relyio

I've tried the Myo a bunch of times, at hackathons and such. I think it was a good product.

It actually worked.

The thing is that it wasn't that useful and they never found product-market fit. Yet, it was an avenue worth exploring.

If you are curious you can find used Myos on eBay, see for yourself. There is a world between them a leap motion for example.

First, Go and C++ are vastly different languages.

Yes, the point isn't to say that they are similar. Quite the contrary in fact, they are different enough that they compliment well. If I have to do latency sensitive systems work I would use C++17. It's good enough, has useful constructs, and all-in-all, rather easy to write.

It's nice to have stronger static safety but they usually displace the cost somewhere else. AFAIK, Rust becomes extremely touchy when you start inter-operating with abstractions the borrow-checker is not omniscient about. Wrapping code in unsafe{} everywhere feels clunky. That's not my biggest peeve though. Programming complex systems is an iterative process for me. I prototype, go back, throw it away, rewrite, until requirements are met and so on. I don't feel like I would be productive doing that in Rust. I don't care for safety for as long as the software prototype is complete enough. In that phase of development, what I care about is a compromise between velocity, performance, and safety.

The only thing I really miss in C++ is powerful type-system: GADTs and all. But again, if I find that I need those I would use a language that truly excels at that, OCaml.

For anything else, I found Golang to be a terrific fit.

It is easy to on-board new people and have them get productive and feel empowered enough to push change. The building blocks are easy and compose well.

Yes, I agree the lacks generics of generics can be frustrating, especially when software grows. On the other hand, it can get old really fast to debug templated software.

As for GC, it might not use fancy algorithms but from empirical experience, having worked with a wide-range of different applications with different workloads, I found that GC pauses are short and hardly ever an issue. I wouldn't use to write a RTOS but for most usage it's fine and a net positive in productivity and quality.

Go rose to popularity because of the authors and the company sponsoring it, not on its technical merits

It rose to popularity because it fills a huge niche. My job is to build robust systems that do their job and deliver business value. It's easy to maintain Go code, it's easy to understand, and provides the right amount of static safety most of the time. I find Golang to be a humble and honest language, a productive C.

Rust is cool but not worth it for me.

No one in their right mind would be cracking out another C++ project if they took the time to learn Rust and C++.

If I had a dollar every time I had read that (replace Rust by Haskell/Erlang/Lisp/Whatever language the cool hip kids use).

I would wager you simply can't. Levandowski was spearheading the self-driving effort at Google.

He was guiding strategy and everything. When a senior employee misbehave it's hard to fire them. When they have a strategic value, it's almost impossible unless they are already lost i.e actively work against the companies interests to further their or a competitor's interests.

Thanks for the lead, I didn't know about it!

1. There Wahabi radical islamic movement was largely funded by SA at it's inception. SA continues to be it's largest donor, both in money and security. This movement has brought the world the 9/11 attacks, Al Queda, terrorism world wide, and has radicalised liberal Islamic populations.

True, and for the anecdote. My family suffered from this directly as we had to flee a country for another because of the rise of Saudi funded radicalism.

With that said, all the things you quote (increased radicalization, terrorism etc.) are mostly - and it hurts to say this - spectacular inconveniences in terms of scale.

And I prefaced this to let you know that I don't see the terrorism from a pure Western perspective where there is one such act every now and then. I know that there are many atrocities which we don't hear about (e.g the 2007 Yazidi bombings).

Yet, if you compare all of these punctual tragedies with the damage, violent deaths, and chaos that the second gulf war has brought. You must see that the two process have different magnitudes and inverse shock values for western audiences.

2. They're brutalistic about Shias - i.e. they refuse Shias (from Syria) refugee status, and continue funding any military action that targets Shias.

True, obviously this goes both ways though. Sectarian disputes have always been ugly in the region.

3. They play a central role in money laundering of terrorist funds.

See my first point, I think that in the grand scheme of things terrorism does not matter much. It's evil and despicable and spectacular, and that's about it.

Wishful thinking.

Maybe! Hard to know if that's the extent of your comment. Care to explain why you think so?

It's funny how this article views weapons and equipment deals with Saudi Arabia as a service the West is making for SA when in fact, that's just:

1. Securing the supply lines of the West and the stability of the world economy.

2. SA playing nice with Western powers and thanking them for their support. Not the other way around. The regional enemies of SA are Iran and Yemen. They have a strong behind-the-scenes intelligence relationship with Israel. They would do fine with Russian or Chinese weapons. Hell, they have enough money to kick-off their own military industrial complex.

I don't think the details of the arms deal are public but I suspect a lot of the money goes into "maintenance" from the weapons suppliers, not in technology transfer. They remain a vassal state to the US.

Their domestic human rights situation is despicable and disgusting, and I hate to find myself defending SA but the fake outrage over their foreign policy is highly irritating. They are no worse in that respect than any other country in the world, in fact the scale of their direct malfeasance is mostly regional. Countries with global reach have done worse in my eyes.

I wish Google would let me pay to just have 0 ads and maximum privacy. I would pay a lot for that and I would be a happier user since all my pet peeves seem to come from them dumbing down products so they can fit ads.

YouTube Red is a good start, hopefully this spreads.

Saudi government is bombing the hell of out kids in Yemen with bombs that have the US flag painted on em

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab...

I don't want to single out the US or give the impression that I hate it. I actually love that country. No doubt one of the best countries in the world despite everything.

But I don't think SA is particularly worse than any other regional/global powerful country on earth wrt. foreign policy. Why should that prompt the US (or any other security council country for that matter) to re-evaluate their relationship when they commit the same, if not worse, crimes.

Some of my friends, who aren't in tech nor are privacy-inclined, were shocked to receive an alert that data on them had been exposed in a data breach.

The data had been collected by a third-party without their consent!

Not long after, the dataset became available and now it is one of the top result when you type their names in Google.

While the data isn't embarrassing, it includes some personal stuff they wanted to keep private.

That they had not even consented into giving that data made them feel violated. And truth is, that happens everyday. Which made me think that privacy is truly a consent issue at heart.

Now for a "fun" exercise, imagine how many CRMs out there run on insecure machines and what are the odds that there's someone incompetent enough to leave these databases publicly exposed and not password protected. IMO, it's extremely likely.

Well, they have very strong opinions on privacy now. I guess that's the only way people will care, sadly.

One of the most remarkable thing to me is Nash's proof of the equilibrium.

The whole thesis is about 27 pages and the proof itself is 7/8 pages (double spaced) and use basic linear algebra. Even though it extends a previous result from Von Neumann (where N=2) significantly.

Now I feel silly dropping her course during my second year at Waterloo.

Well, to be fair I had a packed schedule that semester...

Nice work, it's really neat.

Some feedback: the fact that you use integers to identify registers makes it harder to read, at least for me. I like being able to spot immediate values at glance.

You could supplement the homepage with a link to a MIPS reference sheet, in particular if you use your own subset.

On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates.

I don't disagree with you as much as you think. That's my point, no one in my extended circles of friends actively uses Facebook. I only follow a couple pages but my feed is 90% recommendations from "Pages I might like" and the rest are likes or comments on content my friends follow.

Yes, you could say "you have the wrong friends" but I will counter that "maybe" they consciously made the decision to optimize for engagement and that the feed curation reflects that: over-exposing third-party content over the one produced by your social network.

And maybe we are using two different websites, it's not impossible that Facebook would turn into a different product depending on your age and location.

I suspect you might be in the opposite situation wrt. Instagram. I have never seen a single post from "influencers" since I don't follow any, that is to say beside the promoted content that is being shoved down my throat since a few months.

like a more common usage of IG is to follow "influencers"

The bulk of the usage around me seem to be Instagram stories. People still post photos but now the trend is to put them+videos in your story, sometimes along with polls, weird filters, or Q&A (you have a little box to reply). It's actually pretty fun to use!

I saw some usage data in a quartz article, that I can’t find, earlier this week. Facebook was the most popular social media platform across teenagers, millennials, generation x and baby boomers.

It's really surprising to me. I don't see anyone around me using Facebook (or only to meme on large private groups). Messenger is still prevalent but more for legacy reasons than anything else and can be displaced. It reminds me of MSN messenger. Wizzz!

'm not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy

It's a stupid strategy. All my friends (early 20s) are hardly active on Facebook, if at all and instead prefer the likes of Instagram and Snapchat for a simple reason: you can actually share your life with your friends and see theirs.

Speaking for myself, I hardly care about my Facebook account. My feed is plastered with garbage content and tired memes. I understand why they made the shift to being a content-consumption platform but it seem very short-sighted given that the content is low-quality, redundant, and seriously getting boring now.

I wager that people, like myself, are looking for an actual online social network. That's why I like Instagram, I can actually see videos and photos of my friends, whether it is celebrating their birthday, sightseeing, dancing at a party, or simply going through the grind of everyday life.

Not being a product-visionary, I cannot tell what drives Facebook to adopt this strategy but I find it puzzling that they could fail to understand that my demographic is leaving Facebook (in terms of engagement) because it is hardly social anymore. In fact, it is more akin to a worse 9Gag/Reddit/Buzzfeed mashup, with the occasional aunt or elderly family friend sharing some obscure article using CAPS LOCK.

I don't remember seeing anyone I know publish a status or a photo album in the past... what, three or four years?

think it'd be smart to simply enhance Instagram's ad platform

The amount of ads has exploded over the past few months, it has made the product far less enjoyable for me. I don't mind ads but it bother me that they disguise it as content in your feed.

If people start to become dissatisfied w/ Instagram because of "Facebook-ification" that may open up a market for a new competitor.

I think Snapchat would be in a nice position to take-over. I do prefer Instagram over it, but at this point I'm just desperate for a platform that doesn't sucks or isn't headed that path.

What, no.

I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.

This. I have tasted the fruit and I'm never going back. The social benefits feel largely like gimmicks compared to the standard of living + social recognition you get working as an engineer in the US or even Canada.

This is why you shouldn't be afraid to give out (truthful) compliments folks.

That's what I try to do. Sometimes people take it as insincere flattery because I guess they think it is sarcasm at first. But I do mean it, every time!

You keep telling yourself that while tons of engineers, doctors, and scientists keeps leaving to the states or Canada.

It's easy being happy about the taxation regime when you do 35 hours a week. It's not uncommon for a doctor to do closer to 60h and up to 70h.

And quality of life isn't even that great. Crumbling infrastructure, long wait for public hospitals, dirty streets etc.

That's the feedback I have been getting constantly from my friends (young couples most of the time) who are now doctors (cardiologist, gynecologist, etc.). It really sucks for them, I do not envy their situation one bit. It's in France btw.

It doesn't result in a cleaner interface, which is what matters the most (arguably).

He is a Computer scientist by any reasonable metric.

More UCL and Stanford but okay

I don't know a single Arch Linux user who doesn't check the PKGBUILD of the packages they get from AUR.

Political/Administrative reasons mostly.

ENS and l'X (Ecole Polytechnique) in particular hold special statuses (each in their respective way) vis-a-vis the French state.

Feross was actually offered (at least) an internship per the link you provided.

If you don't like it, then ignore it. Your cynism brings literally nothing to the table.

As a student, and someone who wants to become a strong engineer over the next ten years... this kind of opportunity is fantastic. You can see it as "uncompensated labor", I see it as a way to learn, get my code "out there", and get better at my trade.

In Paxos a leader is elected, then the leader decides the order of events. But that's not a valid comparison, because in PoW the supposed "leader" does not get to decide anything at all - the block has to be put together prior to "winning the election" (because the block is the input to the SHA).

Who picks the transactions from the mempool that will be serialized into history?

Christopher Allen got you covered (almost): https://github.com/ChristopherA/Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Co... "Learning Bitcoin from the CLI"