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I was surprised at the book promoted at the end. I was positive this was going to a revised excerpt from Faster, Higher, Stronger by Mark McClucsky.

I always wondered, but not enough to do calculations, that if instead of increasing one's electricity bill by $10, one could donate $15 (tax deductible) to an organization to run the computation themselves. Which is more efficient?

"ah, I remember that - that's when I more or less stopped commenting. I still think it was a really bad move."

Why would that cause you to stop posting?

Cookiecaper "Government worker salaries are not usual directly associated with the names of the people receiving them; the classifications are public, but you can't just type in "my neighbor salary" in Google and see what they make;"

Not google, but not much more work. If you know their name you do not need to know their classification.

http://php.app.com/fed_employees14/search.php

"Yep, just like KFC is no longer "Kentucky Fried Chicken" - it's just KFC."

The very first words at KFC.com are "Kentucky Fried Chicken"

Doing a text search on the home page says Kentucky shows up two more times.

"tl;dr is "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.""

Paying you for the amount of time you worked is a legal obligation. So really you are talking about can you find an equivalent or better job in the amount of time you would have earned $1,000 if you stayed. Even in the lowest of paying legal jobs in the US, it does not take that long to earn $1,000 relative to securing a job. Not to mention that new job is not guaranteed to fit into your current living situation and other factors that cause the inertia for staying with a current job to be quite large. Seems a bit like a gimmick to me.

Thank you for the response. However, that is exactly my point. Orders of magnitude, plural, means the rocket will be 1% of the current cost. That means a $61 million rocket is on the order of $610,000.

I do not believe that raw material procurement and manufacturing account for 99% of current launches or 97% or 90%. Even if it did, I believe there would be significant amount devoted to quality inspections and testing before you could trust a used rocket that not only fired, but impacted the ground to be used again.

" If they can achieve reusable rockets it'll be on the order of a few hundred thousand per launch though."

Do you have any sources I can read on that? I know reusing some of the hardware will have cost savings, but you are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than I have heard claimed. I would be very surprised that even if all of the hardware was 100% free that there would not be a few hundred thousand in labor costs alone for analysis and launch operations.

I am looking forward to Project Ara. Assuming my Moto X holds on long enough, an Ara type phone will be my next phone. I do not care if the Ara doubles the thickness of my Moto.

That said, I am approaching it the same way I do Lego Mindstorms, Raspberry Pi, and Arduino. However, I do not think Ara will have the education angle those do to reach volume.

I am not sure I see the real value outside of tinkerers. I plan to buy one but I do not expect to actually save money, electronics waste, or have better performance for the dollar.

This reminds of the The Rational Optimist. Not that I agree with all the arguments made, but the contrary optimistic point of view is refreshing. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog http://www.rationaloptimist.com/publications/the-rational-op...

Any recommendations for books for a Matlab user looking to use Julia? Thanks

It is interesting. I held off on learning Python because Matlab was there (paid by school/employer), it ran reasonably fast, and all the libraries (toolboxes) were there.

Now I'm trying to jump to Julia and many of my Python friends are making the exact same arguments (you'll never get the community/libraries/support) that used to made against Python in favor of Matlab.

Anyway, as a long time Matlab user, Julia just feels incredibly 'natural' to me.

"But the landing page is a dash confusing. I thought the avatar'd people were the stories"

I think that is because the link is to the about page, which understandably is about the company. If you remove the /about on the URL you get the stories you are looking for.

Previous discussion with 14 comments from 6 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998144

Maybe the increased number of people on the internet is connecting those who are making open languages. (I know the poster listed many ones made by closed teams too.)

I thought the technical/scientific computing market that MATLAB serves was too niche to get critical mass in an open competitor that could surpass it. I saw Octave as always being a second place clone playing catch up. I don't know what it took to get it going but Julia has me very excited and I'm grateful for the team that chose to make it.

"perhaps if everyone on the road was in a driverless car, and they all communicated and prevented crashes. But that's not going to happen."

I hear this sentiment a lot. Having a higher percentage of cars following safe practices is safer even if those are cars aren't perfect and even if 100% of the cars aren't automated.

Can you tell me the logic (I've seen it many times in posts) that there won't be any safety benefits until all cars are automated (or until there aren't any manual drivers?).

I disagree that the benefit will be that discrete.

"He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating."

Is that really true? I thought Zuckerberg gave more in 2013 to charity then any other person in the United States.

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerb...

This is a fun website. I made my own grid paper in undergrad. It started late one night after all the bookstores were closed and I ran out mid-problem in dynamics class. The Professor took off points for not using grid paper so I made my own out of Excel grids(I wrote on the flip side). I didn't lose any points and continued for the remainder of the semester. At the time, the university printer computer labs did not have a printer quota.

aerospace engineering as well

What is the nearest comparable class for Android?

Have you used it for note taking? I am looking for the master of text + equation + diagram note taking and I thought surface pro might be it.

Thanks

"I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!" "10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs"

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the insights but I do not agree with the premise that 100 or 1,000 Matlab sessions per server or VM is crucial to the economics of the business.

I know many engineering firms who are perfectly happy and profitable to buy a $2,000+ workstation, $2,000 Matlab license, and X*$Y,000 toolboxes for a single engineer. That engineer might be in meetings all day. They might be on vacation, they might not be working on a task that requires Matlab. Larger firms sometimes get floating licenses that may be 10X or more that cost and still have less 100% software utilization.

I see utilization economies both in software and hardware by licensing out this resource to small and mid-size firms who do not have constant large demand and even large firms who need a surge in computation.

"I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about."

I am an engineer (not CE/CS) who uses Matlab, so I am probably missing something fundamental. However, I am curious why you think server side Matlab requires order of magnitude more efficient solutions to current Matlab. Even as a poor college student I used to SSH into my personal desktop running Matlab and it ran acceptably.

At work I will remote into another system running Matlab without issue. Sure if you are doing heavy plot manipulation it may get a bit laggy depending on the situation, but why would mathematical algorithms need to be rewritten unless you mean graphical?

To the people who say this is an online Matlab replacement, I do not think the website, http://www.vectera.com/, presents itself that way. First it says "Learn Matlab", to me this presents itself as another online programming class. I am not saying this is a bad thing, I personally use Matlab every day and see the value. However, I could not find anywhere it talked about online Matlab collaboration.

Also even though the word Matlab is all over the front page, when I went to the about section it said it was powered by Octave. Again, this is not an inherently bad thing. However, I thought this was an online time-sharing license of genuine Matlab. I would pay $9/month for that; I would not pay $9/month for Octave which I have installed on my notebook.

Also you can generally get a student version of Matlab for around $100 so if the only purpose is learning and not "production" Matlab, I do not think it is fair to compare to the $2,000 version.