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Why wait?.. you can just get a Nissan Leaf now

Thank you for the clarification. It seems overly generous =)

Often code is GPL'd with pricey licenses for commercial applications - which always makes me think twice about investing my time into familiarizing with it.

I'm very impressed they aren't trying to make a quick buck here. It sounds like they have a very innovative long term strategy that will pay off many times over.

I think your competition is also fantastic, as it will encourage people to open source their improvements.

Thank you for all your hard work Dr.Upton

Oh woah - I'm very happy about the BSD license. This means people can more easily potentially spin up business around this platform. I wonder why they chose it...

Does anyone have any insight?

I don't really play a lot of videogames anymore, but I have a lot of trouble empathizing with this. When the gender roles are reversed it seems silly to me.

"most every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing them"

As a male, I don't think I've ever had an issue following a feminine video game character. In fact, I've never felt compelled to paused and think that role-playing a female character was weird (say in Tomb Raider, or No One Lives Forever, or any other of the relatively few female centric games). Can you elaborate on why is this a hang-up for you when it comes to playing a man?

The debt issues has less to do with blackmail, and more to do with having serious financial strains. They're concerned you'll sell information in exchange for money so that you can pay off your debts. It's the same for drug addiction and gambling.

I think there was a guy that was caught spying recently that had a gambling addiction.

Thank you for the explanation. That's a lot to think about.

Sure.. a garbage collector would mess you up, but garbage collection isn't an intrinsic property of stateless languages.

EDIT: Seems I'm wrong http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Memory_Management

"on account of the runtime not being amenable to real-time constraints"

What are basing that on?

A stateless side-effect free language would be significantly more amenable to real-time constraints b/c you can guarantee run-times for your functions.

I'm fairly ignorant of the details of static analysis, but why is it being done on programs written in C?

Shouldn't they use languages specially suited for this kind of analysis?

I remember learning that stateless programing (ie. functional programming) makes this kind of analysis several orders of magnitude easier since it eliminates coupling and control flow dependence. Yet I've never heard of critical software being written in Haskell or whatever.

He isn't because he often raises issues which aren't "on the agenda". So he'll make statements for instance about returning to the gold standard, or getting rid of all overseas military bases. These are not only radical suggestions, but they're also not things being discussed in the "national debate". So he comes off as not only radical, but out of touch with what people find important.

There is generally a feeling that Congress should be addressing issues that the people are concerned about. How, do you determine what concerns the people? You look through the insane prism of the media.

PS: Full disclosure, I supported Ron Paul in both his runs for president.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some equivalent)

If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for. You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code snippet.

It'd be helpful if there was a translation scheme that was targeted towards the programming field so keywords were translated appropriately (so like, whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'namespace' would translate accurately to 'namespace' etc. etc.). I feel like creating of map of terms would be relatively easy.

In the grad scheme of things I really really hope knowledge is consolidated in English. It's the lingua franca of the world, and it's also one of the most expressive languages. I spend some time working in Japan, and they had so much knowledge squirreled away from the world b/c they were effectively too lazy to learn English. (they're large enough, and advanced enough that they can afford to maintain trade journals and online technical communities in Japanese)

"I don't care if Bell Labs didn't cash out"

Yeah, well that's nice that you don't care - but Apple's shareholders do. The point is that this kind of R&D doesn't pay-off. Companies have tried it in the past and it didn't work.

If you want R&D then I completely sympathize, but you'll have to go get your government to fund it - don't expect Apple do it as a charitable donation to society.

PS: Examples like Leap Motion come to mind.

"100 failures for every 1 success"

There aren't a lot of examples of big tech companies dumping money into R&D - with no end goal in mind - and then cashing out big time. Even companies that that have gotten useful discoveries from hiring smart people to sit around and invent (Bell Labs, Xerox Park, Microsoft Research etc.) don't ever seem to end up raking in the big bucks.

The only thing that comes to mind is MS and their Kinect.

Unfortunately the ROI is pretty bad when you just throw money and hope it gives you results. It's cheaper to just buy up startups with interesting ideas

Sorry if I came off as bitter. I'm a couple of years out of college and honest I felt that the CS department was pretty self entitled and misguided.

"CS degrees teach you algorithms"

Yeah it does. And it doesn't feel like it's really enough. There isn't a feeling by the end that you've learned only a small fraction of the algorithms and I guess it felt like there wasn't all that much science.

I went to a school with a decent department (I think top 20 in the US) but I never felt like they were actually doing any real, interesting, groundbreaking research.

In contrast, the Physics department is doing all sorts of stuff. Quantum computing, CERN related stuff, building new astronomical sensors, string theory stuff etc. etc. They've got their own problems, but at least it's something you can point to.

Physics majors are sorta screwed. Physics is sorta the opposite of CS. When you're done you feel like you've only learned a tiny bit and that there is so much more to understand. If you're not trying to go to grad school, the department doesn't really care about you. You end up having no marketable skills and your selling point is "I-went-through-a-insanely-difficult-degree-and-i'm-good-at-problem-solving". Most people can sorta code in Python, and sorta can do some circuit stuff. It's pretty bad.

People end up teaching, or working in unrelated jobs. Or going to grad school in related disciplines. One of my buddies ended up picking grapes with illegal immigrants.

I think it's important to hit the ground running using the best tools available.

"Students should learn what those components do from scratch"

Yeah, they will eventually. When they take a compilers class, they'll understand how the compiler works. It's okay to have that be "magic" in the mean time. They should be focusing on learning about OO principles, and data structures, and algorithms and not futzing with command line tools.

In the election of my local representative there are only two realistic contenders - both from the 2 main parties. No one else has the resources to send out all the junk mail and recruit all the college kids to harass people.

And the funny thing is - just like probably most of the congress people - our representative isn't really all that bad. She's just not really good. She's just a nice old lady that's a vanilla career democrat. The chances she'll be voted out are effectively zero.

So I just don't vote for people any more (i leave it blank). However, I still go to the polls to do the ballot initiatives

"CS is a hard science"

Hahaha. As someone who did a degree in physics, computer "science" is a joke when it comes to math. They took one of the easiest field of mathematics and rolled it in to a half-assed degree. Sure you learn some logic and some graph theory (yeah, lets try to avoid numbers as much as possible...) but it's not at a very high level. I seriously doubt CS professors are making significant contributions to mathematics.

"there is a fundamental disconnect between what you seem to think you should be learning and what is actually being taught"

Yeah. That was the point of what I wrote. There is also a disconnect between what academia wants to teach, and the tools that the students need to actually learn the concepts.

It's like teaching an Literature class without actually teaching people how to write. Code is our primary tool for expressing algorithms and concepts. If you hamper people's ability to write code, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

I'm so glad you replied!

I've heard versions of what you've said hundreds of times and honestly, you academics are missing the point!

Yes, the particular tool you learn will become obsolete, but debugging between Eclipse, gdb, Visual Studio etc. is all basically the same. The knowledge you get is transferrable, just like they have a head start if you teach them C++ and they end up in a Java shop.

Teach them tools that are going to be obsolete! Stop worrying about that.

You have no idea how much time your students are wasting hitting their heads against walls that shouldn't exist trying to debug their crappy code instead of actually working on understanding the underlying concepts. I'd say it's a 9 to 10 ratio of brain-numbing debugging to actual concept implementation.

I really strongly encourage you to set up your students with IDEs. Have a few seminars on how to set up a Visual Studio environment, and how to debug a large codebase. It abstracts a lot of the fluff that stands between them and the underlying concepts. The command line and its tools are great in the right context, but you're making the barrier to entry a lot larger than it needs to be. You can transition to command line tools in more advanced courses, but don't hamper their learning from the get-go.

I never knew this was a problem in EE, but I know for a fact it's a huge issue in CS.

They don't want to teach any "tools" b/c CS professors find teaching people how to be good developers as beneath them. They honest to god think CS is an actually hard science on par with math and physics. You can sum up their attitude with: "It's not an associates degree goddamnit!" (even though it should be)

Another source of reluctance is that by the time we'd graduate it will be sort of outdated. I remember we learned subversion and Apache Ant. Everyone now uses git and I'm not even sure if anyone uses Ant

95% of students used std::cout for debugging and 95% of students never set up an IDE.

If I had spent a couple weekend properly learning to use Visual Studio, all of my programming assignment for those 4 long years would have been 10x easier.

reminded me of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverpoint

Given they say

"Each pen will be sold with a notebook made of "stone paper"" I suspect, just like silverpoint, it doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on any random surface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_compiler

I don't have a lot of experience with it. I've used Cilk Plus a few times.

arguably reddit has also "decayed" quite a bit

The quality of the conversation has gotten worse and worse, things are targeted towards the lowest common denominator.

You need to go to specific subreddits or really dig around in the shit to find the gems.

The flip side is that it generates a ton of content. To the signal to noise is horrible, but in aggregate there is more interesting stuff going on then on slashdot or wherever

Why would you want to 3D print a car part when you can just make one with a CNC machine? CNC machines are cheaper, more precise, and are already established.

The advantage of 3D printing comes with making very complex shapes. As far as I know, most parts in a car are pretty straightforward (gears, shafts, pistons etc.). Am I off-base?

The Chinese use Baidu, the Japanese use Yahoo, the Russians use Yandex etc.

"then you should never offer stock based compensation"

unfortunately most of your funding will be from VC companies, and it's unlikely they will give you money under a profit sharing arrangement b/c it does follow their IPO->cash out workflow.

The current system is flawed and self perpetuating

You're being tricked. The saving are artificial.

They clearly normally overcharge for two day shipping. Just because it says it costs 15 bucks to send the widget, doesn't mean they pay $15 when you ship it with Prime.

Most people that opt for faster shipping and are willing to fork over money are people that need something urgently and are willing to pay extra. Amazon obviously exploits that.

While it's true that they don't seem to care too much about profits, it's naiive to think they have a program where they just throw money away for the sake of an increase in volume. There is no long term way to "cash out" and turn that volume into money. Once you drop the incentives or raise the prices your customers simply leave to the next cheap online retailer.

"by increasing the frequency of orders via Amazon, it gives them more power to negotiate better shipping rates, negotiate better bulk rates on products, and expand their distribution network"

I'm skeptical that that is happening (Prime doesn't represent a giant change in volume for them). But let's assume it is, then the benefits should affect all their customers? So non Prime users end up being overcharged?

"Also, Amazon loses a hell of a lot on Prime directly, though I'm sure they just view it as subsidizing growth. I'm sure they've lost money on my shipping, at least."

Maybe you have managed to "beat-the-system", just like people that cycle credit cards end up making off with more money than they give the CC companies - but on average people are being ripped off.

There is no growth to subsidize b/c that only makes sense if they had a mechanism to cash in. If they drop the free shipping then people will stop paying for Prime and will switch to other retailers. Slowly raising the prices to a point where you stop loosing money and then hoping people keep shopping at your website b.c of habit is also a short term strategy.

On a side note, leveraging their size to get preferable shipping rates is also anticompetitive. They aren't a monopoly per se, but they've dominated the market to such an extent that UPS probably can't say no to whatever rates Amazon demands.

How do you pronounce it...?

Membership plans are anticompetitive b/c they effectively lock you in to one retailer thereby decrease competition. You're effectively paying for the shipping ahead of time with the membership, so going to NewEgg or TigerDirect means you "throw money away".

The other issue is that since there is no fixed cost associated with shipping you things throughout the year, do to the the economics of it, the plan must be to your disadvantage. Amazon isn't a charity - the deal is making them money - and therefore on average the consumers are losing out.

Take the 80/yr and split it among all your purchases. Amazon is likely spending less than that on the extra shipping speed.

PS: Hypothetically they could be spending slightly more and decreasing their profit margins in exchange for higher volumes (b/c now that you spent your 80 bucks you feel guilty about shopping elsewhere). However I'm almost certain S&H fees are a lot larger than profit margins. Since the market is already very competitive they don't have much of a profit margin in the first place.

"whose merchant partners typically take a week to get stuff to me"

Which is a week faster than Amazon's normal shipping rate. I think Amazon has purposefully made their shipping slower to get more people to sign up for Prime.

But I can't make myself sign up to their anticompetitive BS.