afiedler

Autodesk Construction | Windows Engineer | NYC, Portland, SF or Remote (US & Canada) | Full-time

Autodesk Construction Solutions is on a mission to build the future faster by creating beautiful software for construction, one of the oldest, largest, and least digitized industries on the planet. Our tools are used by everyone on a construction site, from workers in hard hats to project engineers in the office. We make a big impact in these peoples’ work lives by helping them deliver projects faster and more cost-effectively.

We are looking for a Windows Engineer to join our Markups and Collaboration team. This team is responsible for one of the core features of our application: marking up blueprints and 3D building models. Customers use markups to collaborate at all stages of construction, from pre-construction reviews to documenting a project for hand over to an owner. Our team works across all of our client applications (Android, iOS, web and Windows) to build a seamless, world-class markup tool. You’ll work on the Windows application to add 2D and 3D markup capabilities, data syncing and online/offline support.

We have team members in offices in NYC, Portland and SF. Remote candidates in the US and Canada considered as well.

Apply at: https://bit.ly/2pkT1bf

There's a fantastic Planet Money episode about the Universal Postal Union[1] and why this is a problem.

Basically, the UPU assumes that a country will send about the same amount of international mail that it receives. There may be an imbalance between any two countries, but in aggregate, it assumes that these imbalances will net out. Furthermore, the UPU sets rates based on the sending country's costs. Since China was classified as a developing country, it was very cheap for Chinese to send mail into the international mail stream. This was justified because China's last mile delivery for mail received from other countries is also very cheap.

However, with the huge US-China trade imbalance, these assumptions no longer hold. U.S. shippers were at a major disadvantage because of this.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

Ruby's standard library does this. Here's the code: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/lib/set.rb

The zero interest rate definitely does contribute, but a bigger deal for mortgage rates is that the Fed continues to buy $24-26 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities. It is keeping its total holdings of MBS constant, but since total holdings are still over $1.7 trillion, that results in a lot of purchases each month to cover the reduction in principal from people paying off mortgages in existing MBS.

This article has a good explaination: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/16/why-the-fed-move-doesnt-matte...

Facebook's draft.js[1] tries to solve a lot of these problems and uses React under the hood to maintain a mapping between the model of the document that you are editing and the DOM.

I have only played with it, not used it in production, but if you are using React it could be a good solution.

The one limitation I've seen is that is doesn't really support documents that need a hierarchical model (an example of this would be tables, but also things like "I want a code block within a blockquote").

If you want to see draft.js's document model, I made a tool to do that, too[2].

[1] https://facebook.github.io/draft-js/ [2]: http://afiedler.github.io/draft-js-dm-demo/

The TSA doesn't use backscatter x-ray machines any more. They were all removed because the company that makes them (Rapiscan) couldn't figure out a way to mask the naked images.

Now they just use millimeter wave machines, which have the body outlines only. I really don't find this objectionable from a privacy standpoint. It it basically a better metal detector in that it detects non-metal objects, too, and shows the scanner exactly where they are on the body.

Realistically, not much for a while. The FED still doesn't think inflation will hit its target until 2018, so low rates are here for the time being.

The two things you might notice:

- Slight increase in rates on CDs, money market accounts, and other short-term savings - Slight increase on car loan rates, mortgages, and other long-term consumer borrowing

As a DC resident, this project is really ridiculous for a few reasons. First of all, it is no faster than a bus because it still does not have a dedicated right-of-way. It also follows the side of the street instead of the center, so it constantly smashes mirrors of parked cars. Sometimes, people parallel park poorly and completely block the tracks, delaying service until the car can be towed. Buses don't have that problem, obviously.

Finally, it is forecast to make $450,000 in revenue per year on $5.1 million in operating expenses. I realize most transit systems don't make a profit, but that is crazy. You could literally buy every single streetcar rider rides on UberPool for less money.

One of the biggest advantages that I know of is that VSC has a very good NodeJS debugger for Javascript and Typescript[1]. Having the debugger integrated into the editor is huge improvement over Node Inspector. Last time I tried Atom's debuggers, they were not very good.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/debugging

I was a little disappointed about this too. It could be that their distribution center is close to BWI, and traffic between BWI and DC is epically bad during rush hour. Many of my packages seem to come through BWI over Dulles. DC is relatively open to the on-demand economy, being one of the first cities to fully legalize Uber.

This is great. I think the option to revert to a perpetual license will be a nice amount of market discipline for the team and keep them from stagnating.

I actually appreciate the subscription model and I hope that it will enable them to support new frameworks more quickly. Front-end development is moving so quickly that yearly upgrades are not fast enough. For example, JSX is just now available in TypeScript, but WebStorm 10 doesn't support it and WebStorm 11 is still in EAP.

These types of bonds do exist. They are called "linkers" and many governments issue them. In the US, we have TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) and some savings bonds that are linked to the CPI.

One major issue with these is that the inflation adjustment typically lags by 6+ months, so they are not a good short-term hedge. But they are very popular.

Hey antigen8,

I am working on something very similar with a non-profit in NYC, for NYC schools. It's very exciting, we are building on NodeJS and MongoDB, and already have some data syncing set up with the DOE's systems. Can you shoot me an email (in my profile)? I would love to talk with you and make an introduction if it makes sense.

The title about 'warning Washington' is almost certainly a heads up and not a threat. The Treasury needs to understand market dynamics to have smooth auctions for new treasuries, which is in everyone's interest. Prime dealers (the big banks that deal in treasuries) give the Treasury a heads up about these things, so would be natural for China to do so.

It's extremely likely to pass. Since this isn't technically a "treaty", Congress can only pass a bill to disapprove of it [1]. Obama can then veto the disapproval, and there are enough Democrats to override the veto.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/middleeast/congress-...

How did you guys drop down to a read-only connection on Heroku Postgres? We directly connect DB clients like PGAdmin to a reporting DB on Heroku, but Heroku only seems to support credentials with full access. I don't want an analyst to "DROP TABLES" by mistake.

Two things I've done:

1. Try your best to move more during the day. Standing desks can help, but standing for 6-8 hours is probably just as bad as sitting. Do walking meetings if possible, and take frequent breaks. sSometimes I'll take conference calls with a headset and stretch in my office. Use a Pomodoro app to remind yourself to stretch or change position every 25 minutes or so.

2. Lots of people who sit for most of the day have lumbar lordosis or weak hip flexors (I did). To check if you have this problem, stand to the side in front of a mirror. Does it look like your butt sticks out and your lower spine curves in? (See here: http://stronglifts.com/lordosis-why-it-causes-lower-back-pai...). The other way you can test this is attempt to do a "hollow rock" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh4-uLTL4v4). Is that hard/impossible? You probably have lumbar lordosis, weak hip flexors, weak abs or all of the above.

This can be hard to fix, but not impossible. It's doing to take a few months, but it's totally worth it. The way I did it was to just do Crossfit. It's really hard to do this on your own and keep your motivation up and Crossfit solves that problem. Most Crossfit exercises require you to have an "explosive" hip thrust which will strengthen and stretch your core.

If you don't want to do Crossfit, kettle bells seem to be the exercises in Crossfit that stretch and strengthen the hip flexors most for me. Try kettle bell swings, kettle bell sumo deadlifts, and kettle bell cleans.

The Fed also releases all of the memos that are used by the FOMC to set monetary policy. It just releases them with a five year lag. It also releases transcripts of all FOMC meetings and conference calls, plus all presentation slides used [1].

It really is quite transparent, and I'd argue that releasing things with a codified lag is a good balance between the need for secrecy and the public's right to know.

You can even see the options for wording of the FOMC's statements, considered to be some of the most sensitive material at the Fed. It's contained in the section of the "Bluebook" produced prior to the FOMC meeting called "Alternative Statement Language". [2]

Source: used to work there and make some of the charts and models that go into those documents.

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomchistorical2...

[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/FOMC20080..., page 27

(Disclaimer: IANAL)

Reading through the history of the case[1], it looks like the District Court ruled that the Federal TSA officers involved were entitled to qualified immunity under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The reasoning was that the TSA followed appropriated procedures and wasn't responsible for the longer (few hour) detention by the Philly Police. In my opinion, that seems reasonable. The TSA only detained him for 15-30 mins to question him about the cards, then turned him over the the state police.

After that ruling, the parties settled. I'm not sure why the case wasn't pursued further against the Philly Police. It could be that the case wasn't likely to succeed under Pennsylvania law, or maybe the ACLU wasn't interested in continuing to pursue it, since a Pennsylvania precedent wouldn't be a "worthwhile" expenditure of ACLU resources.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/national-security/george-v-tsa

This is pretty bad, but I believe it is only possible to get an access token if you also allow malicious/non-trusted users to either create new OAuth client registrations (`Doorkeeper::Application` models) or modify the redirect URI of an existing OAuth client registration. The reason is that the access token is delivered over a redirect, not in the response to the form POST. Doorkeeper does check for a valid redirect URI.

One thing that is interesting is that Congress usually blocks funding for DC laws by restricting how we can spend our local tax dollars (through the appropriations process).

When DC decriminalized possession, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland tried to block the decriminalization by blocking funding for decriminalization. If that sounds like the legislative equivalent of a double-negative, it is!

Harris's legislation potentially would have had the un-intended affect of preventing the District from spending any money on enforcing the decriminalization: no money could be spent on writing citations, printing tickets for possession, or prosecuting cases in court. This would have effectively legalized it since the criminal law is already off the books.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mike-debonis/wp/2014/06/...

I doubt Congress will pick this up. They have 90 days to veto DC laws or they go into effect, and they can barely name post offices at this point. Obama has also promised to veto the veto.

I have had good experience using HDF5 to store time series data, but just research datasets and nothing that has been put into production. I don't really know how well it works with threading, for example. It does work very well with PyTables and Pandas for analysis and definitely beats CSV files, which is the the normal way these research datasets are stored.

If you are interested in using HDF5 and PyTables to store time series data, check out this little library that I created: http://andyfiedler.com/projects/tstables-store-high-frequenc...

SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote

This project is to create a Windows desktop application (compatible with Windows 7) that will connect to IQFeed (http://www.iqfeed.net/) and request streaming stock ticks for about 5000 stocks. When the program starts up, the user will upload a CSV file of the tickers that he wants to stream from IQFeed. The program will then request a streaming feed for those tickers. It will keep a hash table in memory that contains the symbol as the key and the last trade price as the value. The application will also act as a server and accept network connections from other clients to access the last trade prices. The other clients will send a simple message over TCP/IP requesting the last price for a stock, and the hub should respond with the last price in the hash table.

Performance is very important for this program. You'll need a good understanding of writing multithreaded programs in .NET, as well as writing low-level TCP/IP .NET networking code using either async or a separate thread for each client (there will only be a half-dozen clients at most). I do have example code of another program (in C#) that I can provide to you that does something similar for a different data feed service. We can also investigate using a WebSockets library for the hub-client communication, but System.Net.Websockets is unfortunately unsupported on Windows 7.

Experience with IQFeed or another similar stock market data feed is definite plus. Freelancers from anywhere in the world are fine. I'm located in the New York City time zone, so we'd need to be able to find a good time to have Skype calls that fit our schedules.

Thanks for reading this posting! Please email me at andy.fiedler@fiedlerconsulting.co (co not com) if you are interested. Please include a resume or link to somewhere I can see projects you've worked on.

Oh man, I wish this was around about a year ago. I actually coded most of this for a client and it was extremely painful to get correct. We are using the Doorkeeper OAuth2 gem which uses slightly different tokens and has some different features, though.

Couple of things/feature you might want to consider:

* You might want to track the expiration time of the tokens if the API provides it. If the token isn't expired, potentially skip the verification step.

* Potentially you might want to add another HTTP interceptor that catches 401 (Unauthorized) responses. If a response returns a 401, you can prompt the user to re-authenticate and hold all HTTP requests until the user does. Then when there is a new token available, you can replay requests. This, coupled with saving the expiration time, can make page load times faster and still be robust.

* I'd make the HTTP interceptor that adds the Authorization header only add the header if the request URL is going to an API endpoint. The library user should be able to specify a function or regex that takes a URL string and returns true if the URL is an API url (and thus needs an Authorization header). Otherwise you'd include the token on unrelated requests to 3rd parties.

Nice job though, I'll definitely check this out next time I need to do token auth on Angular.

This is pretty cool, I didn't know about window functions in Postgres. Most of the time when dealing with time series data I end up dropping into Python (pandas) or R (xts package), but it is nice to see how to do a lot of analysis right in the database.

There already is in the DC area. These ads have been all over Metro at the Pentagon station and areas where lots of other defense/government workers get on/off: http://oathkeepers.org/oath/

I second "Ruby", but I'm deep in the web app development world. Despite the trend towards single page apps, there is still a large market for apps being developed with Ruby-based APIs.

Excellent Javascript skills are in high-demand, especially if you have a good understanding of one or more Javascript front-end frameworks.

This reminds me of this NY Times article about the Amtrak line between NYC and Washington, DC. Similar story of two booming cities and hundreds of miles of urban blight and poverty in between: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/magazine/amtrak-industrial...

SEEKING FREELANCER - Washington, DC or Remote in the U.S.

I'm looking for a front-end web developer with experience building out single page Javascript applications for a 5 month project starting mid-August. You'd focus on front-end development in collaboration with a UI designer as well as a backend Rails developer who will be creating the required JSON API. Someone with some Angular.js experience would be ideal, but if you have a lot of experience with Backbone or Ember, that would work, too (we are not wedded to Angular).

We are all based in Washington, DC (so I would be great if you are here) but remote is OK. You must be authorized to work in the U.S.

If you are interested or would like more information, please email me at andy.fiedler@fiedlerconsulting.co. Please include a link to your profile, or a description of your experience/a resume.

Thanks!