Thanks. I figured this was the case given the sentence "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, ..." I wonder why the didn't include a date on the linked page. Seems like an important piece of information for any news article / investigative journalism.

Although I largely agree with your point that gettin hung up on notation is missing the forest for the trees, you should not entirely dismiss the art of good notation. For example, Leibniz differentials make the chain rule seem "obvious" due to its analogy with standard fractions.

But, I agree that people who get hung up on the same symbol having different unrelated meanings or different symbols having the same meaning will have a hard time learning the physics beneath the symbols.

I wrote a verlet based physics engine years ago and had similar issues. Relaxing distance constraints tended to add a bit of angular momentum in to the system. Sometimes having a drag term in the integrator was enough to compensate, but this appears to be in verlet.js already.

Another issue with defining shapes via distance constraints is that they sometimes have alternate solutions / stable minima. For example, you can smash the circle in to the ground and get it to crumple: http://i.imgur.com/UzxbKvJ.png

But, this is still an awesome demo. Good work subprotocol.

In addition to unitless data, PCA works when all of your variables have the same dimension. It simply doesn't make sense to build a principle component vector that is a mixture of (i.e. weighted sum of) vectors with non-identical units.

I dont know how it is in other fields, but in physics, at least, reviews are only singly blind. The reviewer knows who the author is. Even then, it is often possible to guess at the referrer based on the comments they make. Blinding the author would be nearly impossible due to the small number of workers on most specific topics. That being said, I'm not sure why journals don't at least try (which should benefit newcomers to an area).

Do a lot of guys approach coding with a conquest mentality? I found this sentiment particularly interesting. I've always had a more creative / constructive mindset while coding and curious / scientific mindset while debugging. As a male programmer, I'm curious if I live out in the tails of the distribution, or if Uncle Bob is less average than he assumes.

The slide cast doesn't show up in mobile safari. But, there is a link on the page to a list with detailed descriptions and examples: http://darkpatterns.org/what_is_a_dark_pattern/

The OP is talking about a list with at most five items in it. Linear search is not an issue. Using a dict may even be slower than just searching a 5 element array linearly...

Although this is true (and silly), AT&T (at least) will unlock the phone for you after contract expiration. If this is true of other carriers, then the issue is largely irrelevant.

You can be a current customer with outside of the (typically two year) contract period. Currently AT&T (and possibly other carriers?) will unlock the phone for you in this situation. But, it wouldn't be terrible to have this specifically allowed/required.

"-e: edit something" (or 'sudoedit') is actually very useful. It makes a temporary copy of th file that is editable by your user, allowing the editor to be run without elevated privileges. After the editor quits, it moves the edited file back over the original.

This could be a simple wrapper script around sudo, but that could require entering the password twice.

It looks like this tool doesn't actually calculate a histogram of the data, but simply plots a bar plot of integral data.

So, a negative value means whatever it means in your data.

See my response to the parent. As the OP mentions iphone support in the first two sentences, so, it is a bit disingenuous to suggest that gpgme (which simply wraps the gpg executable) is a solution and that "sheer ignorance" and "lack of will" are the only reasons anyone would suggest this was an interesting article.

GPGME is far from ideal. As papaf mentions, it simply wraps the gpg binary. If you have an environment (e.g. an iphone) where running external binaries is not allowed, then GPGME cannot be used.

To me, the whole idea of wrapping an executable with a library is completely backwards. The executable should do nothing but provide a command-line interface to a library.

I think there is definitely room for a reimplementation of gnupg inverted in this sense (similar to how libgit2[1] is currently reimplmenting git).

[1]: http://github.com/libgit2/libgit2

I stopped reading when I saw the 70 million number. The grants in question were 1.2 million. So, if that is a representative number, then that is ~5 double dipped grants per year. Hard to be concerned about.