Viewing profile — miguelpais

Is Uber trying to be another real world enactment of Animal Farm? The resemblance doesn't seem to be a coincidence.

Well, the portuguese navigators did have a lot of trouble crossing it. This was due to the fact that they mostly always sailed with the coast in sight, but when they reached the eq…

But remember also that northern hemisphere navigators like the Portuguese also had to align their maps in a different direction as they crossed the equator and lost their main refe…

>> "Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit of maths and magic" Even though this actual service is probably not so accurate, it does give an interes…

To be quite frank I wonder what is better for the country: staying there, working your ass off and getting just enough to survive, or being outside, opening your horizons, maybe be…

I'm one of those about to graduate students from a technical university in Lisbon, and for me, there is no doubt anymore, I'll start to work outside of Portugal. When you look at i…

Once I thought of something like that too, but in the environment of a park with speakers and wifi (yeah, far fetched, I know). People could go to a website available on the wirele…

WOW! I had exactly this idea at a Hackaton festival called Codebits in Portugal in November last year and presented it[1] to the audience but didn't receive that much excitement fr…

If the salt is the same for all the users you can have it on the source code that hashes the passwords. Not always being SQL injected means having the back-end code leaked.

>> "And if the passwords were salted before the hash is applied? Well, more than a third of the passwords were easily found in a common dictionary so it’s just a matter of having t…

That's why I have friends lists. Just some weeks ago some girl I didn't know that happened to be the designated driver of the group of friends I was with on the new years eve sent …

The biggest illusion of progress bars is when they don't accurately represent the time left for something to complete. Like when you wait 7,5 minutes for the bar to reach 75% and t…

That's somewhat similar to my second mini-project of my NLP course (that I just delivered like one week ago). What we had to do was, first to gather a large corpus (in this case) o…

Debbie's problem is exactly what makes me use the Friend Lists feature of Facebook. It might not protect your data that well, but at least it is able to keep things semi-private fr…

It might not be that clever, but it is able to considerably reduce the running time of the algorithm (even if the speedup in a 9x9 puzzle is not perceived). In fact, if you ask peo…

As far as I know Norvig's solver has constraint propagation (maybe it didn't have it in the first version though).

Halfway through the article this encoding / data compression algorithm I learned last semester came to my mind: Huffman coding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding It was re…

Yeah, but I can't think of two similar actions where it would be difficult to define the expected behavior: sometimes you just take one bud out momentarily to be able to listen to …

Of course, but as the statement was said it was if there was no way of commuting without oneself being the driver.

"In terms of time efficiency, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting. Imagine being able to spend that t…