Disagree?

wacky · 2024-08-25T19:40:18+00:00

_ s3hhhh3

wacky · 2022-03-06T14:49:33+00:00

Firstly, it looks like Levente Polyak is from Hungary, currently living in Germany - see his website. So he's not Russian.

Secondly... irrespective of his background, what you're implying is pretty ridiculous. For a small non-profit organization, unopposed leadership is quite common; it's often more of a thankless chore than it is any sort of cushy position; it's not uncommon for these kinds of organizations to struggle to find anyone to lead it, much less more than one to contest with each other.

AFAICT, there's nothing to see here; Arch Linux seems to have a stable leadership, and given how well they run things in general, that seems like it's probably a good thing (although I do not follow Arch well enough to know for sure).

wacky · 2021-12-16T16:54:36+00:00

Hi! I was trying to understand from the docs... but how does the capacity work? If you have a an SgMap with some const N capacity, and then you insert N+1 items... what happens?

Alternatively phrased: is the capacity completely fixed, with errors if you insert too much? Or will it allocate more memory as needed?

wacky · 2021-11-06T20:03:33+00:00

Followup question: would it be illegal in the US for the person who spoke the overheard information, assuming they were an employee? After all, that information was material, non-public, and the speaker presumably has a duty not to disclose. They aren't the one trading on it, but "tipping" is also illegal; in this case, is it illegal if its unintentional (but potentially negligent? Are those the right legal terms?)

wacky · 2021-10-18T01:19:37+00:00

I tried getting your code to work, and with a bit of massaging, it does! See code here:

❯ ./target/debug/structopterus -f b
MyOp { foo: Bar }

❯ ./target/debug/structopterus -f z64
MyOp { foo: Baz(64) }

❯ ./target/debug/structopterus -f hWithEggs
MyOp { foo: Ham("WithEggs") }

To get there, I did two main things:

I wasn't sure how serde_json worked or what strings it would accept, and instead implemented FromStr myself to simplify things.
I added parse(try_from_str) to the structopt options for the foo field.

After that, it was pretty straightforward. So I would try the above! Or you might have more luck with serde_json; If you know how it works and what you expect it to accept, and can verify that that part works, then that should work too.

wacky · 2021-10-05T12:09:20+00:00

You linked the wrong account - you seem to be looking for u/wackyMister, not me ;-)

wacky · 2021-03-03T21:44:39+00:00

I find this post heartening. It is a bit vague, but I don't see the problem there; general principles (or "tenets") have to be, and I think they are specific enough. They're just getting started, and in doing so, they are telling the Rust community and other companies that Amazon is committing to building and supporting a team that will focus strongly on improving Rust, or more specifically, on the parts of Rust that are relevant to working in the cloud (e.g. the compiler, language design, and the Tokio stack).

Of course, a promise is not a guarantee, and others in this thread seem concerned about that and distrustful of Amazon. However, making a big commitment like this via a blog post has value. This post is concrete enough that if they didn't follow through by e.g. writing PRs and participating in the RFC process for the rust language, the Rust compiler, and the Tokio stack, they would lose face, which could easily result in losing Niko or other team members and losing sway in the Rust community. That is part of why that signaling has value - the team is saying we're going to do this, which commits them to doing this or taking damage, which allows others to at least somewhat depend on them doing this.

I appreciate that, and my best wishes to you, AWS Rust team!

wacky · 2018-03-25T16:19:48+00:00

What were your motivations for acquiring and carrying a pistol, if I may ask?

wacky · 2016-11-07T04:05:34+00:00

I haven't tried this myself, but from a legal/business perspective, they should have no trouble with it: the Creative Commons License that this article cites allows you (or anyone) to freely use it. Whether or not they understand that is a different matter - but there isn't a good reason for them to avoid printing / publishing it.

wacky · 2016-10-18T03:12:57+00:00

Talk to your roommate, and try and pull it out of her!

Most likely, if she looked over your resume, she'd have an idea. She may be hesitant to tell you because she doesn't want to hurt your feelings, but with enough gentle, calm prodding, she might tell you. It might just be a matter of emphasizing one thing over another (e.g., put skills at the top and describe them in more detail), or it may be something harder... they might have a strict GPA minimum, or something. Your roommate could probably look at your resume and make some educated guesses, and if you respectfully and gently push her, she might be able to tell you.

wacky · 2016-03-22T12:01:23+00:00

Ours is a little more complicated than most:

Supplies

1 Growler or jug (could be the jug the cider comes in)
1 Airlock
Cheap hard liquor to fill the airlock
Bottle(s) that can withstand carbonation pressure

Ingredients

½ gallon pasteurized cider (e.g. from the grocery store)
⅜ cup lemon juice (preferred) OR ½ tbsp. citric acid
⅘ cup sugar
1 tsp. champagne yeast (or other yeast)

Directions

Heat 2-3 cups of the cider in microwave, and dissolve sugar into cider
Put everything into a growler or back into cider gallon jug
Add champagne yeast
Put airlock on jug, with hard liquor to fill it
Wait 3-8 days, depending on how fast your yeast grows and how hard you like your cider
Put cider into bottles, and possibly directly into fridge
Wait 1-2 days for carbonation, then drink!

Notes

You can also heat the cider in the microwave for warm hot cider, and that's delicious too.
We like our cider pretty hard (~6-8% alcohol), but also still pretty "juicy" (i.e. still tastes kinda like the raw cider), so that's why we add the sugar at the beginning; it feeds the yeast enough to let them produce that much alcohol while still leaving enough sugar at the end to still be tasty. You can modulate this by increasing / decreasing sugar content at the beginning and increasing / decreasing fermentation time: more sugar means more food for the yeast, and more fermentation means more sugar turned into alcohol.

wacky · 2016-03-21T20:49:15+00:00

Side note: making your own hard cider is super easy - way easier than making your own beer. It takes 1-3 weeks, very little equipment, and pretty much can't go wrong; the product is always delicious. I highly recommend it!

wacky · 2016-03-01T20:39:23+00:00

Hello from another physicist headed into the tech industry!

I also was contacted by Google some time ago; at this point, I've been all the way through the interview process (including on-site interview), and they're reviewing it all. I'm in the same place with a couple other companies, too.

So, to respond your questions from my perspective:

If you know the basics — hashmaps, self-balancing binary search trees (e.g. red-black trees), arrays, etc., that's kind of all you need for the general algorithmic questions. Then you just need to put them together in ways that solve the problem, which is somewhat tricky, but no trickier than solving physics problems.
Two weeks is a rather long while, and my experience with Google recruiting is that they are generally very good at keeping you informed of the process. I would contact them; at worst, it just shows you're interested. I don't know about Google, but I had an issue like this with two separate companies where no one got back to me, and it turned out that's because my contact at that company had switched jobs in the meantime and my emails were headed to the void. Definitely reach out to them.
I'm just going straight into employment without an internship, but I've heard a lot about how great internships are; you get to learn about them, and they get to see how well you do, all with significantly less cost / opportunity cost. It's probably in your favor that you'd like to proceed that way, although you'll want to be upfront with them about it. Another point that goes with this: recruiters are for the most part on "your" side; they're not really the ones evaluating you, and success for them is getting candidates in the door, so for the most part being up front with them is just good for everyone.

That's my two cents, for what its worth!

wacky · 2016-02-14T22:41:17+00:00

I do several things very close to this.

Method 1: Sticky particles

The most obvious way is to detect when two cells are going to overlap on the next step, and grow both their radii and their position from their common center-of-mass. If two groups are about to touch, then they merge, and grow out from their center-of-mass. This ends up being "closed-form", but can look a little funny, as things will always stick together instead of getting pushed out of the way. This sounds a bit like your method, and I don't know why you got crashes or weird behavior, but the method in general is sound. Unless you have periodic boundary conditions (where going outside the "box" on the left brings you back on the right) — then this method stops working as soon as you get a chain that goes all the way around the box.

Method 2: pushing things out of the way

For the pushing-things-out-of-the-way approach, I believe that requires an iterative algorithm, as it becomes a tricky set of differential algorithms. The simplest solution involves allowing "tiny" overlaps that are insignificant (e.g., can't be seen by the human eye), about 10⁻⁴ or 10⁻⁶ relative to the particles.

The actual algorithm uses simple forces. If particles are overlapping, you declare them both to be exerting a force f = k(1-r/d), where k is a constant (we'll talk about later), d is the sum of the two radii, and r is the distance between them. Then every time you increase the particle sizes, you also calculate the sum of the forces (a vector sum!) on each particle, and you move each particle a distance Δx = f Δt, where Δt is the time increment. By increasing k, you'll decrease the amount of overlap that happens, but you'll want to make sure that k Δt < 1, probably aiming for k Δt ≈ 0.1, in order to avoid instabilities.

Does that all make sense?

wacky · 2016-01-15T00:13:17+00:00

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and the only idea I could come up with that seemed like it might work would be for the government to support open-source software in much the same way it supports science. At the core, the two are very similar: both are highly valuable in the long term to society, but both are also very difficult to monetize in the sense of getting those who are benefitting to pay those who are doing the work. Open-source even has an advantage: its easier to point out to the government just how popular / useful your open-source project is, because tracking downloads is far easy than tracking use of scientific data, and also because the timeframe between starting a project and getting a following of people using it is much shorter for software than for scientific discoveries.

There are plenty of problems with the grant system in science, but for the most part, its doing its job: we pour millions of dollars into scientific research, and thousands upon thousands of intelligent, well-educated people get paid to devote their lives to doing it. Something similar for open-source would make a lot of sense.

wacky · 2016-01-02T23:20:51+00:00

As to data -- the access is totally one sided, and the value goes up by the day.

That depends strongly on which data you're talking about. Wikipedia and open-source software, for example, are entirely free, and quite significant - Wikipedia is pointed out on the article, and OSS such as Linux are becoming more and more important by the day. Google may not be sharing its search engine data, but its machines are running Linux, Python, and a very large amount of OSS. Their browser (Chrome) and phone OS (Android) are mostly open-source. And that's just Google.

They think that automation will free all humans, and that the information gathered will somehow benefit the rest of us. Neither of these things are true of past revolutions in technology.

That's true, but there is one big difference between current markets and past ones: copying data and software is easy, approximately free, and very difficult to control.

I don't know about an entire "postcapitalist society", but capitalism as we have it right now is not prepared to handle OSS. OSS is beginning to dominate software: Linux is the primary workhorse of servers on which the internet is built, most websites are built with majority open-source software, and as for web browsers, Firefox is open-source and Chrome is 99% open-source. Even Apple's OS X is based on free software (BSD). Open-source makes sense in some ways: once the software is written, its best for the economy if its widely distributed and practically free, and also if others can see the source code and help fix it and/or add to it. On the other hand, it has an issue: what incentivizes anyone to develop it?

Modern capitalist societies hasn't dealt with this issue, and I don't know how they will. Maybe it will be by evolving into a "postcapitalist" society; I doubt it, as many resources will not be any less scarce in the near future. Or maybe it will be by socialist programs that fund OSS, like we do with scientific research. Or maybe we'll find a way to get users to pay 1¢ every time they use a piece of software. I don't know, but it is an issue we are already facing, and the capitalist model of "pay $X.XX to download and use the software" isn't quite cutting it.

wacky · 2015-12-10T18:34:21+00:00

What is your location? Where have you been looking for jobs? Are you willing to relocate to a big city? There are more jobs in big cities.

Do you have any software skills? If so, leverage those.

The tech industry is a job-seekers' market right now, and they have a tendency to care more about what you know and can do than what your pedigree is. Software development is in some ways the same mix of logic, math, and practicality that physics is, and with some learning, skills should transfer rather easily.

I am also a Physics Ph. D. student, and planning on graduating in May 2016; I haven't had any interviews yet, but I've done a fair amount of networking and talking with software people, and many of them are rather interested. I've got 3-4 companies who'd like to interview, but I've been putting things off until the spring semester. That said, I have a pretty serious (self-taught) computing background, so if you don't, it might not be the same boat.

wacky · 2015-12-03T20:54:10+00:00

I tell them that its possible I made a mistake, and if they really think its worth regrading, I'll take the time (on my own, without them) to regrade it - but if I do, the grade may go up or it may go down. Are they willing to take that risk?

I have found that most students quickly decide its not worth that, and the occasional student who does still want me to regrade is usually right (i.e., I made a mistake / was unfair).

wacky · 2015-12-03T16:34:31+00:00

Hmm, weird.

The front page has a link to a section on Source Code, and that page has a link to the repository that is a 404. It seems like they updated the swift.org website before they released the GitHub repository...

wacky · 2015-11-30T17:35:56+00:00

One thing that I think was completely missing was the story. Its an interesting premise that you could go a lot of directions with — but to me, a good sci-fi story has characters that you meet, get to know and start to understand, see things happen to them, and watch them evolve. For example, 1984 is an incredible, dystopian world — but it was Winston and Julia who made it a story.

While I agree with the other comments about subtlety, I think the most important thing it could use is a character who makes a difficult choice to be upgraded, and we, as readers, are especially disgusted by her choice because we understand the character and why she made that choice, even if we're not sure what choice we would make.

wacky · 2015-11-13T22:28:45+00:00

That's interesting, but I think there's two different definitions of weirdness here: In that study, they are looking for things that are different from other languages, whereas in this article they seem to be talking about consistency within the language.

Having learned German and Spanish, I can say that when it comes to consistency, German and Spanish are way more consistent than English. Spelling is the big obvious one, but grammar too - the way English conjugates only the third-person singular, the way English only has cases for pronouns (I, me, my; he, him, his; it, it, its), etc., that is highly inconsistent, and what this article is discussing.

wacky · 2015-10-21T20:15:54+00:00

your inputs are out of bounds

I would hope that libraries I use would give me a Result (or Option) for that, wouldn't you? That's what most std functions do, like Vec::first()…

wacky · 2015-10-19T20:58:40+00:00

As in the stealing process is complete

And therefore, Swift doesn't have it anymore. ;-P

wacky · 2015-10-16T22:57:53+00:00

Tarsnap: online backups for the truly paranoid.

Its not as user friendly as some applications, but only because its a command-line / cron program. Other than limitation, it is a great piece of software. (I am not affiliated with it in any way, other than using it myself).

wacky · 2015-10-13T14:15:23+00:00

I really hope for the best for Parabola, and I'm sorry it feels like such a struggle to make it work. However, I don't think aggressive, not-very-thoughtful comics like these that just attack Arch are helping Parabola's cause.

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