1,474 karma · joined February 2, 2012
I love this 2013 blog post from Ben Thompson. It's titled "What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong", but I think it ironically does a good job of showing how Christensen's ideas are actually interesting enough to deeply study and debate, unlike many others in business.
On the viewer side I've thought about building a Sourcegraph extension which would consume a standardized trace format and then display it in any editor, on Github, etc.
I'm intrigued, but having trouble visualizing how even lightweight formal methods can fit into an agile development process at a startup building a web application.
While software engineering is an immature discipline in many ways, blameless postmortems seem like a counterexample -- they're a well-known best practice in software that don't seem as common in some other fields.
$ friends add activity Got lunch with Grace and George.
Really curious why he didn't just record video and watch it the following day, perhaps even playing back at 1.5x or 2x speed.
One caveat is that if many people in an org start doing this it might become difficult to schedule things, in which case it might be useful for the whole company to coordinate (eg "no meeting Mondays").
I think this looks like a great project, we can never have too many programming languages to play around with.
We are definitely trying to make the line selection easier to use, so if you have ideas it would be great if you could make a Github issue!
I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, 'The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Source: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Publishers in the 17th and 18th centuries often sold books by “subscription”, which meant that consumers would agree in advance to buy a book after seeing a prospectus. It acted as a market test. If not enough people were interested, the project could be dropped.
Perhaps a server bug, or a mod mistake..?
If Eich had actively spoken out hatefully against gay people, I would agree that his resignation would be warranted. But he has done nothing of the sort, and committed in a blog post to equality at Mozilla. I think Mozilla's actions smell like a hasty overreaction which sets a dangerous precedent.
EDIT: Listening to snippets from the rest of the recording, it seems that Mizuho is explaining that they want to cancel Mt Gox's accounts with the bank. Karpeles seems to be protesting and asking why the accounts are being shut down. The guy from Mizuho explains (at 28:00 for Japanese speakers out there) that it's a combination of a lot of factors, including recent technical issues, which make the bank uncomfortable dealing with Mt Gox. Karpeles also mentions following the orders of the Financial Services Agency (金融庁）
EDIT2: 15:00~16:10: Mizuho guy explains that the Mt Gox bank accounts will have to be shut down eventually. Karpeles says that he understands that position, but he thinks that the bank has been rude about trying to force the closure, and would appreciate a more cooperative approach.
EDIT3: 18:00~19:00: An awkward discussion of Karpeles' Japanese. The Mizuho person seems to be offended by Karpeles' rude Japanese, which frequently lacks the correct honorifics that would be expected in a business setting. A woman (I think she's on the Gox team?) explains that Karpeles' first language is French and that he means no offense.
I can work on a fuller description of the call, but just wanted to get a quick verification of its authenticity out there, along with some snippets of the contents.
There are clearly benefits to be gained from smooth integration, and the demo is impressive considering it only uses stuff built into the language. But there's also something to be said for letting different teams of people focus on building smaller and more focused tools which can be combined in a variety of ways. I worry that this Wolfram language will be limited in its usefulness for real applications because it simply tries to bite off too much.
One major competitor (well known for anyone who's looked into this stuff) is Alchemy [1]. I tried a New York Times link [2] on Aylien and Alchemy, and Alchemy performed much better -- in fact, Aylien didn't even successfully find the article body. I'm sure you guys will be iterating on improving the algorithms, but just wanted to flag that as a potential turnoff for anyone comparing your website demo with Alchemy.
Best of luck!
[1] http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/middleeast/bombings-...