edgyswingset

Microsoft bashing? Where did I do that?

I run a few things on .NET Core today and it’s great. I’ll probably runs some things in Azure soon enough. I just think UWP has no future because its primary device type (Windows phone) is dead, and it hasn’t seen any uptake in the enterprise to replace Winforms and WPF. F# seems just fine to me, and it’s supported for my app type. Perhaps you need to rethink your choices in development technologies.

My F# code runs on Linux. My client code is migrating to the web and mobile, as is just about every enterprise in the US. Why would I watch Windows developer day?

> there is no sign of UWP going away anytime soon

Except for Windows Phone getting killed, which was the _main_ device type for UWP. The Windows app store is the same graveyard that it was in late 2015 when the announcements around new Windows Phones piqued my curiosity. It looks like that's simply not a thing anymore. I'm betting my money on Xamarin and the browser for a client application, not UWP. There's just no point to it.

As a sometimes-user of F#, I’m quite happy not caring about a dead-end technology like UWP and .NET Native, thank you very much. I’m glad everyone else seems to agree about that, too.

Not that I'm inclined to believe stuff either way, but this is an op-ed and not really financial stuff being reported on.

> No offense (and sorry for being off-topic) but I never get how people obsess over the under 1 or 2% cost savings while completely ignoring the overvalued principal.

Here's my counterpoints:

1. ~5k is enough to pay for two amazing vacations for me and my fiancee. I'd be enthralled to save that amount of money.

2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're making the implication that people should instead be searching for cheaper housing. Easier said than done.

Somewhat related, but there was a very good talk at MLConf 2017 about using sound to catch illegal logging in the Amazon. Similar premise: collect the sound, analyze the patterns, and classify.

In consumer products, perhaps not. Business systems? Oh, you betcha.

Note: I'm interpreting AI as "also the very useful subset of AI called Machine Learning" here. ML is already in so many things, but I think it truly has yet to take off. But I very much believe that it will be ubiquitous. It's probably worth it for programmers to learn some of the basic algorithms, general approaches, and what they're good for.

The answer is simple. Actually work on it. Not an easy answer, as this is surely incredibly difficult work.

The article says:

> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

In fairness, public infrastructure is already miles better in London than most U.S. cities. So the idea of tricked out buses with good smartphone integration seems a lot more realistic to me than if this were done in the U.S.

Probably easier from a technological standpoint, but I can imagine an autonomous freight network being just as challenging as an autonomous tax service if you account for all sorts of things: sales, mountains of other regulations, compliance, etc. I can hardly imagine it's as simple as, "let's just put some sensors on trucks and the problems will solve themselves!"

> This bill is going to end up killing people

I'm pessimistic that this will ever be known by those in swing states, let alone cared about. I've traveled to those places and met people there. They have normalized death due to medical complications and drug addiction. Why should more people dying make a difference there?

I find your confidence in the stupid American voting population strange.

In other words, I don't believe that they'll do anything like what you're implying they will.

Netflix is a polyglot shop which uses a number of different programming languages for different parts of their systems. Yes, Node and JS play a large part in that, but that really isn't the whole story.

The Swift compiler has some serious issues with the way it does type inference. Try compiling code with a line of basic arithmetic on a few numeric literals.

Fable: http://fable.io/

It's able to self-host as well. Check it out at http://fable.io/repl

F# also runs on .NET Core, which is cross-platform and comes with a good CLI. Documented, too: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto...

I imagine most of these companies are using GitHub Enterprise, which costs plenty of money.

This is key, I think. Codeplex feels like abandonware to me. All the important Microsoft projects have migrated to GitHub, where all the active development is happening. Perhaps this also screws over some people who wish to stay on Codeplex, but I can imagine it was just a cost to Microsoft. No use in having something which only costs you money lingering around.

Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

I already use Netflix for my video streaming. Spongebob is on Amazon Prime, so I watch that. I use YouTube, XBOX, and Google Play for other stuff (other videos, some movie rentals, games, music).

I use OneDrive for storing files on a company's servers. Works great.

I normally just get books from a bookstore or library. Tried a Kindle, didn't care much for it. Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

I don't really do food delivery, though I game the coupon system a bit with Blue Apron from time-to-time, since they keep sending me $30 off a delivery when I cancel. I mainly just go to the grocery store.

Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

> but is rather a thinly veiled accusation of "Go is a terrible language".

That's because it is.

I hope this means that various usability and performance issues with Hangouts I've had improves.

That said, I'm having trouble not laughing out loud at this whole thing. It legitimately feels to me like they have no clue what they're doing and are spinning their wheels so that they have wheels to spin.

Maybe? I'm under the impression that the vast majority of Google's software is not written in Golang, though.

> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.

And there's the kicker. In SLC you could afford a real house for that much. It's good that you can save that much right now, though. Definitely going to pay off.

I find this so ironic. The so-called "heartland" and their complaining about "liberal elites" on the coast are so incredibly wrong. Every election in modern history is decided, ultimately, by these people who let themselves believe that they're disadvantaged and being left out. It's the reverse that's true: they get more representation proportional to their population, they get to decide what the makeup of the majority of Congress looks like, and they're the swing states that decided presidential elections. Meanwhile, in other places like the South or the West and East coast, if you vote contrary to the large majority, you may as well not even bother.

I don't think it's mutually exclusive - I simply don't trust Uber to act in good faith for anything they do. They've yet to demonstrate that they're deserving of trust that they're going to make that data open.

> We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all.

I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.

Another aspect of a CLA is the ability for a company to cover themselves legally.

Say I work at MegaCorp (they make heavy use of Go in some backend systems), and didn't bother making sure I had permission to contribute on MegaCorp time (and thus, contribute MegaCorp IP). I make some PRs to Go which improve the Go garbage collector, which Google happily accepts. These changes help Google and they could help MegaCorp if some of their projects use Go. Hooray!

Somewhere down the line, someone at MegaCorp notices that I've been contributing to Go's garbage collector on MegaCorp time without permission. I may or may not be fired. However, Google has now benefited from what is legally MegaCorp IP without the permission of MegaCorp. If this is in the USA, there's a decent chance that MegaCorp tries to sue Google. That's a headache that I'm sure nobody at Google would want to deal with.

If there was a CLA which I had to sign, saying that I had permission to contribute MegaCorp IP, Google has a document clearly saying that I had permission to contribute MegaCorp IP. This is a far better situation for Google than if they had no such document.

How is it a far easier technical problem with simpler logistics?

I'm certainly happy. I can't think of a single company that as "ruined it" for startups more than Uber. Skirting around laws and regulations combined with absolutely insane valuations must have put completely unfair pressure on other startups.

At some point, you end up paying more for your employees to manage stuff than build stuff. That's when you buy better tools.