neptunespear

This is actually not an uncommon occurrence: a Canadian citizen sued TD after his bank accounts were closed in 2012: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/montreal-man-b...

Hey man. In case you see this, you might consider contacting Go Public (CBC News) about this: gopublic@cbc.ca

In addition, the Law Society of BC offers half-hourly consultations for $25, it's called the Lawyer Referral Service.

This would be true if Japanese companies were eager to embrace the open software revolution. However, even as companies in the U.S. and Europe democratize AI, Japanese companies have stubbornly plodded along with closed-off, proprietary standards just like in the 70s and 80s. Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony, KDDI, and so on. There needs to be a cultural shift.

I never said that Preferred/Mujin/LeapMind would be the future of automation. I just said that in my uneducated opinion, having followed these companies for some time now, I feel like they may be better equipped to handle "new economy" automation--shift from hardware to software, shift from closed-off proprietary standards to open collaboration. Aka the anathema of Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, KDDI, etc.

The provincial government in my home province of British Columbia, Canada, is developing a genuine progress indicator (GPI) to replace the GDP metric, which was the idea of the BC Green Party. The point made here is that GDP is a very imperfect solution. Christy Clark may have boasted about BC's booming economy by pointing to GDP numbers, but do they explain the whole story?

I know that's neither here nor there, however.

That was a big typo since I meant to finish that sentence. I've fixed it now.

> I've worked closely with one of these companies... Perhaps they were just not suited to the project we were working on, but I found them quite dis-organized, lacking in focus and mostly buzzwords and fakery. Kind of sad.

You can't just drop an anecdote like that without naming and shaming.

> Who's open-sourced their driverless car tech - anyone with wheels on the ground and a car you can buy? Some advanced mechatronics will be required to fill a lot of voids in the manual labour space. Whose battery tech and engineering prowess will we be using in these vehicles and machines?

Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware, its education system spits out lots of factory workers. But I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less (since China/Taiwan/Korea has gotten so good at efficient manufacturing), and refocus towards software--that may be where the growth will be. Since you mentioned Tesla Motors, I will note that they hire a lot of software engineers, and it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged. Tesla even open sourced some of their patents, though I will admit I think Elon Musk's attitude towards open source software can be a bit duplicitous.

> That should be praise, no? I mean, aspects of sexism and odd views about social hierarchy can go in the trash, but their productivity is still very good.

Haha...accidentally several words there. I've fixed it.

Automation has changed from when Japan was on top. The focus is now on software and open collaboration in a globalized society, not hardware built by factory workers with proprietary standards (looking at you, FeliCa)

China may surpass Japan in the automation/AI sphere. Lots of young, English-speaking, western-educated workers, plus the PRC has already innovated so much in manufacturing, shipbuilding, etc., and an ecosystem willing to splash cash on daring startups (albeit a lot of that is state funding, and you need CCP connections to come up in the Chinese startup world) in ways that leave Japan in the dust. Look at how Nvidia is working in China, look at the rise of Aliyun, Baidu Cloud and Tencent Cloud.

The only Japanese companies I know that are geared for automation for the new economy are companies like Mujin, LeapMind and Preferred Networks.

As a side note, the fact that Japan has managed zero-growth despite a rapidly shrinking, aging population; almost zero immigration; and roughly the same economic policy as from the 1980, is nothing short of a Herculean endeavor. I wonder what Japan is going to do when the population decline really gets in gear around 2040.

I did some digging in the /r/uwaterloo subreddit and it turns out that some customers were getting packages at no cost. Perhaps it wasn't financially viable.

On the microscopic chance that Jeff Bezos sees this: mellow out, man! There was an anecdote, I can't remember from where, maybe from the "Faces of Amazon" page, related to Jeff's response to the NYT criticism back in 2015. Jeff's response was, "should that happen to you, escalate to HR or email me directly". Someone did exactly that and got fired for it.

Protip: Listen to this guy. He's Milun Tesovic, the Expa Labs co-founder and SFU Beedie alumuns.

While I have your ear, Milun, I was curious why Expa didn't open in K-W or Montreal first. They're much closer to east coast tech hubs.

> Expa's founder is from BC so I think them opening up an office there is mostly due to an excess of cash they have from Uber's success, not that it necessarily makes sense from a VC perspective.

The founder of Slack grew up on Vancouver Island and went to UVic, the co-founders of Tableau is an SFU comp sci alumnus; so is the founder of Buddybuild[1] (the first genuine mobile-first CI provider, raised a series A round from KPCB (!) for $7.6M which is unheard of for a Van company, let alone they managed to find an SV VC firm which was okay with the company keeping the company local).

The way I see it, it matters less why they came (whether it makes sense from a VC perspective, the founders are homesick, or as a response to shifting political tides in the United States) and matters more that they're here.

[1] Further reading:

https://www.sfu.ca/computing/newsandevents/archives/2007/sfu...

https://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2016/sfu-in-the-news-janu...

Burnaby Heights is fairly cheap. Right on the 95 B-Line, 25-35 minutes to downtown.

If you're Colin Percival, I know you from Reddit. You're /u/perciva, right? SFU Senate member, an /r/simonfraser mod.

The area bordered by US 101, Willow Road and the Union Pacific tracks is an exception. However, the rest of EMP makes Vancouver's Downtown Eastside or even the neighbourhood of Whalley in Surrey look like the most peaceful, crime-free utopia that has ever existed. At least we don't have Nortenos and Surenos blowing each others' heads off like in adjacent East Palo Alto.

Isn't it a bitter irony that someone who became successful in Silicon Valley (Peter Thiel) was a driving force to get a president, whose policies could potentially lead to a bit of a decline for Silicon Valley, elected?

$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver. I am not going to pay $2200/month to live in gangland-torn East Menlo Park.

Combined with Expa Labs opening an office in Vancouver, it seems that President Trump is the best thing that could ever happen to Vancouver's tech scene. Our anchors historically have been companies like IBM, HSBC, Nokia, and Ericsson, which are all shells of their former selves and have long since closed down their presences in Vancouver. The few existing long-term anchors include MDA and Vision Critical, and SAP's BI division (SAP BusinessObjects and BusinessObjects Cloud, which originated from a local startup called Crystal Decisions which was purchased by SAP in 2008 by way of some Seagate M&As), along with gamedev and film/TV VFX studios which are all feast-or-famine. Just look at the fate of Radical, Roadhouse Interactive, United Front Games, Pixar's office in Vancouver. Sony Imageworks, A Thinking Ape and Animal Logic might go the same way if the loonie increases in value. HootSuite is set to go under eventually as CRM suites integrate social media management; they waited too late to IPO. So this might be the kick in the ass the Vancouver tech scene needs in the eventual post-HootSuite landscape.

So, I say, with all sincerity, "thanks, Trump."

One big problem is economies of scale. The U.S. has more than five times the combined population of these three countries. A similar problem affects the Nordic wundercountries. They are some of the richest and happiest countries in the world and have some of the best education systems in the world, but their small population sizes hinder their sheer economic potential. Finland's population is only 5.4 million and Sweden's is only 9.5 million, and yet they still gave birth to Colossal Order, Spotify, Supercell, Rovio among others. Imagine how many tech powerhouses would come out of the Nordic countries if they had larger populations and thus larger economies of scale. Same with Norway. For years its economy has been tied to O&G, but with the collapsing price in oil the Norwegian government is investing their oil billions into startups; in the coming years, Norway's startup scene will explode. And all with a population of 5 million. If their population was larger, I think Norway's startup scene could be so, so much bigger.

Vancouver has been a popular place to transfer foreign talent to the U.S. for years. It's a short drive to Seattle, a short flight to San Francisco, and in the same time zone as both cities.

Famously, Facebook had an office in Coal Harbour that was just for transferring hires to Menlo Park, they didn't hire any Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

Even more famously, Microsoft's recent expansion in Vancouver, the "Excellence Centre" (doubling its workforce from 400 in Yaletown to 800), was mostly going to be for L-1 visa transfers to Redmond HQ. 360 of those positions were planned, with MS only promising 40 positions (5%) for citizens/PRs. The former Conservative government offered winking acknowledgement. However, voters in Canada were furious when the mass abuse of the TFW program came to light, which forced the government's hand.

The vast majority of positions at the "Excellence Centre" (which was opened by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and houses ~650 engineers as of now) have gone to locals. Anecdotally, I've heard that ever since the TFW backlash, the most popular cities in which to open visa transfer offices have been London and Zurich.

If you want to see the documents proving that MS was mostly going to hire visa transfers in Vancouver, documents obtained by CBC News under the province's access to information laws show what were the draft plans: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1685182-b-c-atip-doc...

The Walton family represents a lot of what I think is wrong with America. If Sam Walton knew that Walmart pays their employees so little that they have to claim social assistance just to survive, what would he say?

While Jeff Bezos isn't an angel, at least he's doing things with his money that I find noble, like Blue Origin and contributing millions to expand the computer science program at the University of Washington

I shudder to think of a future where Walmart dominates the tech logistics scene. Might there be a "Committee for a Third Term for Donald Trump" SuperPAC in the future?

Do you know where to get archived numerical ECMWF/NAM/NEMS/GFS data? Not necessarily on a map.

I only have a minor complaint: It only lets you view real time data and forecasts up to 2 weeks out; there's no archived data like earth.nullschool.net (which has data going back to 12/2013). If there were a site like that, or even a way of creating a DIY site that uses archived numerical data but maintains a similar UI/visual appeal as Ventusky (e.g. the wind streamlines, which I think look much more appealing than on nullschool), I would pay actual real money for this product.

> Several of the airlines have dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do apparently pay staggeringly little per referral. This is greatly eroded the usefulness of Hipmunk and similar sites, and taken away the motivation for anyone to pressure airlines to participate.

This sounds like something for the Justice Department to get involved in.

If you use 500mbar visualizations, you can visualize the "reverse" weather pattern from last summer, with the wonky jet stream, high pressure baking the Pacific Northwest, and cool weather in the midwest and on the East Coast: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2015/07/03/1800Z/wind/isobaric...

Another example from July 2014: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/07/14/1500Z/wind/isobaric...

Conversely, you can see how the "heat dome" of this summer smothered almost the entirety of the contiguous United States, except for the West Coast in general and the Pacific Northwest in particular: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/07/22/1500Z/wind/isobaric...

Thanks for replying, Andrei.

Air Canada Express recently started 2x daily YVR-SJC; direct connections between Vancouver and the Valley may help with communications with the Redwood City office.

Are you willing to publicly divulge an ETA on when you'll come back to Vancouver? Please come back. I really love Human API's vision, and I don't want Vancouver's biggest tech players to be companies like: -SAP (which I wish could be relegated to the ashheap of history in all its ABAP glory) -TELUS (a telco monopoly) -EA Canada (a slave-driving AAA game studio) -Tableau (which will be doomed when Microsoft PowerBI gets in gear and SharePoint integration improves)

Why did you shut down your Vancouver office?

I heard your company's founder is a UBC grad.

I heard your company's founder, Annalea Krebs, speak at July's #TechVancouver event. Her talk was very interesting.

Saudi Aramco's IPO would never have happened without Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Salman might be the king, and Mohammad bin Nayef might be the crown prince, but MbS is "Mr. Everything") consolidating power and courtiers.

Okay, HN, crush my expectations. How is MbS not actually the liberal reformer that western media fawns over and says he is?

Also, what odds do you you have on rival factions in the House of Saud ganging up on MbS and pulling a King Faisal? I have 15/1 odds that the other princes will at least attempt to push him out of prominence (they probably won't kill him)--the Saudi royal family has 15,000 princes, after all.

Finally, I think that "perestroika, GCC style" might be the best or the worst thing to happen in the Middle East in over 50 years. Think about it. Iran has used its large, wealthy, well-educated population (80 million people) to maintain a geopolitical foothold in the Middle East and Central Asia, even under crushing international sanctions. With an absolute theocratic monarchy, an old-world economic structure based on clan ties, and a population of only 32 million (21 million if you subtract out the expatriate population), Saudi has been able to amass otherworldly concentrations of wealth. Imagine how much change those Saudi trillions could do for the country, the region and the world at large the if MbS's dream of a post-oil economy and economic liberalization came through. (Plus, Saudi gets on the good side of the west so it doesn't have to worry about sanctions.) Imagine if Saudi's population boomed and became more and more educated. 40, 50, 60 million. Imagine how the geopolitical fisticuffs with the Ayatollah and the Revolutionary Guard might turn into a détente, or get even worse.