lekanwang

Human visual acuity of 20/20 is being able to discern 1 arcmin in bright light. With trig, you get that, if you're holding the screen a foot away, that amounts to 0.000349 inches, which is 1432 dpi. If you're holding the device 2 ft away, it's 716 dpi. And against your face at 6 inches, you get 2865 dpi.

Just thinking back to when I was in college, I would not trust the college version of myself of my opinion of the absolute strengths of others. For relative strengths, maybe, but even then, I was heavily biased by my peer group, so you would need to make sure you have a well-connected rating graph and do some kind of spectral ranking. Definitely wondering about the methodology here.

The government procurement process is insanely complex. A full competitive bid process for something of this magnitude would have taken many months at least, and would also make it really hard for consortiums to bid because of the up-front cost. Hence the beltway incumbents (Lockheed, Northrop, IBM, and, yes, CGI though they're much smaller) have a much easier time winning these contracts since knowing how to navigate the contracting process and having existing contract vehicles unfortunately gets you a large part of the way there.

I believe CGI actually got this contract via an IDIQ, which is an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity" contract, allowing HHS to add additional "tasks" to the IDIQ contract as long as its within certain bounds set by the contract, and if it stays within their GSA fee schedule. IDIQs started becoming popular in the 90s as a more expedient way to contract rather than the months-long or even years-long process of a standard competitive bidding process. However, it only really solved the procurement woes for incumbents. I couldn't find the original CGI-Federal contract, but here's at least their press release: http://www.cgi.com/en/CGI-selected-build-US-wide-competitive...

Also, here's Accenture RFP award as the prime for fixing up the site for the next enrollment cycle. https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&i...

Max is also a popular visual music programming system http://cycling74.com/products/max/

Has anyone located a more detailed project description or paper? Using camera imagery is definitely nothing new, and in many autonomous systems with radar/lidar (including the Google car), cameras still supplement the lidar imagery. I'm wondering how he improved on the current research.

From a demo I tried, the computer on your right temple is at least sensitive to swipes and taps to access a menu. In addition, the menu can be scrolled by looking up and down, so voice is not necessary.

"Your customer’s incentives are not straightforward."

So true.

Don't mean this to be cynical, but if you actually want to have a chance of upending the healthcare system, always clearly identify the flow of money (are costs paid by carriers? providers? Medicare? consumers? are the prices negotiated?), regulation (are fines built into the cost structure? what regulations are relevant? are they incentivized to be ignorant?) , and decision-making (e.g. how billing departments more often decide on the EMR to go with rather than the docs). Then check again, because it's likely you missed a huge underground river.

Then the tricky part is to align your business plan with your customers' incentives.

Some of our core platform features, backend additions, and applications started as hack week projects. Every project you see featured in the linked video will be used. There are many more that aren't featured in the video that are more specific to a few customers; those will often be fleshed out and rolled out to individual customers to smooth out our customers' workflows.

There was an amazing blog post (http://41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-read...) on 41Latitude when it still around about the absolute thing of beauty and art that is the labeling and visual design of Google Maps that enable it to have extremely high data density, while maintaining perhaps the best readability of any of the interactive maps out there. Correctness is the most glaring issue, but it's far, far more that sets Google apart from what Apple launched in their maps application.

EDIT: Here is an archived version found elsewhere: http://www.allhatter.com/showthread.php/13017-Google-Maps-am...

Java's pretty tedious for certain tasks, but it does lend itself well to large teams coding on a large code base and being able to understand everything quickly. Yes, Eclipse is much more heavyweight than vim, and Java's a whole lot more heavyweight than Ruby, but I'd rather peruse through 10M lines of Java code in Eclipse than 1M lines of Ruby code in vim any day.

Even so, I run into the infuriating aspects of Java from time to time, and that's when Scala comes in. I see it to Java as Coffeescript is to Javascript.

Props to the team for reaching 1.0. I've been trying this out with Scalatra, and it's the most fun I've had standing up a web stack. Would definitely recommend this.

I was MS CS at Stanford, and I agree with Ben's sentiment. I took CS221, and checked out ai-class for fun, and knew several people taking the on-campus version of CS221 this quarter. The short of it is that the online version is essentially the same as the on-campus version, and both fail to adequately prepare a student for further study in AI. It's great that Norvig and Thrun are willing to present this survey class to the public, but not at the expense of students who are actually in the classroom at Stanford and also footing the bill for this grand experiment.

Yes, the class was a fun introduction to AI. But no, it did not offer a deep and thorough theoretical foundation that I would expect from a Stanford class.

How introductory programming is taught should really be approached from two directions these days. (1) How to teach a firm foundation for those likely to pursue computer science, and (2) how to motivate and teach a breadth of material to those students who likely will not take more computer science courses.

At a place like Stanford, a majority of undergraduates will have taken an introductory computer science course by the time they graduate, but it's obviously not true that a majority will be computer science majors. And while I appreciate SICP and Scheme and functional programming, and completely understand why that kind of thinking should be valued, it may not be the best way to present a breadth of introductory programming knowledge that will motivate, interest, and offer practical examples. Sure, lambdas are awesome, but when you are just starting out in your first programming course, the deep theory behind why lambdas are so interesting will almost certainly be lost on the students. It's like building up a field of math from, say axiomatic set theory or algebra. By the time you get to multiplication and fields (perhaps akin to variables or for loops in programming), you gain a very deep understanding and appreciation for the topic that can only be gained by this bottom-up problem based approach, but then again, a non-mathematician (or non-computer scientist) could have probably just assume the existence of multiplication or loops for the sake of solving higher-level problems.

I was quite disappointed by his non-technical lectures as well, and hope they improve.

But, even if they are improved, almost every student watching that lecture will miss a big part of the humanities--being with peers, actively engaging in group discussion, and finding responses to questions by actively synthesizing information. Having an interesting discussion is like finally coding something interesting with a new programming language you just picked up. Learning the facts or the syntax isn't the point.

Khan has the vision that these videos will be used in conjunction with classroom teachers, but with roles reversed from the current school system--students will watch lectures on their own time, and in class, they will engage in discussions and doing practice problems. This seems to be the part that was missed in the article, and much of the discussion here. If that symbiosis is executed correctly (and the lectures are improved), this could be powerful.