It's not terribly selfish to be good with money, so you can better help people who are not.
At least max out your employer match contributions to your 401k plan. Then make sure you can get your employer to match your donations to your charities.
If you can itemize deductions, then the money you donate to causes you like will also reduce the money that the IRS gets from you to let Congress fund stuff you don't like, such as wars abroad or corporate welfare or welfare queens or whatever ticks you off. Unfortunately the primary way to be able to itemize your deductions is to have a big mortgage payment on your home, since interest you pay to banks is deductable enough to get you out of standard deduction territory. Pretty sad how entrenched our government is with the financial house of cards.
On the flip side, once you have over $100k in your 401k plan you may be able to take a $50k loan out of it to pay down your home loan if your plan allows it (supposedly not many do but they're out there). Then you pay back the interest to yourself instead of the bank, so it's good for those times when the stock market isn't performing very well.
Also, if you marry a K-12 teacher or you are one you can usually deduct a small amount of classroom supplies from your fed taxes and some states.
Pan handlers generally fall under the "don't donate" category.
Yeah, pan handlers may be good at looking sad, but its actually fairly lucrative. A common fallacy is that poor people "need" money more, and your buck would go further helping them. Unfortunately, many people are poor because they are bad with money. Many pan handlers will blow their take on drugs or alcohol, or splurge on a stay at a motel when they could easily afford to use that amount of money to make rent and groceries if they had the budgeting sense.
I wish it was easier to find ways to help people... I would look at supporting the social services workers, or supplies for teachers in schools. Even in fairly good neighborhoods there are usually always low income parents that need regular assistance with books and field trip payments and stuff like that.
-- I support public education; I married a teacher
Is there a good reddit area for slashdot refugees to have tech discussions?
The only other alternatives I see are http://arstechnica.com/ (though the discussion engine is pretty limited and somewhat heavily moderated), http://theregister.co.uk/ (doesn't seem to spawn many useful conversations somehow), and maybe http://fark.com/ (good discussions, but but pretty light on tech coverage in a pretty basic discussion engine)
Ha, well, I have a lot of trouble with Kibana since it uses Lucene. Specifically it does this silly thing where all wildcard searches get converted to lowercase, so can't do wildcard searches for anything with capital letters.
For work I end up debugging a lot of ruby and chef, so I'm always searching for help with cookbooks and recipes and gems. Somehow I manage to stay sane. I think.
Oh, yeah, I fucked up... Good catch! I failed at simplifying an example where lim x->1 (x^2 - 1) / (x - 1) = 2 from https://www.mathsisfun.com/cal... which ends up being a pretty innocuous-looking line with a "hole" at x=1 , y=2
But yeah, that's exactly my point that all div by 0 operations might not be "approximated" as +/- infinity , but under certain not-uncommon circumstances, 1 or 2 or any number could be a possible "approximation" of something that would otherwise throw a div by 0 error. But it's much more trouble to code for those special cases than just bailing out. And that was the point I was trying to make to troll for some mod points:P
Thanks for reminding me about L'Hopital's Rule... I vaguely remembered that there was some way to do it using derivatives of the numerator and denominator, but forgot what to actually search for;-D
When you have 0/0, you hit two "obvious" but contradictory rules in basic algebra:
Rule one: anything multiplied by zero is zero Rule two: anything divided by itself is one
Mathematicians don't know which rule has precedence for 0/0, so there's no way a dumb machine can figure it out, which is why most programing languages just throw an exception if zero is the denominator.
It's mathematically possible to do some form of 0/0 using limits and the calculus.
lim x->0 x/x = 1
Also lets you do some interesting other things, like:
lim x->0 x^2/x = 2 lim x->0 sin(x) / x = 1
Shouldn't be too hard to get a function that gives you the correct "approximate" value of the function near the indeterminate point, if there is one. It's just a bunch of special cases that you have to check for every time you do an operation that might possibly result in a div/0 error, right? Go ahead. DO IT! I'll wait.
Yes, sheesh, I've never had any problems just throwing my search engine some extra terms for context. The irony in this Ask Slashdot cuts so deep it hurts.
Here's some obligatory XKCD:
What the poster will get if he he actually gets what he asks for: https://xkcd.com/979/ What the poster actually wants out of a search engine that "doesn't think for him": https://xkcd.com/1185/ (mouseover text)
Disney / ABC is pretty smart. The 35 people are sure to keep looking around the job market (which is much better in NY and CA than in FL from the last round of ~250 layoffs) and eventually leave anyway. If they leave voluntarily, Disney doesn't have to pay them the severance package at all, which is likely equivalent to an extra few months' salary. A small price to pay for the goodwill from this "Hey, maybe Disney does have a heart" headlines.
Er, yes! But just want to point out that MSVC++ is/was "in house" as far as MSFS is concerned;-)
Yeah, for my part, I did my MS thesis in python about 10 years ago, and packaged the entire thing onto a Knoppix LiveDVD. It had a lot of dependencies (python 2.7, psyco JIT that only worked on 32-bit python, lp_solve, glpk,... heck I even included a (barely) working openoffice and the latex used to regenerate the paper.
I think it's aged OK so far. Though now I'd have to migrate everything over to python 3 using the pypy JIT compiler (not sure if it runs as fast as psyco did yet), but I think the other pieces should still work, mostly. My old environment would be too obsolete to try to do any serious new work in. But I suppose it's nice to know that I could still reproduce my results *somehow*.
CSB: so I briefly worked on MS Flight Simulator a few years ago. It was interesting working with code that was older than Windows, but it was still there (under a whole bunch of C++ shims).
You have to know enough to know that it makes whitespace significant. That's useful, because it should lead you to choose another scripting language, one which is less retarded.
As a python guy, I lol'd the first time I had to maintain some ruby and found that the rubocop linter makes it more persnickety about whitespace than python is.
Furthermore, I kinda have always fallen into a hybrid of the 1) - 2) system so I can upgrade *something* every 2 years instead of 4 and still save money overall while also collecting a larger pile of spare parts to build extra lower-end boxes.
When building a new system, I typically get the best motherboard I can, and the cheapest half-decent CPU available for it.
Then in two years after the CPUs have hit the market, I'll throw in the second-best CPU available for that motherboard (the first-best usually still carries a premium). Bonus points for finding something off of Craigslist.
The most recent time I did this was pretty nice... I went from an Athlon II X2 (with 1GHz HT2.0) to a Phenom II X4 (with 2GHz HT3.0), which doubled the memory bandwidth. So even though the core clock went up less than 50% from 2.2Ghz to only 3.2Ghz, I ended up getting more than a 100% improvement in frame rates for my games, even the single-threaded ones that couldn't make use of the additional cores. And the poor sap from Craigslist that I bought the Phenom II X4 system from had it in an older motherboard that only supported HT2.0, so he was missing out on the extra memory bandwidth. I put my old CPU in his motherboard, so that's a better match now.
The best computer in my house is my kids' minecraft rig, which is fairly unique due to the multiseat setup: http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
It's a neat trick... but I need to go in and set up udev so I don't have to untangle the usb device IDs in/etc/X11/xorg.conf every time we plug another usb device in, though.
Cool, thanks for the clarification! It's been tricky trying to piece this together, since no one ever seems to mention Iridium and Google in the same article, even though it looks like they're all working on the same constellation. Is (well, was) Facebook piling in with them as well? And what kind of shot does the competing Virgin / Qualcomm group have?
This whole thing kinda smacks of hardline negotiating... suddenly everyone and their dog was going to launch another LEO constellation, just when Iridium was about to launch the next generation of their product via SpaceX: http://spacenews.com/iridium-n...
From one side, I can sorta see this posturing as SpaceX trying to negotiate better rates from Iridium by says "hey, if you don't want to pay us more to launch your stuff, we'll just partner with Google / Facebook and launch our own LEO constellation."
Then there was also that guy who got the FCC license that expires in 2019, except the consortium he was working with weren't going to have their launches scheduled in time, so he took his license and ran to Richard Branson's Virgin.
Anyway, it seems like the LEO constellation thing is a mess right now, and I can't really tell who's working together and who's working against each other. But it seems moderately interesting from a cloak-n-dagger story. http://spacenews.com/signs-of-...
If he has a 50 foot TV then, well he should build a model of Stonehenge to house the behemoth - just make sure to write down the instructions correctly on the paper napkin.
Well, there's some saying about your career satisfaction being proportional to how much of your education you're able to use on the job.
And I have to admit, I was happiest during a brief stint at a game development studio where I finally actually got to use The Calculus. But yeah, it's much more lucrative to do boring stuff and then have free time and money to actually pursue hobbies.
The irony of course is having gone through college getting an aerospace engineering degree that I'd never really put to use while toying around with computers and Linux all night. Now I make all of my money dinking around with my Linux at work so I can use my aerospace degree to play with toy airplanes. At least I always feel like I'm playing, I suppose.
* I hate the term "financial engineering". Engineers often operate in the public trust, work with the laws of physics, and are held accountable for their work. Financial schemers are just making money from money playing by their own rules, plan from the start to go in take a bit off the top and get out before their financial instrument collapses.
* Yes, some of the math is the same, and it's sad to see some of the brightest people from school run off into finance and go do calculus for banks so they can multiply imaginary money into the economy instead of doing something more modest and practical that only merely adds real money to the economy.
* Scholarships for the engineering school means less competition in the finance sector, so he can stay on top of his game. And yet still show the engineers feeding on hi scholarship who their master is.
Gee that came out kinda bitter. I should probably start hanging out with more investment bankers to try to humanize them a bit. (ha!)
meanwhile, Millennials shun email because "it's for old people".
I sorta see email dying out (not completely, but like USENET) and being gradually replaced with secure webmail and IM islands, like what healthcarw providers and some banks do to communicate with their customers. All it needs is some kind of API access through an auth broker...
Yep, this. Same way that you need your IE6 around in a VM so you can do your mandatory training. Throw one of these puppies in a VM and leave a snapshot.
I guess 1993 was about when the garage door companies standardized on the the rolling-code thingy that has to be paired to each remote.
Though now I'm kicking myself for not just building my own https garage door opener using http://www.instructables.com/i... so I can let the kids in remotely when they forget their keys.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not terribly selfish to be good with money, so you can better help people who are not.
At least max out your employer match contributions to your 401k plan. Then make sure you can get your employer to match your donations to your charities.
If you can itemize deductions, then the money you donate to causes you like will also reduce the money that the IRS gets from you to let Congress fund stuff you don't like, such as wars abroad or corporate welfare or welfare queens or whatever ticks you off. Unfortunately the primary way to be able to itemize your deductions is to have a big mortgage payment on your home, since interest you pay to banks is deductable enough to get you out of standard deduction territory. Pretty sad how entrenched our government is with the financial house of cards.
On the flip side, once you have over $100k in your 401k plan you may be able to take a $50k loan out of it to pay down your home loan if your plan allows it (supposedly not many do but they're out there). Then you pay back the interest to yourself instead of the bank, so it's good for those times when the stock market isn't performing very well.
Also, if you marry a K-12 teacher or you are one you can usually deduct a small amount of classroom supplies from your fed taxes and some states.
Good luck, and keep your tax deductible receipts!
Pan handlers generally fall under the "don't donate" category.
Yeah, pan handlers may be good at looking sad, but its actually fairly lucrative. A common fallacy is that poor people "need" money more, and your buck would go further helping them. Unfortunately, many people are poor because they are bad with money. Many pan handlers will blow their take on drugs or alcohol, or splurge on a stay at a motel when they could easily afford to use that amount of money to make rent and groceries if they had the budgeting sense.
I wish it was easier to find ways to help people... I would look at supporting the social services workers, or supplies for teachers in schools. Even in fairly good neighborhoods there are usually always low income parents that need regular assistance with books and field trip payments and stuff like that.
--
I support public education; I married a teacher
Obligatory:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BN...
From:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Progra...
Is there a good reddit area for slashdot refugees to have tech discussions?
The only other alternatives I see are http://arstechnica.com/ (though the discussion engine is pretty limited and somewhat heavily moderated), http://theregister.co.uk/ (doesn't seem to spawn many useful conversations somehow), and maybe http://fark.com/ (good discussions, but but pretty light on tech coverage in a pretty basic discussion engine)
Ha, well, I have a lot of trouble with Kibana since it uses Lucene. Specifically it does this silly thing where all wildcard searches get converted to lowercase, so can't do wildcard searches for anything with capital letters.
For work I end up debugging a lot of ruby and chef, so I'm always searching for help with cookbooks and recipes and gems. Somehow I manage to stay sane. I think.
Oh, yeah, I fucked up... Good catch! I failed at simplifying an example where lim x->1 (x^2 - 1) / (x - 1) = 2
from https://www.mathsisfun.com/cal...
which ends up being a pretty innocuous-looking line with a "hole" at x=1 , y=2
But yeah, that's exactly my point that all div by 0 operations might not be "approximated" as +/- infinity , but under certain not-uncommon circumstances, 1 or 2 or any number could be a possible "approximation" of something that would otherwise throw a div by 0 error. But it's much more trouble to code for those special cases than just bailing out. And that was the point I was trying to make to troll for some mod points :P
Thanks for reminding me about L'Hopital's Rule... I vaguely remembered that there was some way to do it using derivatives of the numerator and denominator, but forgot what to actually search for ;-D
5 mod points to the AC
Oh, yeah, I fucked up... I failed at simplifying an example where lim x->1 (x^2 - 1) / (x - 1) = 2
At least I know what to do to get lots of followup comments now ;-)
When you have 0/0, you hit two "obvious" but contradictory rules in basic algebra:
Rule one: anything multiplied by zero is zero
Rule two: anything divided by itself is one
Mathematicians don't know which rule has precedence for 0/0, so there's no way a dumb machine can figure it out, which is why most programing languages just throw an exception if zero is the denominator.
It's mathematically possible to do some form of 0/0 using limits and the calculus.
lim x->0 x/x = 1
Also lets you do some interesting other things, like:
lim x->0 x^2/x = 2
lim x->0 sin(x) / x = 1
Shouldn't be too hard to get a function that gives you the correct "approximate" value of the function near the indeterminate point, if there is one. It's just a bunch of special cases that you have to check for every time you do an operation that might possibly result in a div/0 error, right? Go ahead. DO IT! I'll wait.
Yes, sheesh, I've never had any problems just throwing my search engine some extra terms for context. The irony in this Ask Slashdot cuts so deep it hurts.
Here's some obligatory XKCD:
What the poster will get if he he actually gets what he asks for: https://xkcd.com/979/
What the poster actually wants out of a search engine that "doesn't think for him": https://xkcd.com/1185/ (mouseover text)
Disney / ABC is pretty smart. The 35 people are sure to keep looking around the job market (which is much better in NY and CA than in FL from the last round of ~250 layoffs) and eventually leave anyway. If they leave voluntarily, Disney doesn't have to pay them the severance package at all, which is likely equivalent to an extra few months' salary. A small price to pay for the goodwill from this "Hey, maybe Disney does have a heart" headlines.
Er, yes! But just want to point out that MSVC++ is/was "in house" as far as MSFS is concerned ;-)
Yeah, for my part, I did my MS thesis in python about 10 years ago, and packaged the entire thing onto a Knoppix LiveDVD. It had a lot of dependencies (python 2.7, psyco JIT that only worked on 32-bit python, lp_solve, glpk, ... heck I even included a (barely) working openoffice and the latex used to regenerate the paper.
I think it's aged OK so far. Though now I'd have to migrate everything over to python 3 using the pypy JIT compiler (not sure if it runs as fast as psyco did yet), but I think the other pieces should still work, mostly. My old environment would be too obsolete to try to do any serious new work in. But I suppose it's nice to know that I could still reproduce my results *somehow*.
Counterpoint: MSVC++
CSB: so I briefly worked on MS Flight Simulator a few years ago. It was interesting working with code that was older than Windows, but it was still there (under a whole bunch of C++ shims).
C'mon people, I waited all day and I still have to post this for you?
https://xkcd.com/353/
which all of course ends in:
https://xkcd.com/521/ (mouseover text)
You have to know enough to know that it makes whitespace significant. That's useful, because it should lead you to choose another scripting language, one which is less retarded.
As a python guy, I lol'd the first time I had to maintain some ruby and found that the rubocop linter makes it more persnickety about whitespace than python is.
Furthermore, I kinda have always fallen into a hybrid of the 1) - 2) system so I can upgrade *something* every 2 years instead of 4 and still save money overall while also collecting a larger pile of spare parts to build extra lower-end boxes.
When building a new system, I typically get the best motherboard I can, and the cheapest half-decent CPU available for it.
Then in two years after the CPUs have hit the market, I'll throw in the second-best CPU available for that motherboard (the first-best usually still carries a premium). Bonus points for finding something off of Craigslist.
The most recent time I did this was pretty nice... I went from an Athlon II X2 (with 1GHz HT2.0) to a Phenom II X4 (with 2GHz HT3.0), which doubled the memory bandwidth. So even though the core clock went up less than 50% from 2.2Ghz to only 3.2Ghz, I ended up getting more than a 100% improvement in frame rates for my games, even the single-threaded ones that couldn't make use of the additional cores. And the poor sap from Craigslist that I bought the Phenom II X4 system from had it in an older motherboard that only supported HT2.0, so he was missing out on the extra memory bandwidth. I put my old CPU in his motherboard, so that's a better match now.
The best computer in my house is my kids' minecraft rig, which is fairly unique due to the multiseat setup:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
It's a neat trick... but I need to go in and set up udev so I don't have to untangle the usb device IDs in /etc/X11/xorg.conf every time we plug another usb device in, though.
Cool, thanks for the clarification! It's been tricky trying to piece this together, since no one ever seems to mention Iridium and Google in the same article, even though it looks like they're all working on the same constellation. Is (well, was) Facebook piling in with them as well? And what kind of shot does the competing Virgin / Qualcomm group have?
This whole thing kinda smacks of hardline negotiating... suddenly everyone and their dog was going to launch another LEO constellation, just when Iridium was about to launch the next generation of their product via SpaceX:
http://spacenews.com/iridium-n...
From one side, I can sorta see this posturing as SpaceX trying to negotiate better rates from Iridium by says "hey, if you don't want to pay us more to launch your stuff, we'll just partner with Google / Facebook and launch our own LEO constellation."
Then there was also that guy who got the FCC license that expires in 2019, except the consortium he was working with weren't going to have their launches scheduled in time, so he took his license and ran to Richard Branson's Virgin.
Anyway, it seems like the LEO constellation thing is a mess right now, and I can't really tell who's working together and who's working against each other. But it seems moderately interesting from a cloak-n-dagger story.
http://spacenews.com/signs-of-...
If he has a 50 foot TV then, well he should build a model of Stonehenge to house the behemoth - just make sure to write down the instructions correctly on the paper napkin.
Obligatory Weird Al:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Well, there's some saying about your career satisfaction being proportional to how much of your education you're able to use on the job.
And I have to admit, I was happiest during a brief stint at a game development studio where I finally actually got to use The Calculus. But yeah, it's much more lucrative to do boring stuff and then have free time and money to actually pursue hobbies.
The irony of course is having gone through college getting an aerospace engineering degree that I'd never really put to use while toying around with computers and Linux all night. Now I make all of my money dinking around with my Linux at work so I can use my aerospace degree to play with toy airplanes. At least I always feel like I'm playing, I suppose.
Just trolling real engineers, I guess.
* I hate the term "financial engineering". Engineers often operate in the public trust, work with the laws of physics, and are held accountable for their work. Financial schemers are just making money from money playing by their own rules, plan from the start to go in take a bit off the top and get out before their financial instrument collapses.
* Yes, some of the math is the same, and it's sad to see some of the brightest people from school run off into finance and go do calculus for banks so they can multiply imaginary money into the economy instead of doing something more modest and practical that only merely adds real money to the economy.
* Scholarships for the engineering school means less competition in the finance sector, so he can stay on top of his game. And yet still show the engineers feeding on hi scholarship who their master is.
Gee that came out kinda bitter. I should probably start hanging out with more investment bankers to try to humanize them a bit. (ha!)
meanwhile, Millennials shun email because "it's for old people".
I sorta see email dying out (not completely, but like USENET) and being gradually replaced with secure webmail and IM islands, like what healthcarw providers and some banks do to communicate with their customers. All it needs is some kind of API access through an auth broker...
Yep, this. Same way that you need your IE6 around in a VM so you can do your mandatory training.
Throw one of these puppies in a VM and leave a snapshot.
https://chromium.googlesource....
It's been several years since I bought an opener...and even then I can't remember seeing a major brand that wasn't a paired-system remote.
Argh, damn you Slashdot, get out of my Amazon purchase history!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
I guess 1993 was about when the garage door companies standardized on the the rolling-code thingy that has to be paired to each remote.
Though now I'm kicking myself for not just building my own https garage door opener using
http://www.instructables.com/i... so I can let the kids in remotely when they forget their keys.