mcarmichael
Joined 8 years ago
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61
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26
Member since
Apr 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Add some trigonometry, and this superpower has historical military applications:
Comment · 2 years ago
An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the number of qualified operators needed to scale out to a fully national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound business.
The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well here:
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible (switching).
For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might otherwise be confusing:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...
Comment · 2 years ago
Control was an almost completely unaddressed issue before the Wrights took it up, even though it is also crucial to useful glider development.
This video has a nice delineation of the collection of breakthroughs needed:
https://youtu.be/EkpQAGQiv4Q?t=391Comment · 2 years ago
Melville's Moby Dick. It can be about adventure, about whaling, about the fellowship of man, about mortality...
Intruder in the Dust, the best of William Faulkner's "young adult" novels. The short story collection Knight's Gambit is also well worth a look.
Comment · 2 years ago
As described, something more akin to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming#Br...
That page has a reasonable summary of the exploitation techniques and history motivating this work.
Comment · 2 years ago
A nice companion piece, focused on a related probem:
"An Efficient Data Structure For A Hex Editor" https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/tweak/btree.htm...
Comment · 3 years ago
There are fundamental design choices in Lua that can certainly put some people off, such as prototype-based inheritance or the union of arrays and maps.
It certainly wasn't casually hacked together, though. Ierusalimschy et. al. have thoroughly documented the language and its development rationale with admirable clarity.
In particular, the paper "C APIs in extension and extensible languages"[2] will be of special interest to prospective embeddable language developers. "Passing a Language through the Eye of a Needle: How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design" is also a good read, for those who can summon bits through the ACM hellm... er, portal.
Comment · 3 years ago
The really troublesome securities of the Global Financial Crisis were complex derivatives of private-label, almost universally sub-prime, asset-backed-securities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation
The standardized, so-called "agency" MBS on the SVB books really isn't anything like that CDO plague. In 2008, people were losing faith in the ability to even assign valuations to CDOs; SVB's problem with their MBS portfolio is that the current market valuation is obviously not what they needed it to be just now.
Comment · 3 years ago
The project had a real mark-to-market agonizing reappraisal in 2010 or so, as reviewed here (from the standpoint of 2013): <https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-690t>. Since then development targets have largely been met, and potential customers are much more comfortable with capability and reliability data.
Here's a great Australian-based analysis of the F-35's particular attractions for current foreign buyers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQgNwrtVoZ4
Scathing criticism of the early F-35 development process has always been entirely warranted, and the Pentagon continues to pay the price in rebuilding costs for early "production" airframes. Its also notable that the Navy is being quite, ah, deliberate about F-35C deployment; I think only one carrier is currently rated to operate them. The Marines are more gung-ho about their F-35Bs, but only the F-35A is an export success story so far.
Comment · 3 years ago
Indeed. This marketing copy is spectacularly over-reaching.
Canada has a proud history in sounding rockets; I wonder if comparisons to that military research work were the stepping-off point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Brant_(rocket)
Canada also has prior non-military liquid-fueled rocket engine development worthy of note:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Arrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD0ChIZnPLY
That project also originated in a prize competition context; it's great to see Space Concordia persevering with their effort on its own merits.
Addendum: A much more reality-tethered description of the group's achievements as of a couple of years ago: https://www.pccomposites.com/space-concordia-fires-most-powe...
Comment · 3 years ago
The primary author, Ted Unangst, has a couple of blog posts describing the inception of doas, and its intended typical use patterns:
Comment · 3 years ago
Fayetteville State has some pretty unique regional and demographic considerations to take into account, and specific issues concerning student engagement with this course matter.
Paragraphs 2-5 of the article are worth reading in this regard, e.g.
> Our students will be largely taking this course online, half of our students are over the age of 25, many are veterans or military-affiliated, many are from rural communities, and we are a regional public Historically Black University focused on improving student access to a college education.
and
> I started teaching World History to 1600 in Spring 2019 as a provost-led intervention in the core curriculum and gateway classes that had high rates of students receiving final grades of D or F or withdrawing from the course.
The article is a case study in local curriculum engineering, not a doctrinal proclamation.
Comment · 3 years ago
The source article title is quite appropriate in the context of the blog it appears in; presumably it's the HN-specific clickbait paraphrase that's being objected to...
I concur, and suggest "History Curriculum: Ending World History Part One in…1763?".
Comment · 3 years ago
The relevant conceptual distinction seems to be whether the aerodynamics of the blade(s) are conceptually independent, or interdependent. Better explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_(aeronautics)#Aircra...
Comment · 3 years ago
For Tesla in particular, an explanation for the incredible rise in stock price post-2019 is needed, to inform any explanation for the recent slide.
In the last 2 years, Meta touched twice its end-of-2019 price; Tesla peaked at over 13 times its end-of-2019 price, and is still 5 times higher now! That seems like a far more striking and unlikely phenomenon than the recent slide.