peterjs

For people interested in the relationship between algebra and geometry, there is a quite rigorous, yet not too long discussion of these topics in the "Elements of Geometry for Computer Vision" [1].

It comes the from the engineering end and finds a good balance between going into too much depth and introducing the necessary theory for bridging algebra and geometry. E.g. representing motion as a change in basis in linear space, the perspective camera as a mathematical model, etc.

[1] http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pajdla/gvg/GVG-2016-Lecture.pdf

Is it? Intel has been purchasing large quantities of green energy for years. In the last few year it has been 100% of the their overall consumption [1]. Is there any difference in what the two companies are trying to achieve?

[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/green-power-partnership-natio...

Certain services (Search, Gmail, YouTube) are inaccessible from Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

This article is quite ignorant of any history. It might be cool for preschoolers to find flags with similar geometry and colors, but making any conclusions without mentioning the historical context is wrong.

Why would "The Traditional view" be traditional when it represents just a fraction of the relevant history that shaped the culture of European countries? The same goes for "Historical and cultural divide".

Let's take Central Europe as an example - the "Traditional view" was valid for 45 years (during the Cold War) and does not hold for more than 25 years now. The article also dismisses roughly 300 years of the Habsburg Monarchy, 100 years of Austia-Hungary and the years preceding the Cold War.

These lightly ignored years are important when speaking of any cultural divide as tradesmen, craftsmen, students, etc. moved around the empires and exchanged goods and knowledge with each other. Travelling around European towns and villages shows how the builders and craftsmen influenced each other - in regions much larger than the current states.

Is there a way to find for how long they use the app before deleting it? Can you track the activity of the user, e.g. number of tasks added per day? Or, in other words, are you losing long-term users or the ones that are trying out 5 different todo/reminder apps just to pick the one they like the most?

I went down the same road - using mdadm and a UPS instead of a HW RAID controller with battery backup unit. LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261-8i SGL with a battery backup costs roughly 650 EUR; Eaton 9130i 1500VA Rack 2U UPS costs 850 EUR. So it's a bit more expensive, but you would be buying that UPS anyway.

I think it's a macro. A company that builds companies.

I have to admit that it comes close to Volvo's best achievement today. But not quite. I've managed to cram a 2m (6.6 ft) ladder into my 15 years old S40. Which makes me even more fond of it than ever before.

It has no touch screens - just terrific hardware controls. No fancy electronics, manual transmission, a 2.0l petrol engine without turbos (not even one). All this makes me believe that this incredibly sleek and calm vehicle has its best days ahead of it! I got a bit carried away, still, that durability and utility of these older Volvos... There is something refined about them even when carrying ladders around.

Are all these icons black-and-white? It seems to be fashionable to use monochrome colors for icons these days (Gmail, many mobile and desktop apps). It makes for a sleek and calm interface. I think its choosing the easy way out. Instead of picking a good pallet and shapes, just remove the colors and all of a sudden a seemingly unrelated set of graphics has something very distinctive in common (it worked particularly well for me in a small newspaper where low quality photos were contributed by different authors, just make them grayscale, voila).

Really, color is such a great way to convey information.

What kind of scanner/imaging equipment is needed for the studies? It's not quite clear to me from the article.

On a related note. Which python library would you recommend for text-based interfaces? I have never used ncurses, so I don't know how complex it is. What I would like to achieve is having a user launch my script from the command line, use the text based interface to select a source and destination folder, set a few parameters and show a progress bar.

We need new countries as much as spaces between sentences and question marks.

I am quite sure that by "scaling" he meant the scaling of their business activities and not software.

"... Google offers to bring that scale to us. For me, ultimately building great products is key.... ...you have to look at markets outside of the US. We are doing very well in the US and Canada but we need to get to Europe and around the globe. Just getting to UK has taken up a lot of time and energy and when you look at Europe, there are many countries and many opportunities. It is an atoms-based business and a lot goes into getting it to scale — legal, physical distribution and even localization are time consuming and need new kind of scale."

Here is the interview: http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/nests-ceo-tony-fadell-explains-...

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is not a howto guide. It's not a list of 101 tips and tricks for drawing charts, where one would wish for 200 tips instead. It's a framework, a theory, of how to think and reason about visualizing information. It is something you can take and apply in many different situations. Then the question really is, is there anything wrong with the theory it conveys?

As a matter of fact, I do speak the language. A lot of things feel weird to me when I come to visit the city. I have this uneasy feeling about things like the Hungarian Guard [1][2] - a paramilitary group having a rally on the most most important square in Budapest. Or having a fascist party, as the 3rd biggest, in the Parliament [3].

Yet, there is an incredible amount of gifted people, who are the exact opposite of these jerks. I guess a lot of people here admire undertakings like Prezi, LogMeIn, ArchiCAD/Graphisoft, or Ustream, all coming from Budapest.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Guard [2] http://www.maszol.ro/uploads/files/userfiles/images/kulfold/... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobbik

I can't help myself, but Twitter seems to me like a subset of Facebook. Something like ICQ, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger is to Facebook Chat or Skype.

It came at the right time in the US, but it takes some time for these things to get abroad. While it arrived to Central Europe, Facebook had enough users and introduced features like Followers etc. Today, Twitter is solely used by a marginal tech/hip/geek community here.

And advertising goes where people go. The question is, whether this evidence suggests that the Twitter of today can't compete directly with Facebook, and it's success is based on acquiring users before FB matched it in functionality. How stable this user base is? Is it a similar case as with the chat applications?

Anecdotal evidence - a friend of mine just asked, whether one should invest in Twitter... on Facebook.

Thats probably more money than the size of the whole European self-storage industry. I'm really curious, why are these services so popular in the US? What do you store there? When? E.g. when I have something I don't want to get rid of just yet (furniture, spare parts...), I put it in the basement of our apartment house. Although, I can imagine using self-storage when moving.

The good (well...) news is that the curved lines can't even be seen, when the logo is shrinked :)

I found an interesting figure [1] for those of us who could name a few, but are not as well versed in the geography of Britain. It compares British cities to similar European cities by population. The scale is unnecessarily skewed, though.

[1] http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/figure1_tcm77-259156.png

Software is eating the world. For real now. And it is eating hardware. This is such a strong force that even old time franchises like Microsoft and Motorola can't do anything about it. And apparently "pure software" companies don't mind venturing into it. They know it's software, for the most part, and believe vertical integration is worth the trouble with the messy hardware parts.

How deep is the integration anyway? Did Google and Microsoft end up owning the manufacturing plants? Apple is known to outsource the manufacturing itself.

And that's the reason I am packing my stuff and heading to London. At this very moment. I was just about to remove the legs from the table I am writing these lines on (well, I am writing them on a computer, but thats not the point). And surprise, surprise, I am moving from Central Europe. And yes, I can speak with a thick Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian (Andy Grove style) accent. If anyone had a job available for a fresh CS graduate, please let me know (email is in my profile)!

What I really like about the search, is that it accounts for seasons on different hemispheres. E.g. it returns Lisboa and Cadiz as places similar to Sydney. Even though the months with hot weather are different in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

As a side note - clicking the name of a place shows an overlay in the graph. It was not obvious at first; the names are in black.

Try the local names. Praha, Wien, and some unknown mystical name the Dubliners use.

IO is the place to launch new products. It's just slightly more impressive than showing a message "And btw. we've lunched this new version of maps. Check it out (with the probability of 0.00053846)".

I don’t like this new “flat and monochrome” thing. I think it’s a fashion.

One should always be cautious about simple design rules. As design goes, in one setting the flat, grayscale approach can be dull, in another one, it can be cheerful and captivating.

I have a recent example for the new mantra of removing color and flattening things. Take Sourcetree, which is one of my favorite applications. A few weeks ago they’ve switched to a new icon set for their main icon bar:

before http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/img/screenshots/st_feature_hist...

now http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/images/sourcetree_hero_mac_hist...

I don’t think there is any usability or aesthetic benefit to it, quite the opposite. The original version had something slightly funny and frivolous about it, which made it pleasant to use. And from the usability perspective, one could subconsciously click the yellow icon without examining the picture itself.

There are also many counter examples where grayscale and flat design make things a joy to use. I used to do DTP for a black and white newspaper and we never had the feeling it was dull, quite the opposite, we considered it quite elegant and calm as compared to the flashy tabloids.

Are there any similar tools available for Ruby? When I've checked it a few years ago, there were some projects at very early stages; hardly comparable to their Python counterparts.

As for the integrated stack problem, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Enthought Python Distribution [1]. I've used it on both Windows and Mac. It includes all the important libraries for linear algebra, matrix computation, and visualization (SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, etc.). So it is a great replacement for Matlab, which probably falls short of any programming language known to mankind.

[1] http://www.enthought.com/

I was going to read through the comments in my usual routine of gathering insights the original link missed. Then it struck me. I liked that t-shirt. It simply looked good. What comment was I expecting? Some kind of logical reasoning about what's wrong with that t-shirt? Or a proof that the t-shirt is just fine? As wise barber once said, "We think too much and feel too little."

They probably do not know much about the banking sector, as most of the banks (I would say 95%) are branches of Western European ones, like the French Societe Generale, Austrian Erste Group, or the Belgian KBC. The way they bought/privatized/stole them in the 1990s is a whole another story.

It's cultural for the last few generations. From a historical perspective it is rather inaccurate.

Let me just scratch the surface of the history of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It is much more complex, but I hope this simplification will be enough for getting a feel for it.

Czech lands, which are east of Germany and Austria were a part of the same Holy Roman Empire for roughly 900 years until the beginning of the 19th century and then part of Austria-Hungary until the First WW. The influence is clear in trade, culture, education.

Slovakia is a bit different story. During the same 900 year period it was part of the Hungarian Kingdom, which was again a Central European entity. Both countries sort of met in Austria-Hungary in the 19th century. Post WWI they formed Czechoslovakia, from 1918 to 1938. It was democratic country with strong ties to the West.

The most intensive period of Eastern European/Russian influence was from the end of WWII to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The time where the term Iron Curtain comes from.

This and the "slavic connection" with Russia are probably the sources of confusion. The languages are similar. In the period of "romantic nationalism" of the 19th century, part of the so-called intellectual elite was intrigued by the idea of Pan-Slavism and wanted close ties with the Russian Empire. This was always more of a romantic idea that comes back every now and then. When the real decisions have been made (formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Velvet Revolution in 1989, joining the NATO and later the EU in 2004), they were always in a "westward" direction, in terms of both economy and diplomacy.