vtail

Here is how you can find this object with Mathematica: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11819/help-fi...

When I just started, I quickly setup some filters to categorize all mail into three categories: those where I would be one of the few people in To, or those from my boss, or those that are High Priority would go into first category, most others will be in second and mail group etc. will go into third.

The problem with the system is that people who send you email are not aware of it :), and very often violate those rules. Apart from some form of AI gradually adjusting rules over the time, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.

I currently work as a PM in a big company. Yesterday I've got slightly over 200 emails; it is a typical day.

Granted, some of those were CC:, and people like to have one-line replies, but I still have to read each one nevertheless just to make sure it is not something I need urgently respond to.

You mean like those Follow Up flags in Outlook that are one right-click away?

I don't think Evernote is a startup anymore, but it's a remarkable product development story nevertheless. Certainly thinking outside of the box.

Now, for those of us interested in startups - what a perfect example of great product development:

- Address existing need that few other products addresses

- Helps generating new customers by removing some of the barriers - "I like to create my notes with a pen on a paper"

- Involves non-trivial blend of hardware and software

- Involves non-trivial business partnership

- Serves as a test-bed for bringing the solution to more people by refining unskewing algorithms

- etc. etc.

Well executed, Evernote!

What would you recommend as a higher-quality notebooks?

Nice work. Some piece of feedback: documentation is lacking any information on how to interact with VBA functionality/classes that you don't have your wrappers for. E.g. how do I work with creating/opening/interacting with other workbooks?

What I don't understand is why these farmers wouldn't switch back to using old crops/seeds if Monsanto is so prohibitively expensive and using old plants is more economical in long term?

I really don't understand this kind of aversion to proprietary programs. Mathematica is a high quality program with excellent documentation (I cannot comment on crashes - it never crashed on my but I'm not using it that extensively). Maintaining and improving such product takes a lot of effort that should be paid for. Student version is really inexpensive at $139 - most books cost comparable sums of money. Once you get a job with real income, you can either ask your employer to buy it for you or can afford to buy it yourself.

As author(s) of Mathics will surely discover very soon, the devil is in details. There are lots of corner cases and improvement opportunities that takes many man-years to implement. It may seem easy to get 50% of functionality quickly; getting the other half is much trickier.

You are right: 2.6B for CPU, 4.3B for GPU and 6.8B for FPGA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

I'm a bit surprised by a wafer pricing chart. Sure, the individual wafer cost goes up; but if you have a design with the same transistor count, the size of your chip is going _down_, which means that you'll have _more_ chips per wafer (assuming comparable yields), which means that individual chip cost will go down.

(40/28)^2 ~ 2, so if 28nm is not that bad comparing to 40nm, assuming, again, comparable yields.

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen unless we will see some x86 tablets. WOA will have Metro-style apps only.

And I doubt we'll ever see x86 tablets

Thanks so much for very informative reply!

It's interesting to analyze what that decided to put on the front page as their key features:

- 3 points (#2, #3 and #8) related to USB functionality

- 3 essentially identical points (#5, #6 and #7) about what type of keys they have

- Only points #1 and #4 are something that could be considered as real differentiator by a layman

- Gold-plated contacts are mentioned 4(!) times on the first page - I wonder if they provide any advantage over silver or metal ones

- They also mention Darth Vader(!) somewhere on their front page

- They also have a chart that should communicate some additional value that the keyboard provides (and it probably does)

Overall, my impression is that they overdid their marketing. Thoughts?

Update: They also mention (in a system requirements sections that nobody reads) that to use the hub functionality, you would need to occupy two ports of your mac, not one, which somewhat lessens the value proposition

You are doing yourself a great service by learning Scheme - that can fundamentally change how you think about programming. Reading the first chapter of SICP[0] will change you forever. Yet right now you're using Scheme as a Python/C/Ruby with a strange syntax, while it's a totally different language with its own idioms. You should learn them to master Scheme.

As for your particular questions:

1. map yields an error under mzscheme

I'm at work, and didn't have access to a proper scheme, so I used an online REPL[1], which apparently is more forgiving. Regardless, you can write your own map (a good exercise!) that stops as soon as one of the arguments is exhausted. Make it tail-recursive[2] as well!

2. list-ref is bad

Lists are beautiful data structures designed for recursive algorithms. If you are using lists and not using recursion (or a hidden recursion in the form of map), you're doing something wrong. list-ref uses list as a vector, which has a performance implications - your algorithm is O(n^3) while mine is O(n^2).

3. set! is bad

Margins are too small for a proper explanation :), but basically set! has side-effects[3], and functional programming should avoid having them.

Have fun learning Scheme!

[0] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#... [1] http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/jsscheme/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_effect_(computer_science)

This is very, very, very bad scheme. set! and list-ref are no-no.

This is better scheme:

(define (pascal n) (if (= n 0) (list 1) (let ((L (pascal (- n 1)))) (append (list 1) (map + (cdr L) L) (list 1)))))

Or on Amazon from the same publisher: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0981855121/ref=dp_olp...

I've being in your shoes. One of the _most_ effective thing for me was to talk to a mental health professional - it was by far the best investment I've made in myself in the last several years. After 5 sessions I was able to resolve many anxiety, guilt, worries and other issues.

My biggest mistake was postponing the decision to talk to somebody for several months out of false pride, thinking I'm able to handle it myself.

Unfortunately, this is a market with a high barrier to entry, since IB's reputation for many investors is a proxy for the quality of due diligence. It's hard to disrupt this market unless companies will be willing to do their IPOs in other markets, like Europe or Asia.

I'm wondering why such market exists in the US. Assuming there is enough VC capital, why would you need an intermediary?

In this case, they were requiring 10%(!) of the investment as a kick-back.

Another interesting feature: there are plenty of 'funding advisors' that can help connecting you to a right VC[1] for a fee, typically a few percent of the funding.

Kick-backs are also typical if you are a mid-size company a need to get a commercial loan.

[1] They all claim to have connections to some government-backed VC funds such as government-backed Rusnano or Russian Venture Company.

Since it's obvious that Dyson's statement is way too optimistic, I assume that for her it is (was) a good marketing - you bet a lot by investing in Russian startups, why not bet a little bit more to show to your future partners how confident you are?

Here is why the statement is way too optimistic:

- Resources always move to places where they can be used most effectively (econ 101) unless there is a significant friction

- For that type of resource (talented programmers/mathematicians) the friction is very small

- Russia has bad regulation and bad business environment in general

- Specifically, very hard to get investments[1], and investors interests are poorly protected[2]

- Silicon Valley utilizes these resource much more effectively, so that even other places in the US - NYC/Boston/Chicago - could not compete effectively

- Also, managerial talent in Russia is concentrated on more profitable business, like participating in natural resource explorations or working for state-run monopolies - very profitable and risk free if you have the right connections

Disclaimer: I'm Russian living in Silicon Valley. That may have affected my judgement.

[1] I can share the following anecdote: When I was helping some friends to find VC funding in 2008 in Russia, I learnt that most VCs in Russia require kick-backs(!) from startups that they're investing in - presumably as a way to steal from their limited partners (and even provide some advice on how these kick-backs could be recorded in accounting books).

[2] Khodorkovsky's and Chichvarkin's examples are probably the most well-known on the West.

We seem to be having different metrics for 'high-quality'. The first screenshot of the iPad version in the App Store is a list of 24 elements in a small font. I think the developer is missing the point.

With Netflix, their value proposition is:

- Simplicity - it's very simple to select a movie on their website, and you can spare a walk to a DVD rental shop/supermarket. It's even easier to stream a movie.

- Price. $10/month is much cheaper than $15/DVD, if I watch several movies a month and don't plan to re-watch same movies very often

I don't see how that's applicable to the remove development - price argument doesn't work (it's actually cheaper to own an old Mac in the long run) and simplicity could work both ways - it's easier to start with remote development but having a local GUI development is probably easier.

Re: your decision to buy or not to buy a Mac - I just wanted to highlight that on the grand scheme of things - where you want to invest your time, which is your most valuable asset - decision to buy an old mac is an easy one to make.

You're right - I missed the "feasibility of remote development with GUI" part.

Re: your other comments - sure, I totally see who the service will appeal to some customers. The market is certainly there.

What I'm concerned about is the market _size_: I still believe that any current/future iOS/Mac developers will buy a Mac eventually, and there may be not many people like who only need a Mac to fix an occasional bug in an open-source Mac app, which by itself requires a significant skill.

BTW, when I said potential market is small, I didn't mean "number of people around me who will find the idea fascinating" is small :). For obvious reason, this is not the case here at HN, but we're a very special crowd.

So let's assume you wills spend couple of months learning iOS, and will decide that you're into it. Will you buy yourself a Mac at that point?

Assuming yes, you've maybe generated them $100 in revenue. They would need 10,000 people like you to generate their first million in revenue, and they have obviously many costs.

Do you think the world has at least 10,000 people interested in iOS development who don't have a mac yet? 100,000?

It certainly is a valid point. However, your assumption seems to be that the biggest barrier to entry would be hardware? If so, I disagree, with all due respect. I spent best parts of the summer learning iOS - it's not extremely hard, but it has many non-obvious corner cases that you'll need to spend some time to discover. So with almost any reasonable hourly rate (even at the minimal wage) I've invested much, much more in the learning of the framework that I would spend on a minimal hardware that will allow me to develop for iOS.

Let's face it - if you're serious about porting your apps to iOS, you would buy a mac at some point.

So let's see who your potential customer is:

- Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course)

- Someone with a decent internet access

- Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks

- Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby

- Someone who will be able to afford to pay $20+/monthly = $240+/yearly

- And finally, someone who is either unable to afford an older mac mini ($200-300 as noted in other comments) OR someone who has no cheap way to deliver older mac hardware to his home country.

From all the above, the potential market size seems too small to me to be an interesting business. Am I missing something?