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Of course, you can find the full explanation in the amicus brief: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...

It is NP complete in determining to an absolute degree that a redistricting plan is excessively unfair, as the number of possibly districts grows exponentially. Demonstrating to a quantitative degree is more clear (eg stop drawing more maps after a few billion).

I highly recommend anyone interested read at least the summary of the above brief, but relevant details from page 4 are reproduced:

"With modern computer technology, it is now straightforward to (i) generate a large collection of redistricting plans that are representative of all possible plans that meet the State’s declared goals (e.g., compactness and contiguity); (ii) calculate the partisan outcome that would occur under each such plan, based upon actual precinct-level votes in one or more recent elections; (iii) display the distribution of the outcomes across these plans; and (iv) situate the State’s chosen plan along that continuum to reveal the degree to which that plan is an outlier. One can analyze outcomes for a statewide plan as a whole, or for an individual district within a plan. In this way, it is now straightforward to measure the quantitative degree to which a partisan gerrymander is excessive."

This is not only much needed, but also will help shape how our legal system can adapt to new technologies.

I had the privilege of sitting in on an Election Law class last year at YLS. The topic was gerrymandering, with a discussion of the legal arguments presented in Vieth v. Jubelirer.

For non-lawyers, the plaintiffs arguments for what should constitute illegal gerrymandering is technically complex, using statistic concepts, graphs (computer science), and even np-completeness. In essence, the argument was to use computers to draw all possible congressional districts, score them on the basis of discarded votes, and if the scoring of the drawn districts is greater than two standard deviations from the mean district, determine it is unfairly drawn. I found particularly striking an audio recording the professor shared of a lawyer struggling to answer John Robert's questions on technical topics. The professor used this as an example to be prepared to answer questions that you may not have a background in, even if the expert witnesses had already explained the concepts. Unfortunately, the court rejected the proposed determination of unfair gerrymandering in a 5-4 decision, with the dissent stating that the presented way to determine unfair gerrymandering was clever, correct, and should be revisited.

As we continue to push the frontiers of what we can do with computers, we need informed lawyers who can clearly present deep technical topics, and we need judges who are capable of understanding them.

If you exclusively consider the value of the puts, then yes they made a killing. But Mexico didn't use the puts to take a huge directional speculative bet - it used them to hedge oil price risk, so the profits from this trade are structured to offset losses elsewhere. For example, sustained low oil prices will could put companies out of business or even make Mexican oil uncompetitive on a global scale.

Yup. But I didn't take the offer.

The fingerprint scanner is intended to benefit the company, not the users. It makes it significantly more difficult to share an account, which protects Bloomberg's $24,000 / user / year revenue.

I would recommend talking with a lawyer before taking any actions to circumvent international sanctions. There are very severe civil and criminal penalties.

C++ is deep and nuanced, so reading books will help structure your learning. I've found Scott Meyer's books to be great for starting out. Those will give you a fantastic foundation, from which you can dive deeper. Those and others have added significantly to my ability to write clean and maintainable software.

This SO post is a great guide for where to look: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-...

The problem is that the rev/user isn't constant. If they get more users, they earn more from each user. And conversely, if they lose users, they earn less from everyone. So even if a small percentage of their users opted to pay monthly, that would have a negative impact on facebook's earnings on the remaining population.

I feel like your pricing is off. $29/week is too expensive for consumers, yet far too cheap if you plan to get reimbursed from insurers. Especially considering you'll need a lot of people and show improvements for them if you want insurers to pay - this pricepoint won't let that happen.

Can anyone explain how they decide which requests to reject? The blog post just mentions that excess RPS gets rejected, but couldn't rejecting arbitrary requests cause other problems?

"'We’re trying to figure out if we can predict how much shortcutting ants will do given a geometry of their environment,' Garnier said." Garnier clearly states that they haven't figured out the algorithm. Then the separate researcher says “We describe army ants as simple, but we don’t even understand what they’re doing"

Interesting topic but the title is misleading - the article concludes saying scientists still haven't figured out the algorithm. It would be nice if the title actually reflected the content of the article

Who does this and do you have a source? It would be interesting to learn more

Actually I read the whole thing - it was written really well. But it's far from extremely clever what he did. Anyone who's studied tenancy law for more than a few days could do the same. The only difference he had was being sociopathic enough to do so - a point which the article makes in the end when he turns out to be a murderer. Furthermore, none of the above are in any way related to engineering or hackernews, and it's completely off topic for this site.

This article does not belong on HN.

Graduating and going through the hiring process last year, I realized how true this is and how important your tech pedigree is. I recieved no full time offers before interning at Apple last summer, and after the internship I had no trouble getting offers (ended up with 5 full time offers). There wasn't any difference in how I described my interests before and after the summer internship, the only difference was companies wanted to see that I was vetted by a big name company. The real experience I had, working at a startup for three years before that yielded very little value in recruiting, even though the experience there made me a much better engineer and it was a successful startup that got acquired.

Google has an in-house litigation team that would have already been on payroll. Sure they had to pay for expert witnesses and court fees, but the total would be far less than what they settled for

Sure but we can always find an arbitrarily 'better' use of any donation by looking at it from a utilitarian perspective

Amazon hires plenty people of both classes, recent grads and experienced hires. But from my impression I think they hire more recent grads than any other tech company.

So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.

I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page?

Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.

Since the tapes were damaged by "moderate to severe mould," it likely would have taken a non insignificant amount of work to convert them to digital format. NASA doesn't want to waste it's engineers' time - this seems more like work for a historical society or organization

This is completely irrelevant to the article, where they use hydroelectric power to mine bitcoins. But even if they used nonrenewable soures, the negative impact on the environment shouldn't be faulted to bitcoin. It's the energy sector's fault for prioritizing harmful energy to renewable energy.

And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.