bquinlan (u/bquinlan)

bquinlan commented on The physics of airplane flight 10maurycy10.github.io/mis... · Posted by u/luu

My favorite example of this was in the air-data computer I was working on for a fighter trainer. I was just on the software side rather than the aerodynamics, but it was notable that the corrections to angle-of-attack and angle-of-sideslip measured by the multifunction probes (which are way up at the nose of the plane) included terms related to the position of the flaps (which are way back at the trailing edges of the wings).

bquinlan · 2 years ago

That's awesome!

I'm not surprised about the angle-of-attack needing correction. The angle-of-attack is defined as the angle between the average chord (an imaginary line running from the leading edge of the wing to the trailing edge of the wing) and the relative wind. Since changing the flap position changes the position of the trailing edge, the angle-of-attack will also change.

bquinlan commented on Minnesota middle school students 'seem happy' after cellphone ban newsnationnow.com/us-news... · Posted by u/hammock

talldatethrow · 2 years ago

One, students that don't listen used to be removed. So, potential totally yes.

Two, I expect her to put a lot of personal effort into becoming at expert in motivation, behavior management, discipline for kids. I expect her to at least read ONE book about this. She complains for 2+ years about this that I've known her. I recommend books, she gets insulted and explains why it's not relevant.

IMO a teacher being paid $90k a year for 7 hours a day of work, 10 months a year, should be working hard to improve. But instead it's just a cushy job that no one gets fired from no matter how average (or below) they are.

Ps, I have never seen her take work home once in 2 years. So don't say the hours are long.

Tldr; I'd like her to do whatever other teachers that have better control of their classrooms do. Unless you're going to tell me there's zero variation in that amongst teachers.

bquinlan · 2 years ago

> IMO a teacher being paid $90k a year for 7 hours a day of work, > 10 months a year, should be working hard to improve.

I don't disagree that she should work to improve, but you are using $90K as if it were a lot of money. According to census data [1], the median household income in San Ramon is $173,519/year and the median rent is $2,557/month.

In San Ramon, you can get paid $65,000/year as an assistant manager at Starbucks without getting a 4 year degree plus teaching credentials.

Plus, how is she earning so much? The San Ramon teacher salary schedule is public: [2]

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanramoncitycal...

[2] https://www.srvusd.net/documents/Employment/Employment-Resou...

bquinlan commented on BART ridership is still down nearly 70% from pre-Covid levels statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/... · Posted by u/armanhq

bquinlan · 3 years ago

In my social circle there is a perception that the BART is increasingly unsafe and some people who previously used the BART to commute from East Bay to SF are now driving.

Their perception seems to be born out by the data:

From the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department [1]

Aggravated Assault (2019): 112

Aggravated Assault (2022): 114

Relative increase (2019 -> 2022) adjusted for ridership:

114/112/0.3 = 3.39x

[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-01%20Mont...

bquinlan commented on Perl Data Language: Scientific Computing with Perl pdl.perl.org/... · Posted by u/smartmic

pvaldes · 5 years ago

Is this true or is a belief?

The fact is that most people don't even have an opinion about what is Python or Perl.

Python can seem easy to share after you copy part of a python script and miss one blank space somewhere at the end of a line or start copying in the wrong line. If you use a dumb text editor the script will easily turn into a ugly mess. Perl scripts don't have this problem, so some people could say that they are easier to exchange and share in fact.

Many Perl authors will be really glad to share your code with you. This is what they built an online community of knowledge and libraries called CPAN where you can find it easily. To find authors willing to help and explain obscure parts of their own scripts also if asked politely, is not uncommon or particularly difficult.

bquinlan · 5 years ago

I think that the comment that you relied to meant that it is easier for scientists to collaborate using a single language rather than many. For some domains, Python has emerged as that single language. That doesn't mean that Python is the best language.

bquinlan commented on Scalable, Resilient Brainfuck zserge.com/posts/bfaas/... · Posted by u/stevekemp

bquinlan · 5 years ago

Google App Engine originally used a custom containment strategy.

Back in the day, I was on the team that added Python 2.7 support to App Engine and we were experimenting with a different containment approach.

But Python is a complex language to support - you need to support WSGI, to support dynamic loading (for C extensions), a reasonably performant file system (Python calls `stat` about a billion times before actually importing a file), etc.

So our original runtime was actually Brainf#ck. So, at once point, if you had guessed that Google supported it, you could have written your (simple) webapp in Brainf#ck and Google would have scaled it up to hundreds of machines if needed ;-)

bquinlan commented on TF-Coder, a tool that writes tricky TensorFlow expressions blog.tensorflow.org/2020/... · Posted by u/homarp

bquinlan · 6 years ago

Work for Google - have never worked on Tensorflow

I tried:

  inputs = {
      'matrix': [[10, 20, 30],
                 [5, 5, 10],
                 [2, 2, 1]]
  }
  output = [[85/10, 85/20, 85/30],
            [85/5, 85/5, 85/10],
            [85/2, 85/2, 85/1]]

And got:

  tf.cast(tf.divide(tf.reduce_sum(matrix), matrix), 
          tf.float32)

But now I realize that is pretty close to one of the examples. Did anyone try something complex?

bquinlan commented on If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees software.rajivprab.com/20... · Posted by u/whack

lkbm · 6 years ago

Main reason: it's more fun.

I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I can stay in my lane and do my specific job tasks, or I can run around putting out fires and helping wherever help is needed.

I mindlessly build the specific design product handed me, or I can guide my own work in accordance to the needs of our customers and the business.

I can follow policy and fill out forms when making any decision, or I can just do what's right because who has time to write policies and look over approval forms?

tbf, tech is relatively good at a lot of these. As I understand it, Facebook gives a fair bit of latitude to engineers, and Google used to be famous for their 20% time. But the longer a company exists, and the bigger it gets, the more bureaucracy and controlling it'll get. Every big disaster means a new policy on how to prevent future disasters.

I think pg wrote an essay stating that the most valuable skill in an early startup employee is "helpfulness" (maybe not though -- cursory search didn't find it). You do what needs to be done.

This is roughly your "wear many hats" point, but more than just different technologies, and not just being new. If you just want to have a well-defined, steady, sane-every-day job, a startup is terrible. If you every want to say "that's my job", a start-up is terrible. If you're the sort of person people will come to for help with whatever comes up (and enjoy being that), start-ups can be great.

bquinlan · 6 years ago

>I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

I've worked for startups in the past and have had a huge impact on the startup but almost no impact on the outside world because the startups just weren't tackling very visible problems.

Now I work for Google and I have basically zero impact on Google i.e. basically nothing that I can do will ever move the dial in terms of Google's revenue, etc. But I've worked on several projects that have had a big impact outside of Google. For example, I was on a small team (3 people) that developed the Python 2.7 runtime for App Engine (this was a while ago) and I was on another small team that implemented the server-side infrastructure for the Google Home. I also developed the screensaver for Chromecast - which is a tiny tiny project - but still millions of people love it.

bquinlan commented on Google interviewing process for software developer role in 2020 habr.com/en/post/489698/... · Posted by u/atomlib

bquinlan · 6 years ago

Bias alert: I work for Google.

I enjoyed the write-up but I have a small correction to make about "Frustrating moment #2. You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired."

The author is referring to hiring committees, whose job it is to take the feedback from every interview and make a hire/no-hire decision based on the blended results. I've done hundreds of interviews at Google and I've never seen universally positive interview feedback result in a no-hire decision.

The problem is that most feedback is not universally positive (or negative). So the hiring committee has to dissect the feedback and try to figure out if the identified negatives are (1) credible and (2) sufficient to be disqualifying. That can be pretty difficult (especially if the feedback is contradictory) and why a committee does it rather than the recruiter or hiring manager.

bquinlan commented on Show HN: Python package and CLI to generate stylistic word clouds github.com/minimaxir/styl... · Posted by u/minimaxir

bquinlan · 6 years ago

I created word cloud as a Valentine's Day gift this year:

- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-va...

- https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-valentine/blob/ma...

My implementation (https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-valentine) is a lot less sophisticated than stylecloud but I think that I had a few interesting ideas about text extraction.

I used nltk to extract only nouns and to do word stemming (e.g. so that "time", "times" and "timing" are only counted as one word).

I also experimented a lot with various method of determining word size i.e. size proportional to frequency, size proportional to log(frequency), size proportional to sqrt(frequency).

bquinlan commented on Shields.io: Quality metadata badges for open source projects shields.io/... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

cuu508 · 6 years ago

I went more minimalistic and added SVG badge support in the form of a Django template and a couple small python functions.

The template: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/...

And the function for rendering the template: https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/blob/master/hc/...

One funky thing there is the measurement of text width. The width of the badge depends of the width of the text you put into it. I simply measured the width of each individual alphabet letter, and use that to calculate the width of a string. It's not super accurate, but works fine in practice. It was a fun weekend project.

bquinlan · 6 years ago

Nice! My approach is very similar except that I have width mappings for non-ASCII characters. Also, since DejaVu Sans (the font that shield.io, pybadges and healthchecks use) is heavily kerned, I have a table of kerning widths.

You can also opt to use precise text width measurements (important for Arabic, Chinese, etc.) but then you have to have the font file available on your system.