avinium

A PhD is a piece of paper, not something that elevates the holder to the position of a deity. I don't think it should even be mentioned as something that might temper your criticism.

(General comment only, I haven't actually read the article yet).

> You don't understand the business. You think WeWork is for individuals like you. It's not. It's for enterprises.

What's your definition of "enterprise" leasing? 200+ sqm leases for 3 years?

Either way, I guess we'll have to wait for the WeWork S-1 to see whether or not your assessment is correct.

However, if my personal experience of 5 (admittedly international) WeWork offices is anything to go by, it's not. The tenants I saw were overwhelmingly 3-10 person teams (and when they exceeded that number, they moved out and traded up for a more traditional/permanent office lease).

Of course, that's just anecdotal, and hardly statistically significant. You might be right - if so, I'm guessing their S-1 will show 30%+ of revenue from longer-term enterprise leases.

But even if that's true, I still don't see it as an advantage. Serviced offices and independent coworking spaces offering "spillover" space for enterprises are a dime a dozen. I'll grant that WeWork might have an advantage in interior design & fitout - but again, so what? How many companies will pay a premium for a "WeWork designed office"? How many even care?

This is obviously a lot of speculation about what businesses want and what they're willing to pay for. Maybe you're right, maybe I'm right - who knows. We'll keep a close eye on the numbers and see which one is correct.

How can you say they're disrupting anyting? WeWork didn't invent coworking, they don't have a unique offering and I don't believe they have any competitive advantage beyond capital reserves.

I swapped coworking spaces purely because WeWork took it over - they're an incredibly obnoxious company, they're expensive and they've overexpanded. This is one IPO I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.

There's a couple of startups in Australia doing exactly that (I can't recall their names, though, so I can't say whether they're successful or not).

Sorry, should have been clearer. Filecoin (from the same company) sits atop IPFS, acting as a cryptocurrency for distributed file storage.

IIRC, their ICO was massively oversubscribed a year or two ago, so they're sitting on a great big pile of cash.

I don't think it's a viable business model yet, but it's definitely not a scam.

This looks awesome! I don't have any pressing need to develop on the desktop right now, but if and when we do, I've bookmarked Hover.

As someone in the process of picking up Flutter/Dart, the upside of Flutter significantly outweighs the downside of learning Dart.

Flutter is the best-designed framework I've encountered (whether mobile, front-end, back-end or machine learning).

The only downside is Dart, and while it's annoying, it's also very minor.

I feel the same about 99% of crypto participants - but you can't deny there are a handful of legitimate areas. IPFS and Golem come to mind.

You should be careful about making blanket statements like "established science" and "science denial".

It makes you come off as an extremist, and in fact, the page you linked makes no such claims and is far more moderate. It talks only about potentially harmful dietary fats.

> Research about the possible harms and benefits of dietary fat is always evolving. Current evidence suggests that the smart play is to focus on choosing healthier fats and avoiding the less healthy ones.

Researchers (particularly those in the field of nutrition) have got things completely wrong before. An important part of being a good scientist is knowing the limits of the current body of research.

Hah! Interesting video, never seen it before.

Maybe I'm being suggestible because you raised it, but they all seem to have that shell-shocked, thousand yard stare that only comes after months of crunch time and no rest.

How long are your fasts?

I experimented at the start of the year and didn't experience any drop in performance - office or gym - with water fasts less than 24 hours.

Fasting between 24-72 hours, though, really affected my sleep and made me feel weaker during workouts (though it didn't really affect me mentally). Curious to see if others experienced the same.

Can't comment on longer fasts as I didn't exceed 72 hours (though I did read many reports of it actually getting easier after that point in time).

Currently doing IF (very rough 20/4) which is working pretty well.

Didn’t someone ask Bill Gates this exact question, and he confirmed that he would pick it up?

Startup directories like ProductHunt, BetaList, AngelList are all great examples.

Now that I think about it, that actually describes a lot of blogs/vlogs/podcasts too (create an audience with great content, monetize via advertising). Not quite SaaS, though, so slightly different from OPs original question.

Places like https://designacademy.io/ sit in the middle - content-first to create the audience, then use that audience to sell online courses in your given niche.

The takeaway - which applies to any business really - is that you need an audience and you need to be selling something that someone desperately needs (rather than something that someone "wants").

Recruiters need candidates. Advertisers need eyeballs. Companies need investor networks. Find the need, build the audience.

I've also noticed that a lot of successful solo projects seem to be network/directory platforms - i.e. building an audience through free content that you then monetize through commercial partnerships.

As you said, these require a lot more on the marketing/partnerships side, rather than the technical side (in fact, one of the great things is that MVPs can be built in a couple of days on something like Wordpress).

For what it's worth, you're almost exactly the type of person I would look to hire.

From my (albeit small) sample size, pure Physics majors have incredible intellectual chops, but aren't necessarily interested in hacking or building systems.

Pure CS majors usually love the latter, but don't always have the mathematical sophistication for more heavy duty (ML) work.

Someone who offers the best of both worlds is very desirable.

Obviously this doesn't apply across the board - there are countless people who fit the mould in the CS camp, the Physics camp, or without degree whatsoever. I'm just saying that if I had to go through 100 CVs, the simple fact that you're a Physics/CS major is enough to shoot you to the top of the list.

> What the Internet has lost in terms of mystique and pioneering freedom, it has gained in terms of utility and convenience, IMHO.

Maybe I've got a bad case of the "back in my day", but I feel more and more that "mystique" is what makes life worth living.

Watching a lot of movies from the 60s-90s recently, it's striking how much more effort we needed to put into everyday life back then.

Want to meet a friend? Call their number, hope they're home and arrange a time. Want to watch a movie? Drive to the video store and hope they've got what you want. Out of food? You're driving to the nearest restaurant, no Uber Eats. Want to find out the median rainfall in Fiji? You're waiting for the library to open and digging through a stacks of musty old books.

Nowadays, everything's instantaneous - you want something, you get it. We've lowered the bar for almost everything.

If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?

Thanks - will dive in and start checking things out.

I was more so referring to spacy, where (IIRC) a lot of the lower-level tokenization & parsing is written in Cython, so (I assume) the simple fact that Bling is written in C++ wouldn't explain the huge performance gains.

Anyone familiar enough with this library to explain how they've achieved such impressive performance? Otherwise, may dig into it for a blog post when I have time.

> That would feel like going back to the year 1999

That would be absolutely glorious.

Here's a link that's a couple of years old now, but gives a pretty reasonable overview of where it sits in the stack:

https://gpuopen.com/ported-caffe-hip-heres-happened/

As to why you should care, it depends at what level you work. I'm not a graphics/HPC programmer, so I can't really comment on what you'd be using it for in those areas.

For DL applications, though, CUDA/CUDNN used to be the only GPU libraries that offered some of the common/optimized operations you'd encounter in deep learning (e.g. 2d convolutions). That meant you were limited to NVIDIA GPUs within all the higher level frameworks (Tensorflow/Pytorch/etc).

With ROCm more developed, it can supplant CUDA as the low-level library for those frameworks. This means you can start using AMD GPUs for training/inference, which are considerably cheaper.

In fact, in the few months that have passed since I last checked, it now appears that ROCm supports TF - big step. it means you're no longer locked to NVIDIA GPUs

I get the feeling that OpenCL is going to become a second-class citizen in favour of ROCm (https://rocm.github.io/), which looks very promising for HPC/deep learning on AMD GPUs.

I haven't got stuck into it yet, but when I was doing some research it seemed like the AMD team had invested a lot of effort in minimizing the work needed to either support/port CUDA-specific code.

I'm optimistic about AMD fighting their way back into contention as far as deep learning goes. I don't know what that means in the gaming world, but I assume a win in the former will help them in the latter.

Not exactly what you meant, but I’ve been working on the F#/Giraffe server generator for the OpenAPI generator project.

Write your OpenAPI Schema and run it through generators for the server/DB/client It won’t give you a frontend, but I do believe there are libraries out there to do so for React/Vue.

My fork is @ https://github.com/nmfisher/openapi-generator and you can follow the links back to the original project.

The etymology seems to be the same, but I've also heard people classify Deftones as "shoegaze", which makes zero sense to me.

> Yeah he's IDM not EDM, IDM is a older term from the 90s they called it "intelligent dance music"

AKA "beard stroking music" in the D&B world.

It's music that doesn't energize people and get them on the dance floor. Go see a IDM/"experimental/"beard stroking" DJ live, all you see are a bunch of young male hipsters standing around stroking their beards, commenting on the uniqueness of the "interplay".

I often wonder whether we'd be better off if we "tolerated" a small amount of corruption. What's the point in spending $1 million on red tape and auditors to prevent $10,000 in fraud?

Just like the war on drugs, you're fighting a moral crusade against the basest part of human nature. You're always going to lose - better to just accept it and do what's needed to minimize net loss.

Really interesting question, and one that won't be settled until it's explicitly legislated (or taken to court).

I have a background as a lawyer (albeit not in IP) and currently working with ML, and I can see a case being made either way.

For what it's worth, we've been able to file individual income tax returns in Australia for as long as I can remember (15+ years). For the vast majority of taxpayers (i.e. salaried workers), it's completely painless and MUCH better than the paper-based alternative.

I can actually make this comparison, because corporate tax returns still require paper forms.

Now I know the US tax system is much more complex, so take this with a grain of salt. But "free and government provided" doesn't necessarily mean "bad".

And if it were successful enough to drive TurboTax out of business, that would be a massive indicator of popularity and a net win.

I find it utterly absurd that the USA is beholden to this kind of regulatory capture. Forcibly preventing the government from delivering better services to protect an entrenched player? That's an absolute perversion of capitalism - I'd actually say it's reminiscent of communism more than anything.

No, I think they are referring to YouTube's early days, where the company allowed/encouraged (and even participated in) the upload of huge amount of unlicensed content.

It's a fair comparison, but I suppose YouTube had:

(a) the veneer of being a platform to "upload/share your own videos" (c.f. Grooveshark, which was solely for copyrighted music)

(b) savvier management (?) who knew how to play the media/copyright business.

Grooveshark - one of the first/greatest music streaming services around.

Comprehensive music catalogue, servers never went down, and UI was simplicity incarnate.

Totally illegal business model, so it's not surprising that it didn't survive.

But it was awesome while it lasted.