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Comment Algorithms? (Score 2) 34

Just wondering if anybody has leads on the algorithms they use. The description sounds like they explore the search tree in parallel, but doesn't give any hints on algorithms. The Operations Research community often uses things like Constraint Propagation (CP), or Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to solve scheduling problems, and there's a ton of literature on using these techniques.

A.

Comment Re:What data does TikTok collect? (Score 1) 48

And then we have National Security Letters, the US government just gets a a judge to sign a letter requiring you to give them whatever data they want. Can't even tell anybody you received the letter, that's illegal and you go to jail. I don't see much difference between the Chinese government's access to Chinese company's data and the US government's access to US company's data.

For TikTok, I strongly suspect that lobbyists from Facebook and Twitter are sowing the seeds of controversy as they're trying to hang onto marketshare.

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Comment Re:Lowest bidder IT... (Score 2) 83

One additional issue with some government work is that they rebid the maintenance every few years and then a new crew comes in and finds the code is a mess, there's no documentation, etc... The lack of continuity can lead to all sorts of problems.

I recently had first-hand experience with this, was contracted on a short consulting gig to help a software consulting firm help with a federal website (not FAA though). The current system has large amounts of code with single-letter variable names, and has layer upon layer of unnecessary complexity. Almost reminded of the class FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition (though this was Python, not Java)

Comment Law enforcement? (Score 4, Interesting) 41

This will get really interesting for law enforcement, especially in the US. The 4th amendment protects against a lot of unreasonable searches, but could the police argue that you're broadcasting your position through the walls and they are allowed to capture that information from a public place (i.e. the middle of the street)? This is going to get interesting...

Comment Re:Midwest Universities Unite to Eat From This Tro (Score 2) 24

This is not one party or the other - both sides are equally guilty, so don't go there

It's also not something recent, it's been this way for decades. Defense contractors splatter their work across as many states as possible so that almost every senator has to vote for it. "The door hinges for this fighter jet are made in bum-f#%k (insert state here), we need to preserve jobs"

On a slightly different angle, that's why SpaceX is crapping on the traditional players, they're not playing the same game.

Comment Midwest Universities Unite to Eat From This Trough (Score 1) 24

I think the title says it. These universities smell money, and they unite to get political support to slurp at the trough of government largess...

The problem in the US is that companies worship "finance" and use investment bankers to sell off their assets to keep the share prices high. Reward the executives in the name of "shareholder value".

OK, rant over...

Comment Whole genome sequencing (Score 3, Interesting) 15

If they truly mean "whole genome", that has only just been achieved. More likely it's the whole exsome, which is the coding of all the proteins. This can be done for less than $200. You can process the sequencer output (FASTQ files) with open source tools and reduce it to a set of calls (VCF, INDEL, etc) which describes the differences (ie. mutations) when compared to the reference genome. That output, in text form, is a few dozen MB. No big deal.

The challenge to this, as others have pointed out, is that customized treatments will be ridiculously expensive. I'll bet they'll even markup the cost of the lab work 5-10x

Comment Just wondering... (Score 0, Troll) 153

Omicron would be a brilliant way to give yourself 3 or 4 days off over Christmas...

1. Call in sick on the morning of the 24th, say you were exposed or just have a scratchy throat
2. Get your sample taken as late in the day as possible
3. The labs won't process the PCR test for a couple of days
3. Maybe go back to work on the 28th?

The timing of this over Christmas seems very suspect to me

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Comment What happened to keeping it simple? (Score 4, Insightful) 39

The problem here is that they kept adding features on top of features, to handle random requests and maybe even show how clever they are. That's why "Hello World" can be hundreds of megabytes if we just use a couple of frameworks.

Suppose you're using a shell script and just want the number of lines in a file, but "wc -l" accesses the Internet to check for printing the counts in Mayan numerals using the latest Unicode offerings? Would you be surprise if it broke?

The success of Unix (and Linux) has been SIMPLE and COMPOSABLE pieces. I never worry about "sort -u" trying to do something I hadn't thought of, it just works the same every time.

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