bigpicture's comments

Wow, this is the 2nd time in two weeks that something has appeared on my probability homework and then made the front page of HN almost immediately.

Coincidence?

Who else is taking Stat 110?

Advertising in general may work, but any particular ad may or may not work.

> Sure, big old U.S. Steel is behind the times, but that's true for any industry.

U.S. Steel operates integrated mills, which make steel from raw materials. "Mini-mills" make steel using electric arc blast furnaces to recycle existing steel.

If you need very high quality steel, you have to get it from an integrated mill. Everyone else can use the recycled stuff. The real benefit that you are talking about is the fact that recycled steel quality is improving enough to be useful in more applications.

PS - U.S. Steel is converting their Alabama mill to an electric arc blast furnace (they may have finished by now).

> Don’t underestimate AMD’s ability to shoot itself in the foot.

Every single consumer-targeted Intel chip has integrated graphics capable of displaying a 4k movie on the screen/tv without so much as breaking a sweat. AMD has exactly 3 Ryzen chips with that capability, none of which fit into their "Lot's of cores!" strategy. I'm not sure that AMD understands what drives the majority of consumer purchases.

> highest-earning first year teachers only earned $39,259

Appendix A [1] contains the salary schedule for Chicago Public Schools, which shows that in the current school year a first-year teacher ("step 1") with a bachelor's degree ("lane 1") earns between $57,000 and $69,000 per year, depending on the length of the school year in the particular school they are appointed to. A master's degree ("lane 2") bumps the pay by somewhere in the range of $4,000-5,000.

Being a coach on the sports team earns an additional $26.21 per hour of coaching, participating in after-school non-coaching, non-instructional activities earns $40.90 per hour, and after-school instructional activities earn $47.62 per hour.

It appears as though a teacher could add $5,000 or more per year with only an hour of extra time per school day.

If a teacher wanted to be frugal and save money, it surely appears possible.

[1] https://www.ctunet.com/for-members/2015-19-contract

I vote in Chicago, and our electronic voting machines print a paper receipt. The process is as follows: 1) Write your name and address on a piece of paper. 2) Hand it to the worker, who looks you up on the computer. 3) The worker writes your ward/precinct on the piece of paper and asks you to confirm and sign. 4) The ballot is loaded onto a smart card and given to you. 5) You choose any open voting machine and insert the smart card. 6) The voting machine presents your ballot and you press a button to confirm it is the correct one. 7) You do your voting. 8) The voting machine shows you all of your votes, screen by screen and you confirm them. 9) The voting machine prints your votes, page by page on a roll of paper (behind clear plastic) and you confirm them. 10) The voting machine asks if you are really, really sure and you confirm. 11) The smart card pops out of the machine and you drop it in a box on the way out.

If you do early voting, you can only vote electronically. If you vote on election day, you can choose a paper ballot if you wish. Early voting is electronic only because you can vote anywhere in the city (if you work downtown you can do so on your lunch break no matter where in the city you live) and there are dozens of different ballots because we vote on things at the neighborhood level in addition to state and national candidates. Having paper ballots would be quite challenging.

> This means that they can "financially engineer" quarters

Sure, look at their balance sheet from the 8-k filing. How many quarters in a row showing a $1.2 billion increase in accounts payable will their suppliers tolerate?

They exist, here is an example:

https://mhubchicago.com/page/equipment-and-resources

That's a good point

Right, surely these states have some sort of standard that must be met for graduation even if it is not passing some exam.

Chicago has a CLT building - the new flagship McDonald's restaurant is CLT and steel.

Additionally, a CLT office building has been approved in Chicago and will be the largest CLT building in the United States when finished.

A) PowerShell was inspired by OpenVMS DCL. B) OpenVMS on x86 is due to be released in 2019 (it's in private beta right now).

I've driven through wind farms in middle America and for the most part, each tower has a small gravel pad around it with a gravel access road to the nearest public road. Everything in between is farmed as normal. While the overall footprint is large, the majority of the land continues to be used in the way it has always been used. If all the farmland in America became one gigantic wind farm, I don't think you would see a noticeable difference in agricultural production, especially as the farmers collecting lease payments are going to be able to invest in newer equipment.

So when they say that a downside to wind power is the much larger amount of space required compared to previous expectations, is it in the NIMBY "I don't want to see a turbine when I look out the window", or something else? I'd like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt; I wish they'd spent a little more space explaining the downside of the land requirements.

> As far as US judicial system is concerned Osama and Pablo are innocent.

Osama bin Laden was tried and convicted for the first WTC bombing

As far as content caching goes, making it built in to the operation system is a win-win situation. It lessens load on Apple data centers and speeds up downloads/reduces bandwidth for customers with multiple Apple devices.

The current iteration, however, needs some work. On my old Mac Mini, it is constantly complaining that it needs more space. This will become annoying and I'm sure that some people will find this message anxiety-inducing. For me, I have been meaning to find out whether it stops working or if it purges old content when this happens. I hope it is the latter!

As an example, look at the Comcast arbitration agreement [1]. They do not want to choose. They want it to be either the AAA or a judge making the choice. You might also notice that they are totally fine with you suing them in your local small claims court.

[1] https://www.xfinity.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/Subscri...

Arbiter bias is one of the very few areas in which you can sue to throw out an arbitration award. The entire legality of forced arbitration is predicated on the arbiter being unbiased.

The company absolutely has an interest in not choosing the arbiter, instead contracting out that choice to some respected third party. Corporations win more frequently in arbitration because you are required to do work, you are required to be prepared, you don't have unlimited resources at your disposal, and you don't get to go on a fishing expedition in the form of lawsuit discovery.

> But... the author is also a professor at MIT. I feel like if this work wasn’t somewhat publicly funded, it really should have been.

This is published by MIT press, but the author (Friedman) is a professor at Indiana University.

My oven, which is just a plain old GE oven, has a feature in which you set the temperature and cook time, and it will randomly turn on, cook for the prescribed time, and then turn off.

> These bugs can be avoided by using a template function to infer the destination buffer size

I'm a big fan of using strategies to avoid bugs. Another strategy than can be a big help is to spend a little time thinking about what kinds of strings you are going to be using and how big they might be. And then sanitizing your program input based on those sizes. Find the too-long strings before they get into your program and before you start copying them around.

The system I'm responsible for came into being as a set of programs on a Univac II and was a bunch of C and FORTRAN when I joined. Because of the need to pass data between C and FORTRAN programs/code, we had a set of 10-20 standard string sizes, based on what kind of text you had. We no longer write new code in either C or FORTRAN, but maintain the concept of standard sizes for our text. By specifying the kind of text (we also do this with numbers) in the design steps, we save far more time and effort than we spend over the entire SDLC.