hyp0

As the first American eccentric, he was a hipster before it was cool.

The common wisdom is a model of the world, but must be wrong in some ways, simply because the world is far more complex than any model we could comprehend. Bed pans weren't brought to the tropics because they weren't needed, therefore their other uses were not discovered. Acting on what you think is a good idea, that nobody else does, can lead to success. (Plus Luck...)

In investing, contrarianism can work, because the market often over-reacts to bad news. By buying on bad news, you can come out ahead, especially if you also do some checking. For example, Warren Buffett bought American Express when it was involved in a fraudulent salad oil transaction. Because its business (of credit cards) was based on trust, it was thought this would be diastrous. But Buffett checked the local shopping center to see consumers still using it. Their daily habits weren't affected by the news. So he bought big, and made a(nother) fortune.

"Je n'ai pas peur des représailles. Je n'ai pas de gosses, pas de femme, pas de voiture, pas de crédit. ça fait sûrement un peu pompeux, mais je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux." - Charb, one of the murdered satirists

"I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no kids, no wife, no car, no mortgage. It surely is a bit dramatic but I'd rather die on my feet, than live on my knees" - translation from http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2rmgra/these_two_carto...

There used to be an IDE called "Together" that supported bi-directional transformation between source code and diagrams.

Although it sounded like a really cool idea, it didn't take off. Seems text is best (maybe because it supports incompatible hierarchies better).

Like a smartwatch + keypad.

2G connectivity is slow... but I would love super-lite webpages. Like m.mobile; maybe w.watch? This could also use them. Needs less bandwidth, data, CPU, RAM, battery - and clearer because just the text.

If it has an x86 CPU (specs don't say), it could be the world's smallest DOSbox. 8MB RAM is plenty for DOS.

It does (see the specs).

But it has only 8MB RAM (that's MB, not GB).

OO = ADT + inheritance.

And inheritance is problematic.

[ADT is Abstract Data Type; i.e. values that support operations, and are not tied to a specific concrete implementation]

There's also a solar panel, but I agree it seems crazy high.

To be fair, the main thing is that they are actually getting adopted and used, integrated into village life. It's common to spend a lot of money "helping" people, with no long-term benefit to them.

answer to title: I would write, then, to the audience I imagined in the future of my discovery by friendly if unimaginable forces, and to them alone.

Followup experiments with more than two neurons should be interesting, to see whether graph arc destinations are remembered, or just the total.

A far-fetched mechanism could be that each neuron transmits a signature (UID), that we've not detected because we've not been looking for it (perhaps it's slower than expected, taking hours to transmit it once...). It could include gross addressing information, based on chemical gradients at the time of its formation.

I'm partial to the idea that neurons use more than just synaptic connections. It just seems too simple, especially when there's all that powerful cellular machinary (e.g. RNA transcription) just lying around...

Yes, if the best engineers really have x100 or x1000 productivity, why aren't employers offering higher salaries?

There's been high-profile high-tech anti-poach collusion, and Ed Catmull (pixar) even claimed it's for the best. But without that, there would be implicit collusion anyway. It's obvious to employers that an arms-race to attract talent is not going to benefit anyone (who is an employer).

But what would happen if wages did rise to their natural level? First, it would attract people to the profession. Second, the most-profitable companies would end up with the best engineers because only they could afford to outbid everyone else (and resources end up in the hands of those most able to utilize them).

Startups, being poor, will find it difficult to attract excellent salaried, non-equity talent ("inequitable"?)

Thirdly and sadly, it would also mean less development work would occur (because it costs so much, and employers have limited money). But I have a feeling you'd end up with even more open source projects; and more people working on startups (to fill the gaps).

Exactly, though movies often aim not at realism but something better. How to achieve that?

So far, it's taken a lifetime of trial-and-error in every aspect of movie making to find what works (which happened to be at 24fps). 48fps might too.

Buddhism includes reincarnation as animals

I was thinking actual PageRank would be interesting, ranking libraries by who uses what, transitively.

Might be nice to include weightings of app usage by users and downloads (because apps aren't used by other libraries), but just sticking to code-used-by-code could be interesting:

So, "one lib/app, one vote" (weighted by how much it is used by other libs/apps), measures coders' evaluation, not app-users'.

And not have the search part (which PageRank ranks), just the ranking - e.g. a top 10

If go code can now run on android, the go compiler can run on it...? Allowing go coding on-the-unit.

OK, I thought you meant there were many more such languages - but "proliferated" means spread, so my mistake, yours is valid use.

Yes, Haskell is better known, but not proliferated in real-world usage (though jq was based on it). F# and Scala aren't seeing much adoption.

I do think type inference will be borrowed from them (and pr many other features), but not pure fp (it makes some tasks unnecessarily difficult). The growth of dynamic typed languages suggests to me that developers value ease of development over almost everthing.

The brilliant thing about PHP is webapages as templates. It's so simple and easy to get something useful going, both to write it and deploy. Templates weren't new - shell had string interpolation - just simple and useful.

The libraries and improvements to the language follow from its popularity, which followed from its simplicity and usefulness.

Haskell and ocaml fit the bill, but aren't new... which ones do you mean?

Maybe, the alternative perl, "Perlb"? I'd also agree with the "perpetual playground" comment, and note that Perl6 originated not as something needed, but as a way to keep the developer band together.

Plus, I've always noticed a tendency in Perl in the last few years to be interesting/entertaining... sort of like it was designed by science fiction writers.

There have been several JSON transformation tools, but they haven't taken off. (EDIT in general, not just for transformation,) when a task gets too complex for JSON, it's easier to switch to XML. Thus: XML protects JSON.

But I agree there is some pressure on JSON. And if someone can come up with a way to do schema and transformation that isn't complex, it will be adopted like crazy.

Counter-point: (1) all the cool kids use dynamic typing these days, and don't need schema (schema is a form of typing). (2) transformation is easy in fp (which the cool kids are also using), and don't need a separate transformation tool.

I guess the JS is just for proof of concept until support is shipped with browsers etc, but it isn't rendering properly in the stock Android browser (4.2.2).

It gets to Lena's head in the first image, then becomes brigtly multi-coloured, though it looks like the difference between colours right... as if maybe an int overflow in the browser's JS implementation?

Not sure it helps, but an observation is that Oracle's relational database occupied a somewhat similar role, in that it tied together data from different sources, and enabled cross-platform interoperation. This was very important at the time, because there were several different hardware vendors, and companies didn't want to get locked in. And of course, a whole ecosystem of third-party tools grew up around Oracle - esp reporting tools, BI, warehousing, and everything had bindings for relational databases.

Not sure how that translates as a business model, as no one owns git (like Oracle owned oracle). However, although Sun didn't make money from java, everyone else did - so there is a business model, just as a user of git, not an owner. e.g. reporting tools based on git; CI tools, code quality tools.

So maybe the answer is to just to treat git as infrastructure, for the app you sell, as opposed to trying to make money from the infrastructure itself. Linux is a similar product.

"distributed tools for distributed data"

Customers fear vendor lock-in, so an open platform/ecosystem for git could flourish, like java. Hopefully they'll have a better business model for it than Sun did. Maybe amazon's?

True. Modern corps have learnt the lesson of disruption.

I guess the only way it could happen is if it didn't look like a threat until far too late, such as totally different customers (e.g. third world), doing something completely different and no where near as good (e.g. markdown a threat to Word; iOS/android vs Windows)

> To prevent a competitor from getting them.

Yes, or becoming a competitor, signalled by having users and getting more. "Strategic" aquisitions often seem absurdly high, unless seen as a threat to the future of the acquirer. You can be a threat without being fundamentally new.

Good idea, thanks, I know that idiom but didn't think of it. Interestingly, it's not in the tmux manpage, but I just tried it and it works. Cool!

  tail -f log | grep keyword | while read line; do tmux send-keys -t 1:1.0 "$line"; done

Really cool idea! But grep awaits EOF to pipe its result... (though it outputs line-by-line if result is not piped onward)

How are you getting it to work? I found a --line-buffered option for GNU grep, but I'm using busybox grep...

EDIT OK, in case anyone else wants to know, found I could solve it by putting the grep inside the while loop instead (line=`echo $line | grep keyword`), but I'd still like to hear how you did it... BTW: entering "-" causes send-keys interprets it as an option.. I pr need some data cleansing...

this thread feels eerily familiar...

oblig contribution: perfect code != worthwhile code

The super villian's handbook for creating a master race:

1. encourage diversity. This expands the genepool, and the combinations of genes. In particular, allow mating of people with "disorders" because (1) you don't know what other valuable genes they have, (2) the gene directly responsible for the "disorder" may have other benefts (consider sickle cell anaemia), and (3) what is considered a disorder in a present context might be beneficial in a future situation.

2. increase population. This increases the chances of mutations, and therefore of beneficial mutations; and especially the chance of beneficial combinations of genes.

The thing you do not want to do is to select for particular traits! This is primarily because we do not actually know which traits will end up being ideal. Anything else is breeding exotic show-dogs, which are usually no match for the first mongrel that comes along. That is, the mongrel is the superior dog.

Disregard the above if you don't actually want to create a master race, but instead want to control other people and/or feel better about yourself. That's a different handbook.

"VR" gives two hits, App Engineer and Senior Software Engineer, with "VR/AR development"

Apple has lots of prototypes going on all the time, judging from their myriad patent applications, so this doesn't mean that much, in itself...

But, VR/AR seems the inevitable next step in miniaturization, as the display can be much smaller than a phone or watch etc. So I would be incredulous if Apple wasn't working seriously in this area.