caster_cp

Fundamental attribution error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

This is beautiful. Douglas Hofstadter would be proud. 1337 at the end got me.

Sounds very interesting! However, I am very curious on whether this works for simple workarounds such as taking a screenshot of the picture or reducing image quality. Since the original and the altered images are visually identical to the human eye, from the limited knowledge I have on the topic, I infer that the changes made by the algorithm are all in the high-frequency side of the spectrum.

Tanenbaum said that Torvalds would not get a good grade on his course, epic. "I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)"

Perfect display of how universities are good at judging people about how well they know how to "play the game" (and usually that involves conforming to whatever frame of mind your professor thinks is right).

Peter Thiel's advice about monopoly is hugely similar to the point Porter makes in his first book, Competitive Strategy. On the first chapter of his book, Porter clearly states that a business located in an industry with strong competitive forces will have lower margins. He even uses the airline industry example on his HBR article, in the 80's (actually, I'm not sure if it is in his first article, or the one from 2008 in which he revisits the topic 20 years later. Either way, is an old idea in the business world) It is, in a way, a very old idea in the business world. The value of Thiel's way of stating it (very, very boldly and controversially) is that it makes people in the startup world actually listen to it. And that's a very good thing The only problem I see, on the other hand, is the unnecessary bashing of economists. Economists, normally, analyse a market from the point of view of the "public interest". With this perspective in mind, self-perpetuating monopolies are almost always a bad thing (unless you believe in such things as centralized planning and dictatorships).

I would LOVE if Sparkfun did some kind of a deal with Radioshack. I mean, SFun is what RadioShack should be right now, and they definitely could use some physical presence... ah, dreams... going through an online catalog of hobbyist stuff is not half as fun as discovering gadgets while getting to touch, play and feel them

As I said, I don't have the specifics so I can't judge the Macworld case.

Assuming it was an unexpected layoff right after a very demanding day of work, I can see some wrong things there.

First, you should inform people as soon as you made up your mind that you were going to fire them. Letting them work (a lot) and just after that letting them go is wrong. Is using them. Explaining the reasons for the layoff is the moral thing to do. Hiding it with an obvious intention of exploiting people's work without hindering their motivation is wrong (for me, but moral is usually a pretty subjective field).

A simple way to assess that you're up to no good is to see how the employees treat and refer to you after you let them go. And in this case, the twitter action does not feel very amicable to me.

Again, I don't know what really happened there at Macworld. But if someone is laid off and ends up feeling mistreated, maybe, just maybe, we should give him some credit and not directly assume that the business is right and they are just chronic complainers.

While I see your point, I cannot agree with you. Business is not separated from the people that form it. Yes, good businesses are profitable. Yes, if it weren't for the profits, there should be no businesses.

But from my point of view, when you hire someone to work for you, you have some moral (if not legal) obligations with that person. You could say that laying them off was "good, financially". Maybe it was even the only thing to do. As I don't know the specifics, I don't blame Macworld for that.

Although, it is part of your businesses COSTS dealing correctly with your employees. Making theses costs disappear is not "maximizing profit". That is turning your head on a cost you have to pay in order for your business to work.

If you do not do that, you will pay the consequences. Dealing incorrectly with people will hurt you not in a way you can represent in your books, but will definitely hurt you.

Good businessmen are wise if they treat their employees well. It need not be for a higher sense of morality (although it should be), as there are at least a couple of good self-interested reasons to do so.

It is really cool to see how history repeats itself in such a predictable fashion. According to the International Watch Magazine, at first wristwatches were seen as a passing fad, with some men even saying that "they would sooner wear a skirt than a wristwatch" [1].

Of course, on the beginning of the miniaturization process, wristwatches were not as good as pocket watches. But they are less clumsy, easier to access, keeps both of your hands free. Most importantly, they are worn visibly all the time, a pretty neat characteristic for a fashion item. Wouldn't it be better if that iPhone 6 you are planning to buy were kept in constant display for the eternal envy and adoration of your peers, instead of hidden in your pocket 80% of the time?

It is hard to try to predict the future. Instead, I like to talk about scenarios. And I cannot discard a scenario where a smartwatch is your primary "identification" device and smartphones, tablets and laptops are only big screens with greater computing power, to be accessed and unlocked through your smartwatch. Is that too far-fetched?

The history of wristwatches, a pretty interesting article for these times of wearable novelties. [1]http://www.qualitytyme.net/pages/rolex_articles/history_of_w...

From the Internet.org website itself, comes a very timely affirmation: "The future of the world economy is a knowledge economy - the Internet, its backbone". Should this backbone be on the hands of, or at least controlled by, one single company (or cartel, or association)? This move is a very good strategic move to access the so called "other 3 billion", and the mixture of tech companies and public services in developing countries has been proven effective (see M-Pesa, an initiative that revolutionized the financial services ecosystem in Kenya). But there are very deep philosophical implications when private companies start taking the role of government on the internet. Nowadays, many public servants do not understand the implications of this "knowledge economy" referenced on the internet.org website. Specially when it relates to the forces that lead to huge market concentrations and even de facto monopolies in these industries (see Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, ...). The irony of this specific initiative is that a company that fights for net neutrality with the EFF against the telcos tries to do the same thing, but at a different layer, in developing countries. In reality, this raises a very important question for the future of the internet: what is the right amount of private interference on services that were previously considered public ones (identification being the most prominent of these nowadays)? Are we heading to a new Bell style monopoly, but at a global scale, nowadays? And what will be the outcome of the very important fight of internet versus infrastructure companies that is going on? Regarding these doubts, I really and firmly believe that the most interesting phenomenons will not happen in the US, but on the most unsuspecting countries out there (again, see M-Pesa). We just have to wait and see

I really, really thought that the article contained practical tips for excel, the MS Office Excel

This is genius. Really. In my mind you've just "jiu jitsued" the candy bars, by applying the same mechanisms they use to keep you hooked, but against them. By creating habits that are prone to compulsive behavior (the phenomenon at play when you want to check your diet data is the same as when a teen checks his/her Facebook/WhatsApp/Whatever for messages). The surprising thing here is that you could keep this going long enough until it actually became a habit (or so I suppose). This is the trick, and I couldn't figure out what made you keep it so (willpower may be the answer here, but s there any other thing going on?) Anyways, kudos, you data aficionado diet jiu jitsu guy :D

Very good review, though I would only argue on one point. The author says it's unfortunate that Amazon heavily promoted the phone's most "out-there" features, while it really excels on usability and friendliness to the user. For me, this is easy to understand: the technical crowd that went to Bezo's presentation would be very disapointed if the phone's biggest feature was a customer support system.

The fact is: this phone is really not for us, the tech-savvy hackernews reading crowd. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first biggest tech introduction that only has real value to the "regular" folks that came out of the silicon valley culture (ok, ok, Amazon is not a silicon valley company, but it's as if it were). If I'm wrong and there are products aimed mainly at "regular non-tech folks" that came out of sillicon valley, please correct me.

I am really curious as to how this will unfold. As I see it, most of sillicon valley innovations followed the normal adoption curve: go for the innovators, then expand your market until you hit critical mass. Some were slower (Dropbox), some faster (IPhone), but they all had a very big feature aimed at the tech savvy as well. This is why I think Firefly may be a good thing, it's the bait for the tech people to adopt it and then, hopefuly, it will trickle down to the moms and pops out there. Honestly, then, I think of it mainly as a curiosity than something I would spend $600 bucks to have.

I know this may end up seeming a pretty useless comment, but I cannot miss the opportunity of recommending a VERY good book about this subject, by the guy who coined the term net neutrality: http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires/...

The book analyses monopolies in information businesses, since Western Union, going through Bell and proceding all along to the era of Google and Apple. The end of the book is filled with very good insight on the subject. If this is a topic that interests you as much as it interests me, you should get yourself a copy of this.

It's available since July 8th 2014 in Amazon... I see what you did there with your marketing ingeniousness, Mr. WSJ || Bill Gates.

The problem is that I'm easy, all too easy, and I fall for these ploys. And now I'm biting myself to buy the book :) Well done.

edit: what's available is a Kindle edition, that I suppose is from the same book http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str...

The only way out of this, as I see it, is making privacy the default. But this require some cooperation and motivation from the big guys at silicon valley.

Imagine if Chrome, Firefox, Safari, all of them had, just like the incognito mode, the private mode. Of course, as anonymity also depends on the behavior of the user online, other actions are needed to really ensure security and privacy. But making it the default will educate more people about the importance of privacy and, more importantly, make the point that privacy isn't only for criminals, terrorists and wrong-doers, but that "normal", law abiding citizens also should have the right to be private. And that is paramount for a democracy to work.

Has no one read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"? I think all this conversation would be greatly enlightened if we start thinking on the opposite way: when AI is so advanced, how can we tell human and machine "behavior" apart?

Putting it another way: is the Philip K Dick's Voigt-Kampff test the inverse of the Turing test?

I think the point here is not "knowing how to use memristors". Sure, it is possible to use them simply as another type of non-volatile memory. But it's the same as having an airplane and driving it on the road.

Memristors, the way they are hyped, promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, faster, cheaper AND less energy consuming than all of the other memories that exist. All at the same time. If time proves this all to be true, it can bring really groundbreaking changes to computing. And we all will be able to watch more funny cat videos, at a greater resolution.

One factor that has to be taken into account is the "social" one, i.e. how can we enforce that the ultra-fast amazingly optimal sitting scheme will be used.

Let's conduct a thought experiment. My grandma (that has difficulty hearing) is boarding a plane. Try explaining to her, in a sensible and efficient manner that only the people at the windows should get in first.

Ok, maybe my grandma is an extreme example. But think of a first time flyer. Lots of people would be confused.

Also, as already stated, people that travel together sit side by side. Are you going to split the young couple of newly weds during boarding? Is that really sensible? Or the mother and her five kids?

The main takeaway that I get is that you should let people get in without any pre-ordering. Unless you can devise a socially acceptable way to enforce outside-in boarding, that is. I'm not.

You see, the bottom line for me is that simulations are really valuable, but not taking into account the human factors involving the business, how the people actually consume your product, you can have great ideas that work on excel and flunk marvelously on the market.

Dictating the text is an extraordinary advice! I (still) didn't manage to build a decent blog, but I do write a lot. When I started to think about the text as if I were simply going through what I wanted to speak with someone, it was liberating.

On the other hand, though, I do understand the need to use the five paragraph structure (or, here in Brazil, the "three sections structure"). I, just as you, was usually pretty annoyed with these formulaic approaches to text, until I've had to re-learn all this essay writing stuff for my masters. In my college, professors and students are pretty close and debate is (really) stimulated, so I decided to throw my ramblings onto the writing professor (a very good writer, indeed). I used José Saramago (a portuguese Nobel prize winner that uses commas as periods, writes giant paragraphs, all the weird stuff) as my "strong" example, thinking it would shed the formalized structure argument to pieces and I would rise triumphantly from the talk with a Portuguese PhD specialized in text analysis. It didn't take me so long to realize why she had her PhD, and that her point of view was pretty convincing and, of course, well structured.

Kaboom! And I was illuminated. She agreed with each of my complaints. But then she proceeded to show me some texts from the beginning of the semester, comparing them with texts from the end of the semester. They were, in general, much clearer, concise, straight to the point - in one word, better. She argued that a course like that was intended to make people that do not write start to write something intelligible, comprehensible. It was not a course on creative writing. Therefore, the need for simplified rules and structures.

I do understand that this was the OP's whole point: upon reading his colleague's text, he judged it based on the rules he had learned. Then, when he talked to the other teacher, he realized that the main point of a text is to communicate something, irrespective of the number of paragraphs it has or the position of the goddamn thesis.

This rambling of mine is just to point to the other side: rules are important in some specific moments of the development of a proto-writer :)

That happens with all kinds of expressive, communicative actions we humans perform (in my opinion): photography, painting, music, poetry... All of them have some (or plenty of)rules. But these rules are not meant to be used as a "ruler" to judge if a work is good or bad, they are just a compass to guide the noobs :)

almost every time i see a criticism of git it's about the way you use it not the tool itself.

In my point of view, you cannot separate "the way you use the tool" with the "tool itself". A hammmer is easy and straightforward to use because of its design features. That is what makes the hammer useful. Granted that there are complicated tools, that require a steep learning curve (a pipe organ, for instance), but that should not be the case of git.

The whole point is that the tool should make it easy for you to do what you intend to do. That's the whole point of criticizing an application (or tool, as you put it). I am pretty sure that you can make beautiful and exact things with Git, but the fact is that sometimes they are difficult to perform or counter-intuitive, and that's the crux of the criticism.

A tool should not be designed only to "allow" people to do certain things. It should also make these things easy and straight forward.

It's impressive how (most of the times) our usage of a tool is directly linked to how it was designed. Therefore, design features (like the ones proposed in the article) cannot be distinguished from the "core" of the tool, or the functionalities it allows one to perform. The design, in some sort of way, is the tool. And that's what conditions our usage of it.

Loved the story! Mostly because I lived this stuff, and I'm 25 years old :p. In my Electronic Engineering graduation we had three professors crazy about assembly and slow PCs (in fact, FPGAs and microcontrollers). I remember the nights I spent awake trying to make a Viterbi Encoder/Decoder fit into a tiny FPGA, cramming a complex temperature controller (while reading sensors, commanding motors, and handling the input/output) in an 8051, or programming a 128khz sound recorder in assembly on an (old as hell) ARM, while communicating to a PC, showing info on a LCD and doing all the filtering digitally (the only analog stuff we were allowed to use were an anti-aliasing filter and the input/output conforming circuits). Ah, the crazy filters we devised to use all the old ARM's juice.

I lost myself there, but my main point is: in electronics (embedded systems, mainly) all this beautiful joy of crazy optimizations is still alive :D

I'm an electrical engineer and the first project I worked in my professional life was a Power Quality Meter, used by the power company at my city, in Brazil.

In our specific case, DST was pretty good at shifting the two main power demands we had at night: lighting and the effect of people going home (taking a heated shower, using elevators...)

I had access to oscillographies at all power stations in my state (which is not small, here is located the biggest hydroelectrical dam in the World, by annual production). It happened that during DST the quality of the power being provided increased.

I'm not arguing here that this is a solid proof that DST is good, but the effect of concentrated demand and the subtle implications that this has on the actual efficiency of the power grid seem to be all too often neglected.

Well, it's a good discussion, and my main point here is that things are not as simple as they may appear at a first glance :)

And there's the Google stock (a company which, last time I checked, made most part of its revenue through ads) sky rocketing to prove once and for all that ads are a thing of the past...

I see this more as a crisis of the "old" media than a global ad avoidance phenomenon. Brand avoidance, consumer activism and anti-advertisement movements are real, but their size and impact on our culture (at least in Brazil) is not that big for the time being.

In my experience, cynical bad students are usually douche bags that think they are too good for the world and that university is just a bunch of crap. A small ammount of them is really intelligent. The most part of it are people who think too highly of themselves.

Really, I couldn't disagree more that doing assignments, reading books and studying end up "closing" one's mind. From my point of view, there's no such thing as "useless knowledge". Granted that you don't learn everything you need to be successful in college, but IMO college is not there to make you successful and give you heaps and piles of money. That is not the point.

One thing got me thinking: If you really don't respect the university "system" that munch, why devoting your life to it?

The article makes good points about the (over)use of black in UI designs, but uses just one example to show how saturated color can be used in shadows, therefore concluding that black isn't that necessary at all. Wayne Thiebaud really paints astonishingly beautiful shadows, but there are some very good examples of black in art as well, that I thought increases the level of the discussion "to black or not to black".

Pierre Soulages is worth mentioning here. Better seen in person (because of the textures and reflections), even on screen his all black paintings are amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Soulages

And before Excel, the pencil was the root of all miscalculation evil. Damn you, pencils!

"The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation or safety to life and property."

First definition of "engineering" to pop up on a google search (Wikipedia).

The problem is that it is damn harder to be creative when your creations have to actually work, and you have to know some science to make that happen, than it is when the creations just need to be "beautiful, inspiring or thought-provoking".

Although I agree with you about learning to "estimate" being important, there's another very important thing that must come with it: learning not to trust them.

From my small experience, even better than estimating something right, was having the humility not to trust blindly our own instincts.

Don't get me wrong, one has to listen to her own "guts" many times in a life, and that's a good thing. A better thing is learning to recognize when you screwed up, and getting yourself out of that situation before it is too late.

I don't have one, I feel I don't need one, and no one has ever complained about me taking too much to reply to something. As a matter of fact, as I take my time to reply to something, I usually change my mind about what to say, about what's important and what's irrelevant...

And, no, $100 a month isn't nearly close to an acceptable price to mitigate random "complaints" about a possible "reply lag"