mantraxC

Hmm, given how compilers & hardware can introduce incorrectness and security vulnerabilities in otherwise valid code, it makes you wonder if anyone can really claim "end-to-end proof of correctness" unless they include the specific compiler & hardware in their proof.

I'm not talking about the challenge, but those supposed commercial JS libraries with DRM that you're advising "should take notice".

There are no mainstream examples of such libraries. You're likely confusing minified libraries for having an intent to obfuscate, or talking out your ass.

One or the other.

Those home automation products are marketed to the people who have the money to buy such fancy home automation widgets.

Those people also typically want to "save the environment", but I doubt they want to save it so much, that shaving a fiver off their power bill means they get a thermostat tell them when to wash their dishes and do their laundry.

Putting the dishes and clothes in and out is still a manual activity, so this makes absolutely no sense to be scheduled by a thermostat, unless you have waaaay too much free time on your hands.

Oh, Jesus, this looks like the unfortunate result of a Windows Phone and an Android phone in a teleporter accident.

Many here are cheering as if this is good somehow, because Microsoft is open and what not. But look at it. It looks like Windows Phone, but is an Android phone. It exists to confuse customers.

What is the supposed end game here? "Hey, buy this and if you like it, we'll make you abandon all your Android apps, and switch to real Windows phone - because the home screen tiles look similar"?

I don't think so.

This project is more the result of a slow-moving corporate behemoth that started this project way before Microsoft announced it's buying Nokia. It was too late to turn that giant ship in time, I guess, so enjoy your mutant monster.

By the way, the startup sound is Ripley whispering "Kill me" in your ear.

It'll be interesting to see how they plan to market this to people, because I have to tell you... "your thermostat integrates with your car, washer and jawbone bracelet" is damn confusing to me as a value proposition.

Yeah I see the potential, but even though I'm a programmer, I see a lot of random shit put together, and no clear reason why I should go through the effort of building a mental model around it in order to understand their vision.

HomeKit is just a set of APIs right now, so we have yet to see if it has legs, but it centers around a versatile device I always have with me - my smartphone. It makes far more sense to make smartphones the hub, so focus it around Android, not the thermostat...

The Google-Nest relationship is a bit toxic right now and people are all scared that their data is going to leak the Google way. But we all know it's going to happen, why delay the inevitable with this forced, confusing vision of the home?

I've seen such integrations fail before. Apple had those weird wireless iTunes / iPod / Hi-Fi integrations in the early 2000s and it never caught on, because it was damn confusing (and plugging the speaker audio cable in your iPod was way simpler).

This stuff needs to seem simple and inevitable, so people say "but of course I want that". And this is not it. It looks complex and arbitrary and their own ads videos say "people might say, why are we doing this". If you anticipate people might say that, you've failed.

I think you're confusing JS minification with obfuscation. Minified code looks obfuscated, sure, but it's not done to deter "hacking", just to make the code smaller.

"At some point, the 'bad actor' has to access 'legitimate' banking institutions to exchange the Bitcoins to fiat and that is the weakest link."

And on the contrary they can do the exchange in, say, Nigeria. So Bitcoin's weakest link is also the law enforcement weakest link, because no one has authority over the entire world, and there are plenty of spots where you can do the exchange without trace.

They say that, but there's one giant missing ", because..." in that paragraph.

They never explain why they render in 10 sizes (why don't they know which sizes they need), and why is loading one of those sizes on a mobile app not feasible.

It's stated like that and left hanging in the air.

Either their use case is very weird, or they're deliberately vague for some reason only they know about.

Also to clarify why 10 sizes is weird, normally what you'd do is double the width/height of your images with every size (so quadruple the pixels), same as one does with mip-maps. Or with icons.

Let's say the smallest sensible size is 128x128 (minimum needed to discern a product, and easy to downsize from there, won't get much smaller at good quality).

So we have 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, that's 5 sizes. And I'm pretty sure the images they need aren't over 2048x.

So 10 sizes is just pointless.

And with OpenRoss, doing cropping and adding whitespace at the server, producing pointless image duplicates, is senseless. Even the most crippled client-side technique can do the cropping and whitespace for you (yeah, even html).

This screams "we didn't think this through much".

At scale, processing thousands of highly granular items (images) in any way is an embarrassingly parallel task even in its most crude and naive implementation.

So claiming "fast", ok, but claiming "scalable" feels like a redundant buzzword, a bit hand-wavey.

When you make such generic claims, be quick to explain what you mean, or people will not treat you seriously.

So how many people's lives were saved by this coverage and condemnation, that's the real question.

I don't think some country's ruler gives a damn about coverage and condemnation, as long as it stops there.

Who needs prank calls when we can troll the comments sections of news websites.

Wubba lubba dub dub!

Plus... honestly: "underappreciated prank calls". You gonna talk about some ancient childish nuisance behavior as if it's a red book animal species worth protecting?

Jesus, nostalgia is a powerful reality distortion field. Next thing, people might start talking about how scratched dusty vinyl records sound better than lossless digital audio.

I posted this because I found it of particular interest that the blackmailers ask for payment in Bitcoin.

It makes you think if Bitcoin is turning into a giant example of "be careful what you wish for".

We have exchange after exchange get hacked and legit Bitcoin users losing their money, and now Bitcoin enables extortion schemes that couldn't work so effortlessly before.

Where is this going?

Nice, we're evolving the same mechanisms for quick herd notification that animals have.

This is why humans and animals scream when we're in danger (not because screaming is a very effective danger mitigator), and this is why some animals jump in place when they detect danger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting).

We've had these two signals exploiting our vision medium, and our sound medium. And now increasingly, we're adding signals exploiting our digital network medium.

As those become more and more commonplace they have a very tangible effect on our society. Think Twitter riots and what not.

BTW, people in Japan get an instant smartphone warning when there's an earthquake.

People who need Erlang, know about Erlang and don't need "onramps". Dumbing it down hasn't been necessary for Amazon and Facebook to adopt it, among many.

Not every bicycle is intended to be driven by toddlers, so not every bicycle needs mounts where you attach the training wheels.

No, it's still an important distinction, because there's a lot less to JIT in Python, compared to Java, which is why I specifically mentioned that bit.

And to prove my point just bench PyPy against Java on any given machine of your choice, and then come back to tell me if the distinction is important enough.

I get your point, but housing isn't like ice-cream. You can't just decide you don't want ice-cream because it's too expensive.

The alternative is living on the street, which brings with itself inability to maintain employment and so on down the spiral. It's literally better not to eat for a few days, than it is to find yourself on the street with all your stuff. A point of no return.

So the incentive to seek "tricks" is high (whether it be Airbnb, or living with 5-6 other people in a small apartment), and demand is dictated purely by how many people are there needing to rent, versus how much money they have.

He was dispelling the common misconception is that Python is an "interpreted language" and Java is a "compiled language," when the reality is that (in their most common implementations) both of these languages are compiled to bytecode that is then interpreted by a VM.

Good example of how you can take an issue and confuse it even more with tricky use of words, however despite both Java and Python have a VM, and despite both have bytecode, they're at the different ends of the spectrum from "naively interpreted from source" to "fully compiled".

It helps that Java was designed in a way that allows most of the code to be JIT compiled, which leaves interpreting for a few edge cases.

This is a scam. By creating false associations between the product, and donating to give clean water via a massive marketing campaign (which includes a sophisticated web site and posting to HackerNews), I feel compelled to donate to give clean water every time I open the app. You've been warned. Stay away!

Economy is a fuzzy topic. You can't quite model it right, you can't experiment by eliminating all the variables but the ones you test and so on.

It's not an exact science.

So people who thrive in such fields are people who can slap a convincing narrative to a set of selected events, and call it a theory.

Now, Christensen's narrative about Disruptive Innovation has many true elements to it. It's a useful tool in the box to have, as a model, when you analyze your business, your competition and the market you're in.

But it becomes counterproductive when Christensen seemingly is ready to explain everything as the after-effect of disruption. Take his excuse about the iPhone not failing. He's saying "no, I was right, but I failed to spot that the iPhone is disrupting laptops and not phones."

So he got it right, except he got it wrong. Plus, it's hardly that simple. The iPhone is not disrupting just laptops, it's obviously disrupting phones, and desktops, and even wristwatches. He, better than anyone, should know that the thing being disrupted is not a product, but a way of doing a given task, something he calls "what we hire to get the job done".

And so... what good is a model, what good is a theory, if it's so malleable, and so subjective, that you can explains all possible outcomes for a company by tweaking what you see as the disruptor and the disrupted? What value is a model that can't make a proper prediction?

The father of Disruptive Innovation has failed to be any more accurate than a coin toss so far. We're by now convinced Christensen can fit any happenstance to his narrative after the fact, but just as Lepore has noticed, he has yet to make a prediction that turns out as he expected.

He's just guessing, like all of us. But he has authority, because his book is enjoying popularity, so he has that air of authority when he speaks.

I respect Christensen, but unfortunately he's fallible like all of us. He wants his theory to matter, he wants his theory to be shown "right" in every single case, but his theory of disruptive innovation is but a small element in a very big picture. He himself acknowledges that in his response, but fails to grasp the implications of it in the economic outcomes for the players he's analyzing.

I remember when for some reason people started writing SVG and HTML engines for Flash. Because, I don't know. They wanted to put a browser in your browser, so you can browse while you browse.

The engines worked, but where are they now? Nowhere. Just like Flash.

No matter how much effort you put into something, no matter how functional it is, now matter how much geek cred you'll get for it, if it doesn't have some sensible use, at least superficially, it'll linger and die. Wasted effort.

Just because you can do something...

If you want to avoid the moral hazard of tenants subletting their apartment, and the owners being screwed, you need a mechanism for the contract (which disallows subletting) to be enforced.

So how do you effectively enforce that? Should the owner have cameras in the hallway? Should the tenants be subject to random checks? some balance has to be found to keep both sides happy.

The other question is why are tenants going through the trouble and risks of subletting. And this guy knows why:

http://moodyeyeview.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/toodamnhigh....

You might notice Airbnb has virtually no presence (relatively) in countries where the rent is lower, especially in relation to people's income.

Even worse, TheVerge is so full of markup and effects, that the responsiveness is s--t. I used to read TheVerge all the time, but it feels like walking in molasses. I rarely visit it these days.

I find the issue isn't grids, but whether you start designing your site with the intent of the chrome around your content being cool, or your content to be usable. All decisions flow from there.

I had a serious tl;dr problem with that post. I agree with the overall theme, but always remember what Mark Twain said: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

It looks like the author was short on time here.

"With all due apologies to Soderbergh his title seems perfect for our discussion. There may be no sex, but there is plenty of sizzle surrounding quantum computation."

Right, the title "sex, lies and videotape" is perfect for the discussion. There's no sex, and there are no videotapes, but there are quantum computers, and the author's desperate attempt to cram some whimsy into his post.

I'll sum up the problem as I see it. The problem is that we're comparing real (and thus limited by the reality of manufacturing etc.) classical computers, with theoretically perfect quantum computers.

Well the idea of something is always better, faster and sexier (see, I worked back sex into this) than reality, because as we get closer and closer to building computers with a larger qubit number we'll start hitting all sorts of engineering issues that would distance us from that perfect theoretical ideal of a 100% efficient quantum computer.

And it may turn out that idealism is all the advantage quantum computers had in the first place. It was all for naught. Not that we'll stop trying of course.

Think of the power of confirmation bias next time you loudly proclaim there's scientific proof about something.

Usually it takes hundreds and thousands of experiments to really prove something conclusively, because science is affected by culture and fashions like any other field of endeavor.

Most scientists are singularly focused on trying to prove the theory of the day. And if you look hard enough for evidence, you'll find your evidence.

You logic is fascinating there.

If the reader knows this is old news, then they wouldn't have expectations to be tempered, because it's old news to them.

But if the reader didn't know about it, and finds the news exciting, then it's news to them, why temper their expectations?

There's no logical scenario under which someone would find this event notable, but be bummed out because it happened 9 months ago.

Quick! Give those students one million dollars in VC funding!

Just think about it. We have more and more flash-in-the-pan shoddily written apps in mobile.

And because they're flash-in-the-pan, for a time, they're popular. And because they're shoddily written, they're easily exploited at the peak of their popularity, so you can amass a ton of personal information from the app users and abuse it any way you want.

Hacking crappy mobile apps may soon become the new "my WordPress blog got hacked". Think of the potential, it can be a whole new industry. Not to mention all the fake diplomas, mortgages, Russian brides and Cialis pills that'll get sold in there.

No, that's like saying you need a completely different set of algorithms because you changed the overall speed of your computer components up or down.

Algorithms are not designed with absolute speeds in mind. It's relative. The seek to read ratio of RAM is very roughly comparable to that of SSD and to that of HDD. It's just that SSD is faster than HDD and RAM is way faster than SSD.

You may need to tweak a few numbers, such as how aggressive the read-ahead is, and how big the buffers are, but none of this necessitates a new file system or a brand new way of seeing things.

"They're different so they need different file systems" is honestly a bit of magical thinking, hoping for discovering untapped potential, just because of some fuzzy feeling of novelty SSD invokes.

What would you change specifically in a file system optimized for SSD? Be specific, and then we'll have something to talk about.

The RAS syndrome strikes again.

They're very different in terms of implementation, but actually have somewhat similar bottlenecks.

RAM, SSD and HDD, all have penalty for random seeking of data and benefit from pre-fetching sequential data into faster memory.

The differences we do have in SSDs have been solved by the SSDs internally remapping blocks to facilitate even wear, and by "trim", which now all major operating systems support.

If you will push forward a new FS, you'll need a better reason than the switch to SSD.