aduric

Why is the article blaming SoftBank? They bought Arm fair and square. They can do with their acquisitions as they please. Arm is a profit seeking company like every other profit seeking company. They sold themselves to make their founders rich. They are not some beacon of Western liberty that people like to make it out to be.

So why call it 'autopilot'? Seems like bullshit marketing to me. The first association we make when we hear that term is hands-off, not 'advanced cruise control'. They're specifically using that terminology to sell their products and now they're paying the price.

There is a well-known association between the Godfather movies and oranges. For example, Don Vito has an orange slice in his mouth when he dies in the garden. And yes, the fruit stand scene. There are many more examples.

I'm not too familiar with Mario Puzo's novel and use of oranges but it would be fascinating if there was somehow an innate link between the use of oranges in the movies and the origins of the mafia (what this paper is claiming).

This is great! I've been working on something like this as well (an automatic tracker for various body movements). Would love to have a chat about how you've accomplished this.

It would have been amazing if Jodorowsky's Dune actually got made and released. He really was too far ahead of his time for the studio.

I feel that in order to make a roughly 2-hour long film on as complex a subject as what the novel portrays, the only way to illustrate that complexity properly is to ascribe to surrealist elements. That is the only form that can provide the necessary density, if done properly. Lynch knew this, which is why he took on the project, but was later pressured by the studio and his vision was lost. He did a pretty admirable job considering.

Lynch's pedigree speaks for itself:

Blue Velvet: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23 Lost Highway: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16 Mulholland Drive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14 Twin Peaks... etc...

Even if they are not technically selling at a loss (I actually suspect that they are, but in any case), their opportunity for a particularly high profit margin is something that is priced in to their outlook when they are looking to invest and purchase assets. If all of a sudden they don't have as many marbles to play with, they either need to liquidate assets they currently have to the control of foreign owners and invest more strategically (greater chance of using these marbles in non-wealth creating opportunities) or don't invest at all and lose all of these opportunities in the future.

I can transfer my wealth to you either by just giving it to you, or I can transfer my wealth to you slowly over time by not being able to invest in wealth generation at the same rate as you while my base investments depreciate.

There are a large number of web applications running in IIS under the .NET platform: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/02/april-2014-web-...

Also, Microsoft has made some announcements recently to get on the containerization bandwagon: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/08/microsoft-unveils...

The difference is explained in the book.

While I generally tend to stand with McIntyre on the Bayesian vs frequentist debate (whether it is much of a debate anymore given recent advances in AI due to Bayesian techniques for ML is another discussion) I feel that he doesn't adequately explain our 'wrong' intuition on the Monty Hall problem. While he goes on a tirade against the frequentist hold on our education system as being responsible for our mistaken intuition in this regard, he doesn't explain the fact that largely all of us are duped by this problem (having taking courses at school taught by evil frequentists or not). If indeed Bayesian probability theory is innate in us and we have just been brainwashed in school, it would seem to me then that those of us not taught frequentist statistics would be able to solve the problem better than the rest of us. I think this would be an easy experiment to conduct but I have not seen any experiments done to confirm this though.

Not only does testing help with managing large codebases by being able to make actual assertions about certain parts of the code (to be able to prove correctness) but it also improves the quality of your code. If you're writing code that must pass certain tests, you inherently start to think about making that code more modular and de-coupled, ie injecting dependencies rather than creating them for a start.

Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com)

Revolutionize education! We're a fast growing company on the lookout for great talent.

We're looking for many roles (more information: http://www.desire2learn.com/careers/ or send me an email: aduric@gmail.com).

Agreed. I'm currently writing a package that contains a few sophisticated algorithmic parts and a ton of wiring. I find it much easier to utilize TDD in the wiring sections than in the algorithmic parts. I still use TDD for everything, it's just that I find myself to be more easily dogmatic about TDD in the wiring code.

"Are hollywood movies really motivating career decisions?"

You bet. When Top Gun came out, enrolment in the Navy and Air Force increased substantially. Wall Street in part fuelled the popularity in a career in finance and I'm willing to bet that Rounders was used in part to justify being a professional poker player for many people.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Blade Runner (at least subconsciously) contributed towards me going back to school and getting a masters in machine learning.

If said company was truly innovative and satisfies the interests of consumers, I'm sure it won't have much trouble raising the cash necessary to continue being a law-abiding citizen.

Great post Alex. I've recently started to experiment with Clojure on SemWeb apps, RDF, SPARQL, etc. In your post you talk about how Clojure enables you to abstract better than Java. I was just hoping you would discuss a specific example (maybe even in a production environment) instead of how many LOCs you saved.

That's because Turkey keeps their currency artificially bound to the EURO. 2 lira ~ 1 EURO.

Not everything is about how much extra x% wage you can pull by going to grad school. I'll admit that that was my thinking when I initially decided to do a masters but in my second year now, I realise the incredible amount of knowledge and experience I gained. After undergrad I thought I could take on the world. I was actually surprised that I couldn't get a job at the all the cool high-tech companies. Only now do I realise how dumb I was. Only now can I safely say that I can do the job that is required.

I read your quote, but it was framed in such as way that I got the feeling that you were being self-righteous and shallow. First of all you started off with "Surviving..."

Now I don't know anyone with a family who would consider their raison d'être as "surviving."

Then you continued with "...but the quality of your aspirations aren't for me to judge". As if their aspirations were of such inferior quality that it's not even worthy of your judgement.

Anyway, maybe I'm being a bit too defensive in this case, but many people have many different reasons for doing what they do. They are motivated by money, sex, success, spirituality, family, all kinds of things, and they show dedication to them.

Without sounding too philosophical, life should be lived as balanced as possible and time should be given to a reasonable amount of disparate things like work, love, play or (heaven forbid) even nothing!

The actual quote: "It's too bad this had to happen under a proprietary platform with privacy problems."

I Like the headline, but the author presents a bunch of regurgitated fluff in the actual article. In the guise of motivation, all I took away from it is that the author is a pompous jackass. I mean, what's wrong with "settling" and taking care of your family if that your motivation? Why should you get ridiculed for it?

I really hope that this is a satirical article mocking some of the so-called "motivational" crap that has littered HN recently.

I run an emacs --daemon on a powerful server and connect to it from my netbook. Best of both worlds. Just need constant WiFi which I can almost always find.

Microsoft was able to make sure that they were the only OS mainly because of hardware makers' tendency to accept the solution that everyone else was going with. If your main competitor offers a Windows stack, why risk going with something else? I do agree with you to the extent that it all started with their landmark IBM deal. In today's landscape, why would HTC or Motorola or some other hardware maker risk developing their own stack and maintaining it when everyone else seems to be offering Android? I think its more about minimising risk than innovation. Who wants another OS/2 on their hands?

I don't think the big reason for Microsoft's ascendancy was their deal-making. They provided a solution to hardware makers who wanted to sell their hardware. Microsoft came in with a cheap software stack that did everything Apple products did. I bet if given a choice, these hardware makers would have wanted Apple's software, but Apple didn't comply, or it was too expensive.

Hardware makers today (HTC, Motorola and the rest) will most definitely go all in with Google because there's no other choice if they want to compete with Apple! I'm sure they're all well aware that they won't be able to differentiate themselves and they their margins will be razor thin, but even razor thin margins are better than no margins.

Ok, I'll bite.

It seems to me that Apple is following a trend they set in the early nineties. Since around 1986 to 1994, Apple introduced some of its most successful consumer products: Macintosh, PowerBook, System 7 (later to become OS X), etc. These products were wildly successful. They were richly-engineered, consumer-friendly, albeit expensive products. They had their own software stack that was not transferable to other platforms, and that 3rd-party developers were not encouraged to deviate from.

Apple relied on very high profit margins that were not sustainable and instead of competing with companies that were making cheap commodity software that ran on any machine (such as Microsoft), they sued them.

All this set the stage for the rise of Microsoft and their licensing partnerships. Unlike Apple, Microsoft software such as Windows and Office ran on any machine. Developers could create software for these systems free of any restrictions. Even though it can be argued that Apple's software was better, it didn't matter. Developers were already heavily invested in developing for Microsoft's platform.

And now to make my point:

Where developers went, consumers soon followed. It became clear that more software was available on Windows, at a lower cost. Apple was soon on the decline. I am arguing that the same thing will happen again because I'm seeing the same narrative right now. You don't have to try too hard to find frustrated developers switching from Apple to another platform. It's become a hassle. And it will continue.

And again, where developers go, consumers follow.

Substitute Microsoft for Google.

In the late 80's Apple faltered because they had a closed system, while Microsoft's products worked on every important platform and thus quickly became ubiquitous. I am simplifying things a little but it seems to me that history will indeed repeat itself.

Personally, I like the 9-5 daily regiment. I guess it doesn't have to be a specific time frame, as long as I can block off 8-10 hours per day and do my work only during that time. Another important thing for me is to separate my work environment from my home as much as possible. Judging by the other comments on here, maybe I'm becoming a minority.

I agree. This fits in very nicely with their release early and iterate model. If it works for software, why not hardware as well. I'm surprised they didn't call it Nexus Beta.

I agree to an extent. The author should not have been critical of one show and praiseworthy of another. TV is great for winding down and not having to think much. Both shows fill that capacity in a lot of respects. The one glaring omission in this post is the commercials. I absolutely can't stand commercials. 2 minutes of commercials for 5 minutes of actual show? Give me a break. That is the only reason why I don't watch TV.

Precisely. Adobe has two very important footholds on the web: Flash and Acrobat. The web authoring tool landscape is only aimed at developers, a relatively minuscule market. Why would they eat their own tail?