Thursday, July 30, 2015

Crashes only on Wednesdays

http://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/
Caught on yet?  On Wednesdays, and only on Wednesdays, if somebody manually twiddled certain bits in the monitor settings in a certain way, two events would occur during the same millisecond and caused the DB to throw an exception, and the error message that logged this would be exactly 81 bytes long including the null terminator, overflowing the 80-char buffer and causing the program to crash!

Friday, July 17, 2015

The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-view-from-the-front-seat-of-the-google-self-driving-car-46fc9f3e6088

https://medium.com/@chris_urmson/the-view-from-the-front-seat-of-the-google-self-driving-car-chapter-2-8d5e2990101b
But we’re now driving enough — and getting hit enough — that we can start to make some assumptions about that real crashes-per-miles-driven rate; it’s looking higher than we thought. (Our cars, with safety drivers aboard, are now self-driving about 10,000 miles per week, which is about what a typical American adult drives in a year.) It’s particularly telling that we’re getting hit more often now that the majority of our driving is on surface streets rather than freeways; this is exactly where you’d expect a lot of minor, usually-unreported collisions to happen. Other drivers have hit us 14 times since the start of our project in 2009 (including 11 rear-enders), and not once has the self-driving car been the cause of the collision. Instead, the clear theme is human error and inattention. We’ll take all this as a signal that we’re starting to compare favorably with human drivers.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Concise electronics for geeks

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/

This is a really good overview of analog electronics.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

One dot per person for the entire US

http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/

This is a really good population map of the US, even ignoring that it has racial data too.