Random musings of a bored mind. probably a little bit to do with econs, soccer, and computers..
every producer, every service should do this.
http://ift.tt/XcQ3lV
i wonder if the roads are more crowded now..
http://ift.tt/1oIUFKP
Risk of head injury per million hours travelled
Cyclist - 0.41
Pedestrian - 0.80
Motor vehicle occupant - 0.46
Motorcyclist - 7.66
p.s. example of why tech people should read hn..http://ift.tt/1uzJ710
Project Temporality is a third person action/puzzle game built around the concept of allowing the player to play with time. Thanks to our proprietary engine Sparta 3D we make the fourth dimension as available as the other three. Just as with a VCR you can rewind time or fast-forward through it seamlessly.
Solve puzzles involving lasers, mirrors, force fields, trap doors, platforms, keys etc. Exploit time to do the impossible. Explore the world and see into the mind of its people. We hope that you will enjoy the result of our years of evenings and weekends.
One thing that’s almost always guaranteed with product design: when you add a feature, no one complains about it outright; if they don’t love it they mostly just ignore it. Whereas if you take something away, you’ll hear about it if people relied upon it . . . loudly and often. With something like Google Search, even if just a small fraction of people miss a feature and an even smaller fraction says so, that can still be tens of thousands of people. It can seem like a tidal wave of opposition to the removal: “look at all these people who want it back!”
So it would be much easier to leave in everything that’s ever launched. But then you end up with bloatware: an unwieldy array of ill-fitting modules that don’t work well with newer technologies (e.g., the shift to smartphones, or upgraded security, or touch screens, etc.) and don’t really serve most of your users well either. And nothing comes for free--every feature must be maintained, supported in multiple languages, on multiple devices, and the additional complexity must be accounted for in testing so that the entire service remains reliable. And that cost gets balanced against the impact: is this feature solving an important problem for lots of people?
There are many, many such features that you always have to make tough choices about. We’ve actually cut features that I love. This is one of the toughest but most important parts of designing products--deciding what to trim as you move forward. Sometimes you over-trim--we work to measure the impact and aim to strike the right balance. Sometimes we get it wrong, so it is important that people speak up. We really do listen, and we prioritize according to what seems to satisfy the widest needs given our capabilities.
One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.
Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
It sets up a new server running L2TP/IPsec, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge. It also generates custom configuration instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, or fellow activists that will help them connect to the new server.
The use case is to make it easier for people to set up servers that allow individuals who live in countries where the Internet is being blocked to circumvent these restrictions.
"Silence censorship" is meant to be sort of funny, but the idea is that censors have had it too easy for too long, and an automated and repeatable method of setting up an anti-censorship server can help change that.
"Automate the effect" is meant to reflect the fact that you can start as many of these servers as you want. If a country starts censoring the Internet, more servers will spring up in response.
GPS receivers also have to correct for things like light traveling slower through plasma in the ionosphere. Receivers on the ground actually solve for their positions in 4 dimensions (they need to solve for time!). GPS is so cool.
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baddox 5 hours ago | link
Any idea if large-scale weather effects (like the jet stream) can cause noticeable accuracy problems?
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kubiiii 4 hours ago | link
It does, in fact GPS positioning error, derived from fixed GPS stations, is often used as an input for weather forecast models like WRF. The error is closely binded to the atmospheric water content. Using the different azimuths from the GPS constellation you can even build up a 3d representation of the water content on different layers of the atmosphere.
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mnw21cam 1 hour ago | link
You also have satellites with GPS receivers, so that they can measure the effects when the GPS signal skims the atmosphere. This allows humidity and temperature to be measured with very high accuracy, with a very good vertical resolution.
http://ift.tt/1rgzQbMradiooccultation
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We received trade execution reports from an active trader who wanted to know why his large orders almost never completely filled, even when the amount of stock advertised exceeded the number of shares wanted. For example, if 25,000 shares were at the best offer, and he sent in a limit order at the best offer price for 20,000 shares, the trade would, more likely than not, come back partially filled. In some cases, more than half of the amount of stock advertised (quoted) would disappear immediately before his order arrived at the exchange. This was the case, even in deeply liquid stocks such as Ford Motor Co (symbol F, market cap: $70 Billion, NYSE DMM is Barclays). The trader sent us his trade execution reports, and we matched up his trades with our detailed consolidated quote and trade data to discover that the mechanism described in Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" was alive and well on Wall Street.
Let's take a look at what we found from analyzing 5 large trades executed at different times over a 4 minute period in Ford Motor Co. Before each of these trades, the activity in the stock was whisper quiet. Here's a chart showing millisecond by millisecond trade and quote counts in Ford leading up to one of these 5 trades:
