aperiodic

I've never seen it before, but it appears to be inflation notation. It's a subscript on prices, so the year is the original year of the price, and the cost above it is the inflation-adjusted equivalent in present-day dollars.

aperiodic

7년 전discuss

I've actually been thinking of moving to Atlanta recently. I live in Portland OR right now, so the sprawl of Atlanta scares me, but I've heard there are good walkable pockets of it.

I walk my dog 2 hours a day; are there places where the sidewalk density is high enough and the busy road density low enough that I could do that and have some route optionality so I'm not just doing the same walk all the time?

aperiodic

7년 전discuss

Send me an email at [email protected]

aperiodic

7년 전discuss

Yes. I was at Puppet (nee Puppet Labs) for four years, one of the larger Clojure shops to my knowledge (not that I've been keeping close tabs on who's picked it up recently).

I switched jobs and language choice was not my #1 criterion. A very interesting opportunity that aligned well with my values (and paid better to boot), but was in a completely different tech stack (Python DS ecosystem, with some Scala). I love the language, think it's wonderfully concise yet expressive way to think about code, runs on a great platform for the web, and is a great fit for when team size exceeds codebase size (though not so much the other way around). All my fun software projects are still in Clojure or Clojurescript; I just wrote some today to scrape doggy listings.

aperiodic

7년 전discuss

In my experience -- I was a professional Clojure developer for 6 years (until 2018), and hung out in the #clojure IRC channel on freenode a lot between 2011 and 2014 -- the Clojure community tends to be very experienced. Clojure is not many people's first language, but tends to be a language you find your way to after dissatisfaction with other languages, or exposure to other lisps.

I'm sure you can find crappy or charlatan Clojure devs, but I was generally impressed with the Clojure devs I met in #clojure or at the cons. Overall I found the community to have high levels of both knowledge/experience and patience in explaining things thoroughly and precisely to people who were asking questions.

aperiodic

8년 전discuss

I played the heck out of Magic in middle school and ended up with a perfect SAT Verbal.

aperiodic

8년 전discuss

This is just one of the reasons why Limited (building a 40 card deck from only packs that you and your group open) is clearly the best way to play Magic. Another: even though it seems more variance-prone, it's arguable the most skill-testing format in the game.

aperiodic

8년 전discuss

Somewhat related, Leslie Valiant believes that if evolution performs a random search in genome space, it is computationally impossible for it to have led to the complexity that it's produced in only a few billion years.

He's written a fascinating paper exploring what other algorithms besides random search could perform the computational task required and are also biologically plausible: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2643031/valiant_...

aperiodic

8년 전discuss

Curiously, the language's features for doing runtime checks as a user--core.spec and pre & post conditions--are both very easy to completely disable for production. I don't know why they're not used in core: probably a combination of the core team's feeling that they don't need them, and not wanting to make the language slower than necessary by default.

aperiodic

8년 전discuss

In this respect, they share the characteristic of being easy to wholly disable (i.e. prevent them from being compiled at all). With pre & post conditions if the var `clojure.core/assert` is bound to false, then they're elided. The usual pattern is to have them on for testing, and disable when compiling for production.

aperiodic

9년 전discuss

Well, you can easily do this with a native app that relies on content from your servers (e.g. dropbox).

aperiodic

9년 전discuss

How do web-apps help lock-in? Because you can force users to update?

aperiodic

9년 전discuss

It's a great example of worse is better in action: a technically inferior platform winning out because it's better at one or two things that enable virality, which is the only thing that matters when all the money is looking for high growth.

In this case, it's that webapps require zero effort and time from the user to get started with, and allow developers to get the closest to the "write once, run anywhere" dream than anything else (if you're doing a decent responsive design, you can even get a good experience on both desktops and phones with much less effort and no gatekeeping), so the development effort is a lot lower.

These two attributes make it really hard for a native app to compete on growth terms with a webapp, since it has a higher hurdle for users, higher initial development costs to target the same amount of users, and higher iteration costs to ship (and get users to install) a new version. It doesn't matter that it's hilariously inefficient; as long as it's just below the threshold where the user tears their hair out, they're not going to jump ship.

aperiodic

9년 전discuss

I've had good results with a normal crock pot on the high setting overnight.

aperiodic

11년 전discuss

It is exactly that: Pluto is a very tiny astronomical object. Galaxies, nebulae, and such are much further away than Pluto, but that is more than made up for by how mind-boggingly large they are. For example, The Andromeda Galaxy is about six full moons wide as viewed from Earth[1].

[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and...

aperiodic

12년 전discuss

More constant tweaking:

x * y * (sin((x+time)/5) * cos((y+time)/5)) * 15 + 3000

http://maxbittker.github.io/Mojulo/#IHggKiB5ICogKHNpbigoeCt0...

aperiodic

13년 전discuss

You can build hexagons really easily out of equilateral triangles, which seems even purere than squares to me.

aperiodic

14년 전discuss

The logistics of supplies and rescue are a lot easier, sure, but the two environments have more in common with each other than the rest of the surface of this planet. You already need to live in artificial structures that can take a pounding, grow your own food with little from the environment but sunlight and some raw materials, and you can't survive outside for very long without ample protection. I mean, for a training environment, where else would you go?

Also, if you look at the context of the quote, you can see that they're making an analogy:

  Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides 
  similar challenges. However, the South Pole now has a number of very advanced,
  large research stations that boast a great deal of modern facilities that provide 
  a good quality of life. These looked very different 50 years ago. The Mars 
  settlement will develop in the same way.

aperiodic

15년 전discuss

GPS gives you speed relative to the ground, not speed relative to the air, which is what's important for aerodynamics.

aperiodic

15년 전discuss

Contrary to popular belief, the reason that spacecraft heat up upon re-entry is gas compression, not friction (remember the ideal gas law, PV = nRT). The gas would still be compressed by the electrostatic barrier, so the heating would still occur.

Submissions

The Mars Ogler - Curiosity Raw Images Feed

An Analysis of the ESA's "Strong Evidence" for Martian Ocean

Evidence of Sub-Surface Water Ice on Mars

3D Fractal Builder, using WebGL

Quantitative Updates on the Fukushima Reactor from Japan's Nuclear Safety Agency

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