Four short links: 19 April 2019
AI Music, Mind-Controlled Robot Hands, Uber's Repo Tools, and Career Resilience
- AI and Music (The Verge) — total legal clusterf*ck.
- A Robot Hand Controlled with the Mind — student uses open source hand and trains brain-machine interface, and holy crap we live in an age when these kinds of things are relatively easy to do rather than requiring massive resources.
- Keeping Master Green — This paper presents the design and implementation of SubmitQueue. It guarantees an always green master branch at scale: all build steps (e.g., compilation, unit tests, UI tests) successfully execute for every commit point. SubmitQueue has been in production for over a year and can scale to thousands of daily commits to giant monolithic repositories. Uber’s tech. (via Adrian Colyer)
- Early Career Setback and Future Career Impact — Our analyses reveal that an early-career near miss has powerful, opposing effects. On one hand, it significantly increases attrition, with one near miss predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperformed those with near wins in the longer run, as their publications in the next 10 years garnered substantially higher impact. We further find that this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, whereby a more selected fraction of near-miss applicants remained than the near winners, suggesting that early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, the findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”