plafl

There are already insurance companies offering coverage for legal expenses. The interesting part here is maybe that by restricting it to patents the insurer has a very clear idea of the risk being covered, as all the patents are public.

Edit: on the other hand your potential customers will be difficult to convince. To pay insurance you must have risk aversion, something I don't expect to be abundant among startups

I had (aerospace engineer) two semesters of Numerical Methods. Then we had more specialized things like Finite Elements Methods.

I wish we had been taught how to use a Computer Algebra System (example, Mathematica or Maple).

>But we can and should do better. Why is DLL-hell still a thing? Imports should specify versions, defaulting to a default if none is specified. Languages barely even consider versions today, they are almost always hacked on via magic text strings in filenames.

So suppose you fix the version number when you import the library. You then need to copy paste the version number to other imports in your code base? Or maybe you mean each import may have different versions? which is all right until you need to pass some data between two versions of the same library. This wouldn't be so difficult if semantic versioning or another equivalent was respected, but we know it's a lie. This wouldn't be a problem at all if there were some kind of contracts in place when using modules/package/whatever instead of a silly number based on convention but how to specify the contracts is not that easy, and it's similar to say having static typing. I think improving versioning it's doable but it's very hard.

I'm all about improving tooling, I have been obsessing for a few months about the sad state of program documentation and navigation. Why is the computer doing nothing while I think so hard while I'm programming? Why there is so little money in this space?

I love this book, reading it right now:

Power Programming Mathematica: The Kernel.

It's (legally) free, you can find PDFs.

Bonus: I love weird books covers. This one is charming. Am I the only one that notices that the barbell is bending upwards?

> There is even research by now that aims to use ML to find good heuristics for a given family of problems (where the common characteristics of the problems might lend to a dominant heuristic).

I think I have spotted some papers about this for combinatorial problems but not for continuous variables, which makes sense given their relative hardness.

Do you know some papers, journals, conferences about this?

I'm interested specially about the view from people working in optimization research more than in AI.

He got 2/3 of the shares necessary for gaining control. The Bank of Portugal was the only one who could prosecute money forgery and it was being acquired with forged money. This guy was a hacker.

I doubt he would have succeeded nevertheless. In the end the law was changed to apply to him retroactively, which was unconstitutional (and I'm sure it's still unconstitutional on most parts of the world), and that only to give him more sentence time. He would have been removed from the bank, one way or another.

I'm trying to do a PhD part time while working although I don't plan to go to academia, now or in the future.

For me it's a way of focusing on some topic related to my work: I'm a machine learning engineer and I'm doing the PhD in AI/optimization. I have spent just a year on it so success is still far away.

I know people however that went back to academia but they had some previous experience for example as teaching assistants.

Road atlases were the same in Spain. I think the reason is that they are not interactive, that's the all the zoom level you are going to get and so they are extremely dense with information.

I think that for interactive use google maps are way better, they avoid information overload by presenting a very schematic representation. Old road atlases look like versions of Where's Waldo?.

I actually have wireless keyboard, mouse and earphones, both for work and for sport.

But like other commenter says I need nevertheless an space for a 27" monitor, keyboard/mouse and a comfortable office chair. I don't think I have a "mindset", I'm all about improving my day to day, I spend an insane amount of hours in front of my computer. I have been told that my next work computer is going to be a MacBook Pro so I will get a taste of the Apple experience.

> If you never use your battery, why own a laptop at all? Why not buy a Mac mini or an iMac?

Sometimes I need to move, for example while travelling, otherwise I would use a desktop computer.

I came to exactly post this. I previously had a HP ZBook with Nvidia Quadro inside and although I managed to get it running nicely I recently bought an LG Gram with integrated graphics and I'm not looking back. Both came with a Windows which I immediatly changed to Linux.

If you are not into gaming you can save big bucks and weight buying a laptop with integrated graphics. If you need a GPU for work you most probably need one with >8GB anyway.

PD: Why do so many laptops come with crapware instead of vanilla Windows? Why??? Why do laptop manufacturers tarnish their product so much? It remembers me so much of Android phones.

This is a usually cited concern for so many people and I'm curious to know why because I rarely unplug my laptop, like most people I know.

Exercising is doing physical exercise for the sake of it (health). Training involves planification to reach an objective: some personal record, a competition or aesthetic.

> and macOS has good MS Office support.

This. I get the M1 must be very good but what I really want is something I doubt I'm going to get: native Office support in Linux. I use Office rarely but on those rare occasions it sucks to use Office 365.