nrubin

I took a version of this class (called The Art of Approximation) with Dr. Mahajan when he was a visiting professor at Olin College. The course helped me become fearless about tackling a broad range of math problems I knew little about, and has helped me in countless real life situations from financial planning to major work decisions.

Also, it's a great intro on good ways to nail PM interviews, at least at Google (where I now work, thanks in no small part to the lessons from this class).

If you have a spare few hours, read this book or take his classes on edX. It'll absolutely change your intuition for numbers.

This looks neat! Signed up. Question though -- is this all $$$$+ restaurants or will you guys expand to cheaper/lesser well known joints too?

Allen taught every single software class I took in college,its awesome to see his writing recognized on HN! We actually worked through LBoS during a software systems course this past spring semester, it was a great way to get introduced to the complexities of multithreaded programs.

Really cool idea, I have a general question about the healthcare app space -- how many of these apps are written ad-hoc for each medical practice? I.E., should I expect my dentist to run a totally different software stack from my general practitioner, and do they usually run custom software or more general solutions?

Also, how much of the existing stuff is written on .NET? I have a feeling that's a pretty popular stack for a lot of small business/enterprise companies, but is harder to support via open source software.

From what I understand, many of the statistics quoted about Iron Dome are for "attempted interceptions". This skews the effectiveness of the system towards high-priority scenarios, maybe those that are more likely to produce a winning outcome for Iron Dome.

As an Israeli, I've always heard the Iron Dome rockets are stupid expensive to fire, so the IDF really only wants to fire them during scenarios that are high risk -- e.g., a rocket fired toward the Negev is much lower priority than a rocket fired at Tel Aviv.

On another note, I think that as programmers it's an interesting exercise to speculate as to the nature of the computer systems Iron Dome employs in order to mitigate attacks. AFAIK, Iron Dome rockets are only fired when high-value areas are targeted or there is a high probability of success. Can you imagine the kinds of online learning models we employ nowadays, being able to evaluate a set of inputs in <10s ? Even a complex Bayesian inference algorithm that could solve for a probable strike area in that short time with reasonable accuracy is incredible.

As colloquial evidence, a family member of mine recently posted a photo of Iron Dome intercepting a rocket almost directly over his home. So maybe it's not that accurate or that effective, but when it does work it's worth almost every dollar or shekel spent.

This has to be one of the clearest academic papers I have ever read. Aside from the content, the author does a really good job explaining his thesis. I wish more academic papers were written this way.

Quick question about one of the algorithms this article proposes:

Instead, we compute a seed by combining a server_seed (which is provided in hashed form to the client before the deal - in the same way as the initial_shuffle is) and a client_seed.

What if the server picked a large value and this appending caused an overflow? Don't some languages/runtimes turn an overflow into 0? Then the server could always seed the RNG the same way.

I'm probably very wrong, can someone tell me why?

I'm currently working on a project where we started with Trigger.IO but moved to phonegap simply because more people have used phonegap, so the documentation is a lot better.

Also, depending on your target user group, you may want to checkout out Ionic (ionicframework.com). It's a mobile-first front end framework built on top of AngularJS. I've been using it on top of cordova/phonegap and it's easy to get up and running with and very performant (on the modern devices it supports). With Cordova and Ionic, our app feels very close to native on iPhone 5+ and high-end Androids

Hey, did you also here that there are NO trees on their campus?

Yep,

https://github.com/technicalmachine/tessel-design-docs

For some people it may be easy. For others they may have awesome ideas but decide not to execute on those ideas because learning Arduino C++ or figuring out how to install Node on a RaspberryPi seems like a large barrier to entry for them. Maybe some of those people are those that make those awesome websites, and maybe with an embedded controller that feels more like the environment they're used to, they're more likely to bring their awesome ideas to fruition.

Disclaimer: I went to school with the Tessel folks.

I think the appeal is that web developers won't need to learn another language in order to do embedded development. That's another barrier to entry to embedded development lowered.

This is sort of like an internship, but for people no longer in school. I've interned three times (finishing my third now) and I think it's a great way for you to get to know a company and for a company to get to know you. That is, of course, assuming the company has a bite sized piece of work that allows you to show if you've failed or succeeded.

I think it's weird that this person complains about people going home to live their lives. You know what's awesome about big companies? They know you have a life and they don't try to get in your way for that. There is life beyond the work and the office.

Also, Microsoft is a massive company, and this person thinks a single team reflects the entire company culture? It's a huge company with hundreds of teams. One team does not define the organization.

This post should be titled "I worked at Azure 8 months out of college and here's what I learned." That would be a more accurate title.