CoffeeDregs

While I've never been detained, I've been around police enough to know that they generally know the likely suspects immediately after many crimes (turning in a statement after an SF Mission smash-grab; talking with a friend about a -significant- tool theft from their barn). I suspect the reason this celebrity-photo thing is happening is that the police already know their primary suspect and they're looking for "modern", crappy supporting evidence. It's like the JS/PHP of police work...

That doesn't mean they won't go bankrupt... The brand and IP are assets but the liabilities can easily exceed them. Perhaps you mean that Tesla won't disappear...

That is certainly the hope. What is the plan?

    > Arguably, the purpose of a search engine is to help 
    > people find sources that they don't already know about.

I certainly don't want that... I want a search engine to show me a set of results likely to be most relevant to my query and to my interests. Google does some limited randomization of results to prevent winner-begets-winner outcomes (based on my SERP result research) but they're purpose is certainly not to show people sources that they don't already know about. Most of these queries are basically "navigational" anyways: is someone searching for "trump tariff" looking for interesting results or are they looking to navigate to a story about "trump tariffs"?

A related question: I'm a NodeJS, Python and Java user/developer; can anyone explain why this problem appears more frequently in the npm ecosystem than in Maven, PyPi, etc?

Is it the Github-ization of package creation and maintenance? Is it the pervasiveness of left-pad style packages? Is it npm's governance? Is it the community's perspective and culture? Have the malicious just not made it to other repo systems yet?

I've got to say that I've found Google's swirling messaging around serverless-as-a-service to be frustrating. Originally, it was App Engine, which was great: upload a bit of Java/Python and off you went.

Then that suddenly seemed to get expensive (https://readwrite.com/2011/09/02/google-app-engine-pricing-a...).

Then, about 3 years ago, App Engine seemed to be Docker-only App Engine ("Using the App Engine flexible environment means that your application instances run within Docker containers on Google Compute Engine virtual machines") with little mention of the original upload-some-code App Engine.

Now there are the App Engine "Standard Environment" which is in "Beta" and the "Flexible Environment" which is GA.

Now it's old-is-new, upload-some-code App Engine by a different name. I think it would have been much more clear if, having to maintain legacy App Engine code+environments, they had released Google App Engine V2 and called "Flexible Environment" the "Container Environment" (but that would have been confusing with "Kubernetes Engine"...).

GCP's messaging seemed to have been much more coherent than AWS's but they seem to be catching up. What's next? A Lightsail competitor?

What's old is new again: I loved following Leopard Logic (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/leopard-logic) back in the early 2000s. They had a rapidly reconfigurable FPGA coprocessor bolted to a MIPS or ARM processor. The FPGA had multiple dynamic "planes" (4?) of FPGA configuration so, once the system was booted and the FPGAs programmed, you could switch to FPGA plane 1 to do MP3 decode, then switch to FPGA plane 2 to do MPEG2 decode, then switch to plane 3 for XYZ, etc.

Some other related companies had modified GCC to automate the process of co-processor offload.

I did the exact same thing...

This article lacks any nuance. College will always be worth it if you have some combination of ambition, capability and intelligence necessary to couple to an industry (or industries) of interest. College was never worth it if you lacked that.

The big change that seems to happening is that a general purpose college education is less and less valuable in the market. This is a result of consolidation and specialization. Years ago, a general purpose degree could land you on the management track at the headquarters of the regional department store; now you need a specialized degree to even interest the recruiter at GlobX in Seattle/SFC/NYC.

The exception of course is: experience. "In God we trust; all others bring data" => "In reputable college degrees we trust; all others bring demonstrable experience". Demonstrable experience for a developer is easy: github.com. It's also easy for lots of other specialties.

A degree provides a claim of capability that varies with the degree provider. Putting [particle simulation code] on github.com (or whichever specialized site) provides a demonstration of capability without regard to degree.

Some employers will require a specialized capability that only a degree can provide (think GAAP accounting, which is insane/brilliant); some will search for the capability itself. It's a shifting continuum and a discussion between you and your kids; to say it's yes/no is to put on blinders in order to ignore a changing world.

Interesting that Soylent did not get mentioned since they once seemed to be the poster child for this movement. Are they still a player?

Great question. We were not responsible for the difference. The "Statement of Benefits" is a very confusing US healthcare tradition in which you're told how much you should have paid before being told what you owe. In our case, there was a corresponding "Medicare discount" (or something; it's been 8 years) and the final bill was $0.

The situation is terribly regressive: people with the least money and the least likely to be able to afford healthcare and are therefore most likely to suffer high hospital costs. People with the most money get healthcare "insurance" and so get the lowest prices.

This is great.

Article in The Atlantic back in 2009: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

My mother-in-law died of brain cancer over the course of about five days. We received a "Statement of Benefits". She received ~$130,000 of care. Medicare paid ~$30,000. That's bullshit. Per James Fallows' article, medical price transparency is CRITICAL. You can't improve something if you can't see it and can't measure it until after you experience it.

I'm an anti-Trump (and anti-Republican) Republican but I have to admit that, with this Medicare transparency action, sometimes this administration takes surprisingly sensible actions.

I haven't really noticed much of a difference in performance but memory usage is much lower.

Switched to FF Nightly from Chrome about 6 months ago because Chrome's memory usage was awful. Firefox has been much better, especially since I modified the following in about:config:

    browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers => 0
    dom.ipc.processCount                     => 1

From the article: Conventional wisdom suggests that cracks begin deep in the roadbed and gradually migrate upward, eventually breaking out on the asphalt surface. Not so, claims Halim. The cracks have already been created by the rollers, regardless of the temperature and asphalt mixture used.

I would guess that the mechanism of action is that water gets through the cracks and erodes the underlayment.

I was literally wondering about this question the other day. It's 2018; we can make CPUs with 12nm features but we can't make a long lasting asphalt?

Fascinating:

    Nichols said the AMIR “has great potential” to extend 
    the life of roads, and “save significant taxpayer 
    dollars.” In 2016, an MTO analysis found that the 
    province would save $50 million annually if roads on the 
    MTOs highways could last even one year longer.

    "The MTO is not planning on buying or specifying the use 
    of AMIR asphalt rollers..."

Might be of interest, too: http://www.dykespaving.com/blog/why-use-asphalt-instead-of-c...

> Most 'displaced' truckers should be able to find work unloading automated long-hauls into smaller short-hauls and driving them during a lengthy transition period.

If a million truckers lose their long-haul trucking jobs, how do a million short-haul trucking jobs simultaneously come into existence? Many long-haul truck already go to distribution centers on the outskirts of metro areas so the long->short-haul transfer systems already exist.

I've heard (and seen) that in JP, people wear masks to protect other people from sickness. That said, I don't think I've seen an example of a debilitatingly sick person wearing a mask; only their caregivers wear masks. A seriously sick person has no ability to receive the training and certification to wear an N95 mask.

Besides infected people are contagious before they're symptomatic so no one would know to suggest they wear a mask. Early warning nasal swab? Pillow mounted HEPA filter? I'm not sure we know about enough about transmission to really understand how to prevent it...

AFAICT, with current blockchain technology, in order to process PayPal level volumes, every single participant in the network would need to process PayPay level volumes... 1,000 transactions per second is not a problem for a single payments company; it seems like a giant problem for each of the 100,000 nodes on the network also to process 1,000 transactions per second.

Certainly I am missing something obvious?

I saw that, too, and was fairly concerned. A smoothly running, quality focused engineering organization doesn't leave a status page un-updated for 3+ weeks...

Also, "reports of service unavailability"? I would expect monitoring tools to be screaming...

Another good, very mature framework is Repast (https://repast.github.io/index.html), though it is Java with all the goods-and-bads that come with that.

While I disagree with a lot of what Pai is doing, this doesn't seem bad and actually seems to reflect reality:

    > On Thursday the FCC will vote on Pai’s proposal to eliminate 
    > the 42-year-old ban on cross-ownership of a newspaper and TV 
    > station in a major market.

This already exists. Newspapers are all now websites (basically), so CNN is effectively a newspaper/website that owns a TV station (or vice versa)... No significant newspaper is limited to a major market and I'm unsure of the benefit of a 42yo rule that has a limited relevance to our current reality.

Under current regulations, BuzzFeed can buy WNBC in NYC but The NYTimes cannot? Unfortunately, Pai's logic seems to make some sense.

    > more than 39 percent of U.S. television households

But the above 39% thing is totally baffling. From the Justice Department:

    > The agencies generally consider markets in which the HHI is between 1,500
    > and 2,500 points to be moderately concentrated, and consider markets in 
    > which the HHI is in excess of 2,500 points to be highly concentrated.

A Herfindahl-Hirschman Index including this one company (@ 40%) would be 1,600 (40%^2). That one company causes the market to be "moderately concentrated" and we're removing this limit. That's completely insane.

I installed an add-on in Firefox called "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Works great.

    This single line puts the whole article into the realm of
    pure science fiction: no technology capable of working 
    such an ill-defined task like "programming AI systems"
    exists,

I'll admit that they're not (currently) very good at it but there are interesting examples that contradict you: look up Genetic Programming; or Alistair Channon's work (15 years ago) on the generative production of neural networks.

In 2003 and based on Channon's work, I built a system for generating and evolving neural networks using genetic algorithms which coded Lindenmeyer System to build the networks. Attached it to the Heat Bugs agent simulation (albeit with a well defined tasks) and it was startlingly effective. Given the current interest in AI, I've been meaning to resurrect and publish that code.

There was a good blog post on here the other day saying: we're doing lots of work and producing interesting results (the equivalent of the "dual slit experiment" for AI), but we haven't yet formalized the results into a framework. We're probably close.

Agreed. I switched to Nightly and it's completely stable and completely noticeably faster.

Project Fi's support has been nothing short of spectacular... I've had two slow activations (coming from StraightTalk) and they've spent 10-20 minutes on the phone with me until the problem was resolved.

"It’s a future where first responders using image-recognition applications can analyze streetlight camera images and quickly solve missing or abducted person reports."

Erp. That's also known as "a massive surveillance network", right?

"It’s a future where [your government] using image-recognition applications can analyze streetlight camera images and quickly solve [whether you're involved in pre-crime]."

This stuff is going to happen (or is already here) so perhaps it's time to switch to managing pervasive surveillance rather than preventing it.

Had an interesting pricing experience with them a couple of years ago. We were happy with our Mesos/Marathon cluster of ~100-200 machines but needed some acute support and we were in the same investment fund of DCVC. Got on the phone with ... Sales... No problem; you're a friend of ours because of DCVC; we'll get you special, friendly pricing on DC/OS...

Got an email a few hours late: $100,000 per year. Was fairly puzzled.

Two hours later, I got another email correcting the prior price: the special, friendly price was now $150,000 per year.

We migrated to AWS ECS and all was well.

That's exactly what happened to Pivotal. Boutique consulting shop turned into a consulting/services behemoth by strategic investments and business flow.