Interesting Links for 21-06-2017

[andrewducker]

Edinburgh's Ross Bandstand designs shortlisted

(tags: design music edinburgh )

A Neural Network Turned a Book of Flowers Into Gorgeous Dinosaur Art

(tags: dinosaurs plants ai pretty )

Amazon Prime Wardrobe lets you try on and return clothes free

(tags: Amazon clothing )

Older fathers have geekier sons

(tags: geek age fatherhood children )

Sherlock's Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat to get their teeth into Dracula

(tags: Dracula tv StevenMoffat bbc )

The story of music is the story of humans

Are there any other animals that dance? Because "song" seems reasonably common in some senses, but rhythm seems specific to humans
(tags: music humans prehistory )

I had never heard of deck prisms. Ingenious idea.

And copied cheaply in poor areas nowadays using a plastic bottle full of water
(tags: lighting history glass Technology )

Gangs of aggressive killer whales are shaking down Alaska fishing boats for their fish

(tags: fish sharks usa )

The Philosophy Force Five vs the Scientismists

(tags: comic science philosophy funny )

Maze converted to Spanning Tree (nice visualisation/animation)

(tags: visualisation animation trees )

She May Be The Most Unstoppable Scientist In The World

(tags: yemen women science war )

If people can see an immediate payoff they'll take it, even if it means they make less in the long term

(tags: money psychology games information )

It's reading posts like this that make me feel much more secure in my competence as a programmer

I remember a job interview where the interviewer handed me a page of printout from halfway through a program, and asked me to explain it. I said "Well, this is a loop, and it's doing something with a 'salary' variable, and calculating tax in some way, but it's calling off to a function that's not on this page, so I'm not sure what. I'm sorry, I can't tell much more than that, what am I missing?" And they said "You're the fourth person I've interviewed for this coding job, and the first one who wasn't lying about being able to program."
(tags: programming fail OhForFucksSake )

Man sent home from work for wearing shorts in over 30°C heat comes back in a dress

(tags: clothing gender heat )

The world's oldest still-used bridge

(tags: architecture history bridge greece )

US Supreme Court Says You Can't Ban People From The Internet, No Matter What They've Done

(tags: usa law freespeech internet )

Queen's Speech summary: Bill-by-bill at a glance

(tags: politics uk Conservatives )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I for one am glad that Moffat and co are turning their attention to something I'm not particularly interested in. It will be a nice break for me.

[andrewducker]

Ditto!

[danieldwilliam]

Swap fishing for whale watching and see how long it takes the orcas to work out which boats are fishing and which are full of tourists.

[andrewducker]

Also, sell buckets of fish to the tourists for them to attract the orca with.

[danieldwilliam]

Thinking about how to cool down the Tube is going to occupy my entire brain all day.

[andrewducker]

Flood it?

shorts/dress

[mair-aw.livejournal.com]

apparently some French bus drivers are also doing this https://twitter.com/20minutesnantes/status/877448293181145088

It's reading posts like this that make me feel much more secure in my competence as a programmer

[jack]

I know what you mean, but in many ways it makes me feel worse: that the things I'm good at are basically worthless, and wonder if "looking good in meetings" is the only skill people are valued for.

Re: It's reading posts like this that make me feel much more secure in my competence as a programmer

[andrewducker]

They're not worthless if you're working for people who care about getting things done.

Or have any self respect.

[nancylebov]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sSb1qF7m3w

Parrots dance-- there are a zillion youtube videos. What's more they're inventive about the choreography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg0aARl_U88

Dogs mostly don't dance-- there are competitions of people dancing with dogs, but the dog is just paying attention to the human. However, here is a rare exception with a dog dancing on its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg0aARl_U88

[andrewducker]

Not convinced the dog is dancing, as that music was added on later.

But the parrots are a great example. I'd forgotten about those! And they clearly do actually dance and follow a rhythm!

[nancylebov]

Thanks. I didn't realize the music track was added for the dog.

[calimac]

1. As husband of a musician, I can say with assurance that cats, at least, have no appreciation of human music whatever.

2. As a non-programmer, I could not follow anything in that article. However, I had no problem understanding your comment on it, which I think shows that while other programmers speak programming, you speak English.

I did once get a library cataloging job by being the only candidate to find the errors in the written test of competence. (And no, they weren't put in deliberately. The test wasn't written by the employers, and they didn't notice the errors until I pointed them out.)

3. And they make the Queen read all that stuff aloud? It's not easy being Queen.

[andrewducker]

I'd rather not be Queen myself.

And yeah, cats don't even seem to recognise that music exists.

[calimac]

"I'd rather not be Queen myself."

Did you read the interview with Prince Harry in which he said that no-one in the family really wants the job?

[andrewducker]

I'd seen the headline, but not read the article. Thanks for the prompt, it's a good one.

I do have a lot of sympathy for the individuals, while despising the institution.

[momentsmusicaux]

An associative array in PHP, but I have *no* idea how long the lookup would take!

[andrewducker]

But you'd presumably know that it would be faster than scanning through a normal array looking for the answer.

[momentsmusicaux]

Oh yeah, I definitely know that isset($array['key']) is faster than in_array($array, 'value')[*], but I couldn't tell you anything specific in big O notation or ratios.

The other advantage of using a keyed array is that you prevent duplicates when you're adding items.


* I can never remember parameter order here, PHP is inconsistent with the order of needle and haystack parameters. Thanks PHP!

[jack]

I think that's the important thing. Knowing that an associative array is O(ok) and looking through an array is O(terrible) is the amount of knowledge you need in practice.

Most programmers never need to actually design an algorithm of this sort.

[simont]

Knowing that an associative array is O(ok) and looking through an array is O(terrible) is the amount of knowledge you need in practice

And don't forget the third clause, that looking through an associative array is O(godwhatareyouevendoing).

[jack]

:)

I wonder what the worst factors of unnecessary overhead are. There's plenty of examples of being O(n^2) when you could have been O(n) (surprisingly easy to do). And of being O(n) when you might be (1) as in these examples (when you really should notice something amiss).

I was also wondering if anyone's accidentally written a random-indexing (ie. generate a random number, if it's the desired index continue, else repeat), although that wouldn't have a worse complexity than a loop for a single index, even though it's clearly worse.

[simont]

A colleague of mine spotted a bug yesterday in a piece of test automation, in which a specification of a list of test cases had contained some tiny easy-to-miss lexical error (I forget exactly what, but something along the lines of putting an operator inside rather than outside a critical pair of parens) and as a result two long sublists of test cases had been fed to the Cartesian product operator instead of the concatenation operator.

It was only two lists being combined, fortunately, but the same sort of typo could just as easily have done the same thing to n lists, which would have turned a more or less linear amalgamation into an exponential one.

(Though I suppose the worse it gets, the more likely you are to actually notice when you investigate why the test system seems to be spending forever running indistinguishable variants of the test suite in question. Perhaps the real limiting factor on this question is not 'how egregious a consequence can you imagine for a trivial code error?' but 'how egregious a consequence can you imagine going undetected for some reason?'.)

[drplokta]

If you wanted to be difficult in the interview you linked to, you could start to go on about Bloom filters.

In other news, my father was 53 when I was born. So there's clearly nothing in the assertion that you're more likely to be geeky if you had an older father.

[andrewducker]

Clearly

[cmcmck]

I like that guy's style :o)

Dress codes do seem somewhat idiotic in present weather conditions!

[andrewducker]

They do, rather.

(And most of the rest of the time, IMHO)

[ckd]

Many years ago I was interviewing for a systems engineer job. On my application, I'd self-ranked a number of languages and technologies including Python.

During one interview I was asked how I would implement a set data type in my language of choice. I asked if I could assume a reasonably modern installation of Python, say 2.4 or later, and was told that I could.

"In that case I'd use the built-in set type."

I then proceeded to reimplement sets in Perl using associative arrays, since that showed that I understood the details involved....

[andrewducker]

Victory on two counts!

[conuly]

Older fathers have geekier sons

For a given, highly limited definition of "geeky".

Of course, the question here is the same as when they tell us that older fathers are more likely to have autistic children - is it that something happens to the sperm, or that men with those qualities are more likely to wait to have children?