wronskian

RPC Consulting | .NET developers | South of Cambridge, UK | ONSITE | full-time

Our company provides software and consultancy services to the insurance, banking and science sectors. We have our own software platform - Tyche, a high-performance, general-purpose Monte Carlo engine - which consultants and clients use to build models and run calculations.

We use a Microsoft stack, with most development in C#, a little in C++. Our development team (around ten people at present) is located separately from the main company, on a beautiful science park setting near Cambridge. Our developers work across the product, so a real mix of work from performance enhancements on our framework, through UI (WPF) development, and implementing numerical algorithms.

We're looking to grow the team by another five or so developers within the next few months, across a range of experience levels. Exact number of years in the field isn't important, what matters to us is an ability to get up to speed with C#/.NET quickly if it's not already your main language, and some numeracy to your background. Most - but not all - of our developers have a university degree in a subject like physics, maths, engineering, computer science, and we're happy to hear from recent graduates with coding skills, too.

More information can be found on our Stack Overflow posting page : https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/rpc-consulting and our corporate site (which is admittedly not particularly useful for prospective candidates, though gives some idea of the background behind the firm!) is here : https://www.rpc.co.uk/services/rpc-consulting

Please feel free to contact me directly, sam.holloway@rpc.co.uk, or apply via StackOverflow.

Definitely the best article title relative to the content, well done! Happy memories, too.

I wonder if you're thinking of this interview by Teller : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-hi...

"Make the trick more trouble than it's worth."

I have read that article many times, it's a wonderfully illuminating piece of writing.

The Netherlands no longer uses the 1 or 2 cent coins - they are not accepted for payment, even if you have enough to make a round 5 cent amount.

The diff from the patch:

  - goto discard;
  + consume_skb(skb);
  + return 0;

One of the rare cases in the wild where a goto really was considered harmful! ;-)

I saw this exact failure mode in the wild - a C++ Newton-Raphson implementation that relied on the order coming out of the mean calculation. In this case, the ordering put the N-R algorithm out and instability resulted. I seem to remember the fix was to put some simple bisection around the N-R guess, and if it went outside that range, truncate at the bisection range. It worked! (If anyone really wants the details, I can probably find the exact fix in our source control history.)

Those interested by this article may enjoying browsing through Hugh Hunt's other pieces - he's done some pretty amazing things in the name of popular engineering! http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/

10/10 but perhaps my sensing method would be considered cheating : the underlying noise throughout the whole track was noticeably more dithery/glitchy in one set of clips than the others, so I presumed that identified the 8-bit clips. Speakers are tinny laptop speakers which I think probably overemphasised the effect.

It was originally British, yes: developed by Frank Hornby in Liverpool. It's now made in France. There are still avid constructors who prefer 'original' Meccano (red/green coloured metal) as it is supposedly better build quality than today's product (blue/yellow).

The UK scene is quite active : http://www.skegex.nmmg.org.uk/

I've seen the film already - there have been a few screenings of it here in Cambridge, UK at the university maths department. (Indeed, I wasn't aware it hadn't been generally released!) It's an interesting idea and quite reasonably played out without too much cliche and, impressively, not too many blunders in maths or tech. The way the premise has been turned into plot is not, however, so sound. Still, I found it sufficiently engaging and I'd recommend a viewing for anyone with an academic maths or science background.

Following the Superbowl ad, this got some extra coverage by Forbes and Discovery.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mahaatal/2013/02/04/axes-super-b...

http://news.discovery.com/space/private-spaceflight/super-bo...

Down for me here (UK, broadband provider is Eclipse) - looks like a DNS problem. isup.me also fails to resolve it.

Just to be clear, the 'final screen' shown in that article is a mock-up that's been doing the rounds; it wasn't shown on the actual BBC Ceefax service.