bencpeters

I don't think that's the definition usually used for "independent" when talking about voter affiliation. US politics has a long history of people telling pollsters (and filling out voter affiliation info in actual elections) that they aren't affiliated with a specific party because political parties have generally historically been seen pretty negatively in the US. In reality, many of these self-identified "independent" voters have voting records that are heavily skewed (if not straight-ticket) to one party or another. I don't have actual numbers on what % of independents this is (I too am interested in the parent's question on this matter), but it's definitely not a "definitionally, none" answer.

What is the TL;DR version of the difference between Singapore math & US math education?

23 MY owner here - I have been very unimpressed with the automatic wipers in my car, especially in intermittent rain/water thrown up from the car in front, or snowy conditions/lots of salt on the road - they seem to either want to wipe like crazy and smear the windshield, or they never trigger when most of the windshield is covered. This wouldn't be quite as annoying except that the wiper interface isn't physical, and having to reach over to the touch screen to change wiper speed when you're already in a reduced visibility situation is not a great UI! I basically end up just pressing the one physical button to trigger a one-off windshield wipe a lot.

This was a pretty big disappointment for me coming from a 2005 (!) Audi A4 which has auto wipers that work _almost_ flawlessly (and has a physical adjustment on the stalk when I need to override).

I'm very much not a Tesla hater - overall I _love_ the car. I just wish a few details were different (speedometer & nav more directly in line of site, physical controls for windshield wipers, CarPlay integration). I've just been kinda shocked how bad the auto wipers are for a brand new car.

Adaptive Cruise works well for me though, although I enjoy the act of driving so I don't use it all that often other than long straight highways.

I don't, unfortunately, that's above my paygrade ;-). It's likely going to be a function of the larger hiring situation at Amazon (we're currently in a corporate hiring freeze), rather than something Prime Air specific.

Sounds like you've got a perfect background for Prime Air though! Hopefully we'll be hiring again sometime this year - feel free to reach out (email in profile) if you want to chat more about it.

Prime Air is not shut down, we're working on it and expanding.

Can't post too many details, but we are actively delivering to customers in test markets today. A publically released video from a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDyeUiWL3M&ab_channel=amazo...

Source: I'm an SDE at Prime Air.

Mostly right! Fly by wire doesn't inherently have to do with whether a pilot has the strength to move the controls or not - airliners in the pre fly-by-wire era still had hydraulic actuation of control surfaces, which allow pilots to multiply the force of their inputs. The main question/difference here is how much physical feedback the control system gives to the pilot - basically how much harder to move the stick it gets as the actual pressures on the control surface increase. Whether it's an electronic system or a hydraulic one in between the cockpit controls and the surfaces doesn't HAVE to mean that the physical feedback is all that different. It does make it easier to do non-linear ramping of the feedback though.

You also can do more complicated mappings of control inputs to control surface movements more easily with FBW (you can think of automatic traction control in a car as a somewhat analogous system - it uses differential braking per wheel, which the driver has no direct control over, to attempt to straighten out the path of the car and follow the driver's inputs from the steering wheel). As another comment mentioned, this has been happening in fighter jets for a long time, mostly due to how inherently aerodynamically unstable they are.

I feel like this irony is at the core of the modern Republican party (witness the fact that more ideologically consistent libertarian types have basically found themselves ignored in the post-Trump era).

The cynical way of looking at this (and IMO supported by the popularity of Trump's rhetoric) is that most on-the-ground Republicans aren't actually opposed to government handouts, they're just worried that government handouts are mostly going to the wrong people - groups outside of their circle of empathy. Unfortunately, this often seems to be largely defined by race...

I wanted to update my explanation ^ a little bit - it's based on how trim works in smaller trainer aircraft (which are all I've flown). On a 737 there isn't a "trim tab" - instead the whole littler wing at the back of the airplane (tailplane) can change its position based on the trim, while the elevator is the adjustable tab at the back of that which moves based on the pilot's inputs.

I think the basic procedure for how to undo the excessive trim based on too much force to move the tailplane still is accurate though...

I just read this great article (https://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/2627.pdf) linked lower down in this thread for more details.

Maybe not quite 5-year-old, but here's my attempt:

The elevator is the little wing at the back of an aircraft that tilts up and down to make the nose go up and down. When the pilot is flying, this up-down is what moving the yoke forward/back does.

The elevator also has a tab (the trim tab) part of the wing that can move independently from the main part. This trimming movement allows for adjustments to the plane's up/down movement that don't require the yoke forward/back (this is useful to "lock in" the current desired climb/descent/level flight so that pilots don't have to be constantly pushing/pulling on the yoke to get the plane to be climbing/descending/level the way they want it).

The 737-MAX has a system that automatically uses this trim tab to pitch the nose of the plane down when it senses certain conditions, without notifying the pilots. In this case (plane inexplicably pitching down), the natural response from a pilot is going to be to pull back on the yoke to counteract.

This can cause issues because the act of pulling back on the yoke increases the pressure on the elevator (because physics - the more the elevator deflects in an attempt to change the plane's attitude, the more force the airstream flowing over it exerts. This "catching the airflow" is why it can change the plane's attitude at all). Apparently on this plane if the trim tab is way out of line even if disconnect the erroneous system that was automatically adjusting the trim tab and try to reset the trim to a safe position by hand, the airflow over the "loaded" elevator (which is trying to counteract the position of the trim tab and keep the plane from crashing) is too strong to physically allow the manual control to move the tab. So the "correct" procedure is to push the yoke in (allowing the nose to go down/lose altitude) to reduce the airflow that's hitting the elevator, while frantically spinning the manual trip wheel to get it back to neutral. Then, once you've reset the trim manually, you presumably pull back on the yoke to get the nose up and pull the plane out of the dive.

The issue with that is that the ground can get in the way in between when you've let off the yoke and you've spun the wheel enough to get the trim tab back to neutral.

Personally, I find this "turn to anger" a little hollow/self-serving. Nothing Trump has done so far is in any way out of line with what he was saying on the campaign trail - the only people who are surprised by his actions are the people who took a "he's not being serious, it's just talk" view when evaluating his speeches. I wish SV companies and executives could have had this "turn to anger" back when it mattered and helped avert this when it was easiest to do so - before the election.

Ardusat | https://www.ardusat.com | Salt Lake City, UT | Full-stack Engineer, Front End Engineer

Come help change the way science and math are taught in schools! Ardusat is a growing educational technology company providing engaging experiences to science and math students by creating technology, products, and curriculum preparing them to run custom experiments on real satellites in space. With over $6B available in public and private STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) grants, this is an exciting space to work in. We are a small (9 person) team with a successful round of seed funding and a lot of really promising district pilot programs. Everyone at Ardusat is here because we believe parts of the education system are broken, and need to be fixed. We want our work to impact students’ lives all over the world by cultivating more interest in math, science, and technology.

We're looking for an experienced engineer to work on building out our student/teacher software features and help us scale as we grow. We've got a great working platform that is used by schools around the world to conduct science experiments, create and discover curriculum, and help manage, document, and assess Maker projects in the classroom. We have tons of ideas, but we need help taking this tool set to the next level. As an Ardusat software engineer, you would be responsible for architecting major new features and portions of our system - we're not just ticking off a bug list here. The ideal candidate is someone who has experience building web applications from the ground up and is excited by owning a large portion of product direction and design decisions.

Development Process: Our development process is organized around 2-3 week sprints, and we have 2 in-person engineering tag ups a week. We are a small team and encourage autonomy, so we do asynchronous daily updates (accomplishments, blockers, collaboration needs) but try to avoid getting too bogged down in process or unnecessary meetings. We value accomplishments, not time-in-office, so we try to optimize our process around allowing flexibility and personal accountability.

Tech Stack: Our website and API are powered by Ruby on Rails, our experiment tools and platform use Angular.js, our real-time features use Node.js, and we have a handful of microservices related to our data pipeline using Python. On the database side, we use Redis to coordinate services and Postgres for our primary data store. We’re especially interested in candidates with Ruby, Javascript, and Angular experience, but for the right candidate we’re open to other languages/platform experience with a demonstrated track record for learning new technology. Although everyone wears a lot of hats at an early startup like Ardusat, this position will be more backend focused, so experience with server management, cloud platforms (we use AWS), Docker, CI, or API design is a plus (although not required). Experience with "maker" technologies including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, etc. is also a plus.

Apply or request more details: jobs@ardusat.com https://www.ardusat.com/jobs for more details.

Ardusat (Project-based education tech with access to space) Salt Lake City, UT

=================================================

Come help change the way science and math are taught in schools! Ardusat (https://www.ardusat.com) is a growing educational technology company providing engaging experiences to science and math students by creating technology, products, and curriculum preparing them to run custom experiments on real satellites in space. With over $6B available in public and private STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) grants, this is an exciting space to work in.

========================================

Why Ardusat is an awesome place to work:

* Early stage startup with successful seed funding round. We've proven that investors and early adopters are excited about our vision, now we need help making that vision a reality! As part of a small team, you'll have the chance to make a real impact on the future direction of the company.

* Education is a space where what you are doing matters. Everyone at Ardusat is here because we believe parts of the education system are broken, and need to be fixed. We want our work to impact student's lives all over the world by cultivating more interest in math, science, and technology.

* We value autonomy, professional development, and life outside work. Do you do your best work when you get out skiing for the morning and work at 1 am? We understand different people work differently, and we want everyone we hire to be inspired by and love what they do. This means that we try to have people work on projects that are interesting to them, provide the resources to continue learning, and give the flexibility to fit in life outside work.

* Space is cool. So, you're not exactly a rocket scientist? Well, we don't actually work with rockets, either, but a satellite engineer is pretty close. We have a close partnership with San Francisco-based Spire and collaborate with their engineering team on a variety of projects. There's a good chance that some of the code you write at Ardusat will be running in space in a few months.

* Salt Lake City is not the Bay Area. We love visiting the Valley, but we're always pretty excited to get home. SLC is more affordable, has way less traffic, and, most importantly, is 30 minutes away from some of the best skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, and hiking in the country. We are proud to be located somewhere where access to the mountains is close enough that you don't have to be a weekend warrior. (We respect powder days)

===============

Jobs Available:

* Front End Developer - We need someone to help develop our various web-based tools. The ideal candidate would be comfortable creating great UX and familiar with modern JS frameworks (we currently use Angular.js) HTML5, CSS3. Experience developing mobile apps is a big plus. We work with a top notch design firm for our creative, but having a decent eye for design is important.

* Embedded Software Developer - We need a “full stack” embedded hacker to help us develop some of our product offerings. Experience with typical “maker” technologies (3D printing, proto-board prototyping, Arduino, etc.) is preferred. This is an important, early hire for the team, however, so it involves multiple hats, and we're also looking for someone with experience working with backend technologies including sys admin and backend web development (we use Rails and Node.js).

============

Technologies

We try not to be dogmatic about individual technologies. We've all used a lot of different platforms, languages, and idioms over our careers, so we're not overly focused on any particular technology/framework. However, we currently use/like the following technologies, and experience with some of them certainly helps!

Node.js

Ruby on Rails

Postgres

Angular.js

React.js

C

Arduinos

Docker

AWS

iOS/Android

============

How to Apply

If you think Ardusat sounds like an exciting place to work, we want to hear from you! Please email us at jobs@ardusat.com with a brief description of your background and why you are interested in Ardusat, as well as a portfolio/CV. We would like to see a non-trivial code sample that you feel showcases your coding abilities and experiences – whether that's a github profile, side project code sample, OSS contribution or something else. We'll try to get back to everyone as quickly as possible!

Tangentially related - but if you're a vim fan and want to be able to use the full, in-browser notebook, you can easily set up vim bindings by following these instructions:

http://spaceli.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/add-vim-key-bindings... (the post was for iPython 1.0, but it seems to still work with 2.0)

This feature alone made me 10x more excited to use iPython notebook as a development environment.

Not to mention that most of our reservoirs are clogged full of motorboats all summer...

(another Utahan here opposed to silly regulations like no dogs in the Cottonwoods when ski areas dump all sorts of petroleum products, animals and backcountry users are everywhere doing all sorts of things)

Don't forget that in some areas of the country, we get snow pretty regularly - in my experience back-up camera lenses get completely covered by road grit in snowy zones pretty quickly - makes it hard to rely on for something critical like highway visibility for a few months a year.

Around here (Utah), we see TONS of people driving on the steep mountain roads in the winter with expensive AWD/4x4 cars, trucks, and SUVs that they bought specifically for mountain driving yet are equipped with summer or all season tires. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these people end up in the ditch. Snow tires really are a night and day difference for winter driving conditions - I'd rather have a FWD (or even RWD) car with snow tires than AWD with summers or all seasons.

Snow tires are pretty cheap compared to body work too ;)

But you're assuming here that "the rich" investing money is creating more growth (and you stated earlier, helping poor people more) than the government would.

I think that's a difficult statement to back up in the best of times, although it's certainly a difficult thing to prove either way (moving this question beyond the level of anecdotes is really hard). However, when we've got a persistent demand shortage like we have right now, it's much less of a tricky question because of the multiplier effects of consumer spending.

You're making the assumption here that the only way that money can be invested in a "job (and wealth) creating venture" is for the rich to make long term investments. Furthermore, you're assuming that taxing the rich more would decrease their job creation efforts and thus lead to less economic growth.

I don't think that these are valid assumptions. You're basically making a "trickle down" argument (if the rich do better, their heroic efforts will create so much economic growth that everyone benefits), and I would argue that our economic experience since 1980 argues pretty convincingly against that. In fact, studies on this topic (see http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42111.pdf) find virtually no correlation between top tax rates and overall economic growth, contrary to the belief of proponents of supply side macroeconomics.

I think the burden is really on you (or the supply side proponents) to demonstrate the truth of these long term economic growth claims, rather than just asserting them. In the absence of such proof, I would argue that concerns of economic equality and reduced suffering on the truly poor in our society far outweigh any of these nebulous assertions of promised future economic growth.

Finally, this doesn't have to be limited to a "welfare" vs. "investment" question. Government taking in money doesn't have to just give it out to people in welfare programs; it is perfectly capable of making investments too (infrastructure, basic scientific research, correcting market failures, etc.). There's no reason that a dollar invested by the government in infrastructure creates less growth than a dollar invested by a wealthy individual; in fact, given the propensity for wealthy individuals to park money in investments of questionable social value (see much of Wall Street's activities), I'd argue that the former is actually MORE beneficial to overall macroeconomic growth.

I really like this work: http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-income-taxes/

It basically suggests that: a)top tax rates have historically had virtually no significant effects on overall economic growth

b)we are well below the optimal tax rate for maximizing revenues

The authors of the paper on which this summary article is based on go on to suggest an optimal top effective rate of 68.7% as the revenue maximizing point (basically the optimal trade-off between revenue and dampening effects and/or evasion)

I find this work pretty convincing...

One argument I would make is a marginal utility one - the marginal utility of $ decreases dramatically at higher incomes, so even if you have a (comparatively) punishingly high tax rate on the rich, the amount that your tax is affecting their lives in real terms is lower due to the marginal utility of money at those incomes. I'm in the camp that it's reasonable to want at least some semblance of equality of outcome though, so this argument resonates with me in a way that it might not to someone who favors a more lassez-faire approach. This probably falls under your "moral need" umbrella.

I don't agree with your statement about a progressive income tax being economically unjustifiable, especially in the economy that we find ourselves in at the moment (and, if secular stagnation proponents like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman are right, may be the structural norm these days). The current economy is strongly demand constrained, with plenty of money available for investment (corporate profits and cash holdings at record highs), but inadequate consumer demand to justify investments. From this perspective, a progressive transfer of wealth down the income scale makes a lot of sense economically because the poor are much more likely to actually spend that money than the rich are. There's also not much good evidence that high end tax rates affect macroeconomic growth as much as people claim - just in the US we've had tax rates all over the map over the past 100 years, and there's not much correlation with economic growth. We certainly haven't seen any miracles of economic growth for the economy as a whole since 1980 with the long running supply side, deregulation, and low tax experiment. If taxing the rich really has such a strong effect on economic growth and job creation, it's hard to see that in the data...

Finally, interest on government debt only becomes a long-term problem if the rate is higher than the rate of growth. It's not clear to me that that has to be the case, but that's another discussion ;)

If it says no CarWoo dealers in my area, do I get any benefit out of going through the CarWoo dealer contact interface? Or am I essentially just going through the service to give local dealers the ability to call me whenever they want?

AIQ Investments - Park City, UT

QA Engineer/Sys Admin/Jr. Developer

We are looking for a candidate with strong Linux system administration skills and some application development experience including automated testing and dynamic scripting languages to fill a Testing & Systems Administration position at our financial start-up. The successful candidate would become an integral part of a small, fast-paced team and would be expected to wear multiple hats, including everything from working on hardware maintenance of our super computer to helping fill a QA vacancy on the primary development team. We want someone who enjoys working hard and learning new things, but also does well in an environment with a lot of freedom and self supervision. We currently have a small, tight-knit team but are poised to scale up quickly, so this position has a lot of potential for growth for the right candidate. We've got some pretty impressive hardware resources to play with, and we respect powder days.

Necessary Skills:

* Demonstrated experience working with and administering Linux installations (Fedora/Red Hat preferred)

* Demonstrated experience developing software including automated testing

Nice to Have:

* Experience with Groovy, Bash, JavaScript, and Python scripting and development

* Web application development experience using a modern framework like Node.js, Rails, Django, or Grails

* Familiarity with Spock testing framework for Groovy

* Experience managing a grid compute environment (SunGrid) VPN administration experience

* Experience building computers and working with server hardware

About Us:

We are a financial start-up located in Park City, UT capitalizing on exponentially improving processing power and machine learning algorithms to disrupt the money management industry. We combine state-of-the-art hardware (we've got our own, in-house GPU super computer) with a variety of machine learning techniques to develop data-inspired investment strategies. We strive for a "Work Hard, Play Hard" mentality and live in Park City for a reason - some of the best skiing, mountain biking, and hiking in the country is located right outside of our office. If you're looking for a relatively entry-level position with a lot of potential for advancement outside of the Bay Area bubble, we want to hear from you.

If this sounds interesting, submit your resume, cover letter, github profile (if applicable) and/or code sample to jobs@aiqinvestments.com. We'd love to hear details of any projects (professional or academic) that you're proud of and had an important/lead role in bringing to fruition too.

If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me personally by email (see profile)

I'd be interested in finding out more about this. My parents (who live in NH, which gets its fair share of cold days) have a Prius and don't notice any mileage hit in the winter - in fact not running the A/C seems to help things more than cold would hurt. But there's definitely a difference between a hybrid and a full electric...

I generally do 2 in the back on a hitch rack, and 2 on the roof on my Subaru right now.

(but I realize that car shuttles requiring 4 40lb downhill mountain bikes isn't exactly your typical use case for a car! It's just an important part of what I personally need it to do...)

In my experience, bikes on the hitch rack hurt gas mileage less than the roof ones, but I haven't been super rigorous with the comparison...

This might not be as much of a problem for most of the target market, but I was really excited about the Tesla X until I heard about the doors - meaning no roof rack options at all. Here in Utah, I would love a nice, capable car in the snow with plenty of room for gear, but if I can't put mountain bikes on the roof or a roof box with skis on it in the winter, it's not very useful...

Maybe I'm just not in the target demographic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who wants roof racks on my electric SUV...

I wish i could up vote this more than once...

Seriously, does no one on the OS X dev team use multiple monitors!?

What about my Retina macbook air!?

(oh, and a pony)

Agreed. I would argue that many (most?) higher power applications would be better served by ultracapacitors anyway...

I agree with you that it's necessary to look at evidence. But the evidence actually pretty overwhelmingly supports the general Keynesian framework for a financial crisis like this. Look at the data on austerity measures/spending vs. growth worldwide in this crisis (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/austerity-and-gr...), or any data on similar circumstances (the US "double-dip" in 1937 during the Great Depression, before WWII deficit spending brought us out of it, Japan in the 90s, etc.). The real question is, where is there ANY evidence/what is the model for the opposing view? Does it in any way match up with what really happened over the past 4 years? (because the AD-deficit/Keynesian view does)

Responding to the complaint about Obama's economic advisors being wrong is easy - they were wildly optimistic. However, plenty of economists including Paul Krugman were saying this at the time (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/opinion/09krugman.html?par... - note the date Jan 9, 2009, before Obama was even sworn in). The math is pretty basic - according to the aggregate demand view of the crisis you have a combined housing/financial shock that totaled at least 6% of GDB. The stimulus was MAYBE 1.5% of GDB, and that's being generous with assuming that high end tax cuts are just as effective as outright spending money (I would argue that they are not, since in a saver's economy, much of that money is just saved straight away). The Obama stimulus package was 4+ times too small to address the magnitude of the problem by this model; no one who has this view of the world is surprised that unemployment is still high (the only surprise was that Obama's advisors had such a rosy-eyed, not data-driven view of the world. They deserve a LOT of criticism for that).

Your "fall back on models that we do understand and have a lot of data for, like how businesses and households manage debt" is completely at odds with reality for two reasons. One is that it doesn't really imply what you say it does; most rational, not capitally constrained businesses/households (and the US is emphatically not capital constrained - bond yields are as low as they've ever been) invest when they have absurdly low interest rates - you're basically getting free money from the market, it's not a rational response to cut back in a situation like that. The second, and arguably more important, argument, however, is that the government occupies a fairly special position in the economy, since it alone among economic actors will never run out of money. Therefore, the government has the unique ability to act in a counter cyclical manner - it can counteract the collective saving of businesses/households to stimulate demand during recessions, and pull back when the private sector is roaring. (You give me 5% unemployment and 4-5%/yr GDP growth and I will be all for govt deficit reduction)

This is a common argument, but it's fundamentally flawed. We're in a very different economic regime right now than we were under GWB, and that makes all the difference.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on the left who understands the issues who is seriously arguing that deficits are never a problem, or never have to be dealt with. What a lot of us ARE arguing is that as long as we have an aggregate demand shortfall (everyone in the economy trying to save at once), paying attention to the debt is exactly the wrong thing to do, since the government is the only actor in the economy that has the freedom to act counter-cyclically and make up for the shortfall in private sector demand. The ultimate goal is to start a virtuous cycle of spending that gets us back toward full employment (and increases GDP). Then and only then does it make sense for the government to try to reduce debt through cuts.

There's decent evidence (see Delong & Summers 2012: http://delong.typepad.com/20120320-conference-draft-final-ca...) that trying to reduce debt through cuts in an economy like we have right now is counter-productive even on it's own terms (reducing the debt-gdb ratio) because any cuts you make further reduce aggregate demand and thus reduce the GDB side of that ratio even further.

It's not a democrat in the white house vs. republican in the white house thing that is causing people who were complaining about deficits under GWB to advocate against cutting short term spending now. It's all about the underlying economic conditions.