Does anybody know how this compares performance-wise to Numba (http://numba.pydata.org/) which seems like a pretty similar effort? Numba translates to LLVM bytecode rather than C++.
The performance numbers they show are fairly cherry-picked and are not really showing a broad-based comparison of Numba's capability. In addition, Numba is still under active development and the version they used is a few versions older than released. Still it's good to have use-cases and examples which drive Numba improvements.
When I last looked up double-entry bookkeeping for Django for some projects I was working on, I came across Oscar and specifically https://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar-accounts . Have you seen that project? Any sense of how yours compares?
django-oscar-accounts includes a web UI (I assume from the screenhots when I clicked your link).
bookkeeper has an empty views.py, and seems to be using django mostly for the ORM.
I'm curious to know what other people are using for this type of functionality. Does anyone reading this link their app directly to an accounting package, and post transactions in real-time using that API?
In the demo, the computer vision and gesture recognition algorithms are running on a Windows 8 tablet, connected to the glasses via a USB cable. The tablet is processing the live video feed from the glasses and communicates with the AR Drone via the super easy to use https://github.com/venthur/python-ardrone project.
For rapid prototyping, we started with the great JS hand recognition demo http://revealjs.herokuapp.com/ but quickly wanted the flexibility of OpenCV so we moved to the OpenCV Python libraries and other high performance Python libraries such as SciPy.
The bulk of the algorithm uses a variety of different features (such as color, motion and shape) to estimate where hands might be in the frame, and when a hand is found the foreground (hand) and background (non-hand) are learned to improve the robustness of the hand estimation.
We are building an application platform for developers to create applications integrating our glasses, and we'll be exposing the gestures API (among other APIs) for easy gesture-triggered events. This will allow lots of fun applications like waving your hand to turn the music up with your glasses, but we're really excited for all the ideas we haven't even thought of that we know everyone else will build with the platform and APIs.
This is easily in my top five, but the hack that had me buzzing all night with its cleverness when I read about it is Nils Schneider's method of extracting the ipod bootloader:
Hey I'm Peter Brook, an engineer at Facebook hacking our Android code. Reading over some of these responses, I feel like there are some popular misconceptions about Facebook that are being repeated and I wanted to jump in and share my own personal experience.
I was an intern at Facebook in the summer of 2011, and joined full-time as an engineer in the Seattle office that winter. I joined part way though my junior year of college, and though a balance of time I am managing to graduate this quarter. During my (non-Facebook) undergrad, I was completely in to robotics research. I had done research my entire undergrad and was sure I was going to graduate school for robotics. In fact, when I got my full time offer, I basically said thanks but I know I am going to grad school. A week before my deadline expired, I completely flipped and accepted the Facebook FT offer. There were several reasons why, but these are the relevant bits:
People. Facebook is a company focused on humans. My intern manager and my team manager as an intern were both outstanding human beings. I really, truly felt that they cared about me and about the direction that Facebook was going. This manifested itself part way though the Summer when I and some other interns proposed that the interns should do a Reddit AMA about what it was like to be an intern at Facebook. Both my intern manager and team manager were really excited about the idea and helped push it for approval. We got push back, and they advocated for us to the point where I wanted to hug them for caring so much. This initial effort finally did manifest itself in (so far) several Facebook team lead AMAs. At some level, seeing that my manager cared so much made me feel like I’d be okay in life if I just ended up next to such a quality guy.
Personal growth. I really enjoy learning new things about life. I knew that I’d learn a whole bunch of CS in grad school, but Facebook offered opportunities for many different kinds of learning, and in the end that potential for a diversity of learning experiences was really attractive. Boy was I not disappointed. I was immediately encouraged to begin interview training and have now interviewed dozens of candidates. I asked if I could mentor a new employee through Facebook’s “bootcamp” process and immediately got a “sure, go for it!” response. I asked if I could mentor an intern, and got the same response. Less than 1 year after being an intern, I had the opportunity to mentor one! These sorts of experiences pushed me to learn all sorts of new stuff, all while being surrounded by extremely competent mentors that could help me whenever I asked to chat.
Impact. This one gets hyped a lot, but it’s kind of ridiculous and hard to oversell. There is the opportunity for individuals to have crazy levels of impact at Facebook. I am the lead engineer on a critical component of our infrastructure, and all I had to do was step up and take the responsibility (and execute effectively). In meetings and company wide, we are very open to anyone stepping up and pitching their ideas. Of course, the idea might get shot down, but there’s still a lot of opportunity to learn Facebook’s product strategies, understand them, and then suggest and implement improvements to those strategies.
Technical work. This is a minor thing, since it is clear to anyone who has worked at Facebook, but we solve a lot of very hard problems. As an intern, for my intern project, I wrote a statistical analysis service in python that communicated with a backend ML service written in C++, and was controlled via a thrift interface by a PHP frontend I wrote, which updated the client side periodically (since the analysis took a while) via js/ajax. Nobody really held my hand through this (although I’m sure I could have gotten help if I’d asked more, and asking for help is definitely a skill I should get better at), these were just the technologies we had in place and so I just made it happen. In my FT work, I am hitting everything from network optimization to intricacies of Android to how to create maintainable APIs.
That said, both of these companies are stellar places to work. I've heard great things from my roommate who interned there, and I have close friends at both companies.
I tend to prefer http://hckrnews.com just because of the more intuitive browsing interface and filtering options (top 10, top 20, etc). I have it as a shortcut on my main phone screen and bookmarked in all browsers.
Ironically, for me typing n is indeed HN, but the next one is nbcolympics.com, (and we all know how useful the latter is if you don't have cable subscription...) so I assume I don't need to check my self into a HN addict clinic just yet
This really makes you wonder at what point do you go from calling something "some digital nudging about between nations" to "war".
To me this seems to qualify as terrorism and sabotage on all accounts. I'm pretty sure I know how the US would react if they had been on the receiving end of this sort of attack.
Sabotage sure, but I have a hard time seeing this qualified as terrorism - terrorism is an a violent act against civilians designed to instill fear in the general population.
e.g., bombing trains, airports, buildings, poisoning food supplies, etc.
Actions against the military establishment of a country can hardly be qualified as terrorism.
That said, if the US had been on the pointy end of this stick I'm sure many politicians would not have hesitated to the use the T-word themselves...
So I looked at your links and I don't see how those activities "instill fear in the general population". They instill fear in those working for the military, sure, but that's not the general population.
I intend no offense, but can we for once not be pedants? The January 11th incident happened in a public, civilian area (http://wikimapia.org/#lat=35.75663&lon=51.450485&z=1...), it was the fourth such incident (that I know of), and witnesses described a man on a motorbike that attached the bomb to the car.
I'm pretty sure that if you happened to be a block away when a Livermore Lab nuclear scientist was killed by a focused car bomb delivered by a motorcyclist, you'd get a little jumpy and U.S. news reports would call it terrorism.
And, U.S. officials are claiming that the bombings are being carried out by the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, a terrorist organization, and Iran's own vice-president called it an act of terrorism.
For us to call this anything other than terrorism would be hypocrisy.
Actually if I knew the target was specifically targeted and killed by a careful operation I would be more relaxed knowing that my country's enemy was so careful about killing.
It's the same reason why people get in an uproar over a random murder, but barely care when the killing was targeting a specific person.
Terrorism is random. Killing a person because of how they help the military is not terrorism even if done in public. You can call it assassination if you wish (which plenty of people condemn), but it's not terrorism.
Remember Alexander Litvinenko? (The Russian spy who was killed with plutonium.) I don't remember any exclamations of terrorism.
When Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in 2009, 60% of Americans wanted the crime prosecuted as a terrorist act [1], the Bipartisan Policy Center referred to it as a terrorist act in a report [2], and Wikipedia currently refers to it as a "non-state terrorist attack" [3].
While there is not an internationally-agreed-upon definition of "terrorism", according to U.S. law, terrorism is defined as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents" [4]. Premeditated, politically-motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by clandestine agents ... the Iranian car bombings would legally qualify as terrorism under U.S. law.
This is a very silly argument to be having here. I'd really rather be reading about some interesting technical aspect of the technological warfare against Iran, and I really don't want to keep on cluttering up the comments here with silliness.
Nidal Malik Hasan killed people randomly. That makes a huge difference. Another difference is motivation: He killed from hate, not for a military purpose.
The whole point of picking a specific target is that you consider them a combatant. (You don't have to shoot a gun to be a combatant, helping the military is enough.) A civilian contractor for the military can be a combatant. So no, the Iranian car bombings would not legally qualify as terrorism under U.S. law - the bombings targeted a combatant.
Intent matters too: Are you are killing a person because of that specific person? (To prevent that person from contributing to the military.) Or are you killing so that other people see the killing and get scared?
You are right that it's a silly argument because your eyes appear to be closed on the matter (although to your credit you argue constructively). So lets turn this around, in your eyes in what scenario would it be assassination and not terrorism?
I don't think there are too many other technological details to be found, so this thread is likely to end up as a huge discussion of the morals of this action.
If the Tamil Tigers do it (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project), then it is soliciting assistance for terrorist acts, but if the KKK does the same thing (Brandenburg v. Ohio) it is protected speech. I really don't know that there is more to say about it then that.
As Justice Potter Stewart said in his concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." (that's his complete concurrence)
The same could be true for terrorism. We know it when we see it. No objective definition necessary, so we will make do with it as a political label.
It's really not pedantic, it's about using the right word. Terror means fear. Assassination means killing a specific person.
Assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists has the concrete and (for the presumed perpetrators) desired effect of denying Iran the service of those persons. Instilling terror in other nuclear scientists is a much lower order side effect.
So assassinating any government officials by Iran in order to try to defend from future such assassinations of its scientists would also not be considered terrorism, as long as they claim it is a targeted response and if it happens to induce fear in the large number of government officials and others it is just a secondary effect?
But if a clear causation between removing a certain actor from the game and crippling the scientist assassination program is present, I don't see why not.
terrorism is an a violent act against civilians designed to instill fear in the general population.
It got legally redefined by the government. Is now the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
Is now any unlawful forceful act with any wider motive, basically.
> the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce the US government its allies, the US civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
See, when US does it is called "exporting democracy", "conducting an operation", "liberating", "collateral damage" -- basically anything but terrorism.
The way you react is with total silence - you don't want anyone to know you were vulnerable. And that's also why these types of activities tend not to escalate.
Personally, if countries have to fight I'd prefer they do it quietly like this rather than open war. It's a lot easier to ratchet down the tensions when there has been no rhetoric about the enemy.
I don't know about the states, but we (Israel) have been on the receiving end of actual terrorism and sabotage through Iranian proxy groups. Stuxnet seems mild compared to funding suicide bombings.
I understand this is a highly-loaded political issue in the states, but, for Israel, Iranian funded terrorism is a threat in and of itself, nuclear weapon or not.
Terrorism. What about this inflicts terror? I guess you might be a bit scared, but not really all that scared. It's not like someone developed a virus to slowly irradiate people having x-rays.
so how something is reported changes its reality how? I think the spin media put on the facts creates the fear, not the facts itself. Breaking equipment is certainly not going to cause what the media might've spun it into (which is OMG nuclear meltdown OMG).
The difference is that the US doesn't threaten to wipe countries off the map. Iran is an evil theocracy and can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. Drawing moral equivalencies between the US and a totalitarian terrorist state is ridiculous. It's like comparing North Korea with Belgium.
I think that this comment bears a certain indulgent mixture of patriotism and naïvety. Dismissing Iran as an "evil theocracy" and a "a totalitarian terrorist state" is not entirely without grounds, but I would invite commenters to tone down their statements if geopolitics is not among their interests.
As far as I know the US is the ONLY country to ever have used nuclear weapons in war. And they may not have wiped countries off the map but they certainly did a lot of damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The nukes were used at a time of ABSOLUTE WAR. Every major economy on earth was geared toward war; nearly all manufacturing capacity was put toward not being conquered by your enemies and dying. It's clear very few people understand what that means today, as it has been 70 years since an absolute war has occurred, in which the major nations of earth were fighting for their very existence.
Britain would have nuked Germany to save itself if it had the opportunity and the necessity to do so, and or to bring the war to an end and kill Hitler if the opportunity were there. France too would have nuked Germany to defend itself and kill Hitler if possible. Had the Jewish people been able to, they too would not have blinked at nuking Germany and trying to kill Hitler in the process.
Japan would have nuked the United States and the rest of the allies. Germany would have nuked everybody at their leisure to 'win.'
The Empire of Japan was an extraordinarily powerful nation. Their military technology was very advanced, and they demonstrated endlessly that they were willing to use it brutally in instigation of war. They slaughtered millions upon millions in their Chinese invasion. It took a very substantial portion of America's considerable industrial base to defeat Japan.
It took two nuclear bombs before Japan capitulated with an unconditional surrender. The first one wasn't enough, which more than proves they were willing to shed millions more lives to keep fighting. America would have had to invade Japan and would have killed millions in taking the island to stop the war.
America had nukes before everybody else, and if their desire had been to do so, could have wiped out every other capital and brought the entire planet to its knees, regularly nuking anybody that dared to twitch about a nuclear program.
America also could have allowed a war to proceed with the USSR immediately after WW2, and nuked the USSR repeatedly and instantly become the sole superpower.
And in the last 67 years, America has specifically chosen to not use nuclear weapons of any sort, despite the radical military advantage that it has possessed for most of that time. Nukes in Vietnam would have ended that conflict very quickly.
It's a tragedy that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Japan instigated war, both in general in the Pacific, and against America. Japan joined with Nazi Germany in a pact to destroy the allies. It was absolute war. I hope nobody reading this today ever has to really come to understand what that means.
Many historians argue that dropping the bombs was unnecessary. With the USSR transitioning its army to the east and preparing to invade Japan, it was clear Japan was going to lose with or without nuclear weapons. There is evidence that the US sped up deployment of nuclear weapons so that their effectiveness could be demonstrated to the world before the war ended. This argument is usually used to point out that the bombs were used unnecessarily.
Obviously the bombs killed fewer people than a full scale invasion of Japan (and from the perspective of the US, the only casulities were Japanese, not American and Japanese). But many historians would argue that a full scale invasion of mainland Japan was never going to happen after the USSR decided to engage Japan as well. The writing was on the wall.
That said, I think you have a good point using the counterfactual of what would have happend if anyone else got to the nuclear weapon first. Germany would have absolutely nuked anyone and everyone if they could. Japan might have as well (not sure what they would have used it against, maybe the Panama canal? I don't see how they could have launched one against mainland USA without an ICBM). The UK and USSR probably would have if they could.
Basically anyone that showed the stomach to firebomb entire cities would also have used the nuclear weapons of the day if they could.
It also took a couple of years before the full appreciation of the dangers of nuclear fallout became apparent. Not to mention, the nuclear weapons used in WW2 have a tiny yield in comparison to modern nuclear weapons.
This post makes an extremely important and very very very poorly understood point. You are absolutely correct that whilst the conventional wisdom is that the US nuked Japan to avoid the loss of 500,000 lives invading the mainland the historical record is rather different. Recent scholarship has made this plain. For those interested I recommend starting with Gar Alperovitz's 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.'
On a point of detail, ironically it isn't true that 'the only casualties were Japanese." In Nagasaki there were a large number of conscripted foreign workers as well as the native Japanese population (mostly women and children).
Another good point about the firebombing. The US and UK airforce leaders were clear that if they lost the war the 1000 bomber raids onto civilian targets would likely be classified as war crimes and that they personally would be tried as war criminals.
You're definitely right that it was a war of decimation and sheer destruction (eg the fire bombing). It was a fight to the death. It's what makes a war like that so damn scary, the gloves literally come off. WW1 of course had plenty of that as well (chemical weapons). The civilian population required to support the industry necessary to build the war machines are part of the targeting if your intention is to survive that sort of conflict and stop the opponent's ability to produce more tanks, planes and weapons.
One other thing comes to mind -- the conflict in the Pacific had a more distinctly nasty racial and imperial cast than the conflict in Western Europe. The fighting was more savage, and the enemy more demonized (on both sides). This made it easier to carry out the destruction of a whole city.
I suppose Japan could have used strategic nuclear attacks, against the island gains the US forces were making in the Pacific, and potentially nuking our fleet groups.
They probably could have nuked Hawaii as well with some effort, and pushed the US forces even further back to shore and reduced our visibility / force projection.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but WW2 was not actually an "ABSOLUTE WAR". Very, very intense? Of course. But not absolute.
For example during WW2 all of the major participants had chemical warfare weapons. Several, including Germany, had significant stockpiles. (Germany actually had the most effective stockpiles, though they seem to have not believed this at the time.)
The only significant use of chemical warfare was by the Japanese against other Asian countries that did not have chemical weapons. Nobody else dared use those weapons on each other for fear of the response.
And so it has remained. A lot of countries have chemical weapons. There have been a lot of wars between countries armed with them. There have been a number of threats that they would be used (for instance Iraq threatened to use them on Israel during the first Gulf war). And yet the only time they get used is against opponents who are not similarly armed. (For instance Iraq fought a bloody war against Iran without using chemical weapons - then used them on parts of its own population who they thought had been disloyal in the war.)
This fact gives me hope that we will continue to not use nuclear weapons as well.
the main point i got was that retaliatory power was the disincentive to use weapons of mass destruction. Provided that relatiatory power exists, peace will ensure.
Ever hear about King Leopold and the Congo. Belgium has a nasty history (U.S. estimates up to 15 million Congolese killed). Wikipedia shows "wiped off the map" propaganda by the west is just that. The real statement was a hope for regime change, something the U.S. calls for and instigates repeatedly.
Yes, but they do that every Friday. Iran has been openly at war with the United States for over thirty years and loudly reminding the world of that fact at every opportunity. The only surprise in the US now committing an act of war against Iran is that the US has finally retaliated in some form other than complaining or giving Iran money and weapons in the misguided belief they might become friends.
they say they are at war, but they in their minds know they have no chance in hell to beat the USA in a conventional war.
They want to keep instigating hate towards the west. I believe the leaders of that country would like their population's rage to be directed at an external entity, and not cause unrest (among other things of course).
I'm sure China have done plenty of - successful - attacks already. The States don't have an interest in disclosing these findings, nor do the Chinese, though.
"...is based on interviews...with current and former American, European and Israeli officials... None would allow their names to be used..."
Not exactly confirmed, but at least there are a few more details being (intentionally?) leaked. Good ole NYT is always ready to spill the words of unnamed 'officials', but the more interesting question is why, or why now?
I didn't say it was worse or better.
My point is: "cyberwar" can be responsible for painful and "real" physical damage in the physical world. In that regard it is in no way "better" than the "usual/conventionnal" physical wars.
Worst case, the government prints money to pay off all the debts (a 'bailout' if you will). We've done this for far less than a cyber attack. There is some inflation, a lot of hand wringing about cyber security, and the world goes on. GDP might drop a bit, maybe it triggers a recession, but a year later we're back on our feet.
15 nuclear bombs could kill millions of people. Entire cities could be wiped out with 300+ years of history, architecture, irreplacable museum artifacts, etc. People in general would flee cities en mass. It would fundamentally shake the country and likely lead to the US retaliating in a nuclear war, or at least a large scale general war not seen since WW2. The US would probably roll a million man plus army across the middle east or north korea to destroy whatever country allowed the bombs to be built. That war would not be the (relatively) white gloved affair that are the current rules of engagement.
I understand hyperbole, but that statement is just false.
Yes. That position has now pretty much lost credibility, which in my view is no bad thing. I've had the good fortune to never experience actual war, but I'm pretty sure nobody with such experience, is in the slightest doubt about the difference between that and sabotaging computers, however annoying the latter might be. If cyber-conflict is going to take place, I think it's in everyone's interest to keep it at that level and stop it spilling over into war.
Leave it to TorrentFreak to take a couple sentences of hypothesis from a thoroughly researched analysis and blow it into a story. Reading the original piece, it is clear that the source and purpose of these packets is unknown, and behavior has been observed which wouldn't necessarily match up with a poisoning attack. It is unfortunate that TorrentFreak couldn't just report the anomaly accurately, and instead had to spin it into something completely unfounded.
I first used XBMC back when it was XBMP and I was looking around for better dashes than evoX on my xbox. Good times getting those t3ch builds and pushing them to the xbox, occasionally messing it up and needing to drop back to the bootloader to fix it :)
It is incredible how this project has kept on pushing out great features and support for new platforms. I talk to people at work who have discovered this and now use it on their mac mini/htpc, and are completely disconnected from the whole Xbox aspect of it.
This team has a great idea when they initially tried getting builds working and usable on windows and linux. I wouldn't have imagined at the time how far this project would come.
