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yosyp

144 karma · joined November 29, 2012

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yosyp··on A Famous Photo of Chernobyl’s Most Dangerous Radioactive Material (2016)
Highly recommend the book "Voices From Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich (she won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature partially for this work), it is an illuminating account of the Belarusian struggle and subsequent cover-up of the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.
yosyp··on Could gambling save science? (1990)
This is the same Robin Hanson that recently authored "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life". His physics background makes for interesting economic analyses.
yosyp··on Dijkstra's in Disguise
Couldn't agree more, it had me going back to the Algorithms book to refresh on most of part VI (Graph Algorithms). For those interested, Bellman-Ford is 24.1, and Dijkstra's algo is 24.3 in CLRS. Reviewing those helped step through the VisuAlgo link in the article: https://visualgo.net/en/sssp
yosyp··on Modern C++ for C Programmers: part 5
Yes! And be careful and very picky about what you read! To quote a popular Quora answer [1]:

"If you really want to learn C++, I advise against any and all online tutorials and against most books. Without any kind of quality control, many professional book writers published many awful C++ textbooks that may be easy to read and sell well, but teach lies. Stick with the community-verified book list available at StackOverflow"

In other words, use the StackOverflow list to choose the right teaching material [2]. A Tour of C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup) has been a good refresher, with C++ Primer (Stanley Lippman, Josée Lajoie, and Barbara E. Moo) as the primary reference for further clarification. Also use GeeksForGeeks and LeetCode practice problems.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-book-for-learning-c+... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-...

yosyp··on IBM Watson Health slashes workforce
Tangentially related: how does one get their foot in the door at a medical software company? Is there a big market for such professionals?
yosyp··on A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet
Confirmed: The stars in the background behind Comet #67P are in Canis Major: the cluster NGC2362 "falls down" past the limb at top-left; sparse cluster NGC2354 & the star 27CMa are also in the field.

Programming challenge: filter out (or otherwise remove) the sky from the video to isolate the comet surface for better analysis.

yosyp··on Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract
This can also be driven by unreasonable reporting requirements. Say you go against your boss and deliver X,Y, and Z in the first month, and during the second and third months you cannot deliver anything tangible because you have uncovered larger and more complicated problems that take longer to fix.

Often in these situations the funding company would critisize you for underdelivering, since you have obviously demonstrated that you are capable of delivering X,Y, and Z in one month, but have since not contributed anything tangible in the following two months.

On a graph, you would see a spike for the first month, and a plateau for the 2nd and 3rd. Execs do not like seeing downward sloping trends, and middle managers will do everything to avoid them since their job literally depends on them, hence your bosses boss merely understood the responsibilities and requirements of all stakeholders involved.

A meaningful consulting relationship starts with detailed, reasonable, and sane reporting guidelines, which is very difficult to achieve and don't always work well with a programmers mentality.

yosyp··on Receiving and Decoding Russian Meteor-M2 satellite images in real time
Do you have any pointers/references for getting started with Software Defined Radios? i.e. the state of the art software, hardware, and common hobbyist applications? Any open source communities?
yosyp··on Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
A quick google search shows some people are already working on that, including https://www.pathio.com
yosyp··on The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries
My pet theory is that the long-term reasoning for artificially limiting the number of residencies/medical school spots is to avoid an oversupply of healthcare professionals after the baby-boomers die off in 15-20 years.

Sure, there is tremendous strain (and consequently profit to be made) in the system now, at the expense of overworked doctors with limited interaction with their patients. But if the supply of doctors met market demand _right now_, in 20 years there would be an over supply. An over supply of doctors would introduce a new set of problems associated with lower salaries and eventually lower quality of care (see Soviet Union). So in a way, this artificial market manipulation of the supply of doctors is forcing innovation and timing the population market, and betting on medical advances that will eliminate many doctor visits through preventative medicine or computer asssisted diagnostics.

Essentially the AMA is lobbying to prevent a scenario that created the artificial STEM shortage myth in the 1990's that new career scientists have still not recovered from.

yosyp··on The Shortest Papers Ever Published (2016)
Link to the paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2387687
yosyp··on Nineteen people a week overdose in Richmond, dozens are dying, hundreds revived
You're right, I learned something here. Thank you for correcting me. Fentanyl seems like the culprit.
yosyp··on Nineteen people a week overdose in Richmond, dozens are dying, hundreds revived
That's just the problem isn't it? People are prescribed a drug for medicinal purposes that is so addictive and so readily distributed for minor ailments that medicinal use inevitably turns to recreational use after the prescription runs out.

Louis Theroux's "Dark States: Heroin Town" is a good account of how these addictions progress in the US, and some of the reasons for the growing numbers we are seeing.

yosyp··on Quantopian hedge fund has lost about 3% since beginning of trading in June
Could you elaborate on quant jobs requiring PhDs? Do they look for a very specific PhD (i.e. statistics), or is it just a blanket requirement to get past the hiring screens?
yosyp··on Batteries with 50 per cent more energy with pure silicon anode
Are you referring to Professor Sadoway? I greatly enjoyed his Solid State Chemistry course! Always wondered what will come of his flow battery company (Ambri). Looks like they are still steadily making progress, no?
yosyp··on Batteries with 50 per cent more energy with pure silicon anode
You wouldn't want to combine a solar cell and a battery in a single package; maybe in a modular system instead. After some amount of charge/discharge cycles the battery will quickly lose its capacity and utility. I suspect the operational lifespan of photovoltaics is much greater than the best batteries, and will continue to be for some time in the future.
yosyp··on My personal site is a terminal
$ cd Labs/

$ cd ../Projects <-- this does not work, the cwd remains Labs/

yosyp··on A newly discovered moon tunnel
For a more technical description, the paper is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL074998/full.

"Detection of intact lava tubes at Marius Hills on the Moon by SELENE (Kaguya) Lunar Radar Sounder"

Intact lunar lava tubes offer a pristine environment to conduct scientific examination of the Moon's composition and potentially serve as secure shelters for humans and instruments. We investigated the SELENE Lunar Radar Sounder (LRS) data at locations close to the Marius Hills Hole (MHH), a skylight potentially leading to an intact lava tube, and found a distinctive echo pattern exhibiting a precipitous decrease in echo power, subsequently followed by a large second echo peak that may be evidence for the existence of a lava tube. The search area was further expanded to 13.00–15.005°N, 301.85–304.01°E around the MHH and similar LRS echo patterns were observed at several locations. Most of the locations are in regions of underground mass deficit suggested by GRAIL gravity data analysis. Some of the observed echo patterns are along rille A, where the MHH was discovered, or on the southwest underground extension of the rille.

yosyp··on Socially Engineering Myself into High Security Facilities
Safari "Show Reader View" gets rid of all those annoying gifs and makes the formatting nice. Now I practically use it to read all web-based content.
yosyp··on Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) is written in C++ and it's over 20 years old. The FORTRAN codebases seem to be centered around the finite elements/difference methods and the fluid dynamics community.
yosyp··on Calculating the Distance Between Points in Wrap Around (Toroidal) Space
Isn't the topological manifold of the "wrap around" space described in the post spherical? A toroidal manifold would more complicated since the two generalized coordinates do not commute (order matters).
yosyp··on “Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts”
Are Google employees expected to work on Google services over multi-weekends? Are you compensated or is this for fun? If you're working for free and your work is not open source it seems like you are being taken advantage of by your employer.
yosyp··on GeoGebra Augmented Reality
Have you updated to iOS 11? I couldn't find it in the App Store without updating, since the app is only for iOS 11.
yosyp··on Mal – Make a Lisp, in 68 languages
Could someone explain this gem in the C version?

https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/c/types.c#L170

yosyp··on Neural Language Modeling from Scratch
Could you recommend further reading about multivariate polynomials and their applications to problems of this type?
yosyp··on As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
yosyp··on Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React
This is very interesting insight! May I ask which software or service you use to keep track of your family tree?
yosyp··on Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars
Don't print Musk's journal article in black and white: the copy editing is bad. Table 4 distinguishes Good/OK/Bad using colored circles -- it's undecipherable in black and white.
yosyp··on The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
And wear himself out he did, dying barely into his fifty-first year.
yosyp··on Galaxy Note7: What We Discovered
The stagnation of Li-ion batteries can be attributed to industry approaching the theoretical maximum energy density. So instead of optimizing the remaining 25%-30% capacity, focus shifted to Li-air or Li-S research. Li-S in particular can reach up to 2600 Wh/kg theoretical energy density, or 10x of current state of the art.

Maybe you can shine some light on this, why do the search trends [1] for lithium sulfur appear so cyclic? I'm not aware of any uses in industry, or any major conferences/press cycles around Li-S.

[1] https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=lithium%20s...

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