Lramseyer

I have thought about this myself too, so I'll offer my two cents: Spreadsheets are really versatile, but they're a victim of their own versatility. You need to build something that is similar enough that people understand the concepts, but different enough so that people don't get frustrated by the fact that it's not Excel/Google Docs.

I always envisioned something that functioned like a Jupyter notebook, and pulled some pages from the MatLab debugger tool ...kind of like how Light Table implemented them, but don't get too caught up in that analogy. That way, you could create and define tables that are stand alone objects, and run [code] operations on data in those objects to create new tables. Everything that is processed from the tables is it's own [new object] entity, and can be [output or not] viewed or hidden. It would move away from the idea of having few tabs of large continuous spreadsheets in favor of having many small tables [matrices] that would have identifiers [variable names]. And if the user really wanted, they could drag around tables on a spreadsheet like grid, but the data in those tables would not be editable in that view. Oh, and graphs are their own entity too. Users can use a GUI editor to make graphs, but the graph properties will be user accessible in some sort of markup language for the edge case where the user needs to make a ton of graphs, and then needs to make some styling change to every graph. Not something I've ever experienced though... \s

This will:

1. Reduce the need for Excel's reference gymnastics that are performed when you move or insert rows/columns in to referenced data.

2. reduce the headache that is excel formulas. Since each object will be a formula instead of every cell. Also, the formulas don't have to be a single line, so it will be more readable.

The trick is finding a good language to use - Julia maybe? and designing a good GUI for helping non programmers do useful things like accessing and referencing data from objects in an intuitive way. This could be where the traditional spreadsheet view could come in handy. I like how you mentioned that it needs to serve as a good on ramp for ever growing programming skills, because it needs to be intuitive enough that non programmers can understand the basics and accomplish something useful, but powerful and hackable enough that the mental models can transfer.

I'm going to try to name some less mentioned predictions here:

- Smartphones/Tablets doubling as low power desktops/laptops will gain traction

- ARM and RISC-V will gain influence in desktops and servers, not that it will matter because CPU architecture will be abstracted out even more

- FPGAs will come more commonplace, and we will get better HDLs and hardware development workflows. Startups will capitalize on it, disrupting the hardware industry, but we won't see any real damage to the incumbents until after 2030

- Transistor architecture gains will slow down but still chug along and improve well beyond our expectations

- HDDs won't die yet

- Google Cloud will die

- Image recognition AI will become far more useful and more commonplace

- Carbon recapture will become big business

- VR arcades will be a thing

- The US political parties will no longer be Democrat and Republican, but something else.

- Starlink will go online after a few upsets, and catalyze a few major economic and political disruptions.

- China will "break apart" but be just as dominant

- Electric vehicles will become far more commonplace, and we will see some "Cash for clunkers" type incentives around the world, and it will disrupt the used car market.

- Tesla will have multiple brands: Tesla (premium brand similar to Chrysler/Cadilac); Cyber car themed brand; and an economy brand. They will also get into the Carbon Recapture market as an acquisition

- Multiple tech CEOs will run for president

- Recycling/trash will become a global crisis

- Increased tourism to Antarctica

This makes me wonder how falling battery prices will affect the cost of used electric vehicles. On one hand, the replacement battery costs will go down, and in turn should make for better resale value (since the replacement cost of a wearable part is factored into the resale value.) But on the other hand, auto companies (especially Tesla) have been passing that savings down to the customer, leading to cheaper brand new prices of vehicles.

While it may appear on the surface that Tesla has not reduced their prices all that much, keep in mind that the only current offering for the Model S is the 100KWh battery. The Model 3 prices have been incrementally decreasing, while simultaneously standardizing features like autopilot, which used to be a $2K upgrade.

I don't think it's necessarily about using an FPGA on the cloud for your crypto miner as much as it is about reducing the costs (not specifically monetary) associated with hardware design in general. As the blog states: "Access to hardware: Hmmm. This is still a problem." The traditional reasoning would argue that spinning a chip is so prohibitively expensive, so why bother reducing other costs for the open source community?

Unlike the software community where we have nice open source libraries to do the useful and boring bits of of your software stack, more or less everything that's more complicated than a floating point adder is IP. (ARM CPU, PCIe controller, Ethernet controller, Internal fabric, DRAM controller.) Now you can go and buy this IP from other companies like ARM and Synopsis, but it costs money.

Then once you have made an architecture you like, there will be another group of companies wanting hundreds of thousands of dollars for their simulation tools (which are painfully outdated.) And they can charge so much because creating silicon is really expensive!

We have a long way to go on both of these fronts, because making open source hardware blocks and open source toolchains is much harder than it sounds, and for what benefit? It's still several million for masks.

For a startup trying to make innovative hardware however, Those things can mean faster development times, fewer engineers needed, and reduced IP royalty fees. For the industry, it gives students a lower barrier to entry to the field, so that when they come out of college they can be ramp up quicker. For me as a hardware engineer, it makes my life better, as it gives me hope that some day my tools won't be outdated and overpriced.

One thing that's very important to keep in mind when looking at air travel emissions is how fuel efficient planes actually are. The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. And at an underwhelming 2.5% of global emissions, I can't really put it in the category of "low hanging fruit."

That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality of life improvements for North America) but I'm more excited about improvements in vehicle transportation and energy production.

That was what I thought! I’m a pretty anti-Facebook person, and I don’t have a profile anymore. But facebook has data on you both explicit and implicit. They can predict your mental health state, socioeconomic status, and they have tons of data on the formation of relationships and marriages. They can even predict who you like and who you’re going to date next. As creepy as that data is, why shouldn’t they use it to actually connect people who they would predict to be compatible? A huge problem for online dating platforms is making good suggestions, and Facebook is probably the most well equipped to address it.

Not to downplay the issue, but global warming is a much more urgent issue. It's expected to cause far more disasters a lot sooner than any potential disaster from our nuclear waste.

To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.

I really like where the writer is going with this, and I have had similar thoughts on the matter. I believe that a good user experience streamlines the flow of attention and tries to reduce "attention turbulence" for a given task. And I'm referring to more than just smartphone apps and web pages, though they make for great examples.

I wish more people realized the value of human attention. I would even go as far as to say that the reason that the tech industry is so profitable is because of it's ability to provide shortcuts for the attention required to complete a given task.

> upper middle class Americans favor endurance sports as a way to demonstrate "moral character, self-control, and self-development, rather than physical dominance."

As an upper middle class runner, I can definitely agree with that statement. At times, I feel like my habits of running give me a little bit of an edge over my peers at some level.

Serious question - How do the previous employers find out when an employee breaches a non-compete agreement? Is it usually word of mouth that makes it's way to HR/legal? or is it registered through someone's SSN? Because I know LinkedIn does a pretty good job at hiding from your current employer that you're looking for a job. What's to stop them from hiding your current employer to your previous employer?

> Most of US engineers chase easy money in web technology etc. Same concern was raised by Peter Theil about VC investing not in hard tech. Ycombinator is also classic example of investing tons of money in only short term tech. Most of silicon tech needs 5-7 years or even more.

So true! It's tempting, I'm a hardware engineer, but I know I can make more as a software engineer working in web tech. I think the issue for VCs and such is that competitive VLSI design is so much work that it's really limited to big companies who have large budgets to afford the engineering costs.

Personally, I wish there existed more high level HDLs for (at the very least) programming FPGAs and creating chip designs. I am also excited for RISC-V. I hope that as we start to run into limitations in lithography, we get more creative with our chip designs, and as a result, we see more players in the space.

From my experience in the HDD industry I remember that a magnetic bit of data is about 13-15nm long and about 40-60nm wide (narrower tracks for SMR.) The length of a bit is constrained by the grain size of the magnetic media. However, the width of a bit (prior to SMR) is actually constrained by the size of the write head. I don't remember why, but I think it has to do with the fact that the write current is like 40 mA, and the magnetic flux density on the write element is like 1.5T (no that's not a typo)

I'm not an expert on transistor pitches, but here's a chart from Wikipedia for the 10nm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer It's kind of impressive for HDDs considering that it's a 2 inch long mechanical arm that is able to move with that level of precision.

I personally think there are 2 really difficult pills that the incumbent media giants need to swallow:

1. The younger generation (myself) does not like commercials, and are willing to pay a subscription fee to remove them (ie Pandora one, Hulu+, Spotify Premium.) Either the commercials pay for the content, or or the consumer pays, not both!

2. The less popular networks/channels will have to either have revenue/funding cut substantially, go elsewhere (to Youtube for Facebook,) or out of business. Most of us simply don't care and don't want to pay for it. This bundling of unpopular networks with really popular ones is costing the cable companies too much money that they're trying to pass onto the consumer. Customers are sick of paying for it.

Streaming services are delivering content, while removing the waste of time and attention spent watching commercials, and the waste of money spent on programming that the majority of the viewer base could care less about. It's not rocket science, it's just trimming the fat from the old way of doing things.

How about the option to remove the dock entirely? Spotlight and Launchpad are preferable alternatives for opening apps, Mission Control works way better for switching between apps, and the list of running apps can be stuffed into the top menu with a pulldown list that can display diagnostic info and give a nice way to switch-to or force quit.

I hide the dock and keep it off to the side, as I find it more annoying than useful.

This definitely looks like something that has the potential to be really useful, and gives the example of replacing gorilla glass. While I get that this is a very tough glass, I did not see anything about it's hardness in relation to gorilla glass, as hardness is the property that provides the scratch resistance that is so highly sought after in smartphone screens.

Toughness is how much energy a material can absorb, whereas hardness is the resistance to deformation. Think a rubber band vs. glass.

> Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job.

Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Cavium have created very powerful ARM chips for non-mobile application. Apple definitely has the chip architects, the money, and the experience to do such a thing.

If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their software - that the high end mac pro systems started seeing Intel chips in them.

Microsoft started down that path last year with Windows 10 on ARM, and Intel had some legal issues with that - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this.

Not really. On a battery unit, the time and number of charge/discharge cycles [wear] can be measured and used to calculate the depreciation of the battery during the time it spent in any particular car. The user can then be billed on a swap.

The benefits to this are that the cost of the battery is spread out over time for the customer. And since the customer is always effectively paying the difference in cost of the deposit on the battery, the battery in their car will never exceed the value of what they have paid already. This also makes it way easier to recycle batteries once they have reached end of life as well.

I was a little disappointed by the lack of explanation on how light refracts. It references Snell's law and mentions how light travels slower in water, but it did not go into how it's an effect of parts of the wavefront changing velocity at slightly different times as a result of the light entering the medium at an angle (or at least that being a simple way of understanding refraction.)

However, it was cool to see them reference "Do dogs know calculus?" I actually saw Pennings give a presentation on it in high school because my calc teacher was one of his students. He started out the talk by telling us that his dog knew calculus. He then proceeded to ask his dog the derivative of x^3. The dog did nothing, and he told us that dogs don't know calculus.

I worked in the HDD industry, doing signal processing for a few years. HDDs are pretty much magical. It's insane how delicate, yet robust it all is.

But to put things into perspective with some numbers, the write heads on a modern HDD use somewhere on the order of 50 mA of current. That may sound like a reasonable amount until you consider that the magnetic field [flux] is condensed down to a 60 x 20 nm area. It usually takes a little over 1 Tesla to flip the magnet.

I have been out of the Industry for a little bit now, but things are moving towards a magnetic substrate that has a smaller grain size (allowing smaller bits at a similar SNR) but a coercivity well over 3T at room temperature.

This is pretty cool! I know it's new and all, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself when saying that it would be nice if it supported other languages aside from Python. I know that iPython supports Ruby, Perl and Javascript, and there's a plugin for Julia, but it doesn't appear to be supported right now. I am still on the waiting list to play around with this however.

Also, integration with Google docs for the purposes of data processing and data handling would be incredible! But that's just me dreaming.

This is fantastic for AMD! Intel has the largest market share for GPUs with integrated graphics. While I haven't looked into it too much, it sounds like an opportunity for Intel's market share on top of what they already have. Let's just hope that Intel doesn't pull any legal tomfoolery and steal AMD's IP.

I hope Intel does step up their game, but assuming that there's healthy competition with good ARM and AMD chips. Competition is good for the consumer.

But I also want to see ARM based laptops from both Microsoft and Apple (Though Intel has Apple by the ears with Thunderbolt until USB 3.2 becomes a viable alternative on the low end.)

Or you know, move away from it entirely. But in all seriousness, I actually really like Atom as a text editor, and wish it didn't consume so many resources to run.

This may sound like the most ridiculous criticism, but I was really disappointed that the iPhone still uses the lightning charger port and not USB-C. Every other device charges with it including Apple's own laptops. Though seeing how long they take to adopt some features that seem standard to android users (like 4G LTE and wireless charging) in their smartphones, I guess this is to be expected.

"If your processor has an errata in it and you update the documentation to allow that errata, is it still an errata? I think it is, but apparently it's allowed in the newest version of the AMD manuals" [37:48]

I don't understand why more vendors don't do this (if anyone wants to comment to this, I would be interested to get another opinion.) While my experience is admittedly limited to obscure chips that require NDAs for access to the specs, I was always a little annoyed that almost every time there was not even a reference to the errata documentation that the vendor provided when a new version of the spec would come out.

Now in AMD's case, I would argue that they should be more clear that it's an errata, and mention that the updated spec differed from previous versions (which it alluded to by saying "This behavior is model-dependent".) Ultimately, the spec is THE document on how a user should expect the chip to behave. So sue me if I am blurring the lines between an errata and a mistake in the spec, but I just want my documentation to tell me what the chip does without having to refer to a dozen other secondary documents dang it!

Not to mention the amount of CO2 emissions that would be reduced from drivers having to stop and re-accelerate fewer times. While I don't know if it would make much of a change during heavy traffic, I think it would make a huge difference during medium to light traffic.

I like the idea of opening up light timings for public review, however figuring out how to optimize everything would probably take a great deal of computational power, and likely out of the scope of local governments that actually make those decisions. It's also not profitable, so I don't see too many companies going after this problem. If only there was a company that had detailed maps, good traffic statistics, insane computational power, and ambitions to do stuff that may or may not be profitable. Maybe they create tools for municipalities to help time their lights.

Pretty much all of the major car companies are making fully electric vehicles with ranges comparable to Tesla. (I know about Ford, GM, and Volvo.) However, a lot of the hype with electric vehicles is centered around Tesla right now, much like how the hype for hybrids was centered around the Prius. In my opinion, the Prius is one of the ugliest cars out there, and despite the fact that we have a lot of choices for hybrids now, the Prius is still one of the top sellers. I really hope the Model 3 does as well as the Prius has done, because (much like the Prius did) it will put market pressure in places that there previously was none.

Putting most of the current auto industry out of business by being way more awesome is "good" in the short term, but then comes the monopoly, which is never good for the customer.

And to the cell phone company argument, Look at LG, Samsung, and Motorola, all phone manufacturers that have been successful pre and post smartphone era.

While I think that what Tesla is doing is very exciting, I think the statements in this piece are way overblown. A war? How about healthy free market competition. I too am happy that Tesla has a very different take on the way we buy and use our cars, and ultimately think the customer will be better off as a result. But I remain unconvinced that Tesla will somehow dominate the auto industry while the incumbent brands will just sit around and cry themselves to irrelevance.

Tesla is pretty much the first successful electric car brand in modern times, and there were many others that have failed. While they are here to stay, they aren't out of the woods yet. The Model 3 is pretty basic, and is selling for $35K at minimum. They didn't even put a speedometer on the driver side dashboard, it's just a touch screen in the middle that displays/controls pretty much everything. It's not bad by any means, but it's a far cry from the perfect affordable every man's car.

Meanwhile, Ford, GM, and VW also have very good self driving car systems in the pipeline. Pretty much every major car manufacturer is working on EV technology, and to claim the Chevy Bolt as a failure this year also does not somehow curse General Motors to some sort of permanent failure of an electric car manufacturer.

Yep! I still have my i7 2600K running at 4+ GHz and Ryzen is the only thing that has made me even consider upgrading.

You know it's bad when the Dow Jones Industrial Average is outperforming desktop Intel CPUs in annual gains.