Opposites attract. That's how the cliché goes, and people really believe they are attracted to those different from them: 86 percent say they want a partner who "complements them" rather than one who "resembles them." There's only one problem with this idea: It's false.
Cool insight into dating and relationships from FiveThirtyEight.
What Mazda is essentially saying is that it has designed a software fix because it's given up on actually keeping the spiders out and is now focusing on making sure their presence doesn't cause your car to catch on fire.
Software bugs are called that because they used to be actual bugs, but this is certainly a modern take on the issue of testing.
Rather than breaking apart the fuel molecule through combustion, solar thermal fuels release heat by rearranging bonds within a molecule, leaving all the atoms in place. As a result, they can be recycled repeatedly.
Horray for organic chemistry! I'm pretty sure azobenzene was our class's primary example of cis- and trans- isomers, and using the molecular rotation for energy storage is quite clever.
Another day, another broken implementation of web security in a popularly-used product. CVE-2014-0160 is melting the Internet, and we're going to be dealing with the fallout for quite some time. A lot of engineers are not going home tonight...
Every person who retires from the federal government has paperwork that goes through a totally paper system in the middle of an abandoned mine in Pennsylvania.
A fantastic randomized algorithm for counting large numbers of unique things.
The same dynamic is playing out throughout Silicon Valley, as companies like Intel post disappointing earnings reports and others like Snapchat turn down billion-dollar offers. The rapid consumer-ification of tech, led by Facebook and Google, has created a deep rift between old and new, hardware and software, enterprise companies that sell to other businesses and consumer companies that sell directly to the masses. On their face, these cleavages seem to be part of the natural order. As Biswas pointed out, "There has always been a constant churn of new companies coming in, old companies dying out."
But the churn feels more problematic now, in part because it deprives the new guard as well as the old — and by extension, it deprives us all. In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests. [...] The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps.
Perhaps the article's most powerful point is that now that startup launching is commoditized (AWS, Facebook API, etc.), the ideas are what matter, rather than the technology, and older engineers frequently lack the freedom to take risk for ideas and vision.
Pretty. I've been excited about this for quite a while.
In a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing in May, [the researchers] demonstrate a new analytic technique suggesting that, in a wide range of real-world cases, lock-free algorithms actually give wait-free performance.
The easy, simple parallel programming algorithms don't appear to behave much worse than the complicated ones in practice.
Always good stuff from McSweeney's.