joshvm

156 ms·

1. 1471.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   I've given up worrying about conference paper reviewers. The last paper I submitted got a strong accept from one, and a reject from the other (the overall decision was accept). Interestingly the reasons for accept/reject were almo
2. 1472.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   I hate this trend, it's almost impossible to unsee it in modern sci fi movies (e.g. anything Marvel churns out). It's almost at the point where I lose respect for a movie when I see that kind of grading being used. A notable excep
3. 1473.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   I was refactoring some legacy academic code recently. It came with a GUI which, if the user did something wrong, fail with the message "Error N" (N being some number) without any further information or logging. The only way to fig
4. 1474.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   There's also the natural, if a bit disturbing, business tactic of examining which products sell best on Amazon and then leveraging economy of scale to produce their own copies (Amazon Basics). Although Apple is also famous for ruthless
5. 1475.▲
   Super-resolution used to image Beagle 2's landing site in unprecedented detail(theguardian.com)

   3 points by joshvm 11y ago|0 comments
6. 1476.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   Apple Care does take sweet time, but you don't need to go to the store. They'll pick your machine up by courier to fix, at least they did for my iMac when the hard drive died.
7. 1477.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   VMWare Fusion does a few extremely useful things that Docker doesn't - for instance it can hook into an existing Boot Camp install and load it as a VM. It may be a bit heavy for the (Linux) applications Docker excels at, but for me it&
8. 1478.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   You assume that you're not retaliated against. This is the essence of MAD, a kind of bizarre gentleman's agreement. The general opinion was that as soon as the nukes start flying, you can pretty much assume that your country is go
9. 1479.▲
   by joshvm 11y ago

   Great article! What is the overlap between aphantasia and absence of memories? The example you gave was that you couldn't remember going to see Les Mis a year before, so that's not stored as a fact somewhere? There was a (possible
10. 1480.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    This will probably happen anyway. Research ships are manned by researchers (usually of the non-bureaucratic variety) and in my experience are game for a laugh. Regardless of what it gets officially named, this ship will almost certainly be
11. 1481.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    Arduino is the de facto starting place for new hobbyists. It's a very low barrier to entry and runs on pretty much anything. If you want to learn networking at an Internet of Things level, look at the Spark Photon (basically an ARM dev
12. 1482.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I should rephrase "a" natural reaction. Plenty of people don't waste their money, but I think for a lot of others there is at least temptation to live a little with their newfound windfall.
13. 1483.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I think that's confusing liability with speed. Running interrupt-free code on an ARM or AVR is incredibly reliable. I would argue much more reliable than going to the length of patching the kernel. Just because it's slow doesn&#x2
14. 1484.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I think this is a side effect of having jobs which are, relative to the rest of the country, extremely well paid, combined with very high cost of living. In the UK if you told someone you'd be moving to the Bay Area on a starting sala
15. 1485.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    In Ipython %timeit gives 4.3ms per loop, just on a-b. In C++ it's about the same. I agree that the question is valid - making vanilla Python faster is cool. My point was that this particular example (image processing) was flawed, becau
16. 1486.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I get around 0.07 seconds without the write in C++ and the same in Python (good call though). I agree that in pure Python it'd be slower, but realistically why would you do that? Unless you work somewhere where you're forced to wr
17. 1487.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I was under the impression that Numpy also just calls BLAS underneath? Hence why doing element-wise calls in Numpy is far, far faster than simply doing nested for loops. But I think this is the great strength of Python. It's a glue lan
18. 1488.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    You've picked a poor example, I think. And you're probably coding in an inefficient way. Here's the OpenCV way for a pair of 2048x2048 images: import cv2 import time t = time.clock() a = cv2.imread(".
19. 1489.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I was asked an interface question in a recent Big 4 interview, not a system design one (even though I was told one interview would explicitly be system design). Though perhaps it depends on your experience, as a fairly recent graduate, if I
20. 1490.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    What sort of circuits do you want to design? RF? Audio? Analogue is a big field! It's like saying "I want to write programs, which books do you recommend?"
21. 1491.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    Welcome to electronics design! I've never had electric shocks before, but frying components sure. Don't work with mains voltage directly if it worries you. You can power most hobby projects from a USB port or a wall wart. Designin
22. 1492.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    For beginners, buying books on PCB design isn't worth the money. You'd be better off spending $50-100 on a load of sensors, designing the boards for them and getting them built. You'll learn far more than a book will teach yo
23. 1493.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    What are you running this on and how fast do you need it to be? You can brute force nearest-neighbours on a GPU pretty quickly (many times faster than approximate on a CPU). I was able to do nearest-neighbour from each pixel in an image O(1
24. 1494.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    And don't forget $20 for a power adapter :)
25. 1495.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I have a Leuchterm notebook with Whitelines. It's not bad, the app works reasonably well. It's just doing fiducial detection and some perspective undistortion, pretty much out of the box OpenCV.
26. 1496.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    Although the particular modifications were not used, the Shuttle (as a launch system) certainly was used by the military or at least the NRO. Several missions were classified, most were presumably spy satellite launch and maintenance. It ca
27. 1497.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    We still use VRML at work, lord knows why.
28. 1498.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    There is a certain morbid curiosity about it, for the same reason that people watch Big Brother obsessively. Worth watching "The Lives of Others" if you haven't already, though that deals with other problems. There is an argu
29. 1499.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    I thought it seemed odd that Python supported the AND operator on lists, but it doesn't. You do need to convert to a set first, e.g. [1,2,3] & [1,2] gives a TypeError, while set([1,2,3]) & set([1,2]) gives set([1,
30. 1500.▲
    by joshvm 11y ago

    If EVs really take off, I wouldn't be surprised if workplaces started putting in more chargers in their car parks. It's an obvious solution to the problem of home charging. The other option is leased batteries which solves a whole