Shame.

If, instead of the stock, you had been given the equivalent cash value (at today's prices) - would you choose to invest all of it in GOOG stock?

I would use that way of thinking to determine what amount of stock I wished to hold.

Most people I know don't have houses costing that much, even in London.

There's a rather scratchy recorded documentary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile n 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the domino problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem (the problem of testing whether a Turing machine eventually halts) then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.

There are problems that the brain can solve, but you can (provably) show that an algorithm cannot. For example - tesselation on an infinite plane.

I mean - what's the point of spending 3-4 years in an Academic environment that proceeds to then test and grade students on exactly how good they are, at the time - then only to perform the whole process over again some number of years down the road, with fuzzier results?

Seems dumb to me.

I've worked with people who could likely do very well on algorithmic tasks - (of which most software projects require precisely zero) - but actually deliver something of use... not so much.

Trains have drivers. Some stations have shorter platforms than others. Thus at those stations a smaller number of train doors need to open to allow passengers on and off - as some doors won't be next to a platform, they'll be above fresh air.

You could have a 'open all doors' button and a 'open doors' button. But the driver is not trusted to do this, so instead there is a GPS on board so the train 'knows' where it is, and opens the appropriate number when the button is pressed.

I think in London, certainly for the underground, the lack of driverless trains is more to do with strong unions than it is safety perceptions (the DLR line is driverless). E.g:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transpo...

"Unions have fiercely opposed the introduction of driverless technology on the tube, with the Aslef drivers’ union threatening “all out war”, but the Mayor said drivers would not lose their jobs because "train captains" will still be required."

Train captains! :-)

Though that doesn't mean that risk perception doesn't cause us to make other poor decisions. The UK had some rather bad train accidents (again, human error with 'signal passed at danger'- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_passed_at_danger). Politicians get involved - and phrases like "this must never happen again" get pushed around, and huge cost estimates for the engineering required to chase this improbable 100% 'never again' target (>£1bn in 1988) are submitted. This inevitably delays implementation (if it ever works anyway - governments and big systems after all) - when we could be doing something simple (GPS is a thing. Trains move only in one dimension, and don't suddenly reverse direction. Finite number of tracks. Build system monitor for "train about to hit another train") that gives you 80/20.

I am friends with a pilot (commercial 737 short-haul captain for a 'value' european airline). He will happily tell you that

a) Much of what he does is automatable and rather boring (takeoff, landing interesting; the rest very dull), and that it's mostly punching settings into computers. Indeed, he does not have complete ability to do whatever he pleases - if, for example, he climbs too fast or steps outside flight parameters set by the airline (set mostly for cost issues), he would expect to be facing disciplinary action.

b) That a large amount of the training book-work that they have to go through is irrelevant for flying a modern airliner - but is in place mostly to act as a barrier to entry and to keep wages high.

c) That the biggest barrier to 'self-flying planes' (which doesn't mean 'autonomous', it may be drone-style remote-control or other options) is the perception of safety.

It's the last part that's interesting. The Economist ran an article years ago (I can't find a weblink sadly) about how a UPS cargo plane was flown entirely remotely on a test flight. It noted that humans seem to prefer the risk of a "human being" flying them around vs a "computer" - _Even If_ the data showed that the latter was much safer. It went on to point out that this might well be the case given the proportion of accidents classified as "Controlled flight into terrain" (I.E: the pilot crashed an airworthy plane into the ground).

It will be interesting to see if that public perception shifts given recent events. This article is however exactly how I'd expect a pilot to respond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor

So red text has come to mean '-'.

'-' is also 'taken away', so I can see why it's logical to have it in red.

As for green.. well - opposite.

Git is GPLv2.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5598074

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\t int b);

or

\t\t int b);

Because they'll look the same to you, but not to anyone else without 4-space-tabs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4904041

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