datahipster

Kudos to Google for moving this along! A few weeks, the HN community picked up [0, 1] on a presentation [2] about the Tint shading language, a WebGPU shading language prototype. It's great to see them formalize their prototype into a draft spec.

Thank you to those who are working hard on bringing WebGPU to the masses!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316777 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22351285 [2]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qHhFq0GJtY_59rNjpiHU...

Qt's licensing for commercial products is something like $500/month/developer. For a small team of 6 developers, that's $36k in licensing a year. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take existing Qt code and "port" it over to the commercial license -- you're required to start from scratch IIRC.

If you're affected by this and would love to work on a dedicated team developing spacecraft orbit simulation software, my company is hiring. Please send me an e-mail at stefan.novak@ai-solutions.com.

Would you be interested in working on high-fidelity satellite orbit simulation software? Our software architecture is primarily C++ and C#, but we're starting to explore some new technologies for our front-end, i.e., Electron, WebAssembly, React.

Take a look at our posting in the Who Is Hiring thread!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808504

a.i. solutions | Washington, D.C. | C++ Software Engineer | U.S. Citizenship

Would you love to be a part of the new space industry? Do you like solving challenging problems with algorithms and data structures? Do you enjoy designing and developing sophisticated software architectures?

Read on!

We’re a team of software engineers, aerospace engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and data scientists building FreeFlyer, one of the top platforms for satellite orbital modeling and trajectory design. Our software is used by NASA and other space agencies and private companies for satellite mission planning and mission control. FreeFlyer has been used for spacecraft missions of all types, including the International Space Station, communications satellites, science missions, and several planned missions to the Moon and beyond.

Take a look at how FreeFlyer was used to analyze and visualize high-fidelity gravitational field measurement data from the GRACE mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eET-PlSB6yQ. You can learn more about FreeFlyer via our website: https://ai-solutions.com/freeflyer/.

We are looking for someone to join our team who is excited to dive in and make an impact. By joining the team, you will have the opportunity to:

+ Solve interesting problems that are centered around high fidelity computational modeling, data structures, algorithms, data visualization, and performance.

+ Contribute to improving our software architecture and help us build a better product.

+ Learn from subject matter experts about everything that goes into sending a satellite into orbit.

To learn more about the position, please visit: https://rew12.ultipro.com/AIS1000/JobBoard/JobDetails.aspx?_....

If this sounds interesting to you, we would love to hear from you! You can reach out to us over email or connect with us via the DC Tech Slack community with any questions.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The FreeFlyer Team

stefan.novak@ai-solutions.com

@stefan on DC Tech’s Slack community(http://www.dctechslack.com/)

For those interested in learning the spectacular engineering that went into the Hubble: http://a.co/d/4kLahfW

Ha!

They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro.

They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on.

Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work!

I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!

Here's an article of a developer who went through something similar: http://findingscience.com/ruby/2014/11/17/why-im-renaming-a-...

The bit that stands out to me is an e-mail he received from a female engineer:

While the idealist in me would love to aim for a world where sex was treated more equally and openly, the unfortunate reality of tech is that it has been a haven for misogynistic men and the environment is heavily male dominated. While in an ideal world the name SexMachine would be something that both genders could joke about, the reality is that the tech community is not ready or capable of that today.

Neat! I've been looking around for a comprehensive guide in how to write a custom React renderer for an upcoming project of mine. It's unfortunate that Facebook hasn't had the time to document the process, often leaving folks to have to poke around at how other libraries do it. I'm starting to really appreciate how React can be used to incremental render complex state configurations to mediums other than the DOM.

OP: thanks for taking the time to write this series! It'll definitely help me out with some work I'm interested in doing.

Airbnb.com | Portland, Oregon | Front-End Engineer | Full-time | Onsite

Hello! Airbnb is looking for a front-end engineer to join its growing Service Excellence team in Portland, Oregon. We are building world-class tools for our global team of Customer Experience and Trust and Safety agents to ensure our guests and hosts have a great experience on Airbnb, 24/7, and 365 days a year.

Working closely with designers, we implement the user interface of our web app. We build libraries and abstractions to make our lives easier, such as DLS, our front-end toolkit. We make the most of modern tools like React, ES6, and Redux, and even our next-generation mobile apps are built with JavaScript on React Native.

Please feel free to apply online at https://www.airbnb.com/careers/departments/position/572443 or contact us at join-sx@airbnb.com if you have any questions.

Take a look at the recent book Sprint: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25814544-sprint?from_sear...

It details a creative process for developing concepts and testing them. Given that the book outlines a 5-day process that is tailored for product development teams, you might get a lot out of it for personal projects.

Oregon Health & Science University | Scientific Programmer | Portland, OR | ONSITE | Full Time | Relocation available

We are seeking a skilled scientific programmer to develop genomic, imaging, and clinical analysis applications on a distributed data / workflow management and analytics platform currently under development. This position will work in a team oriented software development environment, following best practices such as code sharing through GitHub and development of structured software APIs. A successful candidate will contribute to the international development of standardized APIs and data schemas, and develop implementations compatible with such APIs, ensuring that the system is interoperable within the emerging community ecosystem of software tools.

Responsibilities

+ Develop custom analytics and data management applications to facilitate one or more of the following: large-scale genomic data analysis; machine learning methods to infer genotype-to-phenotype predictive models; analysis of quantitative imaging data.

+ Work with the platform development team to implement scalable cloud-enabled workflows to disseminate analytical advances to the research community.

+ Establish and maintain standards for structured software & systems engineering, including requirements, design, code, test, quality, configuration & release management and project management.

+ Provide documentation and user support allowing computational researchers across campus to access and re-use analysis tools.

+ Maintain well-curated, highly structured, transparent omics, imaging, or clinical data resources.

+ Develop tools to integrate commonly used open source bioinformatics software applications.

+ Participate in leading international efforts aimed at establishing best practices and standards for genomic data representation and analysis.

The job posting is available at: https://ais.ohsu.edu/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/ca...

If you have any questions, feel free to send a note to novast@ohsu.edu.

This is pretty much the main idea behind another paper that Eamonn wrote [0]. The idea is that you can normalize and discretize timeseries data into a lecicographical representation, then perform all sorts of interests analyses on it. For example, searching for common subsequences can be done via regular expressions.

[0] http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/iSAX.pdf

Neat! I did some similar analysis of conducting topic modeling around tweets during the Boston Marathon bombing a couple of years back. It was pretty cool to see how topics were neatly ordered over time.

http://blog.dc.esri.com/2013/04/18/the-evolution-of-discussi...

Spatial statistics aren't the same as regular statistics

I've always been frustrated with the gap between statistics and spatial statistics. For example, some of the methodologies with conducting hot-spot analysis is somewhat misleading, especially to uninformed geospatial analysts. For example, Esri [0] implements this first by conducting geospatial aggregation, then calculating z-scores based on Gaussian assumptions, then generates a corresponding "p-value" to extract "statistically significant areas" that are coined "hot spots". At that point, an analyst typically color-codes those p-values showing regions with low p-values as "extreme" areas of interest. I'm really curious if there's any empirical or anecdotal research that validates this methodology.

There are some attempts to try and normalize sampled data. Location Quotient [1] (and Standardized Location Quotient), for example, compares a local measure to a global measure. However, this too has Gaussian assumptions and doesn't properly account for variance in the data.

I would definitely love to see a hierarchical Bayesian spatial model that takes into account a geospatial prior (such as the overall density of tweets) allowing you to solve for the posterior of cluster centers. Has anyone seen this done before?

[0] http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//0...

[1] http://www.bea.gov/faq/index.cfm?faq_id=478

SHOWHN doesn't seem to work.

For those cases where I have to dip into R for specific functionality, I'll use Rpy2. Pandas has great support for translating Pandas data frames to R data frames!

You ought to take a look at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipython-sql. This, in conjunction with IPython magic helpers specified in your IPython profile, can turn IPython into a SQL client. Here's a good example: https://gist.github.com/slnovak/583e35083ebd42892fab

I'm not familiar with Haskell, but can someone provide some insight into how this compares to PyMC or OpenBUGS?

Also check out Vowpal Wabbit [0]. Although this is a tool that provides several online versions of classification, regression, etc, there's an online LDA module included as well. It takes advantage of the "hashing trick", meaning that you can build an LDA model with a fixed memory footprint. I've had a lot of success using this tool.

[0] https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit

I did something similar to this with tweets during the Boston Marathon bombing [0]. One of the coolest things that I saw was that the topics themselves were neatly ordered in time. In other words, you can visualize how the distribution of vocabulary evolves with time [1].

It would be interesting to extend the LDA model to include a temporal variable. Never got around to doing it, but it seems like it would work well for social media data.

[0] http://blog.dc.esri.com/2013/04/18/the-evolution-of-discussi...

[1] http://blog.dc.esri.com/files/2013/04/topic-distribution2.pn...

I'm delighted to share that I'm currently reading Kelley's book right now. Great read thus far!

It's refreshing to see a story on Monk make the front page of HN.

+1 for a Vim plugin...

$399B is enough to have funded NASA from 1980-2012.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...

TIL that the $392 billion budget for the F-35 program could have funded NASA's annual budget from 1992-2012.

Can you provide some proof as to "work[ing] pretty high up at Google"? Just curious.

This is a simple one-liner gem that makes it easy to render a Gemfile entry for the latest version of a gem. This is nice to hook into Vim so that you can quickly build out a new Gemfile.

This is pretty cool! However, I'm going to put on my Edward Tufte hat and point out that it's probably best to serve up this data in a static table. It always disappoints me to see sparse, categorical data visualized on a map since there's no additional context one achieves from the geospatial components. OP: maybe you could explore visualizing continuous fields, such as the Earth gravity field: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gallery/gravity/ggm01_asia_f...

Ha. I actually submitted a same demo 24 hours prior to your posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688411. At first I was mildly irritated, thinking that someone rehashed what I cooked up, but after looking at your repo, I see that you guys have been playing around with this for a few weeks, so - hooray for simultaneous discovery! :) Anyway, I really do like the rendering you guys have going on. One other thing you can do is hit the Wikipedia API to extract out the "coordinates" property for the page that was updated and show that. Make sure to change any page titles from "Talk/<Page>" to "<Page>" to pull out more relevant changes.

To view Wikipedia updates and Tweets, try the following:

1) Click Twitter followed by Start Collection. 2) Click Add Stream followed by the Wikipedia tab. Enable Page Locations and select a color under the Visualizations tab. Finally, start the stream by clicking Start Collection. 3) Perform step 2 with Wikipedia User Locations and a new color.

Enjoy!