ProblemFactory

€4.50/GB is the maximum what EU operators are allowed to charge each other for roaming data transit right now, and what an external operator like Twilio would probably have to pay them. Of course in each country you will find operators who offer better deals on their own networks - but Twilio can't reasonably build out their own worldwide mobile network.

Despite this, I can see this service being popular among companies who are willing to pay a bit more per GB to avoid negotiating with operators and getting SIM cards all over the world.

> plausible deniability.

Why would that be necessary?

Jackhammers are tools to destroy pavement. But nobody sells jackhammers as "ground strength testing tools".

These are tools to destroy computers. Both are completely legal as long as you are not destroying someone else's property without permission.

Current drone batteries are a much higher fire risk than a hydrogen blimp.

I wouldn't call it "new installs" - most of the PyPI downloads in any category are going to be from deployment scripts.

It shows that 30% of projects being re-deployed are still on Python 2.7.

They still can, but app1 must use the Intents system to pass an access token to app2 to read its file(s).

Most of the world population spends more on American-made movies, music and video games than they spend on American-made food.

We figured out the first principles of fusion power in 1930s, but are still nowhere close to practical fusion power generation. The engineering difficulties are just too great, and simpler alternatives exist which get much more attention, funding and optimisation.

Similar might happen to vision-only self-driving. It might take a decade or two longer to develop compared to LIDAR-based approaches, and meanwhile LIDAR is only going to get cheaper.

> I wonder if they get a good return on the investment.

On just sales income it seems doubtful.

But in the end the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a non-profit whose goal is to get kids interested in programming, and give them the hardware they can experiment on without worrying about breaking your parents' or school computer. Sales to "hackers" is just a side business.

An event space / showroom can help with that mission for kids and parents who might not buy online and get started on their own.

I don't think there is a mechanism for invalidating general election results. The parliament can vote to hold new general elections.

For the Brexit referendum, there is no need to invalidate it, as it was an advisory opinion poll rather than a binding public vote for the government. The UK government could ignore the results or call for a new referendum if they wished to.

I think PostgreSQL does benefit from Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL indirectly.

Unlike MongoDB, it is a real volunteer-led open-source projects, and the goal is to provide an excellent database to users rather than make money. Having easy-to-use cloud hosted versions available helps with attracting users, mindshare, and perhaps in the long run developers to the project itself. Having cloud hosted versions from big vendors means that it's easy to justify "we'll use PostgreSQL for this project" to management or clients.

> They have a lever in front of them with two positions, one of which is "large cloud companies might use your software for free", and the other is "large cloud companies will not use your software at all".

Was that even the goal? My impression of the licensing change was not that they expected to Amazon to pay fees for offering a hosted MongoDB service. It was instead to lock Amazon out, and keep MongoDB Inc. as the only "cloud provider" of a hosted MongoDB service (perhaps still on top of AWS but with separate management interface).

I don't think it will make a difference - everyone is used to most internet businesses being from and registered in the US.

In my experience of trying to sell a SaaS to small businesses, their only location-based concern is about where the data is hosted and if we are GDPR compliant. If you can offer hosting in some EU AWS or Google Cloud region that will be much more useful.

All Linux distributions and MacOS ship with Python, and many users of Python stick to the OS-provided version without installing the latest and greatest on their own.

For example, they might only upgrade major Python versions (3.x) once they migrate from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS or even directly four years to 20.04 LTS. Whichever Python version is available by default there becomes the next Python LTS for them.

For now, all versions since 3.4 receive occasional security and bug fixes to make all of them are "stable". New features are only adopted with a major version (3.x) bump.

I have not heard of the Python community complaining about this being too much work - after all improvement work is only done in the latest version, old versions just get backported bug fixes.

The article describes a major problem with AI/ML-based systems, but the examples they picked are poor.

With recommendations, users don't really care about controlling the results. If you know which movies should be recommended, you would just search for them directly.

The real problem arises in systems where the user does want to achieve some specific results:

* Home automation for lights, heating and cooling,

* Microwaves with clever programs that never do what you want,

* User interfaces that adapt to user behaviour,

* Self-driving cars for other drivers on the road,

* Chat bots and assistant-type interfaces,

and so on.

In more detail it's not about the shape, but mass. Planets are massive enough for gravity to overcome the internal bonds in rocks and metals, making even these materials flow into a round shape.

An asteroid could be perfectly round, but its shape is based on material strength and not just gravity.

> which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.

Literally. Bird can provide the address to the police and they will do nothing, and that's the end of it.

If you are leaving your property on public sidewalks, and offering a $20 bounty for temporarily stealing it, then you need to fix your rewards system before wasting police time.

The fundamental problem with Python dependencies is that they are calculated while executing setup.py, not declared statically.

For example, the popular scikit-learn package has the following in its setup.py:

    if platform.python_implementation() == 'PyPy':
        SCIPY_MIN_VERSION = '1.1.0'
        NUMPY_MIN_VERSION = '1.14.0'
    else:
        SCIPY_MIN_VERSION = '0.13.3'
        NUMPY_MIN_VERSION = '1.8.2'

and these are used to request dependencies from the resolver/downloader. You could have more dynamic dependencies that vary based on system libraries and tools installed on the machine where you are running it, or even the current weather.

Until this is replaced by static version numbers, and all popular packages adopt it, a registry API cannot exist as it needs to run code on your machine to figure out the dependencies.

Virtualenv tip: you can skip the Bash magic of calling "activate" by providing the path to the python executable.

    /hello/venvs/myproject/bin/python myscript.py

will run myscript.py exactly as if the virtualenv was active, which is easier to configure for cron jobs and services.

> Loon balloons are helium, and helium gas is famously hard to contain

It's not like there are any better options? The only two practical lifting gases are hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen leaks even more than helium and is flammable, even though it is much cheaper and abundant.

Bursting is not a goal in itself - it is just a side-effect of using cheap and simple latex or rubber balloons.

You fill the balloon so it has slightly positive buoyancy. As it rises, it encounters lower outside air pressure, and expands to match it. Eventually it will rise to an altitude where the pressure is so low, that the latex is stretched beyond its limits and bursts. Typically at about 40km and about 100x expansion in volume.

To prevent bursting, you need a more complex material that will expand many times at first (to allow the balloon to rise to operating height), but will then stop expanding without breaking.

It depends on how often "need to be mobile" and what you want to do while mobile happens. For me it is at least a few times per week that I want to take my laptop to a meeting, client demo, finish up some work from home, on flights, and so on.

A desktop + ultrabook would be cheaper and easier to carry around - but the hassle of keeping them in sync is too much. Everything from Homebrew package versions to keyboard mappings in different IDEs to browser login cookies. A beefy laptop that stays connected to a dock 95% of the time avoids all that.

You could instead have a lottery like for Olympic Games tickets, so that only the luckiest are able to visit such places.

But I don't see why the locals living there would want to. They get to set the rules, and for them the money from rich tourists is certainly more attractive than being able to "show their culture" to a balanced sample of the world population.

The two conditions

* OS treats filenames as bytes and allows arbitrary byte strings,

* Users want to edit filenames as text

are in conflict and you can't solve it without forcing some encoding or giving them a byte editor. The solution "filenames are bytes but we'll treat it as ASCII because 0x32-0x7E should be enough for anybody" is not acceptable for möst of thé wõrld.

> Bring back contrast. Bring back visual dividers.

The "random content boxes and buttons floating in a sea of pure white" seems to be the latest awful trend in web design. I get that borders and shadows are out of style, but they are necessary for visually grouping things together.

> modest 2 hours of instruction per day

Isn't this close to what students could/should be spending doing homework, reading or doing some projects together with their parents - effectively one-on-one tutoring for every single one of them?

I suspect that US education spending is so high compared to other developed countries because it has to compensate for lack of social support elsewhere in society. The #1 factor in student success is parental involvement. Instead of buying iPads for low-income schools, what's needed is stable 35-40/hr week jobs that you can live on for low-income parents so that they can spend evenings with their family.

> adding road capacity (e.g. more lanes) can result in zero change in congestion because more people choose to take more trips

This is not the paradox nor even an argument against adding road capacity though.

Even if congestion or travel times stay the same, now more people are able to travel to places they want to go. Traffic might not have improved, but some measure of quality of life did.

Yes.

This reminds me of an anecdote from a talk on timezones. Shortly after Stephen Hawking died, the the Google search snippet for "When did Stephen Hawking die" said "Tomorrow" for people in the US.

It was pulling the date from Wikipedia, but it was still the previous day in the US.

> The problem is that most in government simply are not systems thinkers.

I don't think the main problem is that "people in the government are stupid". Real life and societies are much more complex than a jet engine. There are thousands of value goals, too many to be able to put numerical targets on each one.

What is the optimal ratio of potholes to unsolved murders?

And when you forget to include any of the value goals in your model, then you get a paperclip AI scenario with terrible effects somewhere else.

> The problem that needs to be solved is vision.

"Solving vision" is a 10x more harder problem than building a practical self-driving car with LIDAR. We might get it working with LIDAR in 2-5 years, but without LIDAR in 20-50 years.

Arguably Alphabet (Google + Waymo + Deepmind + co) is the largest group of AI and ML experts in the world. If someone is going to figure out general computer vision, then it's likely to be them - and if they are working on LIDAR first then there must be a good reason why.

I believe Tesla is promoting LIDAR-less systems just because it's expensive bulky hardware, and they can't possibly sell cars with it at a reasonable cost. Calling cameras and radars "full self-driving hardware" is a good marketing tactic, but without any guarantees that they can build the software for it in the next 20 years.

Generally variations on RAID 10.

Disks are large and cheap enough to afford losing 50% of your capacity, and it's much faster while in use and when rebuilding.