As a former ICPC winner, I'd say ICPC is mainly a test of teamwork, given the format of the competition (3 team mates, one computer, scoring that rewards clean solutions submitted quicker, tackled in the optimal order for your three sets of skills, etc).
Sure, you need to be individually good at thinking, etc. But the difference between 1st and places further down the ranking is teamwork.
As a former ICPC participant, albeit not first place (hats off to you), I would generally characterize it as "having a good team," much more so than what's usually considered "teamwork." It is a parallelization/scheduling effort than deep interpersonal collaboration.
(In a certain sense, this is actually the ideal "teamwork" setup in the industry as well, to have a bunch of people who own their part and are trusted by their colleagues take care of it and not step on each other toes than kumbaya let's all get together on the same problem.)
The teams we beat trained as individuals and were selected competitively against each other as their school's "best 3".
We were "just" three friends who had studied together for 4 years, knew each other's strengths and weaknesses intimately, and then for the comp trained intensively on optimising the "parallelization/scheduling" aspects (as you put it) to get the best score in the minimum time. That included both the logistical and mental aspects of recovering from setbacks midway through the 5 hour problem sets.
During the finals, you'd be surprised how many teams' teamwork we saw fall apart when three very smart people under intense time pressure hit unexpectedly failing submissions with the bottleneck of a single computer. ICPC is a genius format.
I'd be cautious. Project seems abandoned. And I wouldn't say it's one of those cases where a piece of software is just finished and doesn't need any changes.
GDPR has nothing to do with cookie banners first of all.
Also, literally how the process works is, any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines and have to prove compliance to an incompetent non-technical person to stop the inquiries.
It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers recommend this regardless of what you’re doing.
> any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines
Of course you're not at risk for millions of fines because that's not how the process works.
If the relevant agency gets off its ass and decides to actually work on the complaint (very highly unlikely, unfortunately), they will first contact you and ask you to remedy the situation within some time frame (usually quite generous).
If you don't do that, they contact you again and tell you you might be fined for not doing what you're asked.
The only way for you to risk millions is to repeatedly knowingly violate the regulation.
> It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers
Ah yes. The famously competent technical people, those lawyers.
You and maybe others keep saying that. I assure you, we don't choose to use them.
If you want to operate an ad-supported site, you need that consent. Untargeted ads are pointless and they don't make money. If you disagree, can I interest you in some brake pads for a Toyota Corolla? How about a dental chew for elderly cats? No? ok.
If you operate an e-commerce site or a SaaS of some kind, you probably need to advertise it online. To have traffic land on your site from advertising, you need to have ad network 'pixels' on your site. That's what they require. If you won't comply, then you can't advertise and you probably can't get many customers.
Websites which need neither are called "hobby sites." I'm very happy for the personal blogs which use no analytics, have no need to remember anyone or collect any "data." The sites showing the cookie banners are not that. They need to make money in order to exist.
> Untargeted ads are pointless and they don't make money. If you disagree, can I interest you in some brake pads for a Toyota Corolla? How about a dental chew for elderly cats? No? ok.
Why didn’t you instead suggest server space or a novel automation tool? You know, things relevant to people visiting HN.
That’s how untargeted ads work. You don’t simply advertise anything anywhere, you advertise relevant things to relevant communities. Advertise the break pads on a community of car enthusiasts and the cat chew on pet forums.
If Google Maps would like to hire me so the km/miles switch can remember I only ever want to see distances in km, my contact details are in my HN profile.
I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users...
It's funny cuz is true. Except it'd probably be one long design doc with 10 rounds of review, 15 CLs (PRs) and months of rollouts later ... fails A/B due to declining user engagement.
While you’re at it, can you find and punch the guy who thinks it’s a good idea to zoom the map to “actual size, 1cm = 1cm” mode for your entire trip?
I assume he’s also the one that taught it to spitefully let you drive off the side of the screen if you ever zoom out manually so that you can see more road on the phone than you can in real life. (With a “recenter” button that will zoom you all the way back in).
Also punch the guy that allows Google Maps navigation to flip back to a route that's been specifically rejected.
Earlier this week Google prompted me with "your route may be affected by tsunami warning". Indeed, so I chose the longer, inland route rather than the coast roads.
15 minutes later I realise it's rerouted me "due to traffic conditions" -- obviously the coast road isn't as busy!
(This has happened many times before, but this was the first time I had a safety reason not to take the faster route.)
While you’re there can you add a ‘how much I value my time’ input field for tolls? Google suggests I spend $20 through 3 tolls to save a single minute. Constantly.
Edit: and while you’re there, move the ‘speed camera ahead, is it still there?’ Dialog. IT COVERS THE DAMN SPEED LIMIT ICON.
And also while you're there, if no car ever in the history of your app goes down the road at the speed limit ever it's a good indication you'll never be able to ever do it at that speed. e.g. small narrow single lane country roads which are only theoretically 60mph roads.
Imagine the data they must have on the speeds people actually drive on every mile of every road, they’d easily be able to warn you not that you’re “over the speed limit” as in driving 70 on the freeway, but more usefully, if you’re in the top X percentile of speeds usually or even currently driven, which actually is a decent measure of unsafe was and would also be a great predictor of likelihood to get a ticket.
I saw this video recently where the author set up a camera to record sections of highways and measure the speeds of drivers, and make cool graphs out of it.
I share your intuition that your likelihood of getting a ticket is related to the speed of other vehicles. Presumably, police choose to prioritise ticketing the worst offenders when there are too many offenders to handle.
But I don't share your intuition that safety is also relative in that way. If you're driving dangerously (too fast, or while drunk), you're driving dangerously, even if everyone else is driving dangerously too. If you're in a country where nobody wears a seatbelt, it's still prudent to wear a seatbelt, just as much as in a country where that is the norm. I don't think Google Maps should encourage people to drive as dangerously as everyone else. Quite the opposite!
"dangerously" and "fast" are not synonyms (while drunkess obviously is dangerous regardless). The 280 in San Mateo County is designed for 80MPH, with banked turns, gentle curves, etc. The speed limit is of course 65. If most people are driving 80-85, and you enter that highway and drive 60, which is a perfectly reasonable speed according to the speed limit, you are much more likely to cause an accident than if you just drive the speed of the people around you.
It's fine to point out that many people are terrible drivers and that a given crash that happens is more dangerous at a higher speed and if everybody were to drive under 60 at all times we'd all be safer, but clearly that will never happen unless we install a totalitarian government, put governors on all cars and give prison time for disabling them, with enforcers stationed everywhere to monitor. But no democracy would vote for that, so I don't think it's worth spending much mental energy on such hypotheticals.
> encourage
I think just the opposite: My feature would encourage people like me, who drive a "fast car" and can occasionally accidentally go too fast if a road is especially uncongested, to slow down to the speed that is customary or that others are driving, by reminding me that I could get a ticket and that driving faster than everyone else is dangerous.
Relative speed is important though. Where I live it’s completely legal to drive half the speed limit, and people often drive above it. People driving a consistent speed would reduce lane changes, breakaway traffic etc. imo speed consistency is what’s valuable, not preventing upper outliers.
When I was traveling in Mexico, it drove me nuts that even though I was signed in, Google Flights switched my currency from dollars to pesos every single time I opened a new tab! I think they really don't care.
I think they rely on ip for a lot of stuff they shouldn't. Getting a local esim switches me to km until I switch back to my old one. Have no idea about Australia.
Edit: after typing this realized this isn't ip, its provider. That maybe does make sense to cue off of.
Also accepting gmaps work, if only it could preemptively cache the return trip for any trip longer than an hour, so that I'm not stuck with no service trying to remember how I got there.
I clicked the link with nothing better to do, and woa, that's a really good maps app. Like, "I haven't seen something like this before" levels of good. Reorients itself with my phone, accurately - and in real time, not after I'd already walked ten steps in that direction. With other maps, I thought that maybe my phone's compass is broken. The default but optional 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking map I've seen in a long time. It barely uses disk space, and going by my short experience with it, it really is very light on the battery.
Exceptional, this is what I'm using from now on. Just hope the iOS 15 support is maintained, that's a killer app to keep perfectly good devices productive even after they're restricted from everything else :)
Happy to have made you discover something cool :-)
> 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking map I've seen in a long time
The 3D top-down view with building heights is possible thanks to OSM providing this data, thanks to people improving the map with apps like Street Complete and Every Door. Make sure to check them out :-)
There's with this 3D view though: it sometimes hides streets. I usually end up disabling it at some point.
Wait, there's a setting for this? I've lived in Australia for over 16 years now but everything is still in miles instead of Kms and I have never been able to find a setting to change it (although it sounds like even if I did find itz it would be mostly useless).
Ive lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense.
In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles".
I got the app wrong, it was Uber. I have my phone set to English (UK) and change the measurement system to metric. Uber doesn't respect that though, so it keeps using miles.
Ah, thank you, this was it. I had the language set to English (UK), but changed the distance setting to KM. I got the app wrong, it was Uber, and Uber doesn't respect the override, so it always uses miles. Changing it to English (Australia) and Uber switches KM.
People tend to book using the currency they're familiar with, not necessarily the local one, so remembering their preferred currency makes sense. As someone who travels a lot but likes to see flight prices in USD, this is really annoying.
Another Google Maps request: Places I‘ve labelled used to at least sometimes (if inconsistently) show up in search. Now they never shop up, even when I type the exact name of the label.
Another issue with Google Maps is it not showing Plus Codes for some locations that highlight the entire area. If you however place a pin on that location, it provides a Plus Code. Pretty stupid IMHO.
Also it is really, really hard to search for "Nearby" places. Have to do it through "Directions". Really bad UX.
Google Maps core functionality is sort of in maintenance mode, and things have been slowly bit rotting over the last 3-4 years.
Unless you want to launch some AI feature (used to be chat app for ten years and then Google got bamboozled by ChatGPT…) you’ll not find allies and your career will not progress.
While you're at it, could you also change YouTube so that captions being on/off is a per-language thing and not a "The user turned off subtitles for language X, therefore it's the only they speak, therefore let's turn on subtitles for all other languages." thing? It's really annoying that whenever I watch a video that has a language different from the previous video I watched, the first thing I have to do is to turn off the captions.
This isn't a proper solution, but if you watch with yt-dlp+mpv, you can configure default audio and sub languages in mpv (globally) and they will also work for YT videos in addition to your movies and such. Plus if you do toggle them on/off for one session it won't mess up your mpv config.
> I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users...
Similar with "privacy popups" everywhere. Similar with every bank with "remember this device" feature. I add exactly the same device on every login, until it fills entirely the limit of allowed devices.
If you are following a route in Google maps in Apple CarPlay you can’t search in the map without cancelling the navigation. So you need to use another phone or another maps app.
It would be a very useful feature as on road trips you can have a passenger setup the navigation rather than the driver and then also look around and examine places along the route.
The same here. Oftentimes Google Maps switches to most exotic language "because of reasons". Then I set it manually to my preferred language, for decades now, and it's been the same language all the time. Are they trying to say with poker face "we don't track you"? I don't think my home-grown privacy habits are that good, somehow they manage to show me an ad of "blue sneakers" someone in the household mentioned this morning.
It’s true, except expand that to all big tech companies. The only time UX is changed it’s either to make ads more effective or to “streamline” things by shoving more and more of the functionality into an endless nested chain of ••• and More menus.
> I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly.
Python had web servers from 2000, including Jim Fulton's Zope (really a full framework for a content management system) and in 2002 Remi Delon's CherryPy.
Both were useful for their day, well supported by web hosting companies, and certainly very lightweight compared to commercial Java systems that typically needed beefy Sun Solaris servers.
I'd forgotten about CherryPy until Turbogears was mentioned the other day in the Django birthday thread.
But yeah Python was on an upswing for webdev and sysadmin (early DevOps?) tooling, but took quite a hit with Ruby eg Rails, Puppet, Vagrant and Chef etc.
But Python hung on and had a comeback due to data science tooling, and Ruby losing it's hype to node for webdev and golang for the devops stuff.
The key factor imo was Travis Oliphant merging the competing numeric and numarray libraries into numpy in 2005. That quickly became the foundation of Python as the key environment for open source numeric processing.
It brought across a ton of users from R and Matlab.
Pandas, Matplotlib and ScikitLearn then consolidated Python's place as the platform of choice for both academic and commercial ML.
Agree. There's lots you can do to slow the affects of aging. Most of us just don't try.
I'm 55 and found - much to my surprise - that 12 months of carefully progressively and intense running training has improved me from a slow plodder (jogging 5km a couple of times a week) to on track for a 3 hour marathon later this year. Along the way, I'm back to the weight I had in my early 20s, but now also am a lot faster and with way more endurance.
Of course, at 55, I now need to be more careful now about not getting injured. Which means being disciplined about stretching, strength training and recovery. Things I never needed to worry about when I was younger.
So absolutely:
> Use it (with proper care and feeding) or lose it.
It's so wild that in your 50s you can be more fit and in better health than you were in your 30s. No one ever told me this. My sedentary family bitched and moaned about how they were getting old and their bodies were falling apart every day. I'm so glad I discovered that exercise works in my early 40s. I hear you about injury though. When I get injured now it takes ages to recover. Something that would have gone away in 2 days in my 20s, can take weeks to heal. We're not immortal, but there's so much we can do.
Sure, you need to be individually good at thinking, etc. But the difference between 1st and places further down the ranking is teamwork.
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